Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Forty years ago,” said Izzy, after a lot of uncharacteristic silence and staring off into the distance, “Starfleet was doing a geological survey on a newly-mapped solar system in Delta quadrant.”

“Okay, wow, we’re telling the whole story,” Ed muttered, despite himself. The nerves churning in his gut made him anxious, unbalanced—an emotion he was used to feeling from Iz, try as he might to hide it. Not all of the anxiety belonged to Izzy this time, though. Part of Ed was, in this moment, scared absolutely shitless. The stronger, larger part of himself was relieved beyond words that Izzy was talking. That they were finally going to hash it all out, whatever It even was, given Izzy had managed to hide even the nature of the secret from him this whole time.

Stede Bonnet was a man made of fucking magic, it seemed. A few hours with him and Izzy was ready to crack himself open. It made Ed fall a little further into something he was powerless to call anything but love. It made him want to—well. A time and place for all things.

Izzy shot him a glare, not half as strong as Ed knew him to be capable of. “You want to do this? We’re doing it on my terms. I’m never going to talk about any of this again, Edward. If you want to hear—if you want him to hear—we’re starting at the beginning.”

“Fair enough,” said Ed, and he subsided back into the lounge chair they’d dragged across the room when it became clear that Izzy was not going to move from his spot against the arboretum viewport, and that this would be a long conversation requiring a more comfortable arrangement than the dining table. Stede perched on the arm, and Ed on the seat, and they waited for Izzy to calm himself with the artificial rain tracing down the screen.

“One of the surveyed planets was Earthlike and in the inhabitable range,” Izzy sighed, fingers digging to his eyes. “There was no intelligent life, but the flora was oxygen-producing and non-hostile. Then they found dilithium, and of course the Federation marked it for colonization. The lease on the planet went to the highest bidder—an Earth-based mining company called Prisma. This was the seventh planet they’d colonized, so—Prisma VII.”

“God,” Ed muttered without entirely meaning to. Hearing the name of that planet, especially in Izzy’s voice—it made him feel some type of way.

Izzy’s breath shuddered. “They did their environmental surveys, moved in their equipment and built on the land for a few years. Then the company moved their people in and opened applications for immigration. Four thousand people came in, give or take. Workers and their families, then support staff, and then the typical galaxy trotters; people who just wanted a change of scenery, or to get the fuck off Earth. The lease was meant to last for two hundred years, and the vein of dilithium they were mining was supposedly rich enough to last at least that long.

“Things operated as normal for the first fifteen years or so. Then the environment started to break down—quakes, major storms. The native flora started dying at totally unnatural rates. Entire crop yields were lost, and this was meant to be a self-sufficient colony; they didn’t have supply lines set up. At least not ones robust enough to support four thousand people through shipments alone. They needed those crops. Then the rain went sour. Then the groundwater dried up.”

“It’s called total planetary failure,” Ed said. He shifted himself towards Stede, sitting so his knees were pinned between his own chest and Stede’s hip. Stede met his gaze, even and attentive, as he traced a gentle hand along the ridge of Ed’s kneecap. He used it, and the even tempo of Stede’s emotions, to ground himself. “We don’t know why it happens, sometimes it just does. Rarely, but it’s a known thing. Unpredictable. There’s usually no real indication that it’s going to happen until the planet’s already halfway gone. Goes from thriving to dead in a matter of a decade or less. You can do all the environmental surveys in the galaxy and still not see it coming.”

“I can imagine how that would create a…rather catastrophic situation,” Stede mumbled.

“It didn’t have to,” Izzy snapped. “The governor of the planet waited too long to alert anyone of the collapse. The Federation was supposed to be monitoring the situation but—I don’t know. Things fall through the cracks. The galaxy is big. Point is, by the time the Federation realized what was happening on Prisma VII, mostly because the shipments of dilithium stopped, people were already dying. There wasn’t enough food to go around, the seismic activity was destroying infrastructure fucking daily. People were unhoused, unfed and unhealthy. There was a plague, on top of it all.”

“Some virus,” Ed muttered. “A vaccine would have been easy to synthesize, but they didn’t have the equipment onplanet.”

“Starfleet wanted eyes on the ground to oversee and facilitate the evacuation,” Izzy said. He was making almost unblinking eye contact with the arboretum, where the artificial rain had stopped and the leaves now dripped. “The Ranger was the closest ship they could spare, so they sent us ahead of the evac teams to start the process. We had no idea how bad it had gotten; it was just supposed to be a straightforward evacuation. Simple in-and-out. We get everyone onto shuttles, we stabilize what’s left of the equipment, we leave. The situation on the planet was…it had…devolved significantly further than we realized. For all his fucking flaws, even Hornigold probably wouldn’t have agreed to take the Ranger down onto the planet if he’d known.

“I was on the landing team, because I was supposed to be helping to stabilize the mining equipment for a possible transfer back to Earth. Nobody told us there wouldn’t be any equipment to stabilize. It’d all been torn apart by quakes. The governor had purposefully downplayed the severity of the famine, the drought—everything. Edward was leading the landing team, and he gave the order to storm the governor’s mansion. Mostly to figure out if he was still alive. When we found him, he was holed up in a disaster shelter with his family and some of his advisors. We found them with six months’ worth of rations and the last of the fresh water. The rest of the colony was…they’d been divided. To…prevent the spread of disease. The healthy ones were allowed to stay in their homes. The others—” Izzy paused, swallowing rapidly. Nausea rolled off of him.

“There were camps,” Ed said, grimly.

Stede’s hand on Ed’s knee tightened. Very quietly, he whispered, “I don’t know why humans keep doing this to each other.”

“You and me both, baby,” Ed muttered, and Izzy swept an absolutely unreadable look over the two of them, before he turned back to the viewport.

“When Hornigold realized what was happening, he wanted to wash his hands of the whole thing,” Izzy told the screen. Ed watched his hands curl and uncurl by his hips. “He ordered those of us who had gone planetside to spin this…half-cooked narrative. We were to help evacuate the local government and report to ‘Fleet that the planet was unsalvageable, and the governor’s people were the last survivors of some huge cataclysm. I think money changed hands. The governor was a wealthy person, even aside from his interests on the planet. Ed had gone into one of the camps, against orders—I went with him. Because I always do. The state those people were living in…I’ll never forget it.”

His voice went muggy and thick in the next moment, and he whipped a look around the room. “Where’s your—your fucking bathroom?”

Stede gestured to the open door to the bedroom, and Izzy all but sprinted in that direction.

“He’s getting sick,” Ed murmured, when he was gone.

“I assumed as much,” Stede whispered, and he wedged himself into the chair beside Ed. “Poor thing.”

It took Izzy a moment to reappear; when he did, it was with a pale sheen to his face and water in his beard, clearly from washing his mouth out. Ed felt himself vibrate with the need to touch him and Stede, apparently sensing this, steadied him with a stroke of his thigh.

“Water, I’zral?” Stede murmured to him, but Izzy shook his head and settled back against the arboretum glass.

“If I stop now, I won’t—” Izzy sighed. “Just let me…”

“Right,” Stede murmured, and subsided back against Ed’s shoulder.

Izzy drew in a steadying, creaking breath.

“Hornigold wasn’t happy we’d gone in; he wanted to leave us behind. Or, well. Me. I was just an engineer’s mate back then; Edward was his first officer by that point, and I think even he knew that it was going to be hard to explain showing back up Earthside without him. Command would have gotten suspicious, and Hornigold obviously didn’t want whatever under-the-table deal he’d made with the governor to come to light. So he tried to bribe Edward into leaving me behind; told him he’d recommend him for captaincy, pull him into his ‘club’ in ‘Fleet. Neither of us knew what that meant at the time—I suppose we do now.”

“Should have known then,” Ed muttered.

“You were young,” Izzy whispered, uncharacteristically gentle.

“Dickfuck, I was damn near thirty,” Ed muttered, and wiped his sleeve across his eyes. “Old enough to know a lying old man when I saw one. I just didn’t—didn’t want—"

Stede offered a shush, and another caress, and Ed felt a sob explode from his chest before he could stop it. He leaned his forehead against Stede’s shoulder, shuddering.

“Ed refused. Obviously.” Izzy bit the inside of his cheek and made a few wet, mournful sounds in the back of his throat. “He fucking—he shouldn’t have. I told him as much. I don’t know why—”

“C’mon, Iz, you know,” Ed hissed. “You’ve gotta know.”

“Yeah,” Izzy whispered. “Yeah, I suppose I—yeah. Anyway, he refused. And Hornigold fucked off with the Ranger, and there was nothing we could really do except—survive. The Ranger had brought rations with her, ostensibly enough to keep the colony until the proper evac teams arrived from Earth, but we didn’t even know if they were coming anymore, since Hornigold was going to tell ‘Fleet that there were no survivors. Ed spent the days hailing every off-planet frequency he could connect to, but Delta quadrant is—just the ass end of the galaxy, and Prisma VII wasn’t near any shipping lanes.

“Finally, an exploratory vessel came just within range. The captain just so happened to be a friend of Ed’s—Jack Rackham. Rackham’s ship was the William, and it was big, but not big enough to transport over a thousand people. He couldn’t do much more than convey the message to Command, which he did, and they mobilized an entire flotilla when they realized that there were still survivors on Prisma VII. Delta quadrant is deep space, though, and warp is only so fast. Rackham took the sickest people aboard, quarantined them and headed towards the nearest hospital base; the rest of us were left to wait. It took two weeks. And I got sick.”

Stede gasped—Ed did too, for some reason, despite knowing it was coming. Perhaps because this was the first time since it had been actively happening to them that they’d ever discussed the chain of events on Prisma VII. He’d spent so long trying to forget and ignore the memories of those terrified, helpless weeks that the distress of it all felt new again, despite the years.

Izzy looked at neither of them as he said, “Stede. You’ve heard of Pon Farr?”

“Er—in a way,” Stede stuttered. “I’m aware of it as a…concept. The Vulcan blood fever, yes? Every decade or so, male Vulcans—”

“Not just male Vulcans,” Izzy muttered. “All of them. Every seven years starting around thirty. I was thirty-seven, and I’d been told I was never going to have one. Being half-Vulcan, and on hormone replacements most of my life…yeah. Didn’t think I could. I still don’t know if it was the stress or the virus that triggered it, but—Pon Farr came on, and it came on fast. It’s fatal if you don’t treat it, and that far from Vulcan the only treatment available is…well. It’s called a mating drive for a reason.”

“So you…” Stede darted several rapid glances between Izzy and Ed. “I see.”

“He didn’t have a choice,” Izzy sighed, and he wouldn’t look away from his own damn feet, despite Ed shifting pointedly for his attention. “I would have died, and probably killed some other people while I did it. It’s…violent, in the later stages. Fuck, fight or die. It’s one of our biggest shames in Vulcan culture. We…prefer not to think about it. It’s why we’re usually mated in childhood, so that we don’t have to talk about it.”

“He didn’t want to tell me,” Ed said. “He wanted to just—go off into the wasteland and die. I found him writing a note. To Edward, I’m going off to cark it, love Iz. Fucking unbelievable.”

“I didn’t want it to happen!” Izzy burst, flinging himself from the window with a violent gesture that seemed to shake the very room. “I knew that if you—if we—” He screamed, and hit the glass, and both Stede and Ed jumped as it cracked under the assault of his enormous Vulcan strength. “Fuck! Vulcans have to meld during Pon Farr. They—they have to, or it doesn’t work, the fever doesn’t go down. Edward, we melded.”

“I know!” Ed shouted back. “I fucking remember, Iz—don’t you think I remember what it felt like to be—fucking inside you in that way? You fucking asshole, it was the most incredible fucking—most beautiful experience of my entire life. You idiot. You fucker!”

“Edward,” Izzy said, something like disgust crawling onto his face. “We tore each other apart for three days. It wasn't…lovemaking, or whatever you're trying to make it out to be—”

“It was,” Ed said firmly, “just because it wasn’t soft and gentle and rose-scented doesn't mean I wasn’t making love to—”

“Shut up,” Iz hissed.

“No, no,” Stede said, holding up a hand, “Edward clearly needs to say something too, we should let him—”

Ed threw up a hand to mute him, still yelling over them both. “Don’t speak for me, don’t tell me to shut up. I fucking loved it. Maybe it was fucked nasty and maybe we didn’t have much of a choice, but I’ve never felt so…I’ve never…never had something like that, before or since. I loved it. Tried to tell you when you woke up but you just—pushed me away. And then you kept pushing me away for the next twenty fucking years! You all but told me to forget about it, so I did. Hurt less.”

“Oh, it hurt less?” Izzy sneered, and then barked out perhaps the nastiest laugh Ed had ever heard from him. He turned, facing the chair, and gave his audience a good view of the tears streaking down his face as he slid down the wall and continued to laugh—an ugly choking sound that did not sound altogether dissimilar from sobs. Stede and Ed could only watch him until the hysteria petered out and he was left panting, pulsing out waves of tender emotion. To the floor, he said, “It’s fucking permanent.”

Ed’s heart froze in his chest. “What’s fucking permanent?”

“Oh, my God,” Stede whispered.

“The bond, Edward,” Izzy said, and huffed out another halfhearted snicker. “The fucking bond that formed when you mated with me. It’s a marital bond. It’s permanent. That ‘beautiful experience’ never ended for me. You’ve been living in the back of my mind for the last two decades, Edward Teach.”

“No,” Ed said automatically. “I would know. I would be able to tell.” He knew in his heart that it was a lie. There were whole months of his life that Ed had floated through, completely ignorant to everything surrounding him. He realized now that the only constant thing in those times had been Iz, sliding food in front of him and fielding the needs and demands of the crew while keeping the dirty secret of Ed’s mental state for him. Crawling into bed with Ed on his worst days, a warm body to squeeze or fuck as needed. All these years, and it had been Iz keeping him afloat—while Ed’s broken fucking mind hammered into the tenderest parts of Izzy’s own.

“I’ve been shielding it,” Izzy snapped. “Every day of my fucking life. When I woke up and realized what we’d—what I’d done, I knew I couldn’t…couldn’t keep you tethered to me like that. Couldn’t let you know. Starfleet had a Vulcan healer on staff—they referred me to her when I woke up from the trance. She told me the bond was only half-formed. The virus and the blood fever combined burned me up inside. Made me infertile. I was never going to have another Pon Farr, and my bondmate wouldn’t…any time we melded, it would…feel wrong. There would always be something missing from the bond. She helped me close off your end of the connection and put up shields to keep it from trying to reconnect. I’ve kept them up ever since.”

Ed was out of the chair before he fully processed that he was moving. He crawled across to Iz, yanked his face up and slapped him. Stede screamed, and Izzy groaned like the world had just fallen into perfect fucking order from absolute chaos.

“You…fucking dog,” Ed hissed, gripping Izzy’s jaw in his hand hard enough to bruise. “How fucking dare you?”

“I couldn’t do it to you, Eddie,” Izzy wheezed. “Couldn’t tether another person to my miserable fucking life. I couldn’t give you anything, Edward. Except my body and my loyalty.”

“You stupid—fucking—” Ed’s hand slipped away from Izzy’s throat, and Iz had just enough time to gasp in a breath before Ed’s mouth was on him, pressed with bruising force.

“Ed,” Izzy croaked into his mouth. “I’ve been sick.”

“I don’t care,” Ed snapped. “You think I care? Care about what you can—fucking give me? I don’t give a shit what some pretentious Vulcan bitch said twenty years ago. Take down the shields, Iz.”

“I can’t,” Izzy breathed.

“Yes you can, you miserable fucking—”

“Your boyfriend is seeing the future,” Izzy snapped. He arched away, attempting to rip himself from Ed with limited success—they went crumpling to the floor together, Ed rolling onto his shoulder and Izzy flat on his back. He told the ceiling, “When Vulcans die, their minds don’t die with them. They exist in a kind of…space outside of time.”

“What the fuck?” Ed wheezed.

“You’ve skipped some context, dear,” said Stede, as he clumsily clamored to join them on the floor, clearly feeling left out. It accomplished nothing but adding another body to the pile, and then they were three middle-aged men puddled on the carpet like a trio of wet dogs.

“I’m giving fucking context, twat,” Izzy replied, almost kindly. “But here—to make the story fucking short, Bonnet created a paradox and is bonded to my fucking ghost, so I can’t lower the shields without possibly funneling all of our future memories into my mind, and then into yours. Which, to clarify, would probably drive us all insane.”

“I’m…confused,” Stede offered, through a mouthful of Ed’s hair that got there due to Ed rolling and cackling.

“You came forward in time,” said Izzy. “To a time when you apparently have a bond with me. A bond we neither formed nor consummated. This would be the paradox. They tend to happen when you fuck with time.”

“Well,” Stede huffed, “I didn’t do it on purpose—”

“Shut up,” Ed and Izzy said as one.

Stede subsided, grumbling into Ed’s hair and petting him. Ed, for his part, carried on giggling—mostly so he wouldn’t cry.

“When I die,” Izzy began again, meticulously, like a parent to a child. It was probably the most patience Ed had ever seen him speak with. “My…soul—Vulcans call it Katra—will continue to exist in a kind of…communal racial memory, with the Katra of every other Vulcan who has or will ever live. When Stede punched a hole through spacetime, my Katra must have sensed him—sensed the bond—and attached to him as he went…whizzing the fuck by. That’s the best explanation I can think of, anyway.”

“But we never mated,” Stede said.

“I know.”

“And you can’t—”

“I know. That’s why it’s called a paradox. The only way that you and I can have a bond is if it never actually came into being. It just—exists. It just is.”

“This is insane,” Ed giggled. “You’re telling me I’ve got a time-traveling ghost bond holding a gun to my psyche and I’ve been secretly married for twenty years? Life was boring before you, Stede.”

“I hope it becomes significantly less exciting very soon,” Stede muttered, brushing a nervous hand through his hair. It stuck up in a few new directions.

An almost contemplative silence fell over the three of them. Ed could feel the residual upheaval of the recent past in Izzy’s mind—not only the fucking trauma-dump but also the stress of the last few days; the matters still weighing on his mind. Stede was almost content by contrast, curious and a little worried about the idea of his mind being colonized by his own future memories, but he seemed to have already taken it somewhat in his stride. The biggest thing on Stede’s mind, apparently, was relief. He’d been lonely. He was glad to have Ed and Izzy beside him, even with all of the insanity they’d brought to his life, because he’d been achingly lonely for his entire solitary existence.

“I’m not a trained healer,” Izzy said, after quite awhile. “I can try to…meld with you, Stede. It might give the bond something other than my Katra to latch onto. The bond might right itself that way. But I can’t guarantee anything.”

Stede sat up instantly, facing Izzy with a kind of intensity that reminded Ed of the Academy and rows of cadets standing at attention.

“Do it,” Stede said.

“Right now?” Izzy said, alarmed.

“No time like the present,” said Stede. “Where do you want me—is it better to do it sitting, or laying down? How does this work, which side of my face—I’ve seen this in holovids, but I’ve never done it. Oh, this is all a bit exciting, isn’t it?”

“He’s getting off on this,” Ed said, sotto voce to Izzy’s flustered face. “Just do it, Iz. Is there a reason not to?”

“Not how things are done,” said Izzy, with such a grumpy fucking expression that Ed had to laugh.

“Love, none of this is how things are done.” He wrapped a hand around Izzy’s wrist—and God, how could he not have known about the bond, when that touch alone felt like coming home? He pressed a kiss to the heel of Izzy’s hand, reverent and gentle, and then shifted it towards Stede’s waiting face. “Go on.”

Izzy stared, ardent and speechless, and only seemed to breathe when his fingers slotted against the side of Stede’s face. He moved them then, slipping them towards the psi-points on Stede’s face with an ease that spoke of instinct.

“Ready?” Izzy breathed, and Ed felt a possessive thrill in his stomach that even in this, Izzy was following his order.

“Ready,” Stede replied.

“I want to see you two kiss so fucking bad,” Ed volunteered. “First thing when this is over? You two. Snogging.”

“Do you want me to do this?” Izzy snapped, without half as much heat as he thought.

“Yes,” Stede said. He was practically panting for it, the lunatic. “Please?”

Iz sighed, closed his eyes and licked his lips. “Alright. Match my breathing. Close your eyes. Imagine a…imagine a calm sea. Rippling in the wind. The tide comes in, breath in. The tide goes out, breath out. In, out.”

Ed closed his eyes and followed the rhythm of their shared breath. In, out. The sand was black.

“My mind to your mind, my thoughts to your—”

A thunderous bang echoed through the room, and the entire ship rocked.

Lucius greeted the arrival of the turbo lift to the bridge with a yelp. “Hey! So, yeah, we’re under attack—”

“Captain on the bridge!” Izzy said, and Stede only realized that he was talking about him when the nudging against his hip grew insistent, and Izzy hissed, “Bonnet,” under his breath. To Lucius, he said, “Where—where the fuck is the bridge crew? Who’s on duty right now?”

“Um, well…nobody?” Lucius ventured. “I mean, I’m here. I forgot my sketch PADD on the—y’know, doesn’t matter! But yeah, everyone else is asleep. It’s the middle of the night, and we’re on auto-pilot, so—”

“Who is on fucking watch?” Izzy snapped. It was almost refreshing, to see Izzy back in his Yelling At People element after seeing him so fragile and unsure. Stede could still feel the sensation of his fingertips against the invisible psi-points on his face, like a brand left there by the almost-meld. “This is a ship, not a bed and breakfast! At the very least, someone needs to be at the helm at all times. You’re telling me we’ve been floating through the Neutral Zone with nobody on the bridge? You lot are the most incompetent, insubordinate, work-shy—”

“That,” Ed yelled, storming onto the bridge at Stede’s back and pushing past him to catapult towards the viewscreen, “is my fucking ship!”

Indeed, the portalized viewscreen had been mostly overtaken by the form of a massive starship, her black hull identifying her as the U.S.S. Queen Anne. She was close enough that Stede could see the glowing charge of her phaser canons, and they were pointed directly at the hull of the Revenge.

“What does Starfleet think it’s doing?” Ed snarled, and he began to assault the communications array with furious jabs of its buttons. “When I get my hands on Charlie Vane, oh—that little fucker is going to wish I’d sent him back to Deep Space Four when I had the chance.”

The rest of the crew had begun to shuffle in, sleep-rumpled and bleary. Frenchie first, who drifted to stand by the communications console and simply watch as Ed beat it into submission. Buttons came next and was, predictably, naked—though he did not let this stop him from immediately going to the systems array and checking the damage caused by what Stede assumed to have been a glancing blow from one of the Queen Anne’s phaser canons.

“Shields holding, Cap’n,” he said, folding his wings around himself to provide some slight modesty—this was clearly because Zheng had arrived. She wore the same clothing they’d found her in on the Romulan ship, though her Starfleet pin was now attached in its rightful position on her breast. Stede, finding himself to be only one of three captains populating the bridge of his ship, was at a loss for how to proceed.

“What’s happening?” Zheng demanded. “Is that—Teach, that’s your ship.” Behind her, and with suspicious timing, the trio of Oluwande, Jim, and Archie trailed onto the bridge. Each of them was wearing a different article clearly belonging to the same set of replicated pajamas—Oluwande the pants, Archie the incredibly oversized shirt, and Jim the slippers. Jim was also, thankfully, wearing a robe. Stede, who immediately decided that this was none of this business—especially given the intimate nature of the activities he’d been engaging in this evening—averted his gaze back towards the giant, hovering threat of Ed’s starship.

“Oh, believe me,” growled Ed, sliding his palm up the interface of the communications array to initiate a hail. “I’m aware. Teach to Queen Anne. You better fucking answer me, Queen Anne.”

Evidently, even the jammers from Romulan space couldn’t intercept a signal between two ships hovering less than a handful of kilometers away from each other. The external view of the Queen Anne faded away, replaced by the feed from what was clearly the bridge. A swarm of activity existed there—more people than Stede thought could possibly fit onto the bridge of the Revenge, but they each seemed to have a place and a job to be doing on the Queen Anne. Most of them did not look at all pleased with the man currently sitting in the captain’s chair.

This man being a person Stede could only assume to be Ben Hornigold, given both Ed and Izzy flicked a hunted, haunted look first towards each other, and then back to the viewscreen.

“Well,” said Hornigold. “Edward. How nice to see you again so soon.”

“Fuck you,” Ed said, reflexively.

“Is that any way to speak to a superior officer, Captain Teach?” Hornigold jeered.

“I’m done pretending to have any respect for you, so yeah. I guess it is.” Ed pushed away from the communications console and positioned himself front and center. “I’ll say it again, in fact: fuck you, Ben. What are you doing with my ship?”

Hornigold smirked as though he found Ed’s outburst genuinely funny and leaned forward tauntingly in his—Ed’s—chair. “Your acting captain had some very interesting information to share with me after you left him in charge, Teach. Apparently, some people still hold loyalty for Starfleet. Imagine my surprise when I was informed that not only had you entered the Neutral Zone against my direct order—you also deserted your ship on the edge of Federation space with no standing orders and no  commanding officers aboard. Young Lieutenant Vane here had no choice but to report to Starbase Eleven and relinquish command of your ship to me.”

“So this is payback?” Ed said. “You pissy, Ben? Throwing a tantrum because I wouldn’t let you have your little power trip? You brought my ship and my people into the Neutral Zone—for what? To prove a point?”

Hornigold struck out a hand to the side and snapped. Instantly, the young man standing next to his chair sprung into action, threading a PADD into Hornigold’s waiting hand. He stepped back, though not before he passed a very quick look towards the viewscreen. It was smug, self-satisfied, and clearly meant for Ed.

“I’ll wipe that smirk off your face, Charlie Vane,” Ed snarled. “He tell you he’d make you a captain? I bet he offered to set you up in his little club—his masters of the fucking universe. I’ll put a phaser to your skull next time I see you, Vane. Mark my fucking words, I will end your miserable—"

“Edward,” Izzy said, so quietly Stede could only hear due to proximity, and Stede saw him grab Ed’s wrist in the negligible space between their bodies. Stede knew, though he didn’t know why, that this was not something Izzy would have done only a single day ago.

“That’s enough, Edward,” Hornigold sighed, in the tone of an exasperated adult to a misbehaving child.  Then, reading from the PADD, he began, “Captain Teach, it is my duty to inform you that you have been tried in absentia and found guilty of crimes against the United Federation of Planets. The charges include—”

“In absentia?” Ed roared. “Starfleet doesn’t try people in absentia—”

“—Disobeying a direct command from a superior officer, and in doing so usurping that officer’s authority. Mounting an unauthorized excursion into the Romulan Neutral Zone, established as a violation of the Treaty of Algeron. Four counts of willfully and wantonly endangering the lives of subordinate officers—”

“Hey, whoa, whoa!” Archie spoke up from the back of the room, waving her arms—though it was unlikely that anybody could possibly misunderstand where her voice was coming from. Jim struck out a hand and muttered under their breath, to Archie’s complete ignorance. “He didn’t order us to board this ship! We came over willingly because Starfleet wasn’t going to do anything about it. These guys were going to die, man!”

“It is the prerogative of Starfleet Command that Captain Edward Teach is a mutineer,” said Hornigold, unheeding. The expressions on the faces of Ed’s crew—both those present on the bridge of the Revenge and those visible in the viewscreen—ranged from careful blankness, to deep unease, to visible queasiness. It seemed the only people who were genuinely pleased with the goings-on were Hornigold himself and the weaselly Vane, lurking behind his chair. “Having been found guilty of these charges, it has been decided that Captain Teach will, effective immediately, be stripped of his rank and all authority over his crew and ship.”

“Fine,” Ed said, shrugging violently, like he was physically removing the mantle of his own command from his burdened shoulders. “Take it. Don’t want the rank anymore, or the ship, or the fucking authority. You and Starfleet can kick rocks all the way back to Earth, Ben.”

“I’ve been authorized,” said Hornigold, “to take you into custody aboard the Queen Anne for transport back to Earth.”

“Nah. Nah, mate, I won’t be doing that.” Ed took a step back, waving Hornigold’s assertion away like a bad smell. “Over my dead body, I’ll get on that ship with you—and you can beam my corpse back onto the Queen Anne, if you want it there so bad. I’m not doing that. I’m staying on this ship and making sure these guys get to Starbase Eleven, and then I’m going to need someone other than you, Ben Shit-Fuck Hornigold, to tell me what the fuck is going on.”

Hornigold’s face began to take on a distinct red color. It was satisfying to witness the crack in his cool, self-satisfied temperament—Stede had never been able to suffer arrogance. Unfortunately, given that Ben Hornigold was the greatest threat in the immediate vicinity, seeing the rage build on his face was a bad omen indeed.

“The cargo hold of that ship is full of the most volatile explosive in the galaxy,” Hornigold said, furious, spittle flying visibly from his mouth as he stood from his chair for the first time. Despite his obviously advanced age, he was a brick wall of a man who seemed to find no difficulty in standing or striding across the bridge of the Queen Anne, drawing close to show Ed and the assembled denizens of the Revenge his purpling countenance. “Don’t test me, Teach, or I will unload the entire payload of this Constellation Class starship into the side of that dinghy you’re on and blow you to fucking smithereens. There is enough Red Matter on that ship to turn you into dust, Teach.”

“Red Matter?” Izzy said, so low Stede almost couldn’t hear it. He turned to catch Stede with a look of disbelief and incredulity. “There’s Red Matter on this ship?”

Stede shook his head, helpless, trying to convey his utter ignorance of the situation.

“Sir.” Vane spoke up for the first time. A look of doubt and something that could be called panic had pooled onto his face. “If there’s Red Matter on that ship, we’ll be caught in the blast radius as well—and the surrounding planets.”

“Hey Ben,” Ed rasped. “For someone who’d never heard of this ship before, you sure know a lot about what’s on it.”

Hornigold’s face contorted into a mask of rage.

“You stupid, useless little man,” Hornigold said. “I told Edward not to give you that ship.” It took Stede a very long moment to realize that the Edward being referred to was not Ed Teach, standing a few feet from him and looking desperately confused. With a sickening jolt, Stede realized that Hornigold was speaking to him—and speaking about Edward Bonnet.

“You knew my father?” Stede said, trembling.

“I knew you would fuck it up,” Hornigold said, apparently too deep into his own monologue to process Stede’s question—or, indeed, the growing realization being experienced by everyone who could hear him speak. “You’d never been anything but incompetent, and suddenly Edward wanted to give you a ship. One last opportunity to prove yourself, he called it. Badminton and I tried like hell to talk him out of it, but he’d set his mind to it. Said you were his only son, and he wanted to give you one last chance to get in on the family business. Stupid old man was always obsessed with lineage. Contingency. We assumed the worst that could possibly happen was you get yourself killed in some far-flung backwater of the galaxy and he could wash his hands of you for good. Then you went missing with half of the refined Red Matter in the known galaxy—"

A sonorous boom echoed through the bridge. Stede, who didn’t honestly know how many more sudden, loud sounds he could take in a single hour, jumped and fought off the overwhelming urge to cower. The viewscreen flickered for a moment and then closed out, reverting back to an external view of the ship and the Queen Anne, angled so that they were looking straight down the barrel of her menacing phaser canons.

“Uh, what was that?” Wee John inquired. He was trying, and failing, to hide behind Frenchie—though Frenchie was clearly encouraging it, given he had his arms spread out in a sort of cartoonish display of protection.

“A ship dropping out of warp,” said Ed, steadying himself against the communications array. As he spoke, the Queen Anne tilted on her axis and revealed, behind her, the shapes of at least half a dozen more starships, crystalized warp trails billowing behind them like so much smoke. “Or—um. A lot. A lot of ships.” His frenetic gaze sought out Zheng, still lurking at the back of the room—likely, Stede realized, so as not to draw Hornigold’s attention to herself. “Who did you contact?”

“Nobody,” Zheng said, affronted. “I would have blown my cover.”

“Who else could possibly know we’re here?” Ed said. “We’ve been cycling through frequencies this entire time; nothing’s come close enough, and the Romulans have been running their jammers nonstop. It would have taken days for word to travel from Starbase Eleven—”

As he spoke, the communications array began to ping with an attempted hail, and Ed immediately slid his palm along the display to accept it. Instead of the bridge of the Queen Anne reappearing, the larger-than-life and quite unpleasant view of a mustachioed man’s nose appeared on the viewscreen, flaring as he released a shrill whoop into what was clearly his handheld communicator.

“Tell me that’s not Rackham,” Izzy hissed, taking several monstrous steps towards the viewscreen as though he wanted to be closer to the eight-foot-tall nostrils onscreen. Stede had never found his resemblance to a small, angry dog to be so strong as he did in that moment. “Tell me that’s not Jack fucking Rackham.”

“What is up, Blackbeard?” the man crowed. “Calico Jack to the motherfuckin’ rescue!”

“Jack!” Ed whooped, throwing his hands into his hair. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“You know I’ll always come to save you, baby,” said the man apparently known as Jack Rackham. He blew an obnoxious kiss into the viewscreen—it echoed around the bridge in a way that vibrated Stede’s very skull. “Nice to see you too, Izzy. Looking good, sugar tits.”

Izzy audibly growled.

“Rackham,” came an additional voice over the audio feed—feminine and exasperated. “Get off the frequency.” The view flickered wildly for a moment, and then came back into focus, now split into two feeds. On one side, Rackham’s mustache still loomed; on the other was yet another starship bridge, this one appropriately crewed and sleekly modern. The woman sitting in the captain’s chair was perhaps sixty, chocolate brown hair streaked with gray and held back from her face by a clip. There were what Stede believed to be Admiral’s stripes on her golden shirt, though he was admittedly unversed in the particulars of Starfleet uniform code. She was a beautiful woman with an air of authority that was hard to ignore—though that was not why Stede found himself utterly unable to pull his gaze away from her face.

“Attention Benjamin Hornigold and crew of the starship Queen Anne,” she said, rising from her chair. “This is Admiral Alma Bonnet of the United Starship Bridgetown. You are surrounded by six Galaxy Class starships, and the Romulan military is standing by with fourteen warbirds ready to rock your shit if you don’t stand down. The entire force of Beta quadrant is breathing down your fucking neck right now, Ben. You better come out with your hands up.”

“Alma?” Stede bleated.

“If you surrender now, we will—Dad?”

“Dad?” chorused every other person present on the bridge of the Revenge—and several others on the multiple other starships present, if the cacophony of noise that flooded over the audio feed was any indication.

For a moment, Stede could only stare. She looked, he couldn’t help but think, exactly like her mother. The face of the child he’d left behind and the woman in front of him seemed to blend in his mind’s eye. He wondered, wildly, if she was angry at him—if she had missed him, or if she even really cared that he’d apparently dropped unceremoniously out of her life fifty years ago.

His reverie and the stunned silence were simultaneously broken by Zheng stepping forward out of the shadows of the bridge.

“Admiral,” she said, hands slamming against the helm. “This ship has a cargo hold full of Red Matter. I have to imagine that’s what Hornigold’s been after this whole time. Clearly, it’s already managed to destabilize enough to create some sort of singularity—as I’m sure you’ve noticed. The Red Matter seems to have supercharged the warp core and caused a massive release of energy. This whole ship is a ticking bomb, Admiral. We need to get everyone and everything out of this sector of space right now.”

“H-hold on,” said Alma—and Stede was still so busy wrapping his mind around the fact that he was staring at a sixty-year-old version of his own daughter that he almost didn’t process what Zheng had said. Namely, that the ship they all stood on was apparently primed to explode. Panic exploded within him. Looking around at the faces of his crew, he could tell that he wasn’t the only one. “All of the known Red Matter in the galaxy is supposed to be kept isolated in—”

“No, she’s right,” Izzy said. His entire posture had changed in the presence of someone he clearly both considered an authority, and genuinely respected. All of the Starfleet protocol had flooded back into his body; he nearly looked like a completely different person. It was the first time Stede had ever looked at him and seen a Vulcan, rather than just the strange, endearing bundle of idiosyncrasies he’d come to know as I’zral. “In 2268, a satellite positioned near Starbase One intercepted a coded communique between the planet Qo’noS and the Romulan Secret Police. The Klingons had discovered a deposit of Red Matter on one of their colony planets. They’d refined it and sold it to the Romulans for the purposes of mining higher quality dilithium. The delivery never came. It was a huge diplomatic incident between the empires, and the Red Matter was never recovered.”

“How do you know this, Commander?” asked Alma—should Stede think of her as Admiral? Admiral Bonnet? Madam? She looked just as perplexed as Stede felt, though surely for wildly different reasons.

“I lived on Starbase One as a child,” said Izzy, falteringly. “I…heard things. If there’s that much Red Matter on this ship…” he turned his head, encompassing both Stede and his assembled crew, “no wonder you managed to punch a hole through time. Red Matter has to be kept a certain distance from an antimatter reactor to be safely transported via warp. On a ship this small, that’s…impossible. Punching warp would have an immediate destabilizing effect on the Red Matter, and with that much onboard—the way Red Matter reacts to antimatter would have essentially turned your cargo hold into a black hole. It’s a miracle you all weren’t ripped apart at a molecular level.”

There was utter silence from the Revenge crew, as they all cringed spectacularly at the idea of how close they’d come to being utterly torn out of existence. From the wildly-osscilating feed on the other side—which now appeared to show a ceiling glowing with Red Alert lights—Jack’s voice said, “That’s sexy as hell, Iz. Love it when you’re all Vulcany.”

“I’ll kill you, Rackham,” Izzy said, emptily, and then the ship rocked with a blast of phaser fire.

Multiple people across the multiple open frequencies swore. Stede completely lost his footing and tumbled directly to the floor, where he watched from an upside-down vantage point as a thin, fractal crack appeared on the bulkhead.

“That was a direct hit, Cap’n,” said Buttons—a little unnecessarily, Stede couldn’t help but think. “She cannae take many more like that.”

Izzy’s boots appeared next to his head, and Stede had just enough warning to brace himself before Izzy and his Vulcan strength were hauling him up to his feet. Stede expected to be righted and immediately left to sway on his own, but Izzy surprised him by angling his shoulder against his arm and staying there, like a brace for Stede’s gelatinized legs. Izzy had an expression of careful, practiced blankness on his face—but through the touch of his shoulder, Stede could feel his panic. Everything he loved was currently staring down the barrel of utter annihilation. Stede realized that this was true for both of them—and nearly everyone else standing on the bridge of the Revenge.

“Admiral,” Zheng said, slamming her hand again onto the helm. “We need to evacuate this entire sector right now. The Red Matter has already destabilized—any further disturbance and it’s going to implode with the force of six billion nuclear bombs. Everything within the surrounding four astronomical units will be reduced to atoms.”

“Admiral Hornigold,” Alma barked. “You are ordered to stand down.”

The only response they received was another blow from the Queen Anne’s phaser canons.

“Alma!” Zheng yelled. “Get the fleet out of here!”

A moment of time passed in which everything seemed to be suspended—Stede could only think about Izzy’s hand, scrambling impulsively down to grip his own; Alma’s wide eyes; Ed standing in the middle of all this chaos, beautiful and righteous like an avenging angel.

Finally, Alma said, “All ships, prepare for warp.”

“I’ve got my girl Anne locked onto life frequencies, Admiral,” said Rackham. “We can have Teach and his boys beamed onto the William in a few minutes. And your daddy, I suppose.”

“I’ve got people on that ship!” Ed cried. “Admiral, there are seven hundred souls on the Queen Anne—most of them are greenies. Those kids didn’t do anything wrong; they don’t deserve to be left behind with a maniac at the helm.”

“It would take hours to beam hundreds of people off the Queen Anne, Teach,” said Alma. She looked less like her mother when she was scared, Stede thought. Something of himself bled through in the moment. Likely, he supposed, because Mary had always been so brave—and he’d always been such a coward. “And that’s if Hornigold cooperated with the evacuation. I’m sorry; we don’t have time. Rackham, beam the Revenge out.”

“Aye-aye,” said Jack. He’d turned his communicator to show that he now stood in the transporter bay of his ship, next to a dark-haired woman operating the transportation array. “Here come the pretty lights. Start with Ed, Annie.”

“No, no—Jack—” Ed swatted at his own body, as though he could make the swirling energy streams scatter away by scaring them off. He managed to shoot one last desperate look in Stede and Izzy’s direction before his body completely disassembled and disappeared with the beam.

A moment later, they heard his furious voice over the audio feed from Rackham’s communicator.

“—me back, Jack!” he was already screaming when he touched down on the transporter platform. “A captain goes down with his fucking ship—”

“Sorry, Eddie. That’s not your ship, and I’m not gonna leave you behind; not again. Do Izzy next, Anne.”

“Izzy,” said Stede, urgently as Izzy joined in Ed’s tirade against Jack Rackham. “What happens if I activate the warp core with the Red Matter aboard? Will it explode?”

“Stede, you barely have a warp core,” Izzy snapped, clearly only half-listening as he watched the feed from Rackham’s ship hop in nausea-inducing fashion. Every few seconds, they caught a glimpse of some part of Ed’s seething face—his wild eyes, his whipping hair—as Jack physically held him back from interfering with the operation of the transporter.

“Yes, but if I tried? Would that make the Red Matter explode or would it…react differently? Open another singularity, for example? Anything other than implode and kill seven hundred innocent people?”

“I don’t—I don’t know—” Izzy, for once, did not look angry or disgusted or any other number of emotions Stede had seem him use to hide what truly lurked below the surface of his hardened exterior. He looked terrified, confused, and above all absolutely devastated. Stede realized, because he was still gripping his hand, that Izzy was utterly gutted at the fact that in this one instance, he had no wisdom to give. Nothing he could pull from the practiced arithmetic and eidetic memory of his unfailingly Vulcan, perfectly human mind. “I don’t know what it would do, Stede. But whatever it is, I don’t think—there’s probably no way you’d—survive it.”

“Well,” Stede breathed as the transporter beam began to swirl around Izzy’s body. “It’s worth a try, in the end.”

“Stede,” said Izzy, squeezing his hand in a bruising grip. It was only when the transporter beam took him entirely away, and that grip disappeared, that Stede recalled what Izzy had told him—earlier this same evening; an entire lifetime ago—about Vulcans and their ways of kissing.

Stede, who hoped it wasn’t terribly visible that he was shaking like a leaf in the wind, turned towards the viewscreen. “Er, Mister Rackham?”

“That’s Commodore Rackham to you, Steve,” said Rackham. Ed had disappeared from the viewscreen—likely because Rackham had finally expelled him physically from the booth.

“Stede, if you please.”

“Yeah, that’s what I said,” Rackham muttered. He’d set the communicator on some nearby surface, and it now mostly faced the ceiling as Rackham and the woman he’d called Anne both tapped rapidly at the transporter console. “Alright, the rest of you—groups of three or four. We’re gonna do this fast and dirty. Big guys grab onto little guys and hold on tight. If you lose arms, don’t come crying to me.”

Stede checked around him to ensure that his crew were listening to instructions. Frenchie and Roach were clinging to either side of Wee John’s massive bulk; Fang had Lucius and Pete each under an arm. Ivan, with a look of resignation on his face, had let Buttons wrap his wings around him and was determinedly looking at the ceiling. Swede lurked under Buttons’ wings as well, though his head was mostly obscured due to the fact that he was sobbing into Buttons’ shoulder. Oluwande, who already had the tangled mass of Archie and Jim piled against him, carefully held out a hand to Zheng. After a moment, she tentatively reached out to take it and allowed him to pull her in. Jim and Archie both set a hand on her back, as though to assure her of her welcome, and Stede’s heart ached to see it.

They would be okay, he thought. All of them. Even displaced in time and space, they would be okay.

“Mister Rackham,” Stede said again, “I have a few requests—”

“Ki-i-ind of busy here, fella,” said Rackham. “Okay, big guy with all the babes—we’re locked onto you. Energize.”

Stede was just able to catch Oluwande’s extravagant eye-roll (And Archie’s delighted smirk) before the energy trails of the transporter surrounded them.

“We’re holding a Romulan prisoner in our brig,” Stede rushed to explain. “He helped launch an attack on the ship and we put him there to protect ourselves—he’s very unpleasant but I think there would be trouble from the Empire should we leave him to die—” He yelped, and stumbled to catch himself as the Revenge rocked with yet more phaser fire. Those left aboard all scrambled to take hold of something solid, and the crack in the hull began to widen. Stede could see, just faintly, stars through it—and realized that the only thing keeping the vacuum of space out and their bodies in were the ship’s rapidly failing forcefield shields.

“We’re aware of him,” said Alma. “My tech beamed him onto our ship when we arrived.” She was standing rigid in the middle of her ship’s bridge, which now swarmed with activity. Her eyes were focused and intent on the viewscreen, likely watching the many different feeds from the other ships present as they prepared to warp away from this portion of the galaxy. “Your prisoner is the Praetor’s nephew, and he reported him missing three days ago. He agreed to joint action in the Neutral Zone to intercept Hornigold if we agreed to retrieve Ryckee and overlook his more…egregious crimes against the Federation. Apparently, the Praetor believes Ryckee was just—sowing some wild oats, or something. Ortiz, you’re good for warp. The fleet will rendezvous and regroup at Starbase Eleven. Polaris, stand by for my signal.”

A sonic woosh echoed as one of the assembled starships jumped into warp. Behind him, the Buttons-Swede-Ivan unit made their disappearance off the bridge. On the viewscreen, Ed had reappeared over Rackham’s shoulder—though he was now wordlessly and, it appeared, breathlessly watching the process of transporting the Revenge crew onto Rackham’s ship.

“One other request!” Stede said, trying for levity and failing extravagantly. Even he could hear the shrill tone of hysteria in his voice. “I’d like to be beamed off the ship last, as I believe it’s appropriate for me to do so as captain of this vessel—”

“No,” Edward snapped. “Not happening, Stede.”

“I mean, whatever tickles your pickle, my guy,” said Rackham. “We’re almost done with your people anyway. My man in the blue eyeshadow, you’re next.”

Wee John, Frenchie and Roach were summarily whisked off the ship.

As surreptitiously as he possibly could with the artigrav actively failing and the horrifying sounds of charging phaser canons all around him, Stede began to make his way towards the helm of the Revenge. Steering the Revenge had been the job of the autopilot ninety percent of the time—Antares Class starships were built to be very hands-off where navigation was concerned. When she had to be piloted by hand, during docking or casting off, Buttons had typically been the one to do the honors. Stede didn’t know much about piloting the Revenge, but one picked up on a few things in a year as captain; namely, how to point her in a direction and punch warp. For this moment, that was enough.

“Last but not least, team Santa Claus,” said Rackham, and Stede thought he might have heard Fang giggle before the transportation beam overtook him, Lucius and Pete. “Alright, Steve, your turn.”

Knowing he only had seconds to spare, Stede quickly jumped into action. He threw himself the rest of the way towards the helm and crashed into the chair there, where he slid his palm up the interface to bring it to life. Immediately, half a dozen blinking diagnostic lights blinked at him, alerting him of various structural and electrical flaws all over the decks of the ship. Stede spared one single split-second to mourn the Revenge—her beautiful arboretum, her many hidden passages that Stede had designed himself; even the very bridge he sat on, though it was the sight of some of his biggest foibles.

“Stede,” Edward yelled from the viewscreen. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“The right thing!” Stede replied, and grabbed hold of the yoke on the helm, twisting it wildly to the right. The Revenge’s engines made a frankly alarming sound as they were obliged to start again despite the recent abuse, and the shuddering of the ship was almost enough to unseat him. He narrowly missed one of the nacelles of the Queen Anne as he took the Revenge veering by in the direction of deep space.

“Shit, shit, we can’t get a lock on him!” Rackham yelled, as the viewscreen began to flicker. The signal began to rapidly fragment, rendering the feed from the William nothing more than a jumble of pixels. Seconds later,  the audio feed was inundated by overwhelming distortion.

“Stede!” was the last thing he heard over the feed—and he thought, for just a moment, that he could hear it in his mind as well.

The silence on the bridge after the frequency closed out was almost overwhelming—aside from the sound of the Revenge’s engines being pushed to their absolute limit, and the sound of grinding metal as parts of the ship that were not meant to be exposed were dragged through the unforgiving turbulence of a starship at maximum impulse speed. Aside from that, however, the only sound that Stede could hear—and this one overwhelmed the others, likely because it was happening purely in his own head—was a piercing, high-pitched ringing.

He’d always wondered, in those very lonely and idle moments he’d had so frequently in life, if one actually saw their life flash before their eyes in the moments before death. He’d come to the conclusion that one might, if they actually had anything worth remembering. Stede had been married and witnessed two children of his own come into the world, and he spared a thought for them. They were, however, not what was at the forefront of his mind as the Revenge hurdled further and further away from the Queen Anne and her displaced command team—from a future he would never have.

Strange, how destiny and fate worked against each other in that way. He wondered how it could possibly be that he’d seen those visions and none of them would come to pass. They’d been real and concrete as cherished memories in his mind. If he closed his eyes, he could still smell the sea breeze on that planet he’d never been to. Somehow, he knew what Ed’s warm skin tasted like on a sleepy summer morning and the exact location of a birthmark on Izzy’s hip. Somewhere, in some universe, a version of himself that he was not allowed to be had experienced those things and he had been desired, cherished and content.

It was this thought he used to comfort himself as he activated the warp core.

In the same moment, the artigrav failed. Stede was thrown harshly backwards against the far wall of the bridge, plastered to the side of it by the astronomical force of the ship blasting itself into warp. He could feel capillaries all over his body burst from the stress of the pressure. Blackness began to immediately infiltrate his vision, and he found that he was so paralyzed against the bulkhead that he couldn’t even close his eyes as he began to rapidly lose consciousness.

Before he succumbed completely, he gathered his willpower and tried to locate that warm, pulsing place in the back of his mind where the visions had radiated from. The presence of it there now was small and reduced to almost nothing, but when he reached for it, it felt like Ed’s kiss and Izzy’s hand in his own.

I’m sorry, he tried to scream into it. I wish I could have had the chance to love you.

The universe blacked out.

Though he hadn’t been expecting to, Stede woke up.

Immediately, he wished he hadn’t. He didn’t think he’d ever truly appreciated the term “hit by a truck” until that very moment. It truly felt as though his entire body was one, giant bruise; every inch of him from the bottoms of his feet to the tip of his nose hurt. Hell, he was pretty damn sure even his hair hurt, though he wasn’t willing to move far enough to test the theory—or at all.

The pain in his body alone was enough to convince him that this wasn’t the afterlife; he was relatively sure that one had to be alive to hurt this much. That being said, there did appear to be a bright light hovering in front of his vision. He blinked at it, helpless to do much more, until he was sure that it wasn’t actually some Light-At-The-End-Of-The-Tunnel situation. It was a very bright, very mean florescent light, and it was attached to the biobed he laid in.

With that realization, Stede summoned all of his energy, balled it into a fist in his chest, and let it burst forth in the most pitiful, miserable moan he’d ever heard a person make.

Immediately, the sound of a chair scraping along the floor sounded in the room. It sent a bullet straight through the headache Stede was suffering—which he hadn’t even processed, through all the other pain, but which was now the only thing he could think about as the scraping sound reverberated through his head long after it had actually ended.

“Stede,” said a figure as it loomed into his vision. It took several rapid blinks and the conscious focusing of his eyes before it would resolve into Ed’s face. He looked nearly as rough as Stede felt—nearly, because Stede wasn’t sure anyone in history had felt worse than he did in that very moment. Ed, though still an absolute sight for (literally) sore eyes, had the appearance of someone who had not had much sleep, food or sunlight for quite a long period of time. His beard had a few less than purposeful lines to it and his hair, while still visibly clean, had been pulled completely back onto the top of his head in a haphazard way that made him look both beautiful and exhausted.

“Hello,” Stede breathed. It felt like fire in his lungs.

“Hi,” Ed whispered, voice thick and tears gathering in his eyes. “You stupid prick.”

“I do feel very stupid,” Stede wheezed. He watched a tear streak down Ed’s cheek and managed to lift his hand halfway towards him, though he had to drop it back down when the pain in his muscle became too much to bear. Instead, he whispered, “Don’t cry, darling.”

This, unfortunately, only made Ed begin to cry in earnest.

At this sound, another stirring sound emerged from the other side of the room. Stede sighed, steeled himself, and began the laborious task of turning his head three inches to the left. When he did, he realized that the sound was coming from a cot set up in the corner of the room, just big enough for an adult to sleep on if they bent their legs and weren’t against sleeping on their side. Currently, Izzy was pushing himself up from it, a thin replicated blanket slipping down off his shoulder. It was bright orange—an absurd color that did not compliment him in the slightest. Stede found him to be just as achingly beautiful and soothing to the gaze as he had Edward.

“Edward,” Izzy started, apparently before he’d even entirely woke up. “It’s alright. Remember what the doctor said—he’s going to wake up. The sedatives just need to clear his system.”

“Iz,” Edward sobbed. “Izzy, look.”

Izzy looked up, dread on his face as he clearly expected the worst, given Ed’s blubbering. The look of profound relief that washed onto his face might have made Stede cry too, if he’d felt like he had literally any liquid in his body at all.

Because Izzy was nothing if not a creature of habit, he immediately sprung into crisis management mode. In the next handful of seconds, Stede had an extra pillow shoved under his shoulders—which actually did make him a bit more comfortable, as much as his muscles screamed as it was happening—and a straw belonging to a huge cup of ice water pressed to his mouth.

“Small sips,” Izzy murmured, holding it steady for Stede’s dry lips to wrap around. “You haven’t had anything on your stomach for over a week, and you burst just about every blood vessel in your body.”

“Ah,” Stede breathed, after taking several miniscule sips of water. His parched mouth screamed for more, though he heeded Izzy’s warning—it wouldn’t do to add an upset stomach to the menagerie of pain his body was in. “That would explain the pain.”

“Rate it one to ten,” said Izzy, reaching over Stede’s head to tap a button on the biobed.

“Oh, um. Maybe ten.”

Izzy pursed his lips, tapped the button several more times and then, after pausing to consider, once more for good measure. After a moment, a flood of liquid relief rushed into Stede’s system. He almost groaned as, for the first time since waking up, he could focus on something other than the throb in his head or the ache of every muscle in his body.

“Better?” Ed murmured, and he’d now taken to stroking a finger very gently down the side of Stede’s face—his sideburns, from the way Ed’s touch felt against his facial hair, were pretty out of control.

“Oh, much,” Stede sighed, now able to shift himself into a more comfortable position without his entire being screaming in protest. “Thank you, dear.” This was directed at Izzy, who rolled his eyes but did not move any further away than Stede’s hip, where he sat on the mattress and folded his hands in his lap, worrying them over each other fitfully.

“You’re on Starbase Eleven,” Izzy began, businesslike in manner but in a soft, almost soothing tone. “The onbase hospital. As I said, you’ve been here about a week. Everyone is fine; Starfleet set them up in temporary housing. They seem to be enjoying the respite from their long, arduous days of doing fuck all for a job.” Stede tried to laugh, but found that it activated a pain in his side that made him feel a little bit like he was going to vomit his liver onto the bed. Izzy’s responding expression couldn’t be called a smile, per se, but it was amused. “There was a bit of a firefight between the Queen Anne and the Bridgetown, but there were no casualties. Only broken bones and a few concussions. The bridge crew of the Queen Anne wrested control back after Hornigold tried to punch into warp after the Revenge; I guess the kids finally realized they didn’t have to follow his orders if he was telling them to go get themselves killed. He was taken into custody aboard the Bridgetown and they’re going to send him back to Earth, once the psych eval is done.”

“They’re trying to say he’s got dementia or some shit,” Edward muttered. “Don’t get me wrong—I think he’s totally mad. But I’ve been telling ‘Fleet for twenty years that he’s, like, super villain style insane, and apparently nobody was interested in listening. Now they're saying Aw man, ol’ Hornigold’s gone senile instead of just admitting that they gave rank to a dangerous sociopath. Covering their asses, as usual.”

“Zheng and Admiral Bonnet have records on Hornigold and Black Flag going back thirty years,” Izzy told him, in a tone that said this was not the first time he’d reminded Edward of this detail. “And everything he said over the comms was recorded—it’s a matter of record now that he was associates with Edward Bonnet and Nigel Badminton as far back as ’67. Even if he is senile now, he wasn’t fifty years ago.”

“Mm,” Edward noised, noncommittal as he continued stroking Stede’s face.

Stede cleared his throat. “How did I…?” His voice, he couldn’t help but think, sounded much more like Izzy’s than his own.

Izzy held the water back to his lips and, as Stede took carefully miniscule sips, said, “Buttons apparently knows the physical equation for trans-warp beaming. We managed to beam you off just before the Revenge disappeared off the radar. We don’t know if she kept going, imploded, or entered another singularity; there’re no traces of her on any sensors. As for how you survived that deranged fucking thing you did? Nobody’s really sure. Dumb fucking luck, probably. The galaxy’s stupidest guardian angel woke up and decided to save one of God’s very favorite maniacs. A cosmic joke played on me, specifically.”

“Iz,” Ed muttered, reproachful, though it was the first time Stede had seen anything like a smile on his face since he’d woken up.

Stede smirked around his straw and rasped out, “You can’t get rid of me so easily.”

Izzy fixed him with a derisive look of dubious authenticity, which almost immediately faded into a look of genuine anger. Stede, who knew just enough about Izzy to know the sorts of things he used anger to hide, felt shame twist into his stomach. He pushed the water away, nauseated.

“Why the fuck did you do that?” Ed whispered. Stede turned his head to him and found that there were more tears shimmering in his eyes, and a deep knit to his brow. “The state of you when Buttons got you on the transporter—we thought you were dead. The only reason we knew you weren’t is because dead people don’t bruise. Every single inch of your body was purple. Jack pushed the William to warp nine to get you here before your heart fucking exploded, and it was two days before we were sure you wouldn’t just bite it anyway. I felt you scream in my head, Stede. You’re not supposed to be able to even—even do that.”

“I wanted to be brave,” Stede whispered, throat aching with his own tears. “I had to make sure that everyone was safe. For once in my life, I wanted to actually face my fear.”

“You couldn’t decide to face a fear other than death?” Ed said. “Like, I dunno, spiders? Heights? You had to jump right to the big one?”

“Well,” Stede mumbled. “There aren’t spiders in space.”

Ed pushed his hand against his mouth, likely to hide the fact that he was laughing just as hard as he was crying, and dipped his head forward onto Stede’s chest. Stede, because he couldn’t resist the impulse, tugged the loosely-tied elastic out of his hair and let it pool there like so much silver silk. Ed, very softly against his collarbone, sighed in a way that Stede thought he could call content.

On his other side, Izzy crept a hand along his stomach and silently extended his index and middle fingers. Stede, heart utterly full, met them with his own; the way their minds brushed together was gentle, affectionate, and warm. It spoke words that Izzy, with his taciturn nature, couldn’t speak aloud.

“You’ve had your fun, playing the hero,” said Izzy, drawing his fingers down the length of Stede’s almost playfully. “Some people are better off as cowards, Bonnet. Let the Ed Teaches of the galaxy save the day.”

“The Ed Teaches of the galaxy are going to fucking retire,” Ed growled into Stede’s chest. “Somewhere far the fuck away from any worlds that need saving.”

“Well,” Stede murmured. “I do know a place.”

Stede was in hospital for a further fourteen days. On the morning of the fifteenth, he was discharged with a clean bill of health—or, as clean a bill of health as the medical center on Starbase Eleven was capable of giving him for the time being. The kind of extreme trauma his body went through was difficult to recover from, and the doctors suspected there would be long-lasting effects on his body—not to mention the unknown variable of the time singularity and how that would effect him and his crew in the years to come. While most of them had agreed to some minimally invasive study in the name of scientific curiosity (Buttons had been particularly enthusiastic, surprising exactly no one) some of them had understandably refused. From what Izzy had heard, Jim had to be physically dragged off a well-meaning member of Starfleet Medical at the mention of a test to determine how the singularity had effected their fertility and hormone levels.

If Izzy had surreptitiously slipped them a card the next time he’d seen them, with the name and information of a doctor who was both discrete and alive in the current century, that was neither here nor there.

Either way, Stede was released from hospital with strict instructions to take it easy—no activity more strenuous than light walking, no lifting anything heavier than a mug of tea, no stress.

“No sex,” the medical officer in charge of Stede’s care added as Ed and Izzy ushered him out the door. They were all laden down with armfuls of cards, flowers and candies from dozens of Starfleet families who’d heard wind of what Stede had done to save the lives of their children and siblings aboard the Queen Anne. “Not for at least four weeks. Your vasculature is very sensitive right now, Mister Bonnet. Anything that increases your heartrate, including sex, puts a lot of stress on your overtaxed blood vessels. I understand your partners are happy you survived your ordeal, but I’m sure you’ll all find alternative ways to show your affection until you're further along in your recovery. You should be able to start reintroducing intimacy to your routine in a few weeks.”

Izzy cleared his throat and studiously averted his gaze from the doctor’s very pointed stare. He and Ed probably could have done a better job of keeping their hands to themselves, all things considered. That was a little hard, considering Stede had recently nearly died doing something incredibly stupid and undoubtedly heroic, and fuck if it didn’t make Izzy want to get on his knees for him—in pretty much every way one could imagine. If he wasn’t that kind of person, he probably never would have let Ed Teach get in his bed and get it in all those years ago.

As it was, he simply muttered, “Alright, got it,” and hid his face behind an absurdly large flower arrangement apparently sent to Stede by the family of Ensign Hummel.

“What about just some hand stuff?” Edward managed to ask, before Izzy bodily dragged him from the room.

After the chaos of their arrival at Starbase Eleven and spending a series of uncomfortable nights sleeping in the corner of Stede’s hospital room in shifts, they’d been assigned a ‘townhouse’ by the onbase hospitality services. It was a two-bedroom, dual-level accommodation of the sort typically given to higher ranking officers. It included a living area, two bathrooms and a kitchen with both a replicator and a cooktop. It also offered a view of the onbase park—a massive greenspace with a crystalline geodesic dome covering it, offering sunlight during the day and, when the shaders went on at night, a kind of dim illumination similar enough to moonlight.

Stede was delighted by this when he walked in the door for the first time—Edward pulling him with an arm looped through his and Izzy hovering behind, poised and ready to deliver them all straight back to the hospital at the slightest indication of it being necessary. As it was, Stede was still moving with a great amount of care, but it was leagues better than the open agony with which he’d walked upon first rising from his biobed. Modern medicine did wonders, as did having a seasoned starship command team at your complete beck and call—as well as the entire crew of the Revenge, to whom Stede had finally and firmly endeared himself by doing the stupidest, bravest thing he could have possibly done.

All of this was spinning around Izzy’s head, thoughts chasing each other like so many spiraling ants, as he stood in the doorway to the townhouse. Stede was cooing about the bay window, the window seat, the greenspace. Ed was fussing with all the wrong things (Stede’s jacket, the discharge orders on the PADD he held) instead of doing anything useful, like convincing Stede to sit when he’d just walked his farthest distance yet since his injury, or finding something palatable for him to eat. He wasn’t used to caregiving, Edward, but he was trying so hard. Izzy couldn’t help the affection that rushed through him, though he tried to stamp it down and not make it too obvious that he was really quite in love with these two men.

It was, unfortunately, likely a very lovesick expression he was caught with on his face when Alma Bonnet announced her presence with a knock on the open door and a clearing of her throat.

Izzy immediately adjusted himself to attention, despite neither wearing a uniform nor being in any state that one would consider on duty.

“Ma’am,” he said, nodding to acknowledge her. She was wearing her uniform, mostly because the Bridgetown was still operating as the flagship during its anchorage at the Starbase, but also because the Bridgetown (Including the prisoner still in her brig) was due to depart for Earth today. Izzy was only aware of this because someone had taken the time, earlier in the day, to anonymously forward that particular sent of orders to the entire Queen Anne crew. The implication had been clear: They’re leaving, they’re taking him with them, he’ll be far away from you very soon.

“At ease, Commander,” she said, kindness in her tone as she stepped through the doorway. Stede and Edward turned to take her in, Edward with respectful aloofness and Stede with a sort of kind, open sadness on his face. This wasn’t the first time the Admiral had made an appearance since the odd reunion over the Revenge’s viewscreen, but the others had been in the interest of intel gathering and had essentially been abridged interrogations. This one, Izzy wasn’t so sure about. He hovered, caught between protocol, duty to both Starfleet and the men across the room, and how loathe he was to allow anything to even remotely stress Stede out—even if it was talking to his own daughter.

“He’s still recovering,” Izzy cautioned, moving less than a full inch out of her way. “The doctor said—”

“Commander,” she said again, eyebrows crawling up her forehead. “Your concern is noted, and appreciated, but I’m not here on official business. I just wanted to—” Her gaze went again to Stede across the room, and her posture slumped all at once.

“It’s alright, dear,” said Stede, and Izzy was utterly unsure which of them he was talking to. “One small chat won’t do me in. Edward, darling, could you…tea?”

The way Edward hopped immediately to the task, you would never think he’d spent the last sixteen years of his life giving orders to 700 people.

Stede and his daughter sat at the small three-seater dining table and shared tea—purchased from a purveyor of such things on the Starbase in preparation for Stede’s discharge, and to his obvious delight when he’d arrived to find it sitting on the counter—while Izzy and Edward retreated to the living area and tried, at least ostensibly, to give them privacy.

They meandered over topics half-heard. At one point they reminisced on a memory from Alma’s childhood, which for Stede was a few years in the past and which for Alma had happened an entire lifetime ago. At another, they discussed Stede’s other child, named Louis, who apparently had aimed the family business in a much more legitimate direction after inheriting Stede’s shares of it in adulthood.

“Lou found a ton of records Grandad tried to destroy or hide,” she said, swirling tea dregs in her cup. Her mannerisms did not necessarily echo Stede—fifty years’ absence certainly would do that—but the precision of her movements and fastidiousness of her person could, if one was familiar with Stede, bring him to mind. “That’s part of what prompted the investigation into Hornigold. His name kept coming up. He was a new captain, back then, and he’d apparently been climbing the ranks while making all the underworld contacts he possibly could. Granddad happened to be one of them. Still, they’d covered themselves well, it was all euphemism and implication. Even his actions on Prisma VII weren’t criminal. Cowardly, yes, and more than enough to take his ship, but ‘Fleet couldn’t strip him of rank without acknowledging everything that had happened, and whoever was in charge back then just wanted to…make everything go away.”

Ed snorted—giving away the fact that he and Izzy were eavesdropping, as if there’d been any doubt.

Alma turned and addressed him directly. “I was a new captain myself, at the time. There wasn’t a lot I could have done, even knowing what I did about him. As soon as I made admiral, I started my investigations—then I made contact with Zheng, authorized her to investigate undercover in the Empire. We were doing what we could, but it was slow. Maybe we could have done more, I don’t know. I’m sorry any of this had to happen.”

“So you were Zheng’s reporting officer in Starfleet,” Izzy muttered. “She wouldn’t tell us.”

“We didn’t know who we could trust,” Alma sighed. “The only people who knew about the investigation were myself, Zheng, and to a certain extent Jackie Delahaye, but only because she had to sign off. She didn’t want to know more than she needed to. Plausibly deniability. Of course, knowing there was an active investigation into him helped to mobilize the fleet quickly when we found out he’d commandeered an entire Constellation Class starship—your starship specifically, Teach—and flown it straight into the Neutral Zone.”

“Yeah, that tracks,” Ed muttered, stroking his eyebrow. Izzy set a hand on his knee, and it was still such a novel thing—touching when he wanted to—that he almost didn’t notice the immediate, soothed line Edward’s body settled into in reaction.

Across the room, Alma’s communicator beeped. She answered it against her ear, and spoke for a very brief, perfunctory moment over it. When she hung up, the apologetic expression on her face couldn’t mask the fact that she was glad to be given the excuse to leave.

Stede, Izzy couldn’t help but notice, felt the same way. He was having difficulty reconciling the grown, older woman in front of him with the ten-year-old he still thought of as his daughter. There was no real indication that he would ever be able to—and no real indication that Admiral Bonnet wanted him to.

Still, Stede offered his spread arms as she rose from her seat—and after a moment of hesitation, she stepped into them and allowed the embrace.

“I’ll keep in touch,” she said, after pulling away. “When I get back to Earth, I’ll go see Lou and we’ll…figure something out. You have grandkids, Dad. I’d like for you to meet them.”

“Oh,” Stede whispered. “I would—yes, I’d like that very much.”

After she left and the door was closed, Stede toddled around in a small circle and then, faintly, mumbled, “Was she lying, Ed? About…any of that?”

Very gently, Ed replied, “No, love.”

Later in the week, Izzy found himself back in his Starfleet uniform for the first time in nearly a month. It was almost foreign now, to be wearing the neatly-pressed red shirt and gold insignia pin. At some point between their hectic arrival at Starbase Eleven and Stede coming out of his medically-induced coma, they’d been given access to their quarters on the Queen Anne. They’d both been quite disturbed to find Ed’s cabin ransacked, doubtlessly the result of Hornigold’s rage and tenuous grip on reality in the days leading up to the face-off in the Neutral Zone. In the end, they’d each grabbed a uniform and a few personal effects and left the Queen Anne, their home of sixteen years, to an uncertain future.

Ed, beside him, stood in parade rest in the Commodore’s office. The office had been Jack’s until very recently—and Hornigold’s until even more recently—and now had been restored to a carefully blank slate as it awaited someone to fill the position permanently. Today, however, it had been commandeered by Fleet Admiral Jacquotte Delahaye; the Chief in Command of Starfleet.

“I gotta hand it to you, Teach,” she said, leaning back in the chair with her fingers steepled in front of her. “You manage to get yourself into some fucking situations. This Hornigold shit is bad fucking news, man. I’ve got the Romulans, the Klingons—everyone breathing down my neck, asking about what went down in the Neutral Zone. How am I supposed to explain this?”

Ed visibly considered his response before he said, “Well, sir, you could start with once upon a time, the entire admiralty decided to ignore a mass-casualty event—”

“Sit your ass down,” Admiral Delahaye snapped.

“Yes, sir,” said Ed, immediately coming to heel in the chair positioned opposite her desk.

Due to there being only one chair, Izzy had no choice but to position himself behind Edward’s right shoulder and breathe very quietly, so as not to interrupt the stare-off happening. Admiral Delahaye, on the other hand, breathed audibly, in a way that said she was perfectly content with the amount of space she took up.

“Listen,” she said eventually. “I’ll only say this once. On behalf of Starfleet, I apologize. None of this should have ever gone down. Hornigold acted completely without the proper authority, and I have no problem making most of those charges he brought against you disappear. None of it was ever official, anyway—he pushed through all the paperwork with his own credentials. As far as Starfleet’s concerned, you were never demoted.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Ed, tight-lipped, clearly trying to show as little reaction as possible.

Admiral Delahaye nodded, clearly not done. “You see…I’m fair, Teach. Benevolent, even. But I’m gonna be honest—Jackie hears things. She’s got her ear to the ground. You have to, in this job. Word is that you’ve been checked out for awhile now. You’re a good captain. A damned good starship captain. But I don’t need you hanging around if you don’t want to be here. Now, maybe you just need a change of scenery. A smaller crew, a new assignment for you and your…” She flicked a look at Izzy, considering, then twitched her finger between them. “You two fuck, right? That’s your deal?”

“Uh, yeah,” Ed muttered, clearing his throat into his fist.

“Hm-mm. Yes, sir.” Izzy’s eyes flew about the room, looking for anything but one of the other people present to rest on.

“Yeah, we’re not even gonna start on all the ways that breaks protocol,” Delahaye muttered. “But, hey. To each their own. I’ve sailed with some of my husbands. Never worked out for me, but y’all ain’t me. Only Jackie is Jackie. Anyway, I’m willing to work with you on this, Teach. Different ship, different crew. If you want something dirtside, the Academy’s taking on new faculty—they’ve got some great benefits out in San-Fran. Medical, dental. You should see the faculty apartments. Biggest Pride Parade in the Federation every June, y’know? Jackie looks out for her people.” She raised an eyebrow, clearly expecting some reaction.

“Yes, sir,” Ed mumbled. “That’s…a very generous offer.”

Delahaye leaned back in her chair. “Doesn’t seem like an offer you’re interested in.”

Ed sighed, tilted his head back. “It’s very generous, sir. More than I was expecting to be offered. But you’re right. I’m…tired. To be honest, I don’t know how much longer I can do this. Captaincy was my dream—I worked my whole life towards it. Now it’s just…a job. And not one I particularly fucking love. All due respect.”

“Hmm.” Delahaye’s gaze flicked to Izzy, who felt his spine reflexively straighten. “What about you?”

“Me? Sir?”

“I read up on your file too, Commander,” she said, producing from under the desk a pair of PADDs—one was clearly Ed’s file, given it displayed his official Captain’s portrait prominently on the page. The other had no picture, because Izzy had been dodging fleet-sanctioned photo ops like a particularly determined fish in a barrel for the last fifteen years. However, it was obviously Izzy’s profile, given he could see his very long and much-apostrophed clan name prominent on the page. Delahaye settled a surprisingly dainty pair of reading glasses onto her face. “I’zral Ha—Han—”

“I just go by Izzy,” he said, hoping for the floor to swallow him up. “I don’t associate with my clan on Vulcan. Most of us who live offplanet don’t use the clan name.”

“Uh-huh,” said Delahaye, favoring him with an inscrutable look over her glasses. “Anyway, Commander. According to your file, you’re one of the best engineers in ‘Fleet—or you were, before Teach decided to put you in a fucking management position. Which, by the way, you are not good at.”

“He does his best,” Ed said, defensively. Izzy looked at the ceiling and prayed ardently for instant death. “Not his fault he’s not got one of those—people-forward personality types they’re always going on about at the command meetings—”

“Anyway, if Teach doesn’t want a teaching position, you should consider taking one yourself. You would not believe how many engineering cadets get on a starship for the first time and don’t even know how to perform basic engine maintenance. I’ve got ships breaking down every day in every sector because of this giant fucking skill gap between officers and tradesmen. The operations college at the Academy would pay out the ass for someone with your credentials.”

Izzy shifted his feet nervously. “All due respect, Admiral, I’m not really interested in moving back to Earth—”

“Baby, it’s the twenty-fourth century. Ever heard of remote learning? I’ve got lecturers who don’t even live in this quadrant. Most you’d have to do is show up on-planet twice a year for practicums.”

When Izzy did not respond further than to frown at the carpet and turn his eyebrows inward, she removed her glasses and tossed them onto the desk with an air of finality. “Think about it, Commander. In the meantime, I’ll start the ball rolling on your discharge, Teach. I’m assuming that’s the plan?”

“…Yeah,” Ed mumbled, with a short nod. “Yeah, I think…I think it’s for the best.”

“Alright.” Delahaye nodded, seemingly satisfied for all that she was losing a tenured starship captain. “We’ll be in touch. Thank you for your service. Send in Rackham on your way out—I’ve gotta give him a piece of my mind.”

On opening the door to the office, they did indeed find Jack sitting in an adjacent chair. He offered a smirk and a one-fingered salute as he stood from his seat.

“’Sup, sluts?” he said as he slid past. Then, leaning around the office door, he called, “Jackie! Long time no see—”

“Shut your ass up and get in this office. You ever heard the phrase dereliction of duty? Because I don’t know what the hell you were thinking, shirking your mission in Delta Quadrant to play Clark Kent in the Neutral Zone—"

Her voice petered out—not because the door to her office was closed, but because the doors to the turbolift on the other side of the hallway closed with Izzy and Ed inside.

It was a short walk back to their lodgings, and upon arriving they found Stede asleep in the plush window seat. He had a PADD on his chest and a room temperature cup of tea on the floor next to him. On entering the living area, Ed went immediately to his side and sat down by his hip, setting to wake him with gentle stroking touches on his chest and arms. Izzy, seeing that he’d barely drank the tea, looped into the kitchen to put the kettle on.

“Oh, hello,” came Stede’s bleary, sleep-thick voice, and then the sound of a soft kiss. “How did it go? Are you still demoted?”

“Nah. Handed in my resignation, though.”

“Oh,” Stede said, and he sounded at once concerned, disappointed and strangely relieved. Izzy, who commiserated with those emotions more strongly than he cared to admit, filled a tea diffuser with a heaping spoonful of looseleaf tea and waited for the kettle to boil whilst considering just how drastically things had changed in just a month.

A month ago, if someone had told him that he would be in any way relieved that Ed Teach had hung up the mantle of his captaincy, he would have first panicked and then probably done something very drastic and likely stupid, like closed himself off completely from Edward. He would have shut down entirely to avoid the heartache that he would have been sure was on the horizon—because even just a month ago, he had been so sure that his presence in Edward’s life was utterly nonessential. Now, there were still moments of doubt. Izzy still didn’t know what shape their lives would take once Ed was officially no longer a ranking officer, or where Stede factored into the landscape of his and Ed’s whole thing; the way they sometimes had to tear each other apart just to have the privilege of putting each other back together. The way Izzy still didn’t think he entirely knew who he was without the context of Edward Teach, and Ed still sometimes gave off those Flight Risk vibes, like he was about two seconds from pulling a runner to the other side of the galaxy never to be seen again. Hell, even the fact that Izzy still hadn't been able to bring himself to lower the mental shields separating himself from Stede and Ed, despite the visions of the future stopping after the singularity on the Revenge's cargo hold finally closed out.

He supposed the main difference between Izzy of now and Izzy of a month ago was that he now understood (Or was at least trying to understand) that life was something to be taken one day at a time. Stede was good for helping him—for helping them all—to remember this. He’d been patient with his recovery, eager to learn about how life differed in the 24^th century from the 23^rd, and took delight in quiet moments with both Izzy and Ed together as well as separately. He was still in the process of reestablishing contact with his children—and his grandchildren, of which he apparently had five. He’d also been surprised to discover that his ex-wife was still alive; apparently, she was something of a jet-setting nonagenarian, planet hopping at her leisure with a ‘much younger’ husband (the eighty-three-year-old Doug) and showing no signs of slowing down.

Speaking of Mary, Izzy heard her name as he carefully carried the steeping teapot to the window seat and set it down on the table there with a mug beside it. It was the first mug Ed could get his hands on when they’d been stocking the townhouse for Stede’s convalescence—from the hospital giftshop. Printed on it was a depiction of a frowning whale with an icepack on its head and the phrase Get Whale Soon. Izzy had already decided he was going to ‘forget’ it when they left.

“Look at the picture Mary sent me from her latest trip,” said Stede, sitting up laboriously for Izzy to slide in behind his head. Once Izzy was settled, back against the window and legs drawn up into a bow on the seat, Stede resettled himself with his shoulders in Izzy’s lap and his head against his stomach. His head was tacky with sweat from his nap; Izzy, uncaring, drew his fingers through his hair.

The image he pulled up was of a beach at dusk. Izzy did a double take, and leaned in close as he realized that the colors of the sunset were so odd because the sky on this particular planet was a naturally lavender shade. It cast the sky in navy blue and deep magenta as the sun set red on the horizon.

“Is that—” he muttered, taking the PADD in his hand to better examine the picture.

“It looks a hell of a lot like it,” Ed said, leaning over Stede’s body to look as well. “Did she say…I mean, is it…”

“Republica III,” said Stede, serenely scrolling through the other pictures on offer. “The resort portion of the planet is called The Republic, but there’s a rich immigrant community. It’s a freshwater planet with several well-established island cities, a booming tourism industry, and is less than two days’ travel from Earth.”

“This is it,” said Ed, tapping the PADD screen. “The—the house, with the bed, and the—”

“That’s too…” Izzy sunk his hands back into Stede’s hair, to have something to ground himself with. “Don’t you think it’s a little too—easy?”

“I think we deserve a little bit of ease, dear,” Stede said, settling against his legs with the stupid whale mug held aloft in his hands.

“I’m gonna look at property listings,” Ed said, almost too eagerly. He bounced like an excited child as he danced his fingers across the PADD screen. “I remember exactly what the porch looked like—I bet I could see it again if Stede put his hand on my dick—”

“The doctor said—”

“I said my dick, not his! The porch, Izzy, think of the porch!”

In a few hours, Izzy would wake up from a nap Stede had managed to coax him into taking with him to the sound of Ed’s running feet and his eager voice yelling that he’d found it—he’d found the porch. As Stede and Ed rolled around on the bed looking at the property pictures, Izzy would periodically reach over and take Stede’s pulse rate while, in the back of his mind, he idly daydreamed about teaching a generation of Starfleet cadets how to pick a lock.

For perhaps the first time in his life, Izzy understood why people referred to the future as being bright. He closed his eyes and pictured warm red sun on the water.

Yes, the future was bright.