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The guy sitting next to Ed is kind of, and by kind of Ed means completely, covered in blood.
Like, a lot of blood.
He’s pretty fucking calm for somebody who looks like they wandered off the set of a bad horror film, though he had not been especially polite to the check-in nurse. Ed can’t blame him, he supposes, under the circumstances. He sits still, two seats down from Ed, no moaning or groaning, no attempts to stem the tide from what seems to be a gash in his pretty blond hair. His eyes are closed.
His eyes are like, very closed.
“Hey,” Ed says, quiet-like, glancing at the check-in desk and wondering if he should get up and cause a fuss for this guy. “Hey, man.”
He doesn’t move.
Ed looks around to see if anyone else is seeing what Ed is seeing, which might possibly be—it’s just, someone else would have noticed, right? He can’t be the only one who would’ve noticed if this guy just sat down in the waiting room and kicked the bucket, right? That’s sort of the point of hospitals, right?
Fucking Jack. Ed would end up stuck waiting for him in the emergency room while some guy fucking croaks next to him.
“Er,” Ed says, a touch louder now. “Hey, you all right?”
Nothing. Bloodbath McGee is as still as the stone angel about to top his fucking grave.
If Ed reaches out to touch him, is that disturbing a crime scene? Maybe only if he got all bloodied up in a crime, he guesses. He doesn’t see any other obvious wounds—no visible bullet holes, no knife handles sticking out of untoward places—besides the one in his hair, even though there’s plenty of splatter across his chest that doesn’t seem likely to have come from there. If it’s really just the head wound, that could’ve been from anything. A fall off a tall ladder, or maybe a yacht; there’s clearly a lot of money in the cut of the guy’s trousers, the rings on his fingers. The quality of his shoes. Riot at the stock exchange, maybe. Angry wife got him upside the head with the bad end of a porcelain figurine. Hideously bad day at the hair salon.
He should probably stop envisioning ways Sir Bloodbath Bartholomew BleedingOut could’ve been killed and start making sure he isn’t.
There’s a bloodless spot on Bloodbath’s forearm, on the side closest to Ed. Ed looks around again, but no one’s watching, so he reaches out and gently touches him. “Hey.”
The guy gasps back to life.
Thank fuck, Ed thinks, squeezing a little to steady him. Bloodbath looks down at his arm like he can’t believe it’s still attached, and then at Ed’s hand. Up Ed’s arm. Up Ed’s neck, lingering, making Ed swallow, and then up to Ed’s eyes.
He smiles through the river of blood drying down the side of his face. It’s devastating. Ed is devastated.
“Hi,” Bloodbath says, only very slightly unsteadily. “All right?”
Ed busts out a laugh. “Am I all right? I’m fine, mate, but look like you lost a fight with fucking Norman Bates—are you all right?”
Bloodbath looks down at his shirt. It looks like it was white, maybe, when he got dressed this morning. He sighs, like it’s terribly inconvenient. “Probably,” he answers. “Worth it, though. You should see the other guy.”
Classic dad joke, Ed kind of loves it. Quick glance—no wedding ring. No tan line.
Flirting, then? Ed can do flirting. Ed can flirt no problem.
He re-situates himself in his seat so he can face Bloodbath head on, rests his chin on his head. “Yeah, bet you got ‘em good. Shoulders like yours” —by which Ed means, roughly the size and shape of a little oceanside cabin where he’d like to lay his head for a week or two— “Can really pack a punch.”
“Yep,” the guy says, self-satisfied, and Ed’s just thinking about whether it’s morally corrupt or whatever to pick up guys from the emergency room when he adds, bursting with pride, “I think Nigel might even lose that eye.”
Ed stares.
Should he ask if Nigel deserved it? Does he even care?
“And we don’t like Nigel?”
Bloodbath snorts. “We loathe Nigel. I’ve stepped in dog droppings I enjoyed more than conversing with Nigel. He was terrible when we were children, and now, now—“ He leans in, conspiratorially disgusted. “He’s a security guard. One of those rent-a-cops, carries his little fake badge around and everything. Blergh.”
Ed, who’s been mentally considering whether a red flag might be applicable here, mentally tosses that one aside and picks up something in green instead. Green for go, green for good, green for—
“Good fucking riddance then,” Ed says, and they both laugh.
He’s got a nice laugh, this guy does. Eyes sparkling. Blood at the side of his mouth. Those canine teeth that’d fit just fine in the side of Ed’s neck. It’s kind of a look, really, the blood, the gold curls, the three rings on his hands. He looks like he’s the kind of guy who hauls the Final Girl up from where she’d collapsed waiting for the too-late rescue and kisses her dramatically through the gore in relief that she’s still alive even if she did murder the baddie and she’ll be the prime suspect for half her friends for the next few weeks because there aren’t any witnesses left and really, it’s a lot of blood, and—
No, hang on, it’s a lot a lot of blood.
“Oh, shit,” Ed says, reaching for Bloodbath’s face and catching himself just at the last minute. “You’re bleeding again.”
“Oh.” Bloodbath reaches up too, and he doesn’t catch himself—his fingers come away red from where a fresh gout of blood is coursing down the side of his face. He stares at them. “I suppose I am.”
He doesn’t go pale, Ed thinks, so much as the paleness gets him, like a ghost overtaking him. The Creature from the Very White Hospital Lagoon. He slumps a little in his seat, takes a deep, deliberate breath like he’s reminding himself to do it.
“Okay,” Ed says, getting up, sitting down, getting up again. “Okay, okay, okay okay okay okay. Let’s just—“
“I don’t,” Bloodbath says, haltingly, “feel good.”
“I bet you don’t,” Ed agrees. “Stay there, I’m going to get some, some fucking, I don’t know—“
The nurse that’s been sitting at the check-in desk is gone. Is that normal? That can’t be normal, what if some big emergency came in, lights and sirens and Ed feels like he could be a siren right now, wee-woo, wee-woo, gorgeous funny man drenched in blood giving big blood loss and possible concussion signs, wee-woo. He veers away from the desk, that won’t be any help, and into the bathroom, grabbing gobs of paper towel from the dispenser before rushing back.
“All right, here we go,” he says, crouching in front of Bloodbath. “Anything in this I should know about? What he’d hit you with, a rock? Hatchet? Explosive device?”
“Wine glass,” the guy says. “And it was nice wine, too. Wasteful. Mary got the big pieces of glass out, I don’t know what might be left.”
Ed hums, but decides the moment is probably not the one to be asking who this Mary is. He carefully presses the first wad of paper towel to the spot most of the blood seems to be coming from, wary of feeling anything hard or sharp under his fingers as he starts to apply pressure.
“Sorry, sorry sorry,” he whispers as Bloodbath hisses. “I hope you really did get him better than this.”
The hiss shifts briefly to a bitchy little giggle. “He started with the wine glass, but I finished with the wine bottle. At least I picked an empty one. It’ll be fine,” he adds when Ed whistles. “Mary was telling the officers Nigel’d fallen into a tray of champagne when I left.”
Ed laughs, dabbing at the blood. The first handful of paper towel turns a muddy red as Ed sops up as much as he can, but the second handful lasts a bit longer, the third long enough for Ed to become aware that he’s being watched.
Intently. Really intently.
Bloodbath has hazel eyes that remind Ed of the sand underwater and a growing hectic pink color in his cheeks. He looks at Ed like he’s only just seeing him, or maybe like he’s not entirely sure he hasn’t hallucinated him, or maybe like he’s just going to throw up.
“Hi,” he says again. “Hello.”
“Hello,” Ed answers. “Here, you hold this, all right? Press hard.”
He hands over the wad of paper towel, arranges Bloodbath’s hand just right over the wound. Nurse’s station is still fucking abandoned, what the hell. They could really use something more hygienic than fucking paper towel. He wets the corner of another piece with his tongue like his mum used to do so he can rub dried blood out of the skin near the guy’s eye. Only realizes after he’s done it that maybe it’s no longer the done thing to use spit on a stranger’s face.
At least, not in this context. And that’s all Ed’s thinking about that, back to the context at hand. The very expressive, very handsome context at hand.
“Doing okay?” Ed asks.
“Yes, thank you.”
He doesn’t blink, watching Ed as he swaps out the paper towel for another clean one. He should’ve broken the dispenser open and taken the whole roll at this rate, he’s almost out. Nothing to be done about the shirt, or the hair, but the sticky metallic run of blood down his face can’t be pleasant. The guy’s breathing evens again as Ed gently, slowly works on cleaning up the worst of it.
“Ed,” Ed says.
Bloodbath frowns. “No.”
“No?”
“Mm-mm. I’m Stede. Not Ed. Stede, not Ed, Bonnet.”
Ed chuckles, pauses a second to meet Stede’s gaze properly. “Nice to meet you, Stede-Not-Ed-Bonnet. S’probably lucky you’re not Ed, because that’s me. Ed, I mean. I’m Ed.”
“Oh!” There’s that devastating smile again. Those canine teeth. “Ed. Stede and Ed. Ed and Stede?”
“Like Ed and Stede better. Better ring to it.”
“Absolutely, I agree. And then it’s alphabetical, so it’s a double-win.”
They grin at each other. Ed’s aware that he must look like a bloody idiot, on his knees in front of Complete Stranger Sir Stede Bartholomew BleedingOut Bonnet, mopping him up in an emergency department’s waiting room and grinning like a loon at the sound of their names together. He doesn’t care. They sound good together. Feels like fate, to be sat here. Kismet.
And the way Stede’s looking at Ed, the grin fading into something more intense, more—intimate? Is it bad form or whatever to kiss a complete stranger you’ve only just met in an emergency department? There’s something tugging at Ed to give it a go. They sound good together, he bets they look good together. Two loons in a duck pond kind of good together. He wonders if they fit good together too.
Stede starts to lean in, just the tiniest bit. His breath has gone heavy again, his cheeks pinking up again. “Ed,” he murmurs.
“Stede.”
“I think—“
Ed braces himself on Stede’s knee. Leans in a little closer too, until he can feel the rush of air from Stede’s parted lips. “Yeah?”
“I think—“
“Yeah?”
They’re so close now Ed can feel the heat of him. Smell the penny-bright scent on his skin, in his hair. In his shirt. He’s got Stede’s blood in the whorls of his fingerprints, he thinks wildly, and maybe in the folds of his brain, the muscle of his heart. Ready to stain. He thinks he might let it.
Stede reaches for him. “I think—I might pass out.”
And he does.
Ed catches him, keeps him from collapsing out of his seat with an oof, and his first thought is that Stede is solid, so fucking solid. He’s built like a fridge. One of those walk-in situations like they have in restaurants.
His second thought is that Stede moves just like a fridge as well, which is to say: not at all.
His third thought is that it’s a good thing they’re at a fucking hospital. Right. The hospital Stede’s at, on purpose, for medical attention, not to be picked up like it’s a Thursday night down at Jackie’s. He doesn’t need a date, he needs a fucking doctor.
“Er,” Ed looks around, arms full of bloody, beautiful man. “Little help, anyone?”
*
Stede fights his return to consciousness. There’s pain on the other side, he can just tell, and there’s going to be bad hospital food and overbearing nurses and Mary will be very passive aggressive when she picks him up, and he’d like to skip all that nonsense and go right to the part where he can go to bed in his own apartment with a cocoa and the kind of stupid audiobook he can fall asleep during without really missing anything.
Thinking all this, unfortunately, has the obvious effect of delivering Stede back into his body with haste.
Ugh, he thinks, and he thinks it hard enough that it seems worth saying out loud. “Ugh.”
And then: “Stede?”
That’s not Mary’s voice. And that’s not Mary’s hand in his either. Too big, too leathery. Mary doesn’t wear leather gloves with the fingers cut off. Neither do the kids, or Lucius, or anyone else Stede knows.
No one, except—
“Ed?”
He peels his eyes open, and sure enough, there’s the Dashing Ed From The Emergency Department. Debonair Ed. Dazzling Ed. Does it have to be a D, he wonders? Doesn’t Distinguished Ed deserve more letters? The Amusing, Arresting, Beautiful, Compassionate, Delicious Ed, maybe.
Stede’ll have to workshop the name. It’s not his best work.
There he is, though. Ed. Fingerless leather gloves, tattoos, a leather jacket missing one arm. Long silvering hair, and yes, right there—there’s a bit of a maroon splotch in it where Stede must have passed out on him. Not his best first impression, either.
Ed doesn’t seem to have noticed, at least. His whole gorgeous face lits up at the sight of Stede, his big grin, his even bigger eyes. With the hospital lights catching in his hair, he looks like an angel.
“An angel?” Ed snorts, though he’s still grinning. “Not sure I’ve ever been accused of that, mate. Devil, maybe.”
Stede shakes his head, but winces when it makes the throbbing in his skull worse. Ed’s there in half a second, steadying him with a hand on his arm, saying, “Woah, careful there,” and helping Stede to readjust himself on his pillow and then in the bed, sitting him up. Once Stede is comfortable, Ed passes over a carton of orange juice with a straw stuck in.
“Drink all of it, eh, the nurse looked pretty serious about it.”
Stede doesn’t argue. It’s sweet and cold and Stede’s tongue feels like it’s been on the underside of some road kill. He drinks and drinks, watching with only mild interest as Ed fiddles with a remote sort of thing that must be a call button.
Because he’s in the hospital. Right. And Ed is—Ed is—
“How are you here?” Stede asks, brow creasing. He really hopes he isn’t imagining all this. That would be a bummer. “Were you admitted too?”
Ed looks a little guilty, a little embarrassed. “Ah, nope. I wasn’t—I was just waiting. Brought in with a mate who got a salt shaker stuck up his—“ He makes a vague gesture. Stede has no need for him to elaborate.
“Anyway, I called someone else to come pick him up. Won’t be the first time Iz had to do the ER run for Jack, probably won’t be the last. And, um, you didn’t have anyone with you, and you needed a hand. Well, two hands, really, you were pretty out of it. And then I thought it might be nice to wake up with someone you recognized. A bit.”
Stede blinks at him. At Arresting, Amusing, Beautiful, Compassionate, Dreamboat Ed from the Emergency Department. Who worried about Stede, apparently. Stede can’t remember the last time anybody worried about him. He’s the worrier who worries, not the one who’s worried about. Not the one who’s, you know. It sounds twee even in Stede’s mind but he’s been to therapy so he’s going to finish the thought.
Not the one who’s cared about.
But he’s still doing it. He’s still sitting here. Arresting, Amusing, Beautiful, Compassionate, Charming, Darling, Enchanting, Funny, Gallant Ed, sitting here caring about Stede.
Who is starting to stand up, looking away from Stede’s gaze, because Stede’s been sat here staring at him while he slurps at this orange juice like a numpty.
“I don’t mean to make it weird. I can go. I’ll just—go.”
“It’s not weird,” Stede says instantly. It is, a little, but that’s a good thing, probably. He’s got a lot of weird himself. “Stay.”
Ed hesitates, but Stede gives him his biggest, imploringest eyes, the ones that Lucius always says makes him look like a deranged golden retriever but what does Lucius know anyway, and Ed sits again.
Can blood loss make a man’s heart skip a beat?
“I’m surprised they let you come back with me. Glad they did, though.” He extends a hand toward Ed, meaning to take it, squeeze it, let him know how glad he is. To reassure him.
Ed stares at it. Lifts a hand but hesitates to grab hold. “Right, about that,” he starts instead. “Look, they just made some assumptions, and I just went along with it—“
“Ah, Mr. Bonnet and Mr. Bonnet,” another voice interrupts.
The nurse breezes in, an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips, and starts fussing around with Stede’s monitors. “Nice of you to join us, Mr. Bonnet. Your husband here’s been beside himself.”
Ed sputters. “I was not. I’m calm as hell.”
He does not, however, say, I’m not his husband.
Stede is 99.99% sure Ed is not his husband. He didn’t hit his head hard enough to forget a thing like that.
The nurse gives Ed a look that says he’s seen calmer people in the front row of a Taylor Swift concert. “Right, very calm. Anyway,” he turns back to Stede. The whiteboard at the end of Stede’s bed says his name is Roach. “You have nine stitches in your scalp, my man. No getting it wet for at least twenty-four hours, and I don’t want any vigorous scrubbing in the shower, eh? Get him—“ he nods at Ed— “to help do it in the sink. Gentler. No activity that might tear the wound open. Don’t be rubbing it in the pillows, if you catch my drift.”
He looks significantly between Ed and Stede. Drift caught. Ed rubs a hand over his face; Stede feels himself go extremely pink and is distantly impressed that he has enough blood left over to do that. The nurse doesn’t appear to notice.
“You drink your orange juice, eat your Jell-o. You didn’t lose that much blood, head wounds are just like that. If you still feel woozy tomorrow, see your GP. If the wound starts to smell, see your GP. Any pus, any discharge—“
“See my GP,” Stede finishes faintly.
The nurse nods. “Two weeks, then go see your GP, the stitches come out. Wash the area two times a day with clean warm water, nothing else, and you won’t need to come back to my emergency department. Questions?”
He looks between them again like he’s expecting Ed to answer more than Stede. Stede hasn’t had a complete thought in the last three minutes, so that seems fair. He looks to Ed too. Ed looks back them both, then asks, “When can he drive?”
“Tomorrow, if the woozies are gone.”
“And—“ Ed looks at Stede, asking permission. Stede nods. Might as well. “And pain meds? Over the counter, or—?”
They go back and forth some more, talking about the prescription the doctor is sending Stede home with, and sleeping positions, and shampoo, and pillowcases and curling irons and hats. Questions a husband would ask. Questions Stede can’t think about right now, because Ed’s finally taken Stede’s hand, and he’s wearing one of Stede’s rings on his fourth finger.
Stede’s about 99.99% sure that’s his ring. It fits Ed perfectly.
“Someone’s gonna come by with your discharge papers,” the nurse says, bringing Stede back to himself. “You good? Good.” He doesn’t wait, turning on his heel again and heading off to wherever nurses go when they’re not nursing people. Stede can’t remember. Fifth dimension, perhaps. He doesn’t care either.
There’s a long silence in the room.
“So,” Ed says.
“We’re not really married,” Stede says, cautiously. Just in case that .01% comes back to bite him in the ass.
“Ah, no we are not,” Ed agrees.
“You—you told them we were married. And you stole one of my rings.”
“They assumed we were married. Different thing. You passed out on me, so I didn’t have a lot of choice beyond the bridal carry and they just, you know, drew their own conclusions. Thought I might at least sell it.”
Stede looks at him. Ed looks back.
And then they’re laughing, clutching at each other’s hands and nearly hooting with it. Stede’s head throbs but he can’t stop. Ed bends nearly in half, pressing his cheek—his bare cheek!—to the back of Stede’s hand as he laughs and laughs. It’s more of a giggle that one might expect of a man dressed in leather. Stede likes it. Stede likes that he lied—let them assume. Stede likes that he’s here, that he snagged one of Stede’s rings for verisimilitude. He likes Ed, and he likes laughing with Ed, and it feels good, for once. He decides that’s enough for now.
“You bridal carried me?” is all Stede can think to ask.
“There weren’t a lot of options!”
They laugh again. Ed tells Stede everything that happened after he passed out—Ed hauling him out of the chair and over to the check-in desk, where the nurse there tried to tell him again to have a seat and wait for his name to be called. The sound she made when Ed laid Stede out on the counter like a particularly bloody offering. The rush back into triage, where Stede was sent to a bed they suddenly had open. The stitches being put in, including Ed valorously and not at all squeamishly begging the doctors not to shave his head unless they really really had to—here, Stede gasped aloud, and kissed Ed’s fingers, because he couldn’t not—and then getting him settled to wait.
“And then I, uh, panic ate your jello,” Ed admits at the very end.
Stede looks over to the tray someone must have brought, where his orange juice carton sits next to an empty single-use plastic. He’s never cared less about jello in his life. “I loathe jello,” he says, vehemently. He doesn’t, but he wouldn’t say that to Ed, not now. As far as Ed’s concerned, Stede’s never eaten a jello he’s liked in his life. “You can have all my jello forever.”
Ed leans in, furtive. “It was grape anyway,” he whispers secretively. “Who the fuck sends grape jello with orange juice? That’s what passes for health care here?”
“Terrible. Absolutely horrendous.”
“It’s fucking diabolical.”
“I’ll file a complaint.”
It’s easy, is the thing. Laughing with Ed. Talking to him. Ed doesn’t feel like a stranger, and he doesn’t hold Stede’s hand like a stranger, and Stede doesn’t want him to be a stranger. Stede wants to take him to dinner, and on drives along the coast, and to places he’s never been, just to see his face light up. He wants to know how Ed takes his tea and what he likes to do on Saturday afternoons and if he’s happy. He wants to make Ed happy. He wants to know the feeling of Ed’s hair in his fingers and the heat of the leather on his skin and whether that level of gray scruff would leave a beard burn on sensitive places and good lord, Stede thinks, they must have given him the strong stuff.
He doesn’t stop, though.
And Arresting, Amusing, Beautiful, Compassionate, Charming, Darling, Enchanting, Funny, Gallant, Heartwarming Ed doesn’t stop either.
The name really does need a workshop before Stede runs out of letters.
Ed, then. Just Ed. Or maybe—
Ed and Stede.
*
Ed stays.
He stays until the discharge papers come. And while they wait for the prescription to be filled. And all the way back to Stede’s place that night. Someone unmedicated has to drive Stede’s car, after all.
Stede stays too.
They stay the next day. And the day after that. And the day after that. Ed gets that kiss he was aiming for, and they laugh and laugh when he confesses that’s what he’d thought was happening, and then he gets a series of additional kisses that he quickly loses count of. Stede’s hair gets washed in the sink and his stitches come out and they explore the full drift they’d caught about rubbing it in the pillows.
Stede finishes the alphabet with zangy. Ed’s pretty sure that’s not a word. Stede kisses him with a lemon drop in his mouth to prove it.
“Yeah, all right,” Ed says, an hour later, breathless. “Yeah, zangy, all right.”
He stays. Stede stays with him.
They stay for a long, long series of days and nights and weekends and months and then years, giggling. Helping each other wash their hair in the sink because that’s nice, it turns out. Making jello that Stede always lets Ed have the last bite of, though never grape. Ed meets Nigel, who did lose that eye, what a freak accident, who would’ve guessed a champagne bottle could just do that all on its own? And Stede meets Jack, who, he comments rather bitchily on the way home, is exactly the guy he’d expect to end up in the emergency room with a salt shaker up his—anyway.
They stay through long weekends and rough nights and easy mornings. They stay through Chinese takeaways and Easy Mac on the kitchen floor and Alma’s piano recital and Mary’s next four gallery openings. They stay through a family trip to Disney World, even though Louis gets lost in Epcot’s little France, and they stay through the flight home, even though they’re delayed six hours, and they stay happy even when they fight and they stay in love like they forgot there was ever a time before the start and they stay.
Two apartments converge. Two wardrobes intermingle. Two lives combine.
The scar in Stede’s hair stays, but the laugh lines stay too.
They stay.
*
And the next time Stede ends up back at the emergency department, he first deposits Ed into a wheelchair—“No fussing, now, I won’t have you wrenching your knee any further—“ and then goes to check in.
“Patient’s name?” the nurse asks.
Stede doesn’t hesitate, and he doesn’t lie. He’s been workshopping this name, after all, and he thinks he’s finally got a good one.
“Edward Bonnet-Teach.”