Actions

Work Header

Such Joie de Vivre

Summary:

Professional thief Edward Teach is tired of hole in the wall apartments, shitty pub food, and skipping town every few months to keep the cops off their tail. He’s well past the age he meant to flee the country and retire, and all he needs is One Last Job to set him up for life. When he hears that some rich bastard outside of town has just the sort of treasure he’d trade his good knee for, Ed sets out in disguise to get the lay of the land.

What he gets instead is a case of mistaken identity. Yanked into Stede Bonnet’s multimillion dollar home and greeted with relief instead of fear, Ed suddenly finds himself entrusted with the care of the recently-separated Bonnet’s two children. And he’s not hating it. Not at all.

But there’s still a mysterious treasure to find. There’s still Izzy Hands, breathing down Edward’s neck about finding the money and moving on. And there’s still Stede Bonnet, with his easy smiles and soft, kind voice, and his silly talk of second chances.

The Bonnet house is enormous. It’s no wonder a kid who grew up in dingy squats and group homes would get little lost in it.

Notes:

Sorry about the length but this fic/fandom has possessed me. Yes, I already wrote a long slow burn nanny AU in a previous fandom, but the thing they didn't anticipate when they said "write what you know" is that I only know about like three things, and I also get the theme song to The Nanny stuck in my head a lot. It's fucking catchy.

Other chapters are all fully outlined and should not be such a monstrous length, but who the fuck knows. Maybe they'll surprise me.

I'm writing this alternating with other projects, and I also I just bought a house and have to move soon, so I'm not making any promises on update speed this time. You'll have to all suffer along with me.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Gems of red and blue flash in the weak light streaming through the filthy apartment windows as Edward twists the dagger in his hand, holding it loosely by the crossguard, between his thumb and forefinger. He traces the raised design in the gold hilt with his eyes, then with his fingers, following swirls of indent in the soft metal, raised bumps and crosshatch patterns. They’re set with intent, all of them, no sign of scoring on the decorations that would betray a history of heavy use.

Yet the blade is sharp, the steel tempered, polished, and cared for over many years until the edge is so light he could shave with it. It’s a beautiful thing, a deadly thing.

“Hey Iz,” he calls across the apartment and hears his partner grunt in acknowledgement, “how much do you reckon this one’s worth?”

Izzy looks up from where he’s been counting money, distributing crisp bills into two neat, almost even stacks on the three-legged coffee table they dragged up from the dumpster last month. It works just fine with a cinder block shoved under the droopy corner, and they’d needed somewhere to eat takeout that wasn’t the bed. Izzy rolls his shoulders when he straightens, a sure sign he’s been sitting on that lumpy beige couch, hunched over the table for far too long.

Once upon a time, he could have done that all day without a wince. Now, he gasps as his spine clicks back into place, but his narrow gaze remains fixed on the dagger. “That the one you stole off the brat in San Diego three months ago?”

“San Francisco,” Edward corrects, tone mild. The difference doesn’t really matter. “Eighteenth century at least, or so he claimed. Been in his family since they served under King George.” His lip ticks up. “Wouldn’t shut up about it, once I got him going.”

In fact, it had taken a rather concentrated effort to shut the guy up, and even then he’d been loud, performative in a way Edward associated more with cheap videos in dingy back rooms than the high-ceilinged townhome they’d been fucking in. Still, it had done the job. He’d gotten the loot.

“As if you care where it’s from, beyond the value it adds to the thing.”

Edward does care, though. A bit. He’s partial to old things, if he had a choice in what to steal, though he’s never mentioned the preference to Izzy. The item’s history adds heft to it in his hand. But that’s a bonus, not a need. None of it matters enough to stop him from stealing off someone, provided their shit is good enough.

Izzy unfolds from the sofa, supporting himself with a hand on the back of it that Edward pretends not to notice, just as he pretends he can’t see the slight hobble in Izzy’s meandering steps. He holds his hand out when he reaches the bed, and Edward puts the dagger in his palm.

Gripping the hilt, Izzy turns it much like Ed had before, but his steely eyes are more calculating than appreciative. He purses his lips, gaze flickering over the thing, and Ed can see the numbers piling up inside his scheming brain.

After a moment, Izzy flips the dagger and offers it back to Ed, hilt first. “It’s still hot after three months,” he drawls. “Plus it’s a rather unique item, easy to identify. It’d be hard to fence it as a whole piece, but we could scrap it.” He taps a finger on the ruby at the center of the crossguard. “Pop out the stones to sell as loose gems — they’re nice enough to fetch a pretty penny. Gold always has inherent value, if we had it melted down. If we were in a pinch for funds, there are options.”

Edward stretches out on the bed, flinging one arm up over his head. It scrapes along the bare brick wall in a satisfying scratch. He keeps his eyes on the proffered hilt, but doesn’t take it back. “Wouldn’t melting off the hilt damage the blade?”

Izzy shrugs. “The blade itself is worthless. Who cares?” He sounds bored, edging toward annoyed at the question, and Edward is grateful that his beard will hide his small smile. “You wanted to know if we could make money off it.”

“I wanted to know its worth,” Ed corrects. He grabs the dagger from Izzy’s hand without warning, and Izzy hisses. A thin pink line appears across the base of his thumb, quickly welling with blood. Edward smirks as Izzy grabs a takeout napkin from the windowsill to press over the cut. “I think it’s worth quite a bit, as a weapon.”

“Are you fucking mad?” Izzy snarls. “That’s my dominant hand.”

“Oh, come on, Iz; it’s barely a scratch. You’ve had worse.” He holds the dagger up again, checking the edge for blood. He can’t see it, but it must be there, dancing on the margin. He clucks his tongue. “Now I’ll have to clean it.”

“What the fuck,” Izzy mutters, striding into their bathroom to rustle up the first aid kid. He bumps his head on the bottom of the sink crouching to dig it out, then falls back on his ass in reaction, cursing a blue streak the whole time.

Edward tries to keep in his laughter, but he can’t. It wells up in his chest until a few bubbles escape, emerging from his lips squeaked out like childish giggles.

“Is this funny to you? What the fuck were you thinking, Edward?”

“Bored.” Ed shrugs, kicks one of his legs up across the other on the bed, wipes the edge of the dagger on his thigh. The black denim won’t show the blood, if there is any. “Aren’t you bored, Iz?”

“No,” Izzy says firmly. He’s managed to crack the first aid kit open with one hand, smearing antibacterial over his palm. “I was perfectly content counting our fucking money until some twat tried to slit my wrist.”

“I didn’t try to slit your wrist.” Ed drops the dagger onto the quilt beside him and starfishes out again, arching his back and sighing at the stretch. “If I wanted to do that you’d be scrambling for more than a bandaid. Besides, that’s not what I mean.”

“What do you mean, then? Because I clearly haven’t a fucking clue what goes through your head.”

“Aren’t you bored of this?” Ed asks. He sweeps his hand out, trying in a single gesture to wrap up their entire life: the shitty little apartment, his bed, Izzy’s sleeping bag stuffed in the corner, the stacks of money on their crumbling coffee table, the rolls of art and Crown Royal bags stuffed with gold jewelry and loose gems. “Look at us, Iz, pushing fifty and still doing this same shit.”

“We’ve grown better with experience.” Snapping the first aid kit shut, Izzy stretches his legs out on the filthy bathroom tile like he wants to be there, leaning against the doorway. “Besides, what else would we do?”

“Anything?” Edward suggests. “Literally like… fucking anything?” Sighing, he tugs at the end of his beard just to feel the prickle of reaction in his skin. “This shit used to excite me, man, but I don’t know. I think I’m just… I think I’m done.”

The words leave his tongue and clatter to the floor. Ed hadn’t expected to say that with such finality, but he means it. It feels like the sort of statement that should shatter a silence, but there’s no silence to be had in this apartment, with neighbors’ heavy footsteps creaking the stairs and the streets below, the constant din of traffic and trains.

Still, Izzy is silent, and that weighs heavy in the room. Edward stays staring at the pale brown water stains on the pockmarked ceiling and waits. Out on the street, a dog barks fiercely.

“You’re the boss,” Izzy says finally. He sounds resigned, but Edward doesn’t want to see his face. “If that’s what you want, it’s what you want. It’s just a shame it had to happen now. I’d always figured there’d be one last job, and word on the street is— But you’re not interested.”

Ed rolls his eyes, irritation knotting in his chest. “No games, Iz. I know all your tricks; I taught them to you.”

“‘Course you did, boss.”

Good. Good, that’s where Ed wants this to end. Fuck Izzy’s ‘word on the street’ and his ‘one last job’ bullshit. It’s not the first time he’s claimed something was one last job, and the last time it had ended up with him and Edward both huddled under some furniture in the back of a stranger’s U-haul, sneaking out of a city on high alert with only the clothes on their backs and a few rolled up pieces of priceless art Ed had cut from gaudy gold frames.

The art is still in a pile on their floor over a year later. “Priceless,” when it comes to thievery, often just means, “impossible to sell without being arrested.” It might as well be called worthless art.

Still, Edward has always liked a good story. He sighs. “Alright. What’s the fucking rumor this time?” He glances over, sees Izzy open his mouth and interjects quickly, “Not that I’m going to do the job! Just curious.”

“Of course,” Izzy says, gravelly voice as smooth as he can get it. “Well, apparently there was a certain item set to go to auction last week, recovered from the wreck of a ship that sank three hundred years ago.”

Ed props himself up on his elbows. Sunken ship?

Izzy turns toward the bathroom, away from Edward, but the acoustics carry his words across the room well, the ceramic tile adding a nice reverb to the tone. “Only, the item never made it to the auction block. Some rich bastard who lives outside the city went direct to the seller with an outrageous amount of money — the kind of offer you don’t refuse.”

“What is it?” Ed asks, a little breathless.

“They didn’t disclose the amount.”

Edward waves a hand dismissively. “No, not the offer, Iz, the item.”

Izzy turns back to him, and their eyes meet across the messy floor with a clash like steel. “They didn’t say. Buyer paid to keep even that secret.”

Blowing out a breath, Edward drops his arms and falls back, head hitting the pillow and eyes on the ceiling. He traces one of the stains again, the sort of sausage-shaped one by the light fixture. “Treasure from a shipwreck,” he muses. “I’ve never stolen anything from a ship before.”

“Well, there was that time in Florida—”

“That was a yacht,” Ed says, voice dripping with scorn. “It’s not the same. Besides, what’d we get out of that? A few designer watches and some teensy diamonds. Where’s the thrill in that?”

He can still remember the feeling of it in the early days, heart stuck in his throat and fluttering like a trapped bird as he crept through a darkened hallway, even though back then it was a lucky haul to steal anything worth more than fifty bucks. It’s all nostalgia now. When he searches his last few scores, however valuable they’d been, he can’t recall anything that brought him even a tenth of that excitement.

Sunken treasure.

“So,” Izzy asks, biting back a groan as he levers himself up from the floor to stand, then walks stiff-legged across the room to Edward’s bed, “are you in?”

Ed purses his lips and looks away. “One last job, and then we go, right? We make a life for ourselves on some Caribbean island and pretend this one never existed.”

“Sure. If that’s what you want.” Izzy doesn’t sound excited, but then he never does.

“Alright,” Ed says finally, rolling onto his side to face Iz and thrusting out his hand. “I’m in.”

Izzy grips his hand tight, until the bandage over his fresh cut sticks to Ed’s palm too.

-

The house’s size is unsurprising. Once Izzy’s sources had divulged the target’s name — Bonnet — it had been easy enough to locate the address, and Edward is no amateur. Even before he cases a site in person, he takes stock online first. It’s a beautiful thing, the internet, if only for how many photos it gives him of his targets from different angles. No more going in unprepared and off-center in the modern era.

So when Edward strolls up the long gravel walkway to the mansion’s porch the next afternoon, he already knows that the original portion of the house was built in 1908, that the first owner was an opera singer who lost the place when attendance at the theater dropped in the 1930’s, and that the buyer after her fall from grace was one Reginald Bonnet, who seems to have been the current owner’s grandparent. He’s seen pictures of the current Bonnet in articles Izzy found — tall and stiff-looking, posed with all the presence of a block of wood beside his wife and a pair of kids dressed like time travelers from the 1950’s — and even a glimpse of the impeccable living room beyond that.

He knows, too, that people in this part of town often complain about their internet service and that power lines sometimes go down due to tree limbs falling from the old oaks alongside the wide streets. As he climbs up the steps to the mansion’s front door, he readies the spiel on his lips: Hello, are you Mr. Bonnet? I’m Randy. I’m with the (mumble mumble) service provider. There’s been some outages reported in your area. Have you had any problems today? No? Mind if I take a look around just in case?

His black t-shirt and denim come close enough to passing for a uniform, but with his hair pulled back into a loose pony he wouldn’t look terribly out of place wandering into most blue-collar jobs, tattoos and all. Besides, it’s confidence that sells something like this, not fabric. That’s why they’re called confidence men.

Dusting his hands on his thighs, Ed raises his head high, chin out and shoulders back as he raps on the pine green front door. Once, twice, three—

It swings open under his hand, and wild-eyed man in an oversized blue robe stares out at him. “Oh, thank god you’re here,” the stranger gasps, flailing his arms as he steps back. “Come on, then, come in! Good grief. It’s been hours already.” He cuts off with a dry cough, covering his mouth with a flowing sleeve.

“Has it?” Ed murmurs, running from startled to bemused in a flash.

Even after all the research he and Izzy (mostly Izzy) had done, it takes him a minute to recognize the wreckage in front of him as Bonnet himself. Gone are the gelled golden curls and stiff manner. The man currently leading Edward on into his opulent living room is almost as white as the wall behind him, his hair askew and forehead dotted with sweat. He’s wearing pajamas beneath his robe, and his slippers are cartoonish whales.

“The children are in the yard.” He points through the living room, and his hand trembles in the air. He snatches it back, shivering despite the thick layers he’s wrapped in. “You can help yourself to anything you might need in the kitchen. Just ask Roach or Lucius if you can’t find something; I’m afraid it’s Buttons’ day off. If there’s an emergency, I’m just upstairs—

“Oh dear,” Bonnet interrupts himself before Edward has finished processing what he said already. “Where are my manners? Illness is no excuse, I’m afraid. I’m Stede.”

He holds out his hand — pale, shaking — and Edward takes it, lip quirked with amusement. “Ed,” he says.

It was meant to be Randy today, damn it, but he’s too far off script. It just slipped out, and now Bonnet’s hand is soft and a bit clammy in his, and the man is beaming with warm brown eyes that no photographer had captured, as if he’s genuinely delighted to make Ed’s acquaintance.

Then, the color washes out of his face again. “Please excuse me,” he mumbles. As he flees for the stairs, he hikes up his robe like it’s a gown from Gone with the Wind or some shit, and the only trail he leaves behind is the faint echo of muffled coughing.

Ed doesn’t move right away, stands there just inside the doorway and staring with bemused wonder at the path the strange little rich man took. After a moment, when Bonnet doesn’t reappear, reality sinks back in to fill the space he vacated. Weirdness aside, Ed is right where he’d hoped to be: alone in this wealthy stranger’s home, given free rein to comb the area for signs of anything worth stealing — of one thing worth stealing in particular.

It’s not going to be easy. Ed realizes that the moment he turns away from the staircase and really takes in his opulent surroundings. The decor is fancy, sure; most of the furniture looks antique to him, with scrolling polished woodwork and flashes of gold gilt. Either this stuff is over a hundred years old, or it’s the kind of incredibly expensive new shit made to look like it is. It all adds up to dollar signs already — velvet upholstery, gold frames around the art, fine oak that’s smooth as satin when Ed skims his fingers along the curving arm of a throne-like chair.

Bookcases are built into the far wall, a fireplace set in the center of them with a carved mantle complete with creepy kid faces staring out at him. Cherubim, he knows, but that doesn’t make them not creepy kid faces. He’s seen haunted house movies.

The shelves are piled with trinkets, from books to nineteenth century statuettes to misshapen little dolls of bright clay that must have been made by the Bonnet children, now displayed right alongside an Hermès vase and a pair of silver candlesticks that are probably worth more than the rent on Ed’s apartment.

There’s a theme to the place, Ed slowly realizes, and it’s distinctly nautical. The paintings on the walls here are of the sea, a lighthouse, a swirl of colorful fish. Identifying art was never Ed’s department — that’s Izzy’s thing — but it looks nice enough to him. There’s a ship in a bottle on one shelf, an antique globe on another. Even the screensaver on the giant flatscreen TV over the mantle is of a moving, curling sea at twilight.

It’s going to be a hell of a lot harder for Edward to identify the treasure if everything in the damned house is themed after ships. Thinking on that, he wanders through the arched doorway into the next room.

The kitchen, at least, isn’t nautical. That would be a bit fucking much, although he wouldn’t put it past rich people to do something that ridiculous. Instead, it’s jumped straight out of a glossy magazine: gleaming steel appliances and thick wood block countertops, and everything else white between down to the fancy tile on the floor. The room is nearly twice the size of Edward’s entire apartment, and on one side is the longest table he’s ever seen outside of a prison chow hall.

He runs his fingers along the edge of the kitchen island, eyebrows raising at the smoothness of the wood. It looks untreated, natural, but it’s soft as satin against his skin with nary a splinter in sight.

That’s when the man appears on the other side of the counter, knife in hand.

Edward jumps back, his hand going for his hip on instinct, reaching for his own knife. He stops before the handle touches his palm.

The other man is holding a bunch of carrots.

Oh, he’s got a knife too, and a fuck-off big one at that, plus wild eyes and scattered curly hair like a bush haloing his face, and all of that together surges through Ed like a thousand watts of threat. But he’s also got carrots in his other hand, and a white apron over his clothes, and Edward doesn’t drop his hand away entirely, but he hooks his thumb on his belt loop instead of pulling his knife and tries to look a mile less tense than he feels.

“Who’re you?” It comes out more barking than Edward meant it, and the man behind the counter tilts his head, eyes that are more white than brown flickering down Edward’s body, then back up again.

When it comes, the man’s grin almost has Ed reaching for the knife again. “Roach,” he says, hoisting the bundle of carrots by their green leafy bits along with the knife, which he points at his own chest casually. “I’m the cook.”

The name clicks something in Edward’s memory — ask Roach or Lucius if you can’t find something — and his shoulders drop, hand falling away from his hip. Just the chef. Strange name for a chef, Roach, but who is Edward to judge? God knows he’s heard weirder.

Roach drops the carrots onto the counter in front of him and brings the knife down in a single, forceful swing, severing the tops and making Ed flinch. It takes a second to clear the thunk of the blade from his ears enough to realize Roach had said something.

“What’s that, mate?” Ed asks, watching as the man’s arm becomes a blur of brown and steel, swiftly making mince of the vegetables. “I’m a bit deaf in one ear.”

Not a lie. Having a .45 fired right next to your face will do that.

“I asked if the agency sent you,” Roach repeats. He looks up from the counter, but his knife never stops moving, somehow missing his fingers on instinct.

“Uh, sure.” Whatever agency the man is referring to, it’s clearly how Ed got his foot in the door here, and that’s the best way to end up on a job like this: let someone else make up the reasons for you and just play along.

He waits, loose-limbed and faux casual as Roach looks him over again. What he really wants right now is to get back into that living room. There’s no treasure to be had in here, and the sooner he can get a look at the rest of the house, the sooner he can go home.

Roach shrugs, then waves his knife at the pair of ornate white French doors on the other side of the room. “Kids’re out there,” he says. “Good luck with that. Dinner is at 6:30.”

It’s as clear a dismissal as any Edward’s ever heard, and Roach is watching, expecting, so Ed follows the gleaming steel arrow in his hand and reaches for the door.

If Bonnet himself looked nothing like his photo, then his children look too much like one. They’re just outside the doors on a dark stained deck, the boy dressed like he’s moments away from grabbing a briefcase to run to a meeting, and the girl looking like she’s prepared to attend church — possibly for her own funeral, given the nonplussed expression on her face. She’s seated on a bench, dragging the toes of her white shoes through a sand box, while her brother kneels on the edge of the box, drawing idle patterns in the sand with a trowel.

They glance up at him, and Edward freezes. “Um, hello there,” he says. Is that how people talk to children? He can’t be sure. He hasn’t interacted with a child since he stopped being one, aside from occasionally returning a baby’s smile on the train. “I’m Ed. What’re your names?”

“Alma,” the girl says flatly, then points at her brother. “That’s Louis.” Louis doesn’t look up from the sand, but Alma’s eyes narrow as she looks Ed up and down. He’s getting a lot of that today. Somehow, it feels sharper from an eight year old than it did in the kitchen, with a knife. “Are you from the agency?”

That again. “Yep.” Ed hooks his thumbs on his belt loops, rocks up on his toes as he nods.

“You don’t look like a nanny.”

A nanny. A fucking nanny. Holy shitballs, what’s he got himself into? This isn’t a role Edward knows how to play, but his mind is on auto-pilot, knows what line comes next. “Well, I reckon I do look like one. Because I am.”

Alma’s pursed lips say otherwise, but she turns her attention back to the sandbox, softly kicking dirt in the general direction of her brother. Dismissed, Ed wanders over to the edge of the deck, resting his hands along the sturdy wooden railing, and gets his first look at the rest of the back yard.

It’s incredible. Lawn spreads out ahead in all directions. It’s not quite a sea of neatly trimmed, vibrant green grass, but it feels that way compared to the tiny slivers of grassy median and postage stamp parks Ed is used to from most of the various cities he’s lived in. It’s hard to even believe there’s this much green space in the city, much less owned by one man. It’s gross. Wasteful. Luxurious.

The whole area is bracketed by a high, white wood fence, and the expanse of grass is broken in places by features and decorations — flower beds, hedges, a burbling stone fountain. There are toys scattered about the lawn in the form of collapsed tricycles, wagons, trucks, and a plastic pool which stands empty. It looks like enough to entertain a whole army of children to Ed’s eyes, a wealth of rainbow shaded plastic.

Lording over all of it, at the base of the deck, is a castle.

Well, not a real castle of course — the yard is huge, but it’s not that huge — but a castle to a child’s mind, all painted wooden slats forming a turret on each end. Between the two is a stretch of metal rungs and a bar, a pair of rubber swings dangling down on plastic-coated chains, hanging in the air like a siren’s call. A rope ladder runs up the side of one turret, and a bright red slide curls down from the other.

Edward’s grip on the deck rail tightens, feeling the rough of the wood against his palms, as the sight of those empty black swings stirs up the dust of a long ignored memory. He trails his fingers along the railing as he walks down the stairs, eyes fixed on the play castle, and when he runs out of rail to touch his hand still hangs in the air, waiting until he’s close enough to curl his fingers around the chains of a swing.

The rubber-coated metal links feel familiar and foreign all at once, and Ed clutches them tight in a fist.

Higher, swinging higher with every swoop, legs kicking through the air and heart in his throat as he grins, stretching his voice to shout, “Mum, look! Look how high I can go!” And his mum turns and smiles in return, always ready to hear him even over the screams of a dozen other children, but her smile is still weak and trembling, no teeth, and so Ed kicks harder, harder, wanting to really show off, show her what he can do and how much fun they can have, and the bar of the swingset jolts with his weight as the swing peaks, and he clutches the chains, and he’s so high he can see over the park fence now, so high he can see out to the street, so high he can see the front door to their building and see the moment the front door opens and his dad steps out, his searching and thunderous glare, and Ed’s smile is falling, falling like the swing when it drops through the air, and he falls, and his mum’s smile is gone long before he hits the ground, long before he reaches for her hand, long before his dad’s hand settles in a painful grip on his shoulder, his mum’s shoulder, and shoves them both toward home.

The chain is wrapped around Ed’s knuckles. He lets it go, skims his fingertips down the links instead. The next time his mum had offered to take him to the park, he’d shouted at her. It wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t fun enough to trade for what happened after.

This isn’t a park, and Edward isn’t seven years old anymore, but there’s still a spark of defiance in his chest as he turns around and drops himself into the swing. It sits lower than he remembers, his butt barely a foot off the ground, but that won’t matter for long. The motion comes back to him immediately — muscle memory in full effect — as he kicks himself away from the ground. The chains groan where they grip the bar, but the castle is sturdy, and it’s not like Ed is going that hard.

It’s tempting to try. He swings his legs faster, careful to lift them before they can drag dirt and slow him down again, and his bad knee gives a twinge. Even if the playset doesn’t stop him, his own body will. Forty years older, a hundred-fifty extra pounds or so of muscle extra, and some shrapnel in his leg where a knife broke off in the bone all means that swinging is no longer quite the same as it was in his memory.

But by god, it’s close.

His eyes shut at he breathes with the flow of the swing — up and in, down and out — and even without a great deal of height he feels weightless, leaning back and stretching his legs to streamline. It’s like floating, but the rubber seat is firm and reliable beneath him, the chains in his hands unyielding, holding him together.

Edward opens his eyes to see blue sky stretched out all around and the solemn, round face of Louis Bonnet staring up at him with suspicion.

“What’re you doing?” Louis asks when Ed slows his swinging to look at him.

“What’s it look like I’m doing? I’m having a swing.” Ed’s grip on the chains tightens again as he tilts his head back for another glimpse at the sky. “Always liked swings.”

“You can’t swing. You’re too big.”

Edward considers his options. The first response that springs to mind, Fuck off, probably isn’t suited to a six year-old. He settles on, “Well, you weren’t using it. Someone ought to.”

Louis purses his lips and folds his arms in a manner that has Ed resisting the urge to laugh. He met these fucking kids about two minutes ago, but he’s already seen Alma do the exact same thing, like they’re echoing each other. It looks even sillier on the baby fat cheeks of her little brother.

After a few seconds, Louis nods, accepting Edward’s infallible logic, and drops his arms to join Ed on the other swing. Despite the low set of the seat, Louis’ legs are too short to reach the ground, so he has to sort of toe himself into a running jump to get in the air, then kick his legs like mad to get momentum.

“Hey, not bad,” Ed says, and he doesn’t have to fake sounding impressed. For a tiny kid who can’t kick off the dirt for help, Louis has a decent height on his swing.

“Thanks,” the kid gasps, legs flailing, and Ed grins.

He tries to sync the arc of their swings, but it’s hard to predict where Louis is going to go with his method being half chaos. Sometimes, he gets going and gets a few quick and jerky flights in. Then, tiring out for a moment, he lets the pace fall. It’s enough to keep Edward busy, at least, trying to match a pattern that doesn’t quite exist.

A huff of indignation announces Alma’s presence at the foot of the castle turret, hands on her hips. “I want to swing too.”

“Alright.” Easy enough. Edward has had his turn, and they’re the kids’ swings. He drags his toes through the grass to stop, then hoists himself out of the low seat using the chains, favoring his arms to lift him over relying on the bend of his knee. He dusts the seat off before presenting it with a roll of his wrists, “There you are, miss.”

“But I don’t want to swing with her,” Louis whines suddenly, his swing jerking to a stop. “I wanted to swing with you.”

Kids. A couple minutes ago, they weren’t giving Ed or the swingset the time of day. Now, both are suddenly in demand. He eyes the playset up and down, remembering the sensation of flying through the air, his mum’s hands firm on his lower back.

“How ‘bout I push you instead?” It seems like the obvious option to him, so he’s not expecting the way the kids go wide-eyed at him.

“Really?” Alma asks, a little breathless. “Both of us?”

“Sure.” Edward shrugs, his lips twitching into a smile when the kids nod, Louis so eager that his swing shakes with the residual motion. Who knew such a little thing would get a couple rich kids so interested in him?

He rounds the back of the swings and starts pushing — first Louis, then Alma. The latter takes a bit more work, being older and heavier, but it’s oddly satisfying, feeling the muscles in his arms and back engage and watching the kids go soaring, legs stretched and heads tossed back.

Louis whoops, shouting, “Harder! Higher!” as he swings back down, and Ed finds himself grinning fiercely as he darts from Alma back to him for another shove, then back again to the other swing.

Alma is clearly a master of the swings. While Louis slows himself, little legs dangling and kicking away, Alma stretches out like an arrow, streamlining her body so she soars. Leaning back as far as she can, her dark blonde ponytail trails the tips of the grass beneath her, and Edward has to push her by the shoulders instead of her back. He wishes there were three swings, a sturdier setup, so he could hop into one beside her and compete, see which of them can climb higher.

Since that isn’t an option, he darts back and forth, ignoring the twinges in his knee in favor of the satisfying burn in his arms and shoulders. There’s enough space between the two swings that it takes him a few steps to dash between the two each time a child needs pushing, and soon Ed is blowing with every breath, strands of hair sticking to his neck and the sides of his face from the sticky summer heat.

“If you close your eyes, it feels like flying,” Louis giggles.

Alma bites back, “If you close your eyes, you’ll fall out.”

“Will not!”

“Will too.”

“Why not jump?” Ed interjects, and Alma whips around at the suggestion, almost slapping him with her ponytail.

“That’s not safe,” she says firmly, but her eyes are darting away to the ground, as if temptation is rising up to meet her with every swoop.

“What? I used to do it all the time.” Well, not all the time, but he’d done it once or twice at recess, dared or taunted by older boys into proving he could keep up, back in the early days when they did that with tricks and not with fists and teeth.

Louis takes a deep breath and bounces in his seat. “I’m gonna do it!” he declares, fingers clutching the chains tight. On the next push — which Ed maybe makes a bit more gentle, just in case — he throws himself forward.

It’s hardly graceful. He doesn’t leap so much as he slips and flails, and he lands knees-first in the grass and rolls. Ed stops, grabbing the loose swing, unsure of what to do with the sudden tightness in his chest, and Alma shoots him a glare as if to say, look what you’ve done.

But Louis is already scrambling back to his feet. There are streaks of pale green and pinkish scrapes on his exposed knees and bits of dry grass in his hair, but his blue eyes blaze as he grins. “I did it!”

Edward chuckles, relief and amazement blooming warm under his skin. “You did,” he declares, and this kid, holy shit. He’s braver than Ed would have given him credit for.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise when, a second later, he sees Alma’s fingers tighten on her own slowed swing. “Me next,” she says, determined, and Ed steps over to give her a proper shove for it.

Alma lands better than her brother had, firmly on both feet, and throws her arms out like a gymnast, bowing dramatically, and of course Edward has to applaud that, Louis joining in until Alma suddenly darts back to Edward’s side and slaps him on the arm.

“Tag!” she shouts. “You’re it!” And like that, both kids are scrambling across the yard.

Ed takes a second, face splitting in a grin, and then he lunges after them with a roar.

The advantage of his longer legs is rendered more even by the stiffness of his knee, but it’s nothing Edward isn’t long used to managing at this point in his life. He’s capable of a good sprint when he needs to be, and he uses his wits to fill in the difference, luring Alma in closer with soft, child-appropriate curses and feigning a worse limp than he’s got. When she’s near enough to try for, she runs shrieking, laughing from his playful growls, but not fast enough that he doesn’t tag her on the arm as she flees.

Then, it’s his turn to run.

Alma tags Louis within a minute, and they both dance out of his reach as Louis chases after them, going down on his already grass-stained knees more than once as Edward and Alma dodge between the flower beds and fruit tress.

Edward can see the problems brewing in the boy’s red face even before he stops, folding his arms again with a huff. “I don’t wanna play any more. Tag is boring.”

“It’s not boring,” Alma says, hugging the trunk of a scrawny apple tree. “You’re just mad because you’re too slow to catch anybody.”

“Am not! You cheat!”

“You can tag me,” Edward volunteers, cutting off the Bonnet siblings before their tongues can get too sharp. “I won’t run.” It’s a nicer thing to say than the truth — Louis is never going to catch them, small as he is. His legs are just too short.

“It’s not fair if you just let him win,” Alma complains. Hooking her fingers over a tree branch, she kicks her knees up, hanging from it like a monkey. “Fine,” she sighs, dropping. “What about hide and seek instead? I’ll be ‘It.’”

Louis brightens immediately, and Alma doesn’t wait for Ed to agree, burying her face in her arms against the tree trunk and beginning to count.

“Come on,” Louis whispers before running away, and Edward follows sedately after him, scanning the yard as they go. It’s no surprise when Louis makes a beeline for one of the castle turrets, and Ed joins him — up the rope ladder on one end and then across the metal bars over the swings, to the other side. Louis crawls over atop the bars, while Ed drops down to swing himself along, trusting his arms to hold him more than his legs right now.

He heaves himself over the wooden lip into the other turret right on Louis’ heels accompanied by the distant, steady tick of Alma’s counting.

It’s sweltering in the little castle with no airflow but one square window and the opening of the curling slide. The air is thick and still, pressed tight to Edward’s skin, but there’s enough space for him to stretch his legs out, absently rolling the left side to side to loosen the joint. Despite the heat, Louis crawls over to sit beside him, wedged under Ed’s arm.

“That can’t be pleasant,” Ed complains, thinking of the way his black t-shirt sticks to his skin, but Louis only presses a finger to his lips with a too-loud shhhh as Alma shouts her final number across the yard.

“Ready or not; here I come!”

Despite how still and quiet the two of them manage to be, Edward hears Alma clambering across the money bars about thirty second later. “Don’t run,” she says. “I changed my mind; we’re not playing anymore.”

Louis lurches toward the slide anyway, but Ed catches him by his arm before he can escape, reels the boy back in. “Not a lot of places to hide out here, are there?” Edward asks as Alma scrambles through the doorway.

She shakes her head. Her cheeks are flushed pink from the heat and running, whisps escaped from her ponytail wreathing her face. “We’re not allowed to play near the garden shed. It’s dangerous.”

That explains it. The squat blue and white structure by the hedges was the only other good spot Edward had noticed when he followed Louis across the yard, and if anyone ought to know where to find a hiding place, it’s Edward Teach. A good hidey hole can be the difference between life and death. Or at least between freedom and another trip through the justice system.

Alma folds her legs up and settles in, smoothing her skirt over and out like a proper lady. Neither of the kids look phased by the heat, though Ed can feel sweat trickling down the back of his neck.

“Can I fix your ponytail?” Alma asks abruptly. She holds out a slim wrist with a few spare hairbands around it. “It’s loose.” Her weather eye tells him this may be some cardinal sin of girlhood. That, or she really wants to get her hands on his hair. Either one is fine.

Shrugging, Edward scoots around, turns his back to her and feels her rise onto her knees to reach his head. Her fingers tug, pulling sharp pricks at his scalp that tell him several hairs came free with his own elastic, and then she digs into his scalp, combing at the locks with her fingertips.

“Are you married?” She asks, and now Ed knows what the game was. Her fingers hook in the knots and tangles, showering little sparks of discomfort over his skin, and he can’t pull away without causing more.

He sighs. “No.”

“How old are you ?”

“Forty-eight.”

“And you’re not married?”

Ed winces as she pulls hard, scraping her nails along his scalp. “What are you, my auntie? There’s no age requirement for getting married I think.”

“Daddy is forty-five and he’s married,” she says archly, then quiets, adding, “was married, I mean.”

Ugh. “That doesn’t mean everyone is. Some people never get married.”

“Have you got a girlfriend?”

Ed laughs. He can’t help it. “No. God.”

“Is it because you have a beard?” The elastic snaps as Alma yanks it off her wrist, twisting his hair in the process. “I don’t think girls like beards.”

“Some girls do.” Probably. Ed has never paid much attention to what girls like, but it hasn’t stopped more than a few from approaching him over the years. Not a story he needs to relate to a couple kids, though.

“And tattoos?” Alma sounds dubious. “Maybe you would have a girlfriend if you didn’t have so many tattoos.”

“Hasn’t hurt anything before, other than myself,” Ed says, rubbing his bare forearms. “Besides, they’re kind of permanent.”

Alma hums in response, as if she thinks that’s a shame, and Ed muffles a laugh with his hand.

Louis, bright-eyed and curious, has been watching the whole exchange. He hugs his knees to his chest and follows the movement of Alma’s hands as she tugs hard on Edward’s hair again. Finally, he pipes up, “Are you really our nanny now? You’re staying?”

Staying? It’s occurring to Edward, far later than it should, how little he knows about what a nanny does. A spark of nerve shoots through him, running electric under his skin, as he realizes he may be in over his head.

The thought vanishes when his hair is abruptly yanked. “Ow,” he hisses, grabbing at the back of his head. “Motherf—”

Before the children can learn a colorful new word, Edward hears a door click shut, and someone cries out, “Children! Dinner is ready.”

Alma scuttles past Ed and throws herself into the slide, leaving him with one hand still up and holding his tender scalp. His forehead feels like it’s been pulled back an inch thanks to the tight, high ponytail Alma replaced his looser tie with, and Ed tugs at the elastic to give his poor skin a break.

Louis grabs hold of his free wrist and pulls, rocking back on his heels. “Come down the slide with me.” It’s neither a request nor an order, a peculiar blend of each that the Bonnet children seem particularly skilled at.

Edward eyes the dark red passage at the top of the slide. It looks narrow. He hasn’t been on a slide in at least thirty years, unless he counts the laundry chute he’d escaped through when he stole that emerald necklace with the diamond chips so small they looked like salt on a pretzel. That had been a fun one.

“Sure,” he tells Louis. “Let’s go.”

They slide down in the way that kids always slide together, Ed in the back with his legs out and Louis wedged between, in his lap. It’s not smooth because Edward’s jeans hook and catch on the connectors, and the slide groans, and he has to lean back until his stomach muscles ache to fit at all and scoot the two of them along with his hands when they stick, but then they slip out the bottom opening, and Louis pops to his feet, grinning like it was the ride of his life, and Ed can’t help but chuckle at the boy bounding up the steps like a spaniel.

There’s a man Edward hasn’t seen before waiting for them, hanging off the French doors with one hand hooked over the top. He’s tall and young, with a mop of brown hair and a striped baby cut t-shirt stretched across his chest. As Louis darts past him, the man glances up from the phone in his free hand and gives Ed what must be his tenth once-over of the day.

“Really?” he asks, drawing out the R and the vowels until they pull to nonsense, and it’s not clear if he’s asking Edward or god, so Ed doesn’t bother with answering. Brown eyes flicker over Ed once more, and he braces himself for another question about ‘the agency,’ but the guy’s lip only quirks as he says, “Cute hairdo.”

“Thanks.” Ed tugs the dangling tail of the pony where it brushes the top of his spine. “Alma did it.”

“I can tell,” the man drawls. Tucking his phone into a trouser pocket, he steps forward and puts out his hand. His hips have a slink about them that Edward has rarely seen outside of neon flashing lights and too-sweet drinks. “Lucius. I’m Stede’s personal assistant.”

“Ed.” Their hands squeeze briefly, soft, and Ed resists the urge to rub the sensation away on his thigh. “What’s he need assisting with? He looked like shit.”

“God, I know.” Lucius rolls his eyes. “He’s a big baby, really. You know how men are when they’re sick— Well, maybe you don’t. Either way, I’m not doing any assisting today.” At Edward’s curious look, Lucius adds, “My boyfriend lives here. Not me, thank god, I’ve got my own place, but it’s quieter here usually.”

Edward doesn’t know how to respond to that, so he just says, “Sure,” and then says it again when Lucius holds the door and asks if he’s going in for dinner. If all else fails, agreeing with something is a good backup.

He doesn’t need any persuading once he gets inside. His gaze falls on the table, the riot of a full spread of food options capturing his attention fractions of a second before the smells can. The kitchen is cool despite the summer weather outside, and steam rises from several dishes spread along the huge dining table — roast chicken with crisp brown skin, colorful cooked vegetables and fruit salad, fresh rolls wrapped in cloth and presented alongside pale yellow butter. There’s even a cake at the far end of the table, round and tall and layered with white cream and bright orange sugar, and Ed is halfway across the room to swipe his fingers across it before he notices strangers watching him.

He stops, hand drifting awkwardly back to his side. How many fucking people live here? he wonders. Along with Roach and Lucius and the children at the kitchen sink scrubbing their hands, there are two more men by the table that Edward hasn’t met. One is a mountain of a man, head and shoulders taller than Ed himself, but with a friendly, open face and a cluster of stars tattooed on his temple. He’s dressed in grey trousers and a plain white tank top, gripping the back of a chair. The other, a smaller, bald man wearing a denim vest over his t-shirt, eyes Edward from over by the counter before turning to flash a doting smile at Lucius instead.

“Hullo,” the giant man says, nodding to Edward before offering his hand. “You’ll be Ed, then. Roach mentioned you earlier.”

“And you are?”

“Wee John,” the man answers, rolling his shoulders back to puff out his chest. He’s even taller when he stands up straight, Jesus Christ. Ed is long familiar with the concept of an ironic nickname, and he can see where this one came from. “I’m the gardener. You’ll see me ‘round in the mornings mostly this time of year. Gets too hot after lunch.”

“I hear ya, mate,” Ed drawls, extricating his hand from the other man’s engulfing grip.

“Hi!” The other newcomer wiggles his fingers at Edward from across the room. “Pete. Chauffeur. Boyfriend.” His eyes drop to Edward’s right arm, just below the sleeve. “I like your tattoos. Got a few myself.”

“Do you?” Ed asks mildly, as if he didn’t notice them. He tries to be slow and casual about the way he slides his right foot forward a bit further, rolls his left shoulder back. He can see Pete looking. “We’ll have to talk artists sometime.”

Edward could hazard a guess about a few of Pete’s artists. The five dots on his hand and the other cluster of three near his eye are both patterns Ed knows well from his own prison stints. Pete has done time, and the scattering of stick-and-pokes on Ed’s own skin suddenly feels much more conspicuous than it had earlier in the day.

“Ought to, uh—” Ed’s gaze flickers over to where the kids are jabbing each other with elbows, fighting to both stand on a single step stool by the kitchen sink “— wash up. ‘M filthy, mate. Be right back.” He makes a wide swing around Pete and Lucius to circle the kitchen island, then sticks both arms right in between Alma and Louis.

“Hey!” Alma squeaks when the water splatters all over them.

“You won’t melt.” The girl scowls but reaches for the soap, lathering up her palms and fingers and even grabbing a brush by the spout to scrub under her nails. Louis follows suit when she sets it aside, and Edward huffs in amusement. Fussy things. He can’t remember giving two shits about dirty nails as a kid, but then, why would he? Bigger things to be concerned with. Probably a good thing, Bonnet’s children having nothing better to worry over.

He follows suit as the children dry their arms on a dish cloth, in case this is one of those things a nanny does. Maybe nannies always have clean fingernails. If so, Edward has a lot of work to do that a brief scrub won’t cover.

Clean and dry, arms buffed to the elbow with the soft cotton towel — they use that on their dishes? — Edward rejoins the others at the table. The head seat is empty, though dishes are set as if waiting for someone, and to the left of it, Lucius is heaping his plate with salad.

“I’ll take him up a plate before I leave,” he says, tapping the fork against his dish to shake a radish loose. “I told him he was kidding himself thinking he’d be down for dinner.”

“Don’t bother,” Roach says, reaching for a roll before passing the basket over to Wee John. “I made soup. My grandmother’s recipe. I’ll make sure he gets it.”

Pete blanches as Lucius passes him the salad bowl, then hands it along to Alma. Edward suspects Pete has personal experience with the soup.

“Need help with your salad, sonny?” Wee John asks Louis, who nods silently on his other side. Ed only has a second to wonder if he should have picked a different seat, beside one of the children, but Alma seems perfectly content jousting Roach with a butter knife, and Louis is beaming as John scoops a few leaves of the salad onto his plate, delicately picking out the one round tomato as it lands and popping it in his own mouth.

As he passes the bread along to Ed and piles his own plate with salad, Wee John confides, “The boy’s having a bit of a moment with tomatoes.”

“I get that,” Ed lies. There are foods he doesn’t like, sure, but then there’s hunger, so raw and cavernous that it surpasses the stomach and wraps around his spine. He hasn’t been that desperate in ages. He’ll never forget it.

The sides and meat make their way along the table, passed hand to hand down and across, and Edward watches Roach and Wee John each nudging the children, reminding them to ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ throughout. It has the side effect of reminding Ed of his own manners, and he’s glad to not be the one responsible for the kids right now. At least no one seems to mind. With food on their plates, the conversation is casual, quiet talk and laughter, and Alma especially seems to be invited to insert her opinion right alongside the adults, nevermind that everyone but Lucius is not only twice her size but rough around the fringes. Most of these guys wouldn’t look out of place — again, except for Lucius — if they wandered into the shitty pub by Ed’s apartment, where he and Izzy occasionally grab a lukewarm beer with almost-friends.

Though Edward hasn’t said anything, Wee John gives him a perceptive look between bites. “Stede encourages all the staff to take meals with the family,” he says quietly, hunching his shoulders to bring himself closer to Edward’s level, “even on days off. Table fills up, some nights. Depends on what Roach is making.”

Ed goes stiff, fork frozen mid-air with a piece of chicken hanging from the end. “So this is normal?”

“Yeah, s’ppose so,” John answers, then lowers his voice to a harsh whisper as he adds, “well, ‘least since Mrs. Bonnet left and all.”

As whispers go, Wee John’s leaves something to be desired, and a quick glance at Alma’s strange and far-off expression tells Edward that particular whisper made it some distance. “Ah,” Ed says simply, though a half dozen more questions are clamoring for attention at the center of his chest. “Thanks, mate.”

Nodding, John tucks back into his food with a vengeance as Ed watches the young Bonnets down the table, picking at their own meals with solemn, downcast eyes.

-

After dinner is over, Edward watches Roach reheat some of his mysterious grandmother soup and carry it away as Lucius, Pete, and Wee John set up a line by the sink to clean and dry the dishes. From his chair, bad leg crossed over the better one, Ed wonders if he ought to join in the cleaning before recalling that he hasn’t washed a dish in near twenty years. Hopefully, he can get away with not doing as the Romans without looking suspicious.

If the clock above the back doors is to be believed — and if Ed still remembers how to read a clock with hands and a face — it’s half past seven, and Alma and Louis are setting up camp beneath the dinner table. Edward suddenly finds himself at a loss. What time do rich children go to bed? Does he need to… bathe them or something? Surely Alma, at least, is too old to need help bathing, but what about Louis? A dozen questions are swimming through his head as he glances frantically around the room for some sort of hint.

Bonnet’s words from the afternoon come swimming back again: ask Roach or Lucius if you can’t find something. Roach is upstairs, but Edward’s eyes fix on Lucius in the kitchen, leaning hipshot on the counter and smiling sweet at Pete. Lucius dabs at a dish with a cloth, eyes affixed to his boyfriend the whole time, before Wee John plucks the plate from his hands to dry it properly and put it away.

Well, now Edward feels less out of place for not helping, since Lucius isn’t contributing much either. He hops up from his chair, trying not to wince as his knee protests the day’s activity with a sharpness, and leaves the children playing some sort of hand-slapping game on the floor. When Lucius glances over at him, Ed nods, beckoning him.

“Quick word?” he asks. Lucius sighs like he’s been asked to scale a five story building without a rope, but hands a bowl off to Wee John and steps over.

“Make it fast. I’ve got important things to get back to.” He looks back over his shoulder, eyes drifting obviously downward when presented with Pete’s denim-clad back.

Ed huffs. “Bonnet said to ask you if I needed anything, and well — what do I do now?” He spreads his hands, indicating the quiet kitchen, the kids playing under the banquet table. “What usually happens after dinner?”

“God, he didn’t give you anything, did he?” Lucius shakes his head, then says, “Damned if I know, honestly. I don’t do the —” he wrinkles his nose and waves his hand “— kid stuff. Stede has me doing enough that isn’t my job as it is. If I give him an inch, well…”

He trails off, maybe noticing that Edward’s attention has slipped elsewhere, though there’s nowhere else to go. He’s staring in the direction of the refrigerator, which is shiny and has three doors. He’s never seen a refrigerator so big it needed three doors.

“Right,” Lucius says, snapping Edward back to reality. “Well, I do know they go to bed at eight thirty, so you’ve only got what, an hour? Not much you can screw up in an hour.”

Ed loosens up at that, cocking his hip to take some weight off the bad leg. “Oh, yeah. I guess so.” He glances over at the other two finishing up dishes and spies Pete elbowing Wee John as they crowd over the sink, much like the kids had earlier. Deliberately, Edward stretches his arm out and claps Lucius on the shoulder. “Hey, that helps. Thanks.”

Lucius looks askance at his hand, eyes wide, and Ed drops it immediately. Misstep? Maybe. “Don’t mention it,” Lucius says, and Edward would take that as a dismissal except that Lucius’ eyebrows then shoot back up and he adds, “Oh! But actually, you could do me a favor in return.”

Edward shifts his weight, runs his fingers over the cool granite counter. “What kind of favor?” he asks carefully.

“Could you check on Stede?” Lucius wrinkles his nose again, thumbing in the direction of the staircase. “Not right now, obviously, but once the kids are in bed. It’s just to make sure he’s got water and medicine and all, and I’d do it, but —” his eyes cut to Pete’s backside once more, and his smile stretches broad when he looks back at Ed “— it’d free me up for other things.”

“Sure,” Ed says, keeping his amusement on the inside. “No problem.” If nothing else, it’s an excuse to see yet another part of the house, even if Bonnet will be in there the whole time.

Brilliant,” Lucius purrs. “Appreciate you, so much.” His hips sway as he returns to the kitchen, wrapping his arms around Pete’s waist.

When Edward gets back to the table, he drops down into a crouch and peers under it at the kids. “Oh hey, it’s nice under here,” he says, because that’s the first thing that pops into his mind. It is weirdly nice — a little shaded from the bright fluorescents of the kitchen, the top of the table sturdy and close and the chairs forming permeable walls, legs like rows of soldiers all around. He’s tempted to stay.

But he also knows if he sits on the floor now he’ll have a bitch of a time getting up again. Instead, he keeps himself up by hanging on the table edge. “Hey, what do you guys usually do before bedtime?”

Louis sits up, eyes alight with helpful impulses. “We—”

A kick to the shin from his sister stops him mid-word. “We watch TV,” Alma says quickly, turning to face Edward with her hands in her lap. “Cartoons. Every night. Right, Louis?”

“Oh.” Louis nods so hard that Ed’s neck gets sore. “Yeah, cartoons!”

“Really?” Dual nods, almost in sync, and Edward ducks his head to hide the curve of his smile. “Well, what are we waiting for, then? Let’s go get the TV on.”

The kids scramble out from under the table, and Edward trails after them, chuckling under his breath. They’re about as subtle as a vault alarm, those two, but he can’t fault their enthusiasm. Besides, Ed hasn’t had the chance to sit down and watch a proper cartoon in ages.

He lets the kids take the reins, finding the controls for the massive flatscreen on the living room wall. There’s a brief scuffle over what to watch, quickly quelled when Ed snaps that if they can’t agree he’ll turn it off, and then the kids settle in, their little bodies so swallowed by the overstuffed sofa cushions that their legs don’t even dangle over the edge.

That couch looks comfy as fuck. Edward lets his fingers sink into the back cushions ever so briefly and sighs at the easy give. It would feel like sitting on a cloud, probably.

But if he sits down now, he won’t get back up again.

He listens with his good ear to the movements of the house as he prowls the living room, scanning the walls. Stede Bonnet owns a truly remarkable amount of useless trifle. Useless trifle and books. Ed peruses the selection with his arms crossed behind his back, a cliche of a patron at an art museum, casting a weather eye on the walls. Oil paintings — nice enough, but no names big enough for him to recognize. Leather bound books — some of those might have value, but not even Izzy would know that without researching.

Over his shoulders, he can hear the high-pitched voices of cartoon characters, the children giggling, Roach’s footsteps on the stairs as he comes back down, then soft adult voices from the kitchen. The others are socializing. Maybe Edward ought to be joining them, but no one has asked. He takes his chance, careful steps heel to toe around the room’s perimeter. Books. Shelves upon shelves of books, delicate little statuettes and glass baubles between the rows here and there, but no gold, no safes, no little breadcrumbs for Ed to follow back to his prize. His eyes dart, between shelves, to the grandfather clock in one corner. Eight o’clock, eight ten, eight eighteen…

Eight thirty. “Alright, you two,” Edward drawls, clapping his hands once. “Off to bed.” He’s conscious still of the hushed voices in the kitchen, observers listening from just out of his sight as he locates the remote and shuts off the TV, then shakes Louis awake from his collapsed heap in a corner of the sofa.

Alma whines a protest, but she rubs brutal knuckles against her eyes as she does it, and Edward chuckles. Of all the things to think about, Izzy does the same damn thing when excitement or danger keeps him up for a couple days.

Edward bats Alma’s hands away from her face, same as he’d do to Iz. “Don’t pluck out your eyeballs; we’ll need them later.” As soon as he says it, Edward wonders if it was a bad choice, but Alma only nods along and leads the way up the curving staircase.

The carved wooden banister is worn smooth beneath Ed’s fingers, and he traces it to keep himself steady as they climb step by step, first up to the second floor, then past that landing and up again, all the way to the third.

As if anyone needs a house this big. Even with the staff he’s got, Stede Bonnet must have a half dozen empty bedrooms at least.

The children even have their own bathroom, between their separate bedrooms, and Ed stands in the doorway, arms folded across his chest as they wash their faces and brush teeth. The fucking luxury of it all. He’d slept on the floor in his parents’ bedroom. Izzy still sleeps on the floor, although that’s because the little freak likes it. Separate bedrooms at age eight. Shit.

“Are you gonna tuck me in?” Louis asks when he pads past Edward on his pale, bare feet and notices that Ed isn’t following. “Daddy always tucks us in.”

Ed’s first instinct is to look down the hallway for an out, but there’s nothing around but rich cream-colored walls and rows of deep brown doors, all closed. There’s nothing for it. He puts a hand on Louis’ shoulder. “Right,” he says. “Yeah. ‘course I am.”

It’s not like it’s hard. Edward might not have any experience with tucking children into bed — or being tucked in himself — but he has seen it on TV and movies occasionally. He has a general idea. Louis clambers on his own into a neat little wooden bed in the midst of a pale yellow room, the walls decorated with paintings of fantastic islands and yet more bookshelves and toy bins, and Ed stoops over him to pull the quilt, an ornate thing stitched with whales and dolphins, up to his chin.

“Can I tell you a secret?” Louis loud-whispers while Ed is bent down close.

“Sure, mate.”

Louis glances at the door, then turns those big round puppy eyes back on Edward. “We’re not supposed to watch TV before bed,” he confesses. “Daddy usually reads us a story.”

Edward’s fingers clutch in the soft blankets, and he smiles. Louis looks so genuinely apprehensive to fess up to his tiny crime, and it hits Ed right between the ribs. Then he imagines the kids snuggled up, their dad perched on the bed to read to them, and the blow sharpens.

Louis’ eyes are so round, watching Ed closely. Smiling, he pats the blankets over Louis’ tummy. “Thanks for tellin’ me, mate. I’ll remember that.” The smile that bursts over the little boy’s face is so free, Edward can’t imagine not being charmed.

After turning out the light in Louis’ room, he goes down to Alma’s. Her walls are painted a calm, pale green, and one wall is decorated with a mural of trees and mushrooms, faerie creatures flitting between the flowers. She’s already in bed, snuggled down between a pair of stuffed rabbits with her hair loose and chaotic over her dark blue pillow.

“You can turn the light out,” she says. “I’m not a baby. I don’t need tucking.”

“Okay. Good night, then.”

Edward flips the switch by the door and starts to close it, when Alma whispers urgently, “Wait! Not all the way!”

Smiling, he leaves the door open a couple inches, so a crack of light can slip through.

He lets out a long, slow breath. Kids in bed, and it’s not quite nine according to his phone. There’s an alert on the screen, Izzy’s name waiting for him, but Ed doesn’t feel like dealing with whatever that is just yet. He slips the phone back into his pocket and rests his hands on the stair rail at the landing.

It’s silent. Two floors up, most of the doors closed, and a house filled with people is quieter than Edward’s apartment at two in the morning. There are no voices, no shuffling thumping steps of people and pets, no honking cars or rumbling from a train passing on an overground line. It’s only Edward now, the deep burgundy carpet under his feet lit in perfectly round pools from sconces on the walls that seem to flicker like fire though he knows they’re electric.

The house is yours, Edward’s inner voice whispers, and his grip on the stair rail tightens. His. Dark and quiet and practically empty, and after hours of the cacophony of child-minding, he’s free at last to roam, to search.

His lips curl in a smile that no one can witness as he creeps along the hall, past the sleeping children in their beds, and begins to check the other rooms.

As he expected, most of the rooms are empty. One door after another he shoulders open, only to find a bed and a couple pieces of furniture draped in white cloth, protected from dust and cobwebs, though Ed can’t imagine a spider lasting more than a few minutes in this place. He counts three bedrooms and two baths — incredible — before he reaches the last carved mahogany door at the rightmost side of the hallway. When he reaches for the knob, it swings open easily beneath his fingers.

This room isn’t empty.

It’s the master bedroom — Bonnet’s bedroom — and the ornamentation of woodwork and oil paintings hung on the walls is so overwhelming that Ed isn’t sure what to look at first. The bed dominates the space, a four-poster with dark gold curtains dripping around it in a canopy, and it’s enormous — do they make something larger than a king? — so Edward can be forgiven if it takes a few passes of the room before he notices the man wedged in the center of a lake of bedding, his sickly face so wan that he blends into the white sheets.

Pale blue light flickers in the room from a TV on the opposite wall. Edward recognizes the Discovery channel logo below a slow camera pan over an unending sheet of ice and sea, but the sound is off, and the man in the bed is fast asleep, his breath edged with a wheeze on each rise and fall of his chest beneath the blankets.

He’s out like a light. Might as well not be there, as long as Ed is quiet, and it just so happens he’s an expert at quiet-being.

No books in this room aside from a few stacked on the bedside table, but not much else either — paintings, like he noticed before, and some decorative plates. There’s a lot of floral in here, and Edward frowns, examining one painting with a close up detail of some petals. It looks off. Everything in this room looks off, and that’s the sort of instinct that usually tells him there’s something to find.

He slips over closer to the bed, glances at the tray between Bonnet and the door, and then checks it again when he spots a pile of papers and a pen underneath the empty soup bowl and a bottle of cold medicine. A contract? A bill of sale? Edward edges the soup bowl aside and scans the pages over. Legalese is far from his native tongue, but Ed knows how to look for keywords. He also knows divorce papers when he sees them.

The man in the bed stirs with a soft hum that’s interrupted by a hacking cough, and Edward freezes, breath catching, as Bonnet’s eyes fly open.

He doesn’t see Edward right away, too busy hunched over his own knees, coughing painfully into his arms, and when he finally looks up his brown eyes are watery from the force of it. “Who the devil—?” he starts, strangled, and then blinks. “What’re you doing in my room?”

“Hey,” Edward says, like an idiot. It’s just that Bonnet is wearing these white pajamas with a sort of sheen to them that catches every flash of light from the television, and the top few buttons are undone, and someone should perhaps have warned Bonnet that people can see his nipples in that shirt.

Fuck. Ed hasn’t gotten laid in ages.

And Bonnet is still waiting on him for a response as Ed tries not to blatantly stare down into the gulf of his gaping shirt, so Edward swallows and says, “Lucius asked me to check in on you. I got the kids in bed. Didn’t mean to wake you.”

Frowning, Bonnet looks over at the squat alarm clock buried under books on the bedside table, and his cheeks pink up. It’s almost enough color to make him look healthy. “Oh god,” he groans. “I’m sorry. I didn’t give you a bit of direction, did I?”

“No, but it’s alright. Lucius filled me in some, and the kids were good. No worries, mate.”

Bonnet sinks back into the pillows at that, and Edward watches the soft things cave under his body weight. Seeing that fills him with a desire not unlike what he felt over Bonnet’s open shirt. Those pillows look incredible.

“Well, thank you for your help today. I apologize I wasn’t able to be more attentive, but it seems you’ve done perfectly well without me.” Bonnet has a nice smile, even wavering around the edges like it is. His hands, bare of any adornment or even scars, fold on top of the sheets over his stomach. “Feel free to take any of the guest rooms on this floor that you like.”

Ed is so preoccupied staring at the man’s long fingers, he misses those words at first. “What’s that?”

“The guest rooms,” Bonnet repeats. “I thought you might want one of the ones on this floor, to be near the children, but if you’d be more comfortable on the second floor with the staff, then—”

“No,” Ed says quickly. “That’s, um—” He wasn’t planning on staying the night. Fuck, he wasn’t even planning on staying the day, but if Bonnet — idiot Bonnet lying there in his bed, looking so frail and broad at once and smiling — if the man wants to so casually invite Edward to stay in his ridiculous, incredible home, then, well…

“That’s perfect,” Edward answers. “Thanks.”

“Wonderful,” Bonnet says, breaking off into a yawn that turns into yet another deep, aching cough, and Edward’s hand is half raised on instinct, a step forward before he remembers he can’t just rub a stranger’s back. Instead he shifts his weight, checking to make sure there’s still plenty of water in the jug by the bed, and waits out the fit before Bonnet is able to croak out a hoarse, final, “Good night, Ed.”

“Night,” Edward says, and takes that as the cue it is.

Once the bedroom door closes at his back, he mutters to himself, “Iz’s gonna fuckin’ kill me.” That’s one of the selling points of spending the night, actually. Going back to the apartment means dealing with Izzy, and all the questions and opinions that come alongside that. It’s impossible to escape, living in a single room together.

Edward deserves a night off. He hasn’t earned much, but he’s earned that.

Besides, while everyone else is sleeping, he’ll have all night to search the house.

He’s smiling, humming under his breath as he kicks along the hallway, bypassing the empty rooms he checked on earlier. There are three more doors past the kids’ rooms, and he goes to scope them out.

Any of the bedrooms on this floor would dwarf his apartment, but the plain white dust sheets behind the first door do nothing to entice him. Door number two is yet another bathroom. This place has so many bathrooms that he could shit in a different one for every day of the week. He might, too, if he were staying that long. He’s still smirking from that idea as he twists the knob and opens the third door at the opposite end of the floor from the master.

Edward’s mouth drops open, just a bit.

The room is nearly twinned with the master on size, but this one is done to the fucking nines. Another four poster bed, this time with sea blue bedding and deep red drapes, and the wall opposing it is filled with built in shelves, beautiful scrolling woodwork displaying rows upon rows of books, leatherbound and hardback. There’s a theme to this room much like the living room downstairs: paintings of the ocean, antique sextants, a whole shelf of brass and silver compasses beside an ornate globe. Even the books follow the theme: guides to sailing and tomes of pirate lore, history of sea exploration and underwater dives. Even the end of the bed is carved to a round with a unicorn’s head at each post, not unlike the prow of a ship.

It’s the most ridiculous room yet, and Edward grins as something bright unfurls in his chest. This is what rich fucks should do with their money. This is living.

And the bed looks every bit as comfortable as Bonnet’s had. It wouldn’t hurt to just… check. Ed sits on the edge.

He sinks into the fluffy quilts with a soft whoof of displaced air. The mattress underneath is firm, with just a hint of give. It feels like he’s being cradled by softness, absorbed into a vat of cotton candy. The movement of his legs against the blankets gives rise to a sweet, floral aroma, and Edward breathes deep.

Oh. Oh no.

He’d reminded himself so many times tonight not to sit down, but he’s still done it, and the ache that sets into his limbs and lower back reminds him why. The moment he sits, everything he did today catches up. He makes a brief attempt to rise from the bed, but his knee screams, and Edward bites down on his tongue as he falls back.

Nope. Not going to happen. Especially not now, when he’s flat on his back on this delicious mattress, surrounded by that lovely warm scent, and already his eyes are drooping closed. It takes a monumental effort just to get his jeans unzipped and sit up enough to rip open the laces on his boots. He slips back against the bed as he kicks the mess off, then flings his shirt into the pile with them, wanting to feel the bedding on his skin.

He’s down to only his black boxers as he pulls the sheets and blankets up over himself, sighing contentedly as he tumbles into a cocoon of silky beauty.

“Just a few minutes to rest up,” he tells himself, muttering the words into the pillow as he rubs his cheek against it. Once his legs feel better, he’ll get up again, check out the house.

He falls asleep with the light still on.