Chapter Text
The last time they meet Ed is on his way to a buffet of sorts, meandering across town with his band of friends to some discoteche with dim lights and bouncers with low morals.
“Look out, guys. Don’t catch fleas.” Deacon sniggers.
“Deacon-” Ed sighs. The night hasn’t even started yet. He just wants to go and feed and -
“What's that, mate?”
“Keep going. Keep walking. Keep walking.”
“We heard that, mate, we’ve got sensitive hearing.” The pungent pack of wolves turns around, stopped in their tracks with their hackles raised. And Ed and his friends turn as well, fang first, hungry and ready for a fight. Ed’s eyes fly open wide, his hand rubbing the spot on his chest where something alive in his unbeating heart strums to life like a harp being tuned, pluck by pluck of someone’s fingers against rusted, heavy strings.
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
But before then, there was -
Well, there was Ed as a soldier. Well, someone who at least looked like a soldier, fighting as a rebel in the American Revolutionary War.
Battle after battle, scrap after scrap, Ed ate his way through the scraps of the soldiers stabbed and shot and torn through with cannon balls. It was easier this way. He didn’t really have to do the killing (except for the Redcoats, they deserved the death they got by his hand).
Until one evening, dusk still hanging purple and pink in the sky, he jumps into the fray of a battle approaching its close. In a dirty tan jacket, musket in hand, he decides he could do with relieving some tension and tears and rips and slashes and shoots until all that's left is moaning soldiers in the mists of the evening battlefield.
The air smells like metal and gunsmoke and Ed thinks of a raid on the high seas under the cover of night, mist rolling over the sides of the ship as he and Izzy torture and terrorize and search for gold or silver. Somewhere a cannon fires, a white flag waving in the dark. He’s brought back to the future, the ocean still roaring in his ears.
“Help!” cries a meek voice. Ed cocks his ear against the wind. “Help me!”
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
The second time he meets Stede Bonnet he's not Stede Bonnet at all.
Ed finds the person calling out underneath the weight of a long dead redcoat. He’s thin, malnourished and bleeding into the dirt, musket clutched to his chest with pale hands. “Oh thank god.” he says. “Please help me. My leg. I can’t feel it. I’ve been stuck under this bastard for hours.”
There's only one booted foot sticking out on the other side of the Redcoat. Ed suspected it’s mate was laying somewhere else in the dark, sliced off with the edge of some other Officer’s blade. “Leg’s gone, mate.” Ed crouches over him inhaling the familiar, delicious scent.
Too familiar.
Ed’s eyes meet the man’s as he begins to sob and all of the sudden a song begins that he hasn’t heard in decades. A thrum behind his sternum. Beats of the wings of a bird he thought long dead.
He’s a pirate on a ship in the atlantic swinging on a hammock below the stars. He’s swinging a sword on a swabbed deck. He’s kissing a man he loves so much he could burst into fireworks on a golden beach. He’s dying and then dead in an unfamiliar house in Barbados. He’s found and lost again and now he’s here with - well, he’s not the same man. Not even close. Except for those fresh-ground cinnamon eyes and the symphony conducting itself inside of Edward.
“You’re here.” it comes out as more of a question. He has to stand, filled with nervous energy. The blood is too much. He’d been too busy fighting to feed. He’ll lose himself. He’ll hurt him again. He’s already so hurt, a frail thing trapped underneath just the weight of another man, unable to free himself.
He’s sobbing. Not-Stede is on the ground, white-knuckling his musket to his chest like a teddy bear and wailing for everyone to hear.
“Ste- Soldier, please. The Redcoats won this one, they’ll be looking for survivors.” Ed inhales and holds his breath and leans down to push the matted blonde hair off the man’s head. He uses his thumbs to wipe away the tears, much too intimate for a stranger but not intimate enough for Stede.
He keeps crying, breaths breaking from his mouth in tight, squeaky gasps. With shaking hands, Ed waves his fingers over his eyes.
“Breathe. Breathe. In and out, there we go. There we go. It’s alright.” the soldier’s sobs even into shallow, rattling breaths. He’s losing color. He’s losing blood. Ed can feel his death fast approaching.
He sits on the blood soaked earth next to the man and pries one of his hands off of his gun to hold it, massaging circles into the calloused skin. “Do you know who I am?” he asks.
“No.” the man gasps. “I’ve seen you before, fighting, but I don’t know you.”
“Same here, mate.” Ed’s fighting his own tears now. All he has is a feeling. All he has is a hope. “What’s your name?”
“A-Abe.”
“Abe, I’m Ed. You’re going to be alright.” he lied.
“Will you pray with me?” asks the man.
Ed winces.
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
Only a few more moments pass before the light fades from his eyes. The pulse fades from his hand that now grows colder in Edward’s grasp. His song fades just as quickly as it came. Ed’s empty again, soul left as quiet as an empty church.
He moves the Redcoat off the man, fixes his hat over his eyes, crosses his arms over his chest and places a kiss on his pale cheek, a ghost scent of lavender following him.
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
Ed finds that every time they meet, he’s swept off of his feet. A decade passes. Probably more like two, and he accidentally nudges the woman sat next to him at a concert hall in Prussia at the very beginning of the 19th century. It was the first performance from a new composer. Ludwig van something or other. Ed just wanted to show off the ornate purple jacket he’d taken off a body the night before.
He’d flipped his coattails dramatically to take a seat and his knuckles brushed her arm.
They both turn to apologize and Ed sees the same, achingly familiar, hazel deep eyes staring out at him from the face of a young woman, her face framed with strawberry blonde ringlets.
“I-” His voice catches in his throat and he has to swallow. “You’re here.”
She says something in Prussian that Ed is pretty sure means “The fuck?”
He clears his throat again and fumbles through the language, thick in his throat and pooling at the front of his mouth. “My apologies, madam.” he says.
She smiles demurely and turns her attention back to the man seated on her other side, leaning in to speak to him against his chest.
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
And it's creepy. He knows it’s so creepy. But after the performance, with his heart swimming in the shallow pond of music still playing, bubbling like a brook over clean river stones through his dusty veins, he follows her.
She loops her hand through the arm of a man in a top hat that’s half of Ed’s age (well, his human age, at least) and the two of them stroll leisurely through the lamp lit streets until they turn onto the drive of an immaculate estate not too far from the house Ed laid in his coffin every day.
The two of them enter through the heavy front door, the voices of staff and the small chirp of a child greeting them before the door clicks behind them. Ed transforms, his own skin receding into the inky black scales of a garden snake. And he watches.
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
And he watches. And he watches. For years, as an owl or a snake or a mouse whiskers smoking as he wiggles his way into a church just to watch a little longer.
She’s happy. Alive and flushing and flourishing with rosy cheeks and laughter lead libation that Ed missed.
He missed - Even after all of these years he missed Stede with a fierceness that could power one of those new steam ships. Her laughter tumbles out of the cracks between her windowpanes and Ed thinks of the lines at the edges of a Gentleman’s eyes. He hears her crying and the gentle coos of a loving husband and thinks of Stede, stabbed through the middle and whimpering in his fevered sleep.
He watches and he watches and God, he wants.
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
She has children under his watchful eye, a crow perched on a tree limb that looks through her window. At first, a little girl with the same reddish blonde curls. Ed listens to her screaming and agonizes with her, wings flapping in agitation.
The first child cries, roaring into the world and Ed thinks of the faces of the children he’d seen through Stede’s window, decades ago. The boy and the girl. They’d be elderly now, faces lined with laughter and life.
He pictures himself on a rocking chair on a salt air weathered porch somewhere, waves crashing in the distance. He’s hand in hand with a withered and gray man with half-moon shaped reading glasses and sunken, crinkling, bright hazel eyes. The sound of the waves and of the rocking turns into the squalling of the baby girl as he watches on, thinking of the closest thing he could muster to a prayer.
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
Another child comes, another girl, another night of screaming.
And then another child comes and there isn’t any screaming at all. Ed watches, the eyes of a rat peering out from a shrub near the house, as her husband digs a neat rectangle into the earth at the base of an apple tree, the dirt staining his breeches as he weeps into the soil.
“My son.” he whimpers. “My son.”
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
And the girls grow. They have three of them total, pink and blonde and dressed in the finest dresses money could buy.
She raises fine women, teaching them to read and write and to manage a house. She braids their hair and arranges flowers and buries herself into the busy life of motherhood. She never notices that she has a shadow.
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
It's a rare night that Ed breaks away from his watchful duties to feed himself. He’s withering, skin thin and gray with the lack of blood.
When he drinks he doesn’t kill, just hypnotizes and sips and then sends whoever on their way. He wants her to feel safe. For their children to be able to roam without fear.
Tonight there is a hollowness in his stomach that outweighs the coiled need to be near her in his chest and he meanders into the darker parts of town. He’s dressed in all black, a top hat pushed low on his brow, his collar almost as high as his ears.
While perusing the selection of patrons at a particularly reeking brothel he sees her husband and then he sees red.
He’s seated at a table, a woman much younger than his wife bent across his lap as he traced his greasy fingertips over her waist, the swell of her hips and then down her thighs and back up again.
And again, Ed watches, tracing his own fingers over the edges of the knife he brought with him from another life.
He watches and he waits until the man is finished with the young woman and the room he rented for them. As soon as the latch clicks behind him, Ed springs, yanking him up to the ceiling with a thud and a hiss.
“This is for her.” he growls, placing his fangs on the pulse of an artery in the man’s neck. He’s pissed himself. He’s screaming. Ed doesn’t care. “You fucking bastard. This is for her.”
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
And then, he watches more.
They have a funeral and the police never figure out what happened. She doesn’t find a new husband. She dresses in black and keeps raising her daughters.
They grow and they get married and they leave her alone in an empty house, visiting every now and then with children of their own.
Except Ed is there, a snake in the grass, a stray cat curling around her ankles, welcomed inside to accept table scraps that Ed was careful not to eat.
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
He stays in Prussia when Moira moves again, bored and restless. She made a new companion, a feisty little brunette thing with a thick accent and even thicker thighs. They two of them set sail for Istanbul or Constantinople or whatever it was called then.
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
Just before she dies, Ed comes to her, dressed as his old self, his hair loose and wild and his legs trapped in leather and belts. He sits on the edge of her bed and takes her warm hand into his and pushes a wisp of white hair off of her age-spotted forehead.
“Hello, love.” he says. Her eyes flutter open, still bright and still hazel.
“Edward.” her voice shakes, her mouth lifting into a ghost of a smile. Lightning strikes Ed’s heart and he weeps, overcome. She knows him. She knows him.
“I’m here.” he says, breaths ragged. “I’m here. I’ll find you again. I will. I love you.”
“I know.” she says. And then, as all things tend to do, all things except Edward Teach, she dies.
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
There’s a hook embedded in Ed’s solar plexus, fishing line wrapped over and under each of his ribs and Stede’s reeling him in across time and across continents. The years pass in a blur of wars and conquests and ships sailing across the sea that brought them together centuries ago.
World War I, a battleside surgeon with a quick wit sawing legs and saving lives. The 60’s, back in America, plumes of pot smoke curling in the air as music played on a stage. A world tour in the late 80’s with a band of other vampires, feasting on an ever-growing army of devoted fans.
And then finally, Wellington.
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
The anchor tied around Ed’s middle leads him to the southern hemisphere to an island in Oceania that he’d never given a passing thought to before. He lands ashore in the dark, finds flatmates and a place for them to live and he waits, almost patient. Almost.
Now, passing by him on the street, absolutely reeking of a wet dog, Stede’s eyes look out at him from a very familiar face. Almost shockingly familiar. Rugged, younger but still kind. Same hooked nose. Same smile lines under a shock of ginger hair and a scraggly ginger beard.
“What are you filming? It’s a music video, is it?”
It takes everything in Ed not to kiss him then and there.
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
Cameras, cameras, cameras. Ed can’t see his own reflection in a mirror or on the side of a new toaster but there are cameras following him around from room to room. He thought it would be fun, when he first got here, to make up a little character. A little bit of the art of fuckery. He hadn’t had the pleasure in years.
“And you are?” Vladislav had extended his hand out to him when they first met at Big Kumara. Ed’s dressed in worn, old clothes that followed him and his coffin around in ornate, heavy trunks. He’d cut his hair again, dying his curls darker with a thick, acrid dye. He wore a shirt with a ruffled collar, an ornate ruby pinned to a pinstripe thin black cravat that he was surprised lasted through the centuries.
“Viago.” he introduced himself, lips curling up secretly in the corners. “I’m an 18th century dandy.”
“Right. Yeah. Cool.” Vladislav nods, convinced by the butchered accent and the old clothes and Ed is quite pleased with himself, thank you.
Until he has to keep up the facade through all hours of the night in front of bloody cameras.
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
Weeks. It takes weeks for everyone in the house to be occupied and for the camera crew to take a night off for a work holiday or something. He left Vladislav in his den with several women of vampire and non-vampire descent, Petyr with a raccoon they’d caught in a trap in the garden and Deacon in front of a lengthy playlist of gore themed knitting technique videos and was able to slip through an upstairs window unnoticed.
He walks, the cane he’d first used in Barbados click, click, clicking against the pavement as he follows the gentle tug centered over his breastbone. He’d wander through the city until the sun sears his eyes if he had to.
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
“Alright, mate, just leave me be, okay? I haven’t got my pack with me. Pretend I’m just some bro at a cafe in the middle of the night.”
Ed finds him hunched over a newspaper with an empty espresso cup sitting on the edge of a small table in front of a 24 hour coffee shop, neon sign flickering overhead. He’s dressed in a plain T-shirt and jeans and Ed can feel the heat rising from him from a dozen paces away. Werewolves run hotter than your average human, they’re blood thinner and quicker.
Ed smiles and the man winces. “Put those things away, man.”
“I vanted-” he begins, coughs, starts again without the accent that had grown on him like a new personality. “I wanted to apologize. For my friends.”
“Sure you do.” he rolls his eyes.
“Truly. They’re just restless. Being cooped up when the days are so long would make anyone crazy. They’re still men, underneath everything.” he reasons.
The man looks up from his newspaper, eyeing Ed up and down before nodding at the chair opposite him. “Go ahead. Sit.”
And like a dog, Ed sits.
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
It takes a few minutes of him glaring with his nostrils flared, nose turned to the air before he decided to speak. Ed was half tempted to reach his hand across the table to offer it like you do to a scared dog in the park.
“Well? Everything check out?” Ed leans back in his chair and eyebrow raised. His heart is leaping with song, the conductor behind his sternum putting on a glorious show.
“I just don’t like the way you dress.” he says, lips lifted on one side in a smirk and if Ed could blush he would have.
Instead, he pats at the lapels of his coat, pretending to knock the dust off. “Hey, these digs were all the rage about 200 years ago.”
The man’s eyes widen in shock. With a chuckle, Ed peels a glove off of his right hand, lends across the table and extends his hand. “I’m E- Name’s Viago. Born 1680.”
“Anton.” he hesitates for a beat longer than Ed would have liked before clapping his hand into Ed’s with a firm shake, the heat immediately leaching into his pale skin. “You’ll have to guess my age. Go on.”
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
“What brought you here? We’re a long way from, well, a long way from anything, aren’t we?” Anton asks. A waitress had just dropped off a larger coffee to their table and he’s pouring a dollop of creamer into the darkness, swirling it with a tiny spoon.
Ed decides, watching his fingers maneuver the spoon around the center of the cup without touching the sides (such a gentlemanly way to stir a cup of coffee. So posh. Mannered. Learned.), to tell the truth.
“Long and the short of it is,” he pauses, eyes meeting Anton’s as he finally takes a sip of coffee. “A man.”
“Ah. Well, he must be something special.” Anton sets his cup back on the table pinky first, placing it without noise in a practiced way that Ed never mastered, no matter how many times he made Stede demonstrate.
“I’ve still never met anyone quite like him.” Ed’s eyes crinkle in the corners. “Reminds me a lot of you, actually.”
Across from him, color rises in the werewolf’s cheeks and Ed can smell his blood as it rushes through his veins, sweet and exhilarated underneath the smell of wet dog that he’s almost used to now. “Well, go on then. Tell me about him.” he leans forward, elbows on the table, all ears.
“We were pirates.” Ed begins, a story spilling out of him that he’d never told anyone.
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
The conversation stretched on for hours, the way it used to as Ed and Stede sat with their legs dangling between the banisters of the top deck, a whiskey glass passing between them.
Ed recounted his tales of piracy, of the sloshing of the sea, mermaids, a unicorn figurehead galloping over the endless waves, Izzy, Ivan, Fang and then finally, Stede. Anton seems so enraptured and so Ed keeps talking, going on for longer than he thinks he’s ever spoken in his life. Centuries of hiding and searching and finding and losing again spill from his lips like an uncorked bottle of champagne and it just feels so good.
“You’re taking the whole reincarnation thing really well, mate.” Ed almost laughs when he stops for a long enough beat to realize that Anton hasn’t spoken in an hour.
“I mean, you can’t really surprise me much anymore.” he shrugs. “I thought I just got mugged by a weird, hairy guy a few years ago and then the next time there was a full moon I turned into the weird, hairy guy. Makes a man pretty open to the different ways the world works.”
“And works, she does.” Ed chuckles
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
“You’re leaving already? We only just got here.” Nick says as soon as Ed scoots his chair back from the rickety, thrifted, dining room table.
Ed can feel how close Anton is, a hook yanking him off stage after lingering on a line too long. “I’m afraid so. It’s alvays so nice to see you, Stu.” he grasps Stu’s warm hand between his own with a nod before gathering up his coat.
“He’s got himself a girlfriend.” Deacon teases, looking up from his knitting with a smirk. He, Nick and Stu jostle each other like frat boys in a booth at a grubby bar.
Ed rolls his eyes with a “tch” and throws his hands up in the air before leaving the dining room, a cameraman trailing behind him just a few steps behind.
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
“Oh, hello! Fancy seeing you here.” Anton laughed, almost bumping into Ed on the footpath.
“I live here, Anton.” Ed’s eyes shined.
“See you’ve got your buddy with you, tonight.” Anton waves awkwardly into the camera with a half bow. “For the documentary, was it?” he’d been walking down their street with his hands shoved in his pockets, collar turned against the wind. Suspiciously alone, again.
Ed takes a step forward and with his head bowed and his hand cupped over the microphone pinned to his lapel he whispers “Do you want to do something weird?”
The corner of Anton’s mouth lifts up just a hair and Ed loops his arm through the wolf’s, leading them further from the house.
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
The two of them meander through town, the cameraman loping behind them a few paces back. Ed makes idle chat: the weather, the fullness of the moon, the taste of the blood he’d had for breakfast last night. Anton talks about whatever game he’d watched on TV and the upcoming birthday of a member of his pack.
And Ed enjoyed the chatting. He smiled with ease that he hadn’t felt in ages, his fingers lazily rubbing against the polyester of Anton’s windbreaker until he’d decided they’d walked far enough.
“Okay. Ready?” he turned towards the wolf, an eyebrow raised.
“Sure.” Anton answered but it came out as more of a question.
“Up we go!” Ed shouted with a laugh, hoisted Anton underneath his arms and shot into the brisk air of the night sky leaving the cameraman shouting below them on the pavement.
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“This is fantastic!” Anton whoops and yells as the two of them soar through the whipping wind. Even with Ed’s vampire strength, Anton is a little heavy and it can’t be comfortable to be carried like this as a full grown man but Anton kicks his feet and howls and Ed picks up speed, smiling like it could crack his face in two. “You can do this and you walk everywhere? What a rush!”
Silently, Ed admits to himself that despite the rocky start to his undead life that it is kind of fun being a vampire sometimes.
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“Just here.” Anton directs after he’d hooped and hollered himself into contentment. They were approaching a drab, brown apartment building, the street lights in the parking lot the only thing illuminating it. “Third floor, right in the middle. There we go.” Ed drops him gently over the railing of a balcony without any furniture. Anton rustles through the pockets of his jacket before pulling out a keyring and unlocking the sliding glass door.
“Thanks for the lift.” he says, stepping through the door and running his hands through his windswept hair. “Could I get you a beer or anything? Fresh out of O neg, I’m afraid.” he’s already in the small kitchen with the fridge open.
“You have to-” Ed gestures.
“Invite you in? That's a real thing?” he leans against the counter with an eyebrow cocked.
“‘Fraid so.”
“Even through the back door?”
Ed snorts.
Anton throws a kitchen towel towards the door with a roll of his eyes and says “Come in, then. Make yourself at home.”
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
They settled across from each other, draped lazily over Anton’s worn out leather couch. He turns on something ambiguously sporty on the TV and they ignore it, facing each other as Anton nurses beer after beer.
“Sorry about the state of things.” he gestures vaguely in the direction of the rest of the apartment during a lull in their banter.
“The state of things?” Ed asks.
“I don’t spend much time at home what with tending to the guys and all that. My ex got all the furniture in the divorce and I just never give much thought to replacing it since I spend most of my time in the woods.”
Ed peered around the place and noticed that the couch and the TV were the only things in the small front room. One dish and a set of cutlery sat in the drying rack near the sink and through the crack in the bedroom door he could see a mattress on the floor, the fitted sheet peeling back in one corner and the blankets strewn across the room.
“Tell me about this ex, then.” he props an arm on the back of the couch, situates his back against the arm rest and crosses his legs in front of him.
And Anton tells him.
“Well, I was turned after we met. Got attacked. I still don’t know who did it. Anyway, it’s miserable at first. You don’t know what's wrong with you but you just want to kill and you’re so angry all the time and any little thing can bring the wolf out at first before it settles into the monthly change. I was horrible to him. I was pretty damn awful to myself too. But he left. It was a few years ago. No kids or anything but he took the cat.”
“I’m sorry, love.” The word slips past his lips before he has a chance to stop it and their eyes meet across the couch, Anton’s cheeks flushed bright red in the darkness of the ill-lit apartment.
“It’s just. That's why I’m so tough on the pack about us trying to stick together. They’re younger than me and they’re alone with this new thing that’ll eat them up without an outlet. I know what it’s like to be abandoned for something that you can’t control. Something not your fault, you know?” he holds Ed’s gaze, empty beer bottle loose in his fingers.
“I know. I’ve been a loner since the 1700’s. It got easier when I moved in with the guys. Almost, at least. We’re all kind of at our own spots in this journey.”
“I meant to ask you, about the whole immortality thing.” Anton polishes off his bottle and stands to grab another from the fridge.
“Yeah?”
“I haven’t been a Werewolf long enough to notice, I guess, but I’m pretty sure it’s not happening for me anymore. Aging, I mean. I just feel like I’m in a stasis. I’ll be this way forever. Like a curse.”
Ed fights the urge to leap up and dance.
The word forever bounces around through his mind and his lips lift into a smile. “We’ll have to look into that, won’t we?” he asks. “Figure it out.”
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
“I feel like I’ve known you for my whole life.” says Anton, later on in the night. The TV has turned to some early morning infomercials. Anton has switched from beer to a short glass of almond colored liquor he poured from a bottle under his sink. His head is down, heavy, his eyes tilted upwards, on Ed. Always on Ed.
“Me too.”
“Viago?”
“Yeah, mate?”
“Can I be honest with you?”
“Of course you can.”
“I’ve wanted to kiss you for an hour now.”
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
It's the only permission Ed needs before he’s on his knees, hovering over Anton for a split second before gently pressing their mouths together. Anton lets out an almost imperceptible noise when he breathes in and Ed’s own breath gets caught in his lungs before he loops his arms around Anton’s neck, nudging a knee between the other mans and exhaling, deepening the kiss deliciously.
Behind his closed eyes he sees him through the ages. A bad pirate and then a good one. A soldier, a widow, a nurse and a groupie. Always different but always Ed’s. The rhythm echoing around the unbeaten chambers of his heart threatens to bubble up his throat and he gasps against Anton’s mouth, crushing their bodies together like he was trying to osmosis them together, like they were born attached this way and were only separated through time.
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
Later as Anton positions himself carefully, Ed ready and shaking and naked as the day he was born on the mattress on the floor, his eyes glow golden yellow, enough to cast shadows on the wall behind Ed.
He’d carried Ed in here, his legs wrapped firm around Anton’s waist and his hands buried in his hair as they kissed and kissed. He was so strong, sturdy and burning hot, blood loosened by the drinking he’d been doing all night.
Ed touches his cheek, fingers pricked by the stubble there. “Hey. It's okay if it’s too much.”
“I can manage.” Anton says shortly.
“And I can, too.” Ed promises. “If something happens. I can handle it. Immortal, remember? It’ll be awful hard to hurt me.”
“How about to make you feel good?” Anton teases, pressing forward.
“It’ll be much easier to do that.” Ed’s laugh is caught in his throat and Anton keeps pressing, leaning down to take his mouth again, tongue probing and insistent.
I love you, I love you, I’ve always loved you. He wants to say. But he settles for his name, over and over in the place of God’s and twice as powerful. “Yes, yes, yes!”
-:::--::---->◇<----::--:::-
As he walks home, the threat of the breaking dawn close at his heels, Ed fixes a button that he’d missed near his sternum and notices that his song, that familiar tune that rested within him for the last 300 years was at a pause. He saw the rests, painted in a steady pattern across the measures, stretching on and on, the song still playing just silently.
Indefinitely.
Forever.