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the haunting of the widow bonnet

Summary:

Mary's being haunted by a man who isn't dead.

Notes:

This is a Gotcha4Gaza fill for Anonymous, who requested to see Mary confronted with a Kraken-era Ed, particularly his darker, more dangerous side, from this prompt: https://ourflagmeanskink.dreamwidth.org/316.html?thread=904252. This is technically divergent from canon at the end of s1, but I drew heavily on s2e1-3.

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

Work Text:

Things get—weird, after Stede dies the second time.

Well, dies. What he really does is disappear. He leaves.

Which illustrates the point, actually: Mary didn’t think things could get weirder. There isn’t much than can be weirder than your husband coming back from the dead, and what might rank as stranger than that should probably be neatly tied off by helping him to fake his death all over again—and that only after a few passive-aggressive remarks about your new boyfriend, a few aggressive-aggressive threats to said boyfriend with a cheese knife, and one relatively harmless attempt to murder him in his sleep. With a skewer. Through the ear hole.

It’s been a week, is all she’s saying.

So when things start to get weird-er, Mary should be forgiven for taking a moment to notice. For dismissing it as her imagination, or as her paranoia that their trick’s been found out.

It starts with just a few mislaid belongings, maybe two days after things have finally settled and Stede’s disappeared into whatever optimistic sunset he was chasing. Stacks of his books pile up on chairs in the library; the scent of his cologne lingers in the upstairs hall. Nothing, really. Mary rolls her eyes at Stede’s inability to pick up after himself, opens a window, and forgets about it.

But the books don’t stop piling up. The scent in the upstairs hall gets stronger.

Mary starts hearing the piano in the midnight hours, playing the soft, lilting melodies Stede used to hum around the house. She finds candles trailing smoke as though they’ve just been blown out; she finds cups of tea no one can remember making, a slurry of sugar left in the bottom. She finds Stede’s cravats, his jackets, spilling out of the trunks she’d packed them away in. His silk socks, folded into careful piles on the floor.

Mary is not a naturally nervous person. She doesn’t have the luxury of hysteria.

So it’s easy to chalk everything up to a tired mind and a pair of curious kids. It’s easy to just say, well, you know, it’s been one hell of a week for everyone. Of course Alma is going to go through Stede’s old things, searching for something of her father’s to hang onto. Of course Louis is going to pick up on some of Stede’s stories, playing pirates like they’d always done.

But then.

Then the books start turning up with the pages torn out. The plants in the conservatory start turning up shredded, petals plucked from their stems, foliage ripped from their roots. His shirts start arranging themselves over the backs of chairs, set up carefully as if Stede had been sitting there and disappeared right out of the linen. As if someone had been having a conversation with him, and he’d left as suddenly and silently as he’d left her.

She follows footsteps as they echo through the halls and finds nothing, no one.

Mary almost has herself convinced that it’s all in her head, that she’s going around the twist. It’s stress, she tells herself, it’s worry. She needs a long weekend, a glass of good wine, and a late morning lazing around in bed with Doug, and she’ll be fine again. It’s fine. It’s all fine.

Then late one night, coming up to bed, Mary looks down the hall to see the shape of a man standing silhouetted against the window at the end.

It’s only an instant. Only a flash of black against the blue night.

There and gone again.

Her heart hammers. Her throat aches. Mary trembles on the landing for one moment, two, tries to make her eyes pick out the shape again, tries to make herself see what’s really there, but all she sees is darkness. Shadow and smoke.

A ghost.

*

Mary is a realist.

She has to be, in her position. She is a down-to-earth, no-nonsense, there’s-no-crying-in-high-society, make-the-best-of-it, we-only-have-this-one-life-so-we-should-at-least-try kind of woman.

But Mary is also an artist.

So she knows there’s more to this world than meets the eye. That what one can see is only part of what is real. She spends hours and hours picking apart the layers of truth and being and beauty and becoming in the world, each one thin and translucent, delicate as a moth’s wing, sharp as amber glass.

And she knows what it is to be haunted. To spend long hours alone with the memories of a mother who looked at her like she was assessing a price, of a husband who couldn’t look at her at all. To feel the ephemeral ties of things like duty and obligation and respectability, grounding her, binding her.

But ghosts? Spirits and spectres and all that? Aimless wanderers, doomed to an eternity of—what? Reorganizing her fucking library? Using up the dregs of old perfumes?

No. No, Mary doesn’t believe in ghosts.

She lays awake at night, resolutely not listening to footsteps moving across the attic floorboards. To the sound of whispers, incomprehensibly low, drifting down to her. No one will be there if she goes to check. She’s checked a dozen times.

This isn’t happening, she tells herself viciously, eyes closed, hands clenched, ignoring the goosebumps on her arms. You’re being ridiculous.

Stede Bonnet can’t be haunting her. He isn’t even fucking dead.

*

It should be a relief. She should be relieved.

It’s late and the night is cooling off fast. Something in the chill sharpens the smell of hay and turpentine in her studio, and Mary breathes it in, trying to revel in it, trying to sigh out the week’s anxieties. The old barn is usually something of a strange comfort, with the lingering smell of animals, the sound of the wind in the eaves. There’s something grounding about it, something tethering.

She should be relieved to have a night to herself here. She wants to be relieved.

It should be a good reminder that this, right here—the weight of this paintbrush and the expanse of this canvas and even the cold creeping up under her rolled shirtsleeves—this is real.

The problem with all this being real, of course, is that it’s harder to convince herself that the rest of it is just her imagination: the slow, ominous creak of the rafters, the shadows stretching across the walls in the lamplight. The feeling she can’t seem to shake, the one that pools dread in her belly and raises the hairs on the back of her neck, like someone’s watching her.

Like someone is so close behind her that they could just reach out and grab—

There’s a crash behind her.

Mary whips around, gasping, but there’s no one. One of her lanterns lies shattered in the dirt, the flame extinguished. The barn is still. Silent.

Then, behind her again, there’s another crash. Another light goes out. And another.

Another.

Mary stands frozen in place, trying to track whoever—whatever—is here with her, brush clutched in her hand like a weapon, heart clutched alongside a scream building in her throat. The barn is a big space to fill with light, and Mary’s never regretted it more as she does right now, watching the lanterns as they’re snuffed out one by one, her sense of safety suffocated by the dark, until all that’s left is the single mirrored lamp she keeps at her side.

The silence now sounds like a threat.

Should she douse it? This last light? It makes her a target, it prevents her eyes from adjusting to the swell of new shadows, makes her a fucking beacon in the dark. She knows that, she knows.

But the idea of being trapped here with someone, with something, not being able to see, not knowing when they’re coming—she can’t. She can’t.

Instead she breathes heavily into the sudden stillness, forcing each breath through her lungs like she’s doing it by hand. Her muscles ache with the strain of standing as still as possible.

I should move, she tells herself, without moving an inch. I need to move.

It’s probably lucky that she doesn’t, because in the next second, there’s the sound of metal on metal and then a knife, flying through the air with enough force that it lodges hilt-deep in the her canvas, just inches from her head.

She finally loses control of both the shriek she’s been trying to swallow and the brush in her hand, splattering violet-red paint down her front as she drops it. Her knees give and her hands tremble and she feels like she’s going to throw up or maybe pass out or maybe her body will just shake itself apart, and she has just enough time to think about what a useless fucking reaction that is before there’s a sound of a match being struck above her, and finally she understands.

Mary isn’t being haunted by a man who isn’t dead.

Mary’s being haunted by the man who is right there.

The match is just a drop in the darkness, and Mary can make out barely more than a figure in the hayloft, a skull formed into a scowl. Barely more than an impression of smoke and hair and the faint golden gleam of the flame reflecting off the metal barrels of gun after gun after gun strapped to a man’s chest.

But that’s enough. That’s more than enough.

No one could live with Stede for so long without knowing Blackbeard on sight.

“Well, well, well,” he says, low and slow, “If it isn’t Mary Bonnet.”

*

Stede had told stories about Blackbeard.

Obviously, Mary had thought, it was all hogwash. Nonsense. Imagined fantasies for the sole purpose of luring the kids back into good favor. As far as she was concerned, Stede probably hadn’t done anything more than the sailing equivalent of dog-paddling around the Lesser Antilles for several months before he’d run into more feelings than he knew what to do with and panicked.  

They weren’t even convincing stories—outrunning the Spanish navy and burning down a French party. A treasure hunt.

Above, Blackbeard catches a rope in hand and steps out of the hayloft, sliding down to the ground.

He stays outside the circle of her lamplight, melting back into the shadows as he stalks around her. She can’t see his face, but she can feel his eyes watching her. She’s been feeling his eyes for the last two weeks, she realizes. That sour prickle of disquiet dripping down her spine, pooling in her belly—it’s been him.

He does not look like the sort of guy that goes on fucking treasure hunts.

All right, Mary tells herself. Whether Stede’s stories were real or not, Blackbeard is here now, and she has to handle that. She can handle that. She pulls in a breath, tightens her stomach, marvels for a moment at her own daring, and demands: “What do you want?”

Blackbeard is, predictably, unphased. “Who’s to say I want anything?”

“You’ve already been inside the house,” Mary presses. He doesn’t deny it. “You’ve been through all our things. You could’ve had anything you wanted—“

“Still could,” he interrupts, deceptively mild. “Still might.”

“You know I don’t have what you’re looking for.”

“You’re so sure? What is it you think I’m looking for?”

Stede, obviously. It can only be Stede. His books, his plants, his shirts. The songs he used to hum, the cologne he used to wear. This ghost has always been about Stede.

Now Stede is gone, and Mary doesn’t know if that works in her favor.

“I think if I had it, you’d have already taken it.”

Blackbeard tsks from the shadows, disappointed. “Come now, Mary.” He says her name silkily, dangerously. “I’ve been watching you for nearly two weeks now. You’re smarter than that.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t you? Hm. Well, maybe we should ask someone else, then. Who’s up at the house? Just the kids, is it?” He puts on a high, squeaky voice, and it would be ridiculous and silly if it didn’t rattle her down to her bones. She’s afraid, she realizes, a bit late and a bit stupid. She’s terrified, actually. “What’s that, Mr Blackbeard, what are you looking for, Mr Blackbeard? We don’t know, Mr Blackbeard sir—“

Stop.

The word punches out of her. She drags air back into her lungs, burning, and says, “I think you’re looking for Stede.”

Blackbeard steps into the light.

The woodcut illustrations in Stede’s books, she understands suddenly, are parodies. Bared teeth and fuses tied into the ends of his hair, hands clasped full of swords or some sailor’s head—it’s the sort of thing a person illustrates when they’re trying to frighten without ever having known real fear.

Because Blackbeard does not bare his teeth at her. He doesn’t have fuses smoking in his hair, or a sword in his hand, or a dead man’s head tied to his belt. He does have the guns and the knives, and black paint has hollowed out his eyes, been smeared over his cheeks, his jaw, emphasizing a surprisingly short beard into his infamous namesake, but none of that is what frightens Mary.

What frightens her is the emptiness.

There’s no rage burning in his eyes, no vengefulness. No malice. There’s no wanting in him. There’s only his frame, standing there like a husk, and his face, staring at her from some abyss, and if he wants nothing, needs nothing, if he’s here for nothing—there’s nothing Mary can offer him to make him go.

He looks like a man already dead.

“I’m not looking for Bonnet,” Blackbeard answers as he steps closer, and closer, and closer. “I’m looking for you.”

*

The painting Mary’s been working on is wet. This isn’t the most important thought she could be thinking right now, but it is, unfortunately, the one she’s thinking about the most, because Blackbeard is coming closer, and closer, and she can feel the red-violet paint pressing into her back, her hair.

She’s going to look like a crime scene, if she doesn’t become one.

Mary swallows, tries to steady herself. “What could you possibly want with me?”

“Well, maybe not just you,” Blackbeard concedes with a shrug. He closes in until he’s only a foot away, then reaches for her—she cringes back, away, but he only snorts, and his hand goes high at the last moment, past her, above her. Grabs the knife still buried in the canvas and hauls it out. “Thought I’d come see how the other half lives. See what he was so eager to get back to.”

Blackbeard twirls the knife across his fingers, back and forth. It leaves a trail of red paint across his knuckles.

“He’s not here,” Mary croaks out, watching the blade flash. “You must already know that. He’s dead.”

He doesn’t seem to hear her. “I thought about stealing his identity once, did he tell you? Would’ve been easy. Just a quick jab with a knife, burn his face off, and bob’s your uncle. I could’ve been the one running back to this cushy little life. Beat me to it though, didn’t he?”

Mary imagines, a little hysterically, what it might’ve been like had Blackbeard burst into the house and announced himself the way Stede had. Darling, I’m home. Dressed in all that leather, that greasepaint. Tattoos and greying hair halfway down his back.

She thinks she probably would’ve noticed the difference.

“He’s dead,she repeats, louder.

Blackbeard laughs, thin and shuddering. “Oh, aye, we heard about that. If he’d stuck to just the jungle cat, I might’ve even believed it, but the carriage trick? A piano dropping on his head? That’s excessive, Mrs Bonnet.”

Okay, Mary thinks. So he’s clever. Fuck. “He’s still not here.”

“But he was.” Blackbeard emphasizes the point by leveling the knife at her. “He was. He dropped all his little playthings, came back to all his fine things in his fine house. And you.”

The blade finds a resting spot right under Mary’s chin, forcing her to meet Blackbeard’s dark, empty eyes.

“What's so special about you, Mary Bonnet?”

And then the strangest combination of things happens.

First, Mary starts to feel something other than abject terror. Incredulity, perhaps. Annoyance. It's just such a patently absurd thing to say about herself and Stede bloody Bonnet, of all people.

Second, Blackbeard leans in close, examining her, and a length of his hair falls over his shoulder in a wave. And on that wave, Mary catches the scent of Stede bloody Bonnet's cologne. The same cologne she's been smelling all over the house.

And third, someone slides open the barn door and says, “Edward, we've got to get moving,” and Blackbeard responds—“Piss off, Izzy.”

Edward. Blackbeard. Edward.

The stories about the treasure hunt, the petrified orange. The differences between raiding a French ship and attending a French party. Talking together, laughing together. Passing the time together, and that’s—well, Mary hadn’t really believed him, because Mary never could understand all of Stede’s idiosyncrasies. She certainly hadn’t found them charming.

But someone had.

His name is Ed.

*

If Mary ever sees Stede Bonnet again, she is going to kill him. For real.

His name is Ed, he’d said. His name is Ed! Swell, she’d thought! An Ed! That made a lot of sense! That recontextualized a lot of things she’d felt really very bad about in her marriage for a long time! Because his name is Ed.

Stede Bonnet did not say, oh, and by the way, those stories about Blackbeard—same guy, actually. Isn’t that funny?

It may, actually, have been funny, had he said that. But he hadn’t, and now Blackbeard was here looking like he’s feeling a lot of really very bad things, and Mary is trying not to laugh with the hysteria of this realization and also trying not to cry because the knife is right there.

Only Stede fucking Bonnet could gallivant off to be a pirate and end up stealing Blackbeard’s heart.

But Mary’s buried Stede fucking Bonnet. Twice. And she’s a mother, and an Allamby, and a society lady, and an artist. And she does not believe in ghosts, but she knows what it is to be haunted.

She meets Blackbeard’s dark eyes, and takes a breath.

*

“We won’t be back,” one of Blackbeard’s crew tells her, escorting her—escorting her!—back up to the house. He has a fresh tattoo around his exposed belly button and a studded belt wrapped around his head. “Think he got everything he needed.”

“Um, okay,” Mary says. “Thanks?”

Blackbeard hadn’t gotten much, honestly. There had only been so much Mary could say—that he hadn’t come back for her at all, hadn‘t come back for his cushy little life, hadn’t wanted it. That he’d renounced it all, left it all behind, Mary herself included. That he’d faked his death to get back to someone important.

“What do you mean, important?” Blackbeard had demanded.

He’d taken the knife away by then. Mary had looked at where he was still fiddling with it, flicking it back and forth again, and saw anxiety rather than anger. The fear still sat in her belly, thick and churning, but she looked at him and saw just a man.

Not a monster.

“I think you had better hear that from him,” she’d said gently.

It hadn’t put a light back in his eyes. It hadn’t eased the tension from his shoulders. But it had made him turn away.

“I don’t want to hear anything from him. Don’t even want to hear his fucking name. I want to—” He’d paused, fought with himself, his back to her. “Whoever he knew, that man’s dead now. Nothing but Blackbeard left.”

He’d stabbed his knife into her little work table, tossed, “Nice art, by the way,” over his shoulder, and disappeared back into the night.

*

Mary sits up the rest of the night at the top of the staircase, a pistol that had once belonged to Stede’s father loaded in her hands, the front door shut and locked at her feet. Nothing in the house moves for long, long hours.

At dawn, the books are still on their shelves. The shirts are still in their trunks. Nothing is shattered, or shredded, or torn. Nothing is broken.

Or, well—

Mary remembers Blackbeard’s dull, lifeless eyes, the exaggerated skull of his painted face. The way his hair had smelled like Stede’s cologne. The way he’d left Stede’s socks folded on the floor. The way he’d never said Stede’s name. 

Almost nothing.  

 

Notes:

Find me on tumblr @forpiratereasons or on twitter @darcylindbergh!