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Stede’s bed is soft.
Yeah, Ed’s sat on it before, but the first night he sleeps in it—only a few hours after meeting Stede, even though it feels like it’s been a lifetime—the soft swish of silk is almost as good as flesh.
The mattress shifts when Stede moves in his sleep, and fuck, that’s something he hadn’t thought to miss, isn’t it? The intimacy of that: the way a shared mattress feels almost alive, the way every movement is telegraphed across feet of down and linen and silk.
Ed can’t close his eyes, obviously—sleep’s more of a sort of twilight unconsciousness these days, shifting ribbons of dreams floating across a half-aware mind—but he’s not ready to try for rest, yet, anyway.
Instead, he tucks his hands under his jawbone and stares across the dark expanse at Stede’s face.
And Stede’s a skelly too, obviously, so it’s not like he’s got skin, or expressions, or whatever, but still... Ed feels like he can see the relaxation on his bony features, can see the calm in the drape of his spine where it curves into his skull, in the way his hand rests between them on the bed, fingers spread.
Ed reaches out carefully, rests his hand on top of Stede’s, gently enough that their bones don’t even clack.
He takes a deep breath in, lets it out, listens to the faint whistle of Stede’s snores—how the fuck does the guy snore without lungs or a throat or a nose, what the fuck—and drifts off.
#
And then it just—keeps going like that. Ed meets all Stede’s skellies, gets to know them a little bit, and then meets the other creatures who live there, too, because Stede’s doing it different in a lot of ways, actually. In addition to the pack of bones he’s met, there’s a half-bird siren, Buttons, a ghost—Oluwande—and a banshee whose name Ed doesn’t catch but whose shrieks have a strangely Scandinavian cast to them.
There’s also a guy—Lucius—who looks just like a regular human, which freaks him out a little, until he sees the guy’s hand change color and size as he holds it up to draw from. “Doppelganger,” Stede confirms later that night. “And also a very skilled artist!”
It’s a weird place, is all he’s saying, and before he knows it, he’s been there for weeks.
He does have to go back to his side eventually, just to make sure the guys don’t think he’s dead, but Fang’s so taken with the idea of it all that he and Ivan trail along with Ed—and bring along a naga named Archie they’ve apparently met while he’s been gone—and are immediately absorbed into the fold.
And Ed’s... happy.
What the fuck?
Like. He’s been a skeleton for fucking decades. Centuries, maybe, who’s fucking counting. And these last few weeks? Well. He doesn’t think he’s been this happy before. Definitely not since dying. Maybe not ever.
He still misses the fleshy shit—getting nice and toasty, eating something good, touching skin and being touched in return, but. This is pretty good. He thinks about it when Stede settles beside him on the plush couch in the room that’s sort of theirs now, not just Stede’s, when Stede’s bony shoulder leans against Ed’s own, and sinks into a pleasant sort of half-doze.
And then he glances over and spots what Stede’s reading.
...his throbbing member, engorged and dusky, stood proud from a thatch of auburn curls...
Holy shit. Ed’s suddenly absolutely not sleepy.
Stede’s reading some kind of porn or something. Right there! On the couch next to Ed!
Jesus fuck, Ed’s suddenly a lot less at peace with his bones.
“What, uh, what are you reading?” Ed asks, and Stede’s bones stiffen (not like that).
“Oh!” Stede closes the book, but Ed does notice he keeps one fingerbone in place to keep it from closing completely. “Just, erm, a bit of fiction.”
“Yeah?” Ed leans even closer, ribs pressed to Stede’s (carefully not letting them tangle, because being a skelly is not all fucking fun and games). “What kind of story?”
“Er.” Stede says. “Just. A story. That I found in the library. When I was alive.”
“A favorite, then?”
Skellies can’t blush. They don’t have blood, or cheeks, or skin, or any of that, but still... Stede’s definitely fucking blushing. Ed can feel it radiating off of him.
“Let me see,” he says, and it’s not a question, because he’s easing the soft leather from Stede’s tight grip, letting it slide from bone to bone, slipping his own index phalange in beside Stede’s own, knuckles clacking as they pass by each other. And he doesn’t have feeling in his bones the way he did in his skin, but he can feel Stede, can feel the phantom of his touch, can feel the way his cartilage quivers as Ed strokes down the side of his metacarpal.His fingers tighten, just a bit, on the gilded cover—flaking gold embossing, curliques so complex Ed can’t quite make out the words they’re intending to spell—but whe Ed gives a gentle tug, he releases it with a half-caught breath.
Ed spreads the book open on his lap at the spot Stede had been marking, runs the tip of a finger down the paper—he’s not sure if it’s paper, actually, or vellum, or something else entirely, but it’s smooth and soft under his fingertip, the dips and divots of letters and decorated edges like ridges of the fingerprints they’ve both long lost, and he swears he can still feel the warmth of Stede in the long-dry ink.
“It’s just a story,” Stede says. “You don’t need to—read it.”
“You liked stuff like this?” Ed asks, and he can feel the heat inside him, feels it gathering in his dry, old, brittle sticks, feels the way the magic and cartilage and centuries old sinews stretch with it, go a little loose and a little tight all at once. He doesn’t have anywhere for it to go, all this feeling, and this is—different. “Liked to, uh, enjoy it?”
“I did,” Stede says, voice hushed, trembling, and Ed can sense the way he’s leaning in and away all at once, the conflict in Stede’s bones, the tension. “I do.”
“Can’t, uh, enjoy it the way you used to, though, can you?”
Stede doesn’t reply right away. Instead, he reaches out, traces a line across the ink, lets the underside of his fingertip brush the place where Ed’s fingernail would have been, when he was human. “I don’t know,” he says softly. “I like to imagine.”
“Oh yeah?” And now it’s Ed whose voice is barely above a whisper. “Imagine what?”
“Imagine... them,” Stede says. “Imagine what it would be like. To be them.”
And Ed has a thought, suddenly: thinks about what he knows about Stede, the way he knows Stede’s preferences. Thinks about the world he left, thinks about royalty, thinks about careful negotiations.
Thinks about a quiet, imaginative, slightly bitchy boy who probably didn’t make many friends in his world, probably didn’t have the chance to make many in any other world, either, not before his flesh was stripped away.
Thinks about what that life would give him, in opportunities.
Thinks about what it wouldn’t.
“Hey,” Ed says, and shifts so he’s holding the book open carefully between them with one hand, drops the other to lay on Stede’s thighbone, brushes his thumb up and down the white bone carefully, gently. “Read it to me?”
Stede’s femur shivers under Ed’s fingers, patella rattling softly. He nods and reaches up a finger to press to the space between his eye sockets—and oh, the tenderness that swells in Ed at the sight of that unconscious gesture, that pushing up of glasses on a nose that no longer exists. Huh. He wonders if Stede still needs glasses, somehow, if losing his eyeballs fixed his vision, and that’s a question for another time but he puts a pin in it because what the fuck—and clears a throat that’s barely theoretical. “I’ll start at the beginning of the chapter, I suppose,” he says, and his voice is just a little deeper than usual, a little rougher. He clears his throat again, and Ed squeezes the smooth bone of his thigh, tilts his head closer to listen, lets his vision blur as Stede’s voice washes over him.
It’s strange, the way it feels: because the story is... well. It’s not the kind of story Ed would usually read, is all. It’s a romance—fucking obviously—between some kind of land pirate kind of guy and the lordling he robs on the road. Ed gathers there’s been plenty of mishaps and miscommunications and all that in previous chapters, but this one seems to be the reconciliation. They’ve fallen in love but won’t admit it, not yet, and in this chapter they’re still working things out—with their dicks, pretty soon, if Ed’s reading the signs right (and it’s a romance, so. He’s pretty sure he is).
Fuck, Ed misses his dick.
He lets his hand drift over Stede’s thigh, settles in closer, and Stede lifts an arm to tuck around Ed’s shoulders, bones of his palm running over Ed’s carvings, thumb tracing the scales of his snake around his humerus, down his radius. They’re reclined against the pillows side by side, legs stretched out, feet resting on the velvety overstuffed ottoman. Ed’s bones don’t hurt, and he’s warm, and the way Stede’s reading voice is just that little bit different than his normal one is making his marrow go all soft inside.
“Jeff smiled, teeth sparkling inside his wild curls of beard, and Godfrey gasped as the highwayman peeled off his codpiece...”
Ed misses clothes, too.
If they had flesh, clothes, nerves and all that, he’d untie all Stede’s lovely bows, unclasp his fastenings, peel him out of his silks and linens slow.
He bets Stede’s skin would be smooth, warm, perfect.
He bet Stede’s hands would be long-fingered, solid, square-palmed.
Ed’s fingerbones tighten on Stede’s thigh, slide up a little further.
Stede’s breath hitches. words catching in his throat. “Ed, what—”
Ed curls in even closer, tucks his face into the crook of Stede’s jaw and spine. “Keep reading,” he murmurs, feeling the way his voice vibrates through the planes of Stede’s bones. “I like listening to you.”
“Ed, you’re—”
“Keep reading,” Ed says again. “I’m just...” he doesn’t even know what to say he’s doing, just knows he wants to touch Stede, wants to be closer, because if he’s reading this right, then Stede’s never done this. Never been this close to someone. Never been... wanted.
He lets his thumb drift over the crest of Stede’s pelvis, feels the gasp in Stede’s illusory lungs.
“Jeff’s skin, covered in lines of ink, felt so hot under Godfrey’s—oh!”
Ed smiles with libs he doesn’t have traces the downward curve of bone, dusty and smooth, and murmurs, “I would touch you here,” as he brushes his hand over the empty space where soft stomach once stretched. “I bet you were ticklish.” The tips of his fingerbones tap against Stede’s bottom ribs, and Stede lets out a small, broken noise. “Did you have hair on your chest?”
“Not—not a lot,” Stede says, his voice small and shaky and heated. “Just across the top, between my—my nipples. And a bit down lower, I think, on my stomach.”
“Bet it was golden in the sunlight,” Ed says, and works the book from Stede’s grasp, setting it aside, and Stede lets it go with unresisting fingers, lets Ed set it aside on the couch. “Bet it was just as pretty as the hair on your head.”
“A little darker,” Stede gasps. “More, um, reddish, maybe, I don’t—oh, Ed, I don’t remember.”
“Would’ve liked to see it,” Ed murmurs, and nuzzles into Stede’s collarbone, can almost feel the way Stede’s skin would taste under his lips. “Would’ve liked to know how fucking soft you were.”
“I love your carvings,” Stede whispers. “I know they were tattoos, and I’m sure they were absolutely beautiful, but—” he finds the dagger Ed’s got carved on his thighbone, follows the blade up to its point, and fuck, Ed can almost feel that, too, feels phantom goosebumps rising on missing skin.
And then Stede’s finger hesitates, then continues, curves around Ed’s hip socket, traces cartilage and ligaments and that fizzy magic space that holds him together and—
“Ah!” Ed feels it. For a second—less than that, a fraction of it, he can feel it, can feel Stede’s touch, not in the abstract way he’s felt everything for centuries, but—real.
“Ed?”
“Do that again,” he says, and Stede shifts closer, does it again, and it’s not quite as shocking this time, just a whisper of feeling, but still.
It’s new.
Stede’s got a calculating air, now, and Ed lets himself be urged down until he’s stretched out on the couch. Stede’s fingers are curled around the base of his skull, his other palm on Ed’s sternum, and when he turns to sit beside Ed—and shit, that’s one bonus to being all bones, they both fit easily on the couch when they’re stripped down to skellies.
“Can I touch you, Ed?” he asks quietly, fingertips steady where they’re hovering just above Ed’s hip, and the air between them is fizzing with magic. It feels a little like when Ed’s flesh got pulled from his bones, if that had been the best thing to ever happen to him—because the way Stede’s looking at him feels like he’s pulled the bones right off his soul.
He nods.
Stede hand settles against his pelvis again, gently, but it’s a steady pressure this time, no tremble, no nerves. And Stede’s like that, isn’t he, always panicking, always talking, until he finds his footing, all of a sudden—and then he’s got it.
And the feeling of his smooth, fresh bone over Ed’s carved and brittle ones isn’t the same as touching flesh—of course it isn’t—but it’s...
It feels like care.
Also, it’s making something in Ed’s nonexistent stomach go all squiggly, making his sinews and tendons loosen, making his scapulae sink into the plush cushions beneath him like he’s iron on a blacksmith’s fire.
Stede’s backlit, like this, the flame of the torches in the sconces behind him making him shimmer, giving him a halo of glittering gold, and when he leans forward, the light catches in the gaps in his cranium and makes his empty eye sockets sparkle gold.
And Ed imagines him, all golden hair and fleshy, and yeah, okay, that’s real fucking appealing, sure, his broad shoulders and big funky nose and sweet, sleepy eyes—the little wrinkle between his upturned brows giving him a perpetually slightly concerned air in the portraits—but also...
The elegant, bony hands slide across his ribs, roam over his collarbone, dip into the strange empty space between sternum and pelvis, and with every touch, Ed’s breath catches and something in him releases.
“Is that all right?” Stede murmurs, but his hands don’t stop, and there’s something building in Ed—he feels like he’s about to laugh, or maybe cry, because he’s sinking into the couch and floating under Stede’s touch all at once. There’s something tingling through veins that rotted into nothing centuries ago, long-dormant paths in his soul reawakening, and it’s like a ghost limb, like some of the old salts used to talk about: he can feel the flesh that once was, can feel the way it wants to be again, can feel the way Stede’s touch is almost tangible against the places it used to sit.
He suddenly needs to touch Stede back, needs him to understand what this is, what it feels like, and he reaches out, tugs at Stede until he swings a leg up and over Ed and settles, humerus to humerus, across Ed’s thighs.
And it’s not like sex. It’s not—wet, and messy, not slick and hot and sweaty, but...
But Ed’s hands come up to Stede’s hips, to his bones, pull him closer. And Stede’s fingers wrap around Ed’s back, press into the divots of his spine, make his vertebrae shiver with it.
Their leg bones tangle, feet pressed together, metatarsals clicking, patellae knocking, and they’re not kissing, they’re not fucking, but Stede’s body is pressed as close to his as any body could be. Their pelvises rock together in a strange sense memory, an instinctual movement, but with every roll, Stede sinks in closer, until something starts to buzz. Ed lets out a groan, feels it rumble through lungs, throat, across a tongue that hasn’t existed in fuck knows how long. Because it’s not sex, but... it’s not not sex. Yeah, there’s no dicks, no holes, but there’s Stede, and there’s Ed, and there’s the magic that holds their bones in place, keeps them animated. There’s the way Stede feels impossibly warm, impossibly heavy above him, the way he feels blanketed in Stede, held, safe.
And the magic—he doesn’t know how it works. Doesn’t know what it is, even, keeping them all upright and moving and thinking and talking, but it’s bubbling in the spaces between his bones, now, swirling around his joints and mingling with Stede’s, and the spot where the hinge of Stede’s jaw presses to Ed’s own feels red-hot with it. Ed turns his head just enough that he can press a lipless, toothy kiss to Stede’s mandible. It’s not a kiss, just a press of bone on bone, but Stede gasps, jaw dropping open, and clutches Ed tighter—and that’s when their ribs slip, and interlock, and the fizz in Ed’s bones boils over.
His head falls back on the couch, his arms curling around the crests of Stede’s pelvis, and when Stede groans long and low, it echoes through Ed’s skull like he’s the one making noise, and maybe he is. Because suddenly, as bewildering, overwhelming, glorious sensations rattle through him, he can’t tell which bones are his and which are Stede’s, can’t find the boundaries of his own body, curls a leg around a hip and can’t tell which part of the action is his as the places where their hearts should be overlap through ribs that interlock like crossing waves, like closing teeth, like clasped fingers.
And it feels like an orgasm he’s having in his fucking soul, as Stede sinks into him, foreheads pressed together so hard Ed thinks there might be bonedust gathering between them, their panting breaths making it fly in little whirlwinds. It sounds like a foghorn in his ears, feels like a wave crashing through him, and as his bones stretch out, separate, fling themselves free, he thinks in a distant corner of his mind that if this is how he finally goes to fucking eternal rest, it’s the best way to go.
#
Stede blinks back to awareness between one moment and the next, and something feels... odd.
It’s not the usual odd of being a skeleton without any skin or clothing (besides his various kerchiefs and cravats, because one must maintain some sort of sartorial standards): it’s not just the weirdness of waking up without having closed the eyes he no longer has.
No, there’s something.... stranger afoot.
Ed, he thinks, and his whole pile of bones goes warm. Ed, touching Ed, being touched, pressing together...
There’s something under his cheek that’s poking him in just the wrong way, lodging itself in the hole where his ear used to be. His finger, he realizes, and tries to move it—but it doesn’t move.
Frowning internally, he tries to push himself up, but.
Nothing happens.
He tries to move a foot, but no luck, and he’s starting to panic, just a bit, all that lovely lassitude leaching from his bones. He turns his head—and thank goodness, that much he can do—and there’s Ed, jaw shifting as he wakes.
...and beyond Ed, scattered across the floor of his chamber, are a haphazard spill of loose bones.
“Well,” he says, as Ed groans a little with the return to consciousness. “That’s... never happened before.”
#
It’s only a day or so until Colin the cursed wizard happens in the neighborhood, and by then, Oluwande and Lucius have come to check on them and at least arranged them both on the bed, skulls facing each other, bones mostly sorted back to the right person, although they’d had a couple finger and toe bones that they weren’t sure about (and honestly, there’s something weirdly romantic about the idea of trading bones, and Ed’s maybe been a skelly too long).
They spend the day just talking, and Ed’s almost disappointed when Colin floats up through the window and chants the reanimation spell.
Still. When Stede reaches out a newly reconstructed bony hand and takes Ed’s—and yeah, that’s definitely not the right phalange on his ring finger, which is, yep, something, all right!—Ed thinks that maybe death isn’t just a death after all.