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“The Kraken,” Stede said flatly. He was keenly aware that his voice didn’t usually do flat, but he was doing a lot of things lately that he didn’t usually do, so here they were.
“The Kraken,” repeated Ed - or the mirror world image of Ed, sideways from everything he had become in the weeks they had been aboard the Revenge together. His beard was back - short, smeared with kohl, all trace of the silver gone. His eyes, too, had a familiar wild look, but there was something else there that Stede couldn’t place, that made him shiver a bit with. Something.
“So should I call you The Kraken? Or just Kraken? Or can I still call you Blackbeard, or –”
He was cut off before he could say the last. “Not that.” Not Ed, then. Blackbeard. Kraken. “He’s gone. He’s not coming back.” The Kraken drew himself up to his full height, rested his hand on the hilt of a vicious-looking sword at his hip. It was broad and curved, the black leather of the sheath battered and patched together like each mismatched scrap had been carved off something, or someone. It did not look like a dueling sword. It did not look like a sword that could run you through and miss the important parts.
“Oh. Well.”
The silence hung heavy between them, only the sound of the waves crashing against the hull of the Revenge and the sails snapping in the wind doing anything like welcoming Stede to this place he so loved – to these people – to this person –
"Is none of you gonna say nothing?" whispered Ivan to Frenchie in his whisperiest whisper, which was to say every single person on the deck of the Revenge could clearly hear him.
Stede knew what to do with Ed, mostly. He was fairly sure he knew what to do with Blackbeard, if it came to that, although his instincts tended to pull him in two opposite directions on that score. He knew how he wanted to treat the crew – his men, and the men he had come to feel a fair amount of loyalty and affection for, who were arrayed at a careful distance around their captain, faces a study in worry.
This man, though. This man, who was and was not Edward Teach. With this man, he did not have the foggiest clue what to say, or how to be.
Stede opened his mouth, unable to bear the weight of this awful silence any longer. "Captain, I must –"
"Do you want this man here, Kraken?" Izzy interrupted. It seemed the most important question Stede had ever heard, and he felt a stab of gratitude it had been asked, even by Israel Hands.
The Kraken took a beat before responding, and it felt like the longest breath of Stede's life before he spoke. "Yes."
"Captain, you can't possibly..." Hands said before shifting on unstable legs and trailing off, thinking the better of it.
He needn't have worried. The Kraken had not finished. "We will host our Gentleman Pirate in the brig. Ivan, take him."
Ivan was there at Stede's side before he had fully processed what had been said. His heart still danced in his chest, echoing with Ed's "yes." But Ivan was hauling him away, and even his muttered, ”Sorry, mate,” wasn’t enough to jostle Stede out of the stupor of joy that word had sent him into.
It was only when Ivan was shoving him into the brig that the rest of it hit him.
He may, he considered, have made a grave error in judgment.
—-
The brig of the Revenge was much like the rest of the ship in that Stede had lovingly designed it with not the faintest conception of what an actual pirate ship might require in a brig; this was to say that it was stashed back nearest to the stores, well away from anywhere allowing an example to be usefully made of him to the crew. Beyond that, it appeared much as the rooms that housed the crew, for whom the brig had this for existed only in theory, but who might have found some further annoyance at his ignorance of the usual way of things if they had known there was a full, private room locked and furnished to which they had no access.
Stede certainly had not planned that he would ever be the occupant of this room when he had drawn up the ship's plans, yet here he was, grateful for the ignorance of his past self. For this wasn't so bad – at least, not so bad as it could have been, had he been a more knowledgeable pirate captain.
Of course, had he been a more knowledgeable pirate captain, he would never have met Blackbeard, and this did not bear consideration.
So he stretched out along the bed, comfortable and quiet, and waited.
This Edward Teach who had ordered him here was as much a mystery to him as Blackbeard had been to his bumbling self months before. He inspired the same level of terror, too, which Stede recognized now as the delicious twist in his stomach, the catch in his breath and the pulse that raced as he considered the hard, wild stare that Edward had fixed on him as he clambered back aboard the Revenge, returned.
There was nothing of the open affection from the beach, from the breathless moment before —
Well. That Ed had gone, and Stede had been the author of his demise. Badminton had said that he broke every beautiful thing, and Stede in his ignorance had thought back to the man he had known first — or thought he had known, the man in the leathers with the wicked laugh who lived out Stede’s own accursed dream and for some reason known only to God had decided that such a man as him was fit to share it. He looked upon Ed with his beard gone and his expression full of hope and his mind full of new identities and new places and Stede had misunderstood everything. He thought he had broken a magnificent creature, brought this mythical figure that occupied every one of his dreams down to his own wretched mediocrity.
He had it only partially right, though. He hadn't broken Blackbeard. He had broken him open.
And then he had proved Badminton right, and smashed Ed's soft openness to bits, thinking all the while he was being noble, protecting the illusion and fully ignoring the glorious reality.
He deserved to be in the brig. He deserved whatever he got. Worse, probably.
That was it — the tears were coming thick and fast now, and there was nothing for it but to turn his face to the pillow and let them fall where they would.
Sleep pulled him under amid his still-falling tears.
---
He woke with a start to the slamming of a door, unable to situate himself in either time or space, adrift in the dark. The sun had set beyond the tiny porthole, leaving the only light —
"Hello, Bonnet.”
Ed's face was barely illuminated by the stub of a candle in its battered brass holder, and the ember glowing in his pipe glowed almost as brightly as he took a drag. The kohl on his face and in the rough beginnings of his beard was streaked — whether by sweat or by someone's blood, Stede couldn't make out by the faint flicker of the light, though either seemed likely. It added to the menace that was surely Ed's intent, stepping fully into the Kraken persona he wore like another leather coat.
He stared up at the Kraken from the bed, unable to move as surely as a blue-winged butterfly pinned to canvas in the office of a demented collector, determined to collect beautiful things no matter the cost. He was caught; there was nothing for it.
"I'd never imagined you would find the nerve to return to the Revenge,” said the Kraken, curls of smoke wafting into the darkness as he spoke. “Your nerve has been known to fail you.” He didn’t say, with me. With us. It lingered between them like the smoke.
“I had to,” Stede said finally. “I couldn’t - it couldn’t end.”
“It did, though,” said the Kraken. “You made it end. You created something new.” He chuckled; it wasn’t a pleasant sound. “I should be thanking you, really. Pirates gone soft tend not to live very long. I’m quite sure you saved my life. Almost definitely.”
Stede had nothing to say, and said it. “I. I mean to say, Captain. I can’t - I created - I…?”
“And do you like what you made?” The Kraken stepped forward, gestured at his own leather-clad form with his left hand, which held something. He had to squint to see it properly in the dim candlelight: the ominous coil of a whip, much like the one that killed sweet Karl. “Are you proud of your creation, Stede Bonnet?”
“I’ve always been proud of you,” Stede said, voice catching at the edge of the name he truly wanted to call the Kraken. “Less so of myself, of course.”
“Well,” said the Kraken, “we all make mistakes. Clearly.” He bent momentarily, tipped the pipe’s coal into the water basin. “You shouldn’t be too hard on yourself.” He set the whip down next to the basin, and stripped off his jacket. It, too, was laid neatly on the floor, and then the Kraken retrieved the whip, where it uncoiled with a slick sound that made Stede’s empty stomach twist unpleasantly. “That’s what I’m here for.”
His eyes glinted in the light, and if the Stede of a few months ago had seen this it would have confirmed his deep fears of a man with eyes that glowed with madness, something in him eternal and beyond human. The Kraken was transcendent, terrifying. He could only watch, and say nothing. Whatever it was, whatever was to happen, he had made this, and he deserved it.
The Kraken gestured with the whip. “Strip.”
“Captain, I -”
“I don’t think you will want me to speak again. Quickly, Bonnet. I’ve got tranquil seaside plantations to terrorize.”
Stede did as he was told - the shirt came off quickly, open as it was at the neck ever since he had abandoned a proper cravat in St. Kitts. The breeches took longer, and his fingers felt no longer under his full control, unable to do much beyond fumble haplessly at the buttons. In desperation he looked up at Ed and said, “Captain, I’m trying.”
“You think you are, probably,” said the Kraken. “It doesn’t matter, though. We can start this as you are - laying down, I think.”
“Laying –”
The whip cracked at Stede’s ear, drawing no blood but making him jump about six feet out of his skin. He fell against the mattress, hands clutching the tear-stained pillow like a very wet and squishy lifeline.
“You’ll need to thank me after each one,” said the Kraken. “For the lesson I’m teaching you. This is how the world works, Stede Bonnet. You need to know it.”
He felt the sting of it almost before the sound registered - the pain was bright and true, and it brought him fully to this time and space: he was here, on the edge of night, locked in the brig of the Revenge with Edward Teach, finally. The noise he made sounded foreign and animal to his own ears.
“Thank you,” Stede said on a gasp as the brightness of the strike flamed into heat, unfamiliar. “For the lesson.”
“I’ll give you as many as you need,” said the Kraken. “Look at me. Look at your work. Learn .”
The Kraken waited as Stede lifted his head, holding the next stroke for whatever it was he needed to see in Stede’s face. His thick arms were spread wide - here, the gesture said, to be inspected. Even through the heat on his back Stede could drink him in, the familiar lines of his body, the soft tangles of his hair that he could still feel on the pads of his fingers, catching at salt-rough skin. He was, and was not, the same. He was, and was not, the feel of home. “Is this what you came back for, Stede Bonnet?”
Stede felt drunk, adrift. His world came in pieces, and all of it was the Kraken, the whole of him so much more than the parts Stede’s mind tripped over. His hair - his hair - had been pinned back somehow, and Stede had a wild thought that he probably needed it out of the way while he worked. It pulled a giggle out of him somehow, the idea that this elemental from the deep had spent any time with pins in his mouth, twisting his hair out of the way.
The Kraken’s face fell into shadow as he stepped back for another swing. “We will go as long as it takes until we can prove the lesson learned, Stede Bonnet.” Another crack of the whip, a bright snap on his skin, catching him at the base of his spine and ripping a tear through his breeches as it snapped back.
“Thankyouforthelesson,” he gasped out in a single breath as the heat rushed in, or perhaps it was just the feeling of his blood flowing to the surface in the wake of the stroke.
There were tears now, though he thought he had none left to cry. They leaked from the corners of his eyes without his consent, and the thought flitted through his head that he should tell Ed that it wasn’t the pain. But he didn’t know what it could have been other than the pain - he could not hold any thoughts except what the Kraken had instructed him to do, except that all of this was deserved, deserved, deserved.
Footsteps. The Kraken leaning in close, big enough to block the light, silhouetted and suddenly more familiar. The scent of him, of sea and dirt and smoke, the reality of his body, pulled Stede’s world sharply back into focus so quickly he gasped with it. “Laughing at me,” he said in a low voice that rumbled with menace like a storm on the horizon, “was not the expected response, Stede Bonnet.”
“I wasn’t - I couldn’t ever - I - you must know, I…” The Kraken was the only coherent thing in his world now, and everything else was shadow and broken pieces.
The Kraken laid a hand on his back, and Stede heard a whimper come from some primal place inside himself, somewhere he thought years ago had probably been bred out of his family generations ago. The pressure - the familiarity of his touch, a sense-memory - not gentle, exactly, but firm rather than rough, like the Kraken was pulling something out of him.
When he took his hand away, Stede tried to follow it, but it tipped him over onto his back, and now he was staring up at the Kraken, who was looking at his own hand like he had never seen it before. The tips of his fingers glistened in the candlelight, dark with - blood? Stede’s blood? That couldn’t be right.
The Kraken’s eyes drifted shut for a moment, and he brought his fingers to his mouth and licked gently.
“Oh,” said Stede, the sound punched out of him by the sight, sure as any fist. “ Oh. ”
“I believe you had an order,” said the Kraken, eyes still closed.
“I did?” he asked, dazed, and then the memory came back. Impassive face, voice a rumble. Strip. “I did.”
The Kraken’s eyes drifted open. He licked his lips, smudging the black just a bit more. “Are you going to do as you were told?” he asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “Yes, Captain. Of course. I know - yes. I must.”
His hands found the buttons along the flap of his breeches, and though they shook his fingers accomplished the task, the order he had been given suddenly superseding everything else flooding his senses.
The Kraken was still as he watched Stede’s work, eyes not straying from his face for even a moment. “I don’t know why you call me that,” he said finally, as Stede began working his way down the second row of buttons.
“You’re my - you’re the captain.” The buttons are almost all freed, now, and his hands are sure even as his voice stutters. “Why else would I follow your orders?”
“Fear,” the Kraken suggested.
“I have been more afraid than I ever was today,” Stede said as he freed the last button, hitching his hips up to shove his breeches down his legs. The motion pulled at the twin lashes on his back, and he hissed out a breath, but kept going. For a moment, he forgot the existence of the small buttons at the cuffs of the breeches, but at this point compliance was more urgent than the structural integrity of his garments. He tore at the cuffs, unwilling to wait, and the buttons popped. “I began to see the folly in living my life by running from fear the moment you came aboard the Revenge for the first time.”
“You stopped feeling fear?” The Kraken’s voice dripped unpleasantly with sarcasm. He sounded cruel, like Badminton and his brother Badminton. He sounded like Stede was something to be stepped on until the softest parts of him squished out of his sides, and then left.
Deserved, deserved, deserved.
“I am afraid of everything, Captain.” His breeches and smallclothes were at his ankles now, and he kicked them off, laying back against the bed and awaiting the next orders. The memory of the whip crack twisted something inside him, and he hoped desperately to hear the sound again. “You taught me that fear shouldn’t enter into the decisions I make. And now I know what happens when I ignore your lessons.”
The Kraken took a step back - for a moment, a trick of the candlelight showed something familiar twisting at his mouth, a flicker on his face like the false crest of a rogue wave, sparkling with seafoam at the top only to grow in size and overwhelm a careless sailor. His face fell to shadow, and he picked up the whip again where he had dropped it. “Yeah. The lessons.”
“I,” began Stede.
“You find so much value in them, Stede Bonnet? I won’t disappoint.”
The whip cracked again, and it laid a clean line of crystal-sharp focus along his abdomen, wrapping up along the side of his chest and cutting in the same instant it was back at the Kraken’s side. He screamed this time, seeing the blood rise up, and somehow the scream molded itself to orders he was given: “ Thank you for my lessons, Captain. ”
But no, that wasn’t quite right, and he should regret the error. He felt the tears come again, and he was desperate to be understood, except the world was all in pieces amid the heat of his body and the drips of blood. “I mean -”
“I know what you meant,” said the Kraken, voice low. “You’re. You are doing well with this. You’re… learning.”
He was moving closer again, kneeling over Stede, inspecting his work. The candlelight was not deceiving him anymore - the wild flashes in the Kraken’s eyes, the madness in his slow smile was heady, too much for anyone to bear. Stede had made this, he’d said. The Kraken was his own creature, and he deserved whatever it was the Kraken said he deserved.
“I’m just going to show you something,” said the Kraken in a terrible rasp, and then his mouth was fixed to the stripe of red that was the Kraken’s own handiwork, following its path from the curl over Stede’s heart down across his belly, a slow drag-suck-lick that pulled hellish noises from Stede’s throat.
“Are you mine, or am I yours?” the Kraken said into the deepest slice the whip had left, a rumble of sensation along the jut of Stede’s hip bone, and there he was - Ed, bleeding through the streaks in the Kraken’s kohl-smeared face.
“Yes,” said Stede.
“I’m keeping you here until I figure this out,” the Kraken said, speaking through lips gone red with Stede’s blood. “Might as well have another lesson.”
His right hand moved from where it had stroked the raised line on Stede’s abdomen down, stroking into the wiry curls at Stede’s groin and finding purchase on Stede’s prick, which was - inexplicably, to what little mind Stede had left - full and aching in a way that resembled his relations with Mary in the same way that the little toy crafts he had sent floating across the Long Water in Hyde Park resembled the Revenge as it stood firm against a sudden Caribbean gale.
He didn’t ask what the Kraken was doing. He didn’t want to be laughed at now, when his body was crashing on the rocks of sensation, rising and falling with the Kraken’s mouth and hands and the press of his body against his thighs and the slide of the leather between his legs. Besides, his mouth seemed to link to the dark, soft parts of him, the ones that he had swaddled in fine linens and hidden behind silk velvets and goldwork embroidery and prayed would stay safe and out of sight for as long as he lived. There were sounds pouring out of him he could not parse, and he could feel Ed smile into the welt at the hollow of his hip as they echoed in the small, comfortable room he’d had the audacity to call the brig. The suction at his hip seemed to match the pace of Ed’s hand on his prick, and things were happening that he could not name but which nevertheless threatened to engulf him.
“Am I yours,” Ed said again, “or are you mine?” His hand moved to cup Stede’s stones before wrapping solidly around the trunk of his arbor vitae, pulling Stede sharply back from a precipice he didn’t know he was approaching. “I need an answer, Stede.”
Then his mouth was engulfing the crest of Stede’s cock, the slick of his tongue darting into tight places and sliding along soft skin, a silk twist that reduced him to rubble and rebuilt him again in an instant. “Yes,” Stede said again, not knowing how else to convey it, all other words departing his wretched mind under the onslaught of Ed’s brilliant mouth and seeking hands.
“Yours,” Ed said again, and his hands were joining in now, finding their way to assist the slick, warm heaven he was creating around Steve’s prick, sliding along the length of it, down to the seam behind his stones, slick warmth spilling around him until Ed’s work good work seemed to consume everything, a flood of feeling and sensation beyond what his mind had capacity to recognize. “Mine.”
He was gasping now, pulling in great lungfuls of air, a drowning man unsure when he would have the strength to burst through and claim another. All he knew was the word yes ; all he could see were Ed’s dark eyes in the candlelight, desperate and wild, mirrors of his own. It was too much - it was not enough - it could never be enough, and would always be more than he could take.
“I’m,” he tried, hands moving helplessly to Ed’s hair, trying not to disturb the pin that held it, trying not to pull in his desperation.
Ed’s mouth pulled away, a gleaming line of spit still connecting them, and this felt like unspeakable loss. His hand moved towards Stede’s where it rested in Ed’s hair, and for a horrible moment he knew he had broken this, too, by his desperation, by his impatience. But Ed’s hands were pulling out the pins, dropping them to the floor, and his mouth was smiling a wicked smile that spoke no of rebuke. “Pull it,” he said, and his mouth was once again swallowing Stede down, and this time when Stede’s hands twisted in his hair there was a rumble of something dark and glorious within Ed’s chest that felt like want , that pushed him closer once more to that tallest precipice.
One hand replaced Ed’s mouth, wrapping around him and pulling him along, slick noises loud and deliciously obscene. “Mine,” Ed said, other hand spreading his legs wider, hands too eager to be gentle now. His mouth drifted lower to lick at the delicate skin of his stones, beard scratching Stede in dark and secret places, and again in the same hot rasp he said, “Mine .” Then his tongue found its way between the seam of Stede’s cheeks, one hand pushing his legs up and open as the other took him apart in firm, unyielding strokes, and then was just the press of Ed’s tongue against his hole sending him flying into the stars, shaking apart in wet bursts that left his chest and belly slick and his mind unable to process anything, except -
Ed was hitching himself up now, unlacing his leathers with an unsteady hand as the other slid its way off Stede’s softening cock and up the mess he’d made on the soft skin of his abdomen. Laces undone, he was pulling out his own prick, flushed dark and already half-slick in the candlelight. “Mine,” he said again, and caught some of Stede’s spend to slick his own way, pulling roughly at himself as he rushed headlong toward his own peak.
He was a creature of smoke and leather, of sea and storm, shaking apart above the filthy wreckage of Stede’s own pleasure. He was curling tattoos and wild hair and smeared kohl, an otherworldly vision - and he was also, unbelievably, Stede’s own Edward. His hand on his own prick set a punishing pace that made a need rise in Stede’s belly he had no names for as he watched - and when his eyes locked with Stede’s the desperation in them made something in him crack open, made him want to beg.
“Oh, Ed .” It was the wrong thing, the worst thing, and somehow it pushed Ed into freefall, and he shook apart above him, his hand twisting frantically on his cock, spilling over his hand and mixing with the spend cooling on Stede’s chest, with the blood still slowly welling to the surface from the kiss of the Kraken’s whip.
And then Ed’s hands were both sliding up through it, slick and filthy as he pulled Stede up onto his knees, capturing his mouth in a desperate kiss.
For an interminable minute it seemed that this was all there was, all there would ever be - the heat of Ed’s mouth, the slide of his tongue, the hum of pleasure that vibrated from one or both of them. He did not want to breathe for fear of breaking this, of sacrificing the closeness for unnecessary air that could not possibly match Ed’s mouth in necessity. He floated back to himself in the kiss, back from wherever Ed had taken him, and he couldn’t fathom needing anything else.
Except.
He wanted to see Ed, too, he realized as his mind untangled, wanted to see the light of him shining through the pieces of the Kraken that remained. That, too, felt like necessity, and so as the kiss became slow and soothing, calm seas after crashing thunder, he pulled back. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, you see? I can’t bear anything that isn’t this - that isn’t both. I don’t want you to be mine if I can’t be yours.”
More of Ed was shining through now, taking in the mess he’d made of Stede, of the solid little bed in the Revenge’s comfortable brig. He looked - it was impossible, of course, but he looked like a man on the edge of breaking. He looked like Stede had felt, like he thought he deserved whatever horrible and cutting thing Stede was about to say.
“Captain,” Stede said, and Ed’s eyes darted up to Stede’s, ready to be broken open, ready for every soft piece of him to be pulled out. He didn’t understand, and Stede realized that Captain had been the wrong thing to say. “Ed . I missed you so.”
“You left,” Ed said, eyes returning to the lines of blood where the skin on Stede’s chest had broken, and his breath was coming in shallow pants now. “You left me on the pier, with my dinghy and my bag of beard, and you weren’t ever coming back, and -”
“I was an idiot,” Stede said. “I didn’t know I was an idiot. I have never once known I was an idiot, only that everyone told me that I was, and it was awful . But I knew as soon as I set foot in that house, that house that had never been my home, that I was an idiot. And I didn’t know how to fix it.”
Ed was still staring with a horrified expression at the welts on Stede’s chest, at their spend soaking into Stede’s skin, and he didn’t seem to be listening. Stede needed him to listen. “I should have known I loved you before you kissed me, because I did. And I should have known after you kissed me, because - I did, Ed. I did. But I thought I had broken you -”
“You did,” Ed said reflexively, eyes coming back up to Stede’s.
“I thought I had broken Blackbeard, because I was an idiot, and I couldn’t understand what any of it actually meant, because I was an idiot.”
“What it meant?” Ed asked. “What the hell d’you mean, what it meant ?” He pulled Stede closer, and Stede was suddenly extremely conscious that he was about to smear their spend all over Ed’s clothes, even if Ed didn’t seem to notice or care.
He put his hand on Ed’s chest. “I didn’t learn what I needed to learn before I made a right bungle of all of it, Ed. I didn’t see what it meant to be yours, and for you to be mine. I didn’t know what you were asking me on the beach that day, until I finally did and then you were - the Kraken. But it doesn’t matter who you are, Ed.” Ed’s face twisted a bit, unsteady, and no, Stede, that had been a wrong thing too. “Or, it does, but only because I love all of them. Blackbeard, the Kraken, the Captain of the Revenge. Privateer Edward Teach. Ed. I’ll have all of them, please. They can all be mine, if you let them.”
“You can’t mean that,” Ed said flatly. The Kraken’s pieces were there, his tentacles sliding along Ed’s skin, soft reminders of everything he’d done. “You cannot possibly want -”
“I’ll take whatever you think I deserve of you, Ed,” Stede said, wary to interrupt but seeing no way to avoid it. “But I cannot have you telling me what I want.”
“You can’t possibly want him,” Ed said again, urgent. “He’s awful.” I’m awful, Stede heard him say. “He’s a monster.” I’m a monster . “He… he hurts people, and he likes it.” I hurt people. I liked it. “He hurt you, Stede.” I hurt you.
“I wanted it,” Stede said, and the truth of it shocked him. “I needed to feel it all. All the pain that I caused you. I deserved it.”
Somewhere along the way tears had come to Ed’s eyes, and it hit Stede now as he saw them spilling over what had streaked away the dark from his face before he had even set foot in the brig. He felt like crying again, taking in the enormity of what he had done.
“I made you bleed. I wanted - the things I wanted to do to you, Stede. The bleeding was just the beginning - I wanted to -” and here he took a heaving breath that shook with a sob, continuing despite himself. “I wanted to rip you apart with my hands, tear into you and see what made you a person. To see what you had that I don’t.” The sobs overtook him now, and his head dropped down to his knees, wretched.
“I know,” Stede murmured. “I saw it. I wanted you to. I deserved it all, and more.”
Ed’s shoulders shook. “You’re mad,” he said, “absolutely mad, do you know that?”
“I liked it when you tasted my blood,” Stede said, because the noises coming from Ed didn’t sound like sobs anymore, and Ed had always delighted in his madness when it aligned so perfectly with Ed’s own. “I hoped you would - you would bite me, maybe, and take pieces of me to replace what I’d broken. I would have deserved that, too.”
“Fucking mental,” he said into his knees, and then he was dropping back onto the bed, and there it was. There he was.
“I didn’t know I loved you, and I came back because I needed you to know that I didn’t just love you - I love all of you, whoever is in there. I love Jeff the Accountant, did you know that?”
Ed was howling with it now, almost in danger of rolling off the bed. “Absolutely goddamn insane,” he says between great gasping breaths, his laughter tied for the best sound Stede has ever heard with all the other sounds he heard Ed make today.
“I don’t know what else I will want,” Stede says, “but I trust you will know what I deserve, and tell me.”
And then Ed was pulling him down into a kiss, making a true mess of his clothes and clearly not noticing or caring in a way that would have given land-Stede the vapours. But if it didn’t matter to Ed, then it didn’t matter to -
“Okay, sorry, it’s just you’ve made a mess of me and now you’re getting it all over your clothes and leather is really rather difficult to…”
And then Ed was howling again, rolling them both onto the floor with a great clatter that surely would have brought someone in to check on them. Except nobody came, and Ed’s great leather-clad thighs were pressing up against him so well, and he was still slick with their seed, and the slide of it all was so delicious, and Ed’s finger was trailing down his –
“Jesus fucking Christ, what the fucking fuck is this bullshit,” Izzy said from the newly opened door of the brig. “You,” he said, pointing at Stede, “are clearly some sort of - creature - menace - bullshit, and you ,” he said, turning on Ed, “you promised you were done with this. You promised, and you cut off my fucking toe . You lunatics deserve each other, you fucking fucks. I’m done.”
He turned on his heel and walked out, the door slamming - rather more dramatically than strictly necessary, Stede thought - behind him.
“I think someone might be feeling a bit grumpy,” whispered Ed.
“You cut off his toe?” Stede asked. “I think he might have a right to be.”
“I didn’t cut off his toe. It was the Kraken. He likes the Kraken.” He said it as if the logic were perfectly sound.
“You’re the Kraken, Edward.”
Ed grinned. It was a Blackbeard grin this time, wicked and sideways. “Only a little bit.”
“You’re going to have to be the Kraken for Izzy,” Stede said, going for stern and ending up in fond. “You do realize that man needs you to be the Kraken for him, yes?”
Ed’s hand tightened on Stede’s backside, and the squeeze was delicious. “And for you, sometimes?” he murmured.
“Ah,” said Stede, hitching against Ed’s thigh a little more now, “you know I’ll take whoever you’ll give me.” Dignity had never really been his forte, he decided.
“You,” Ed said against his mouth, “will take what you deserve.”