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“Your beard is growing back in quite well.”
Ed grunted softly where they sat together in their quarters, sharing their dinner by candlelight. Roach had made a delicious rice dish of crab meat, diced vegetables and spices for the whole crew, and Stede proposed they all break open the bottles of wine they looted from a French vessel a few weeks back. They could hear the others laughing and cheering from the mess hall; in the Captain’s cabin, all was silent, save for the clink of their forks on their plates.
Stede finished swallowing and then cleared his throat, his brow pinching upwards. “Edward?” he prompted, softly. “Are you quite all right?”
Ed looked away with a soft sigh as he pushed the last of his meal around on his plate. He stopped when Stede’s hand came to rest over his, soft and warm, even with its new callouses.
“Ed,” Stede pleaded.
Ed turned his head towards his lover and murmured, “I’m sorry.”
“What ever for?”
With a tense sigh and a shudder, Ed lifted his gaze to the barren bookshelves, the stripped mantlepiece, the curtainless windows, the gutted auxiliary wardrobe and the plain bed of cotton instead of silk and velvet. “Your quarters,” he gruffed. “I ruined it.”
Stede looked at Ed for a long moment before squeezing his hand and rising from his chair, shuffling closer to stand beside Ed’s shoulder, rubbing his back. “You know I don’t care about any of my material wealth anymore. I gave it all away for a reason, love. For you. You’re the only luxury I care about having, so I get the feeling there’s something else rattling around in that beautiful head of yours.”
Ed huffed and flinched away from Stede’s gentle, loving hands, turning his full body away from the man.
Stede slowly walked around to his other side and went down on one knee. “Is this about the crew?” he hedged, gingerly, knowing very well that Ed was still hurting from their wariness around him. Whenever Ed walked into a room, the crew would cease their talk and laughter and shutter up into perfect little drones that eyed Ed like he was a loose snake. Whenever Ed tried to eat in the mess hall with the others, dinners were spent in awkward silence where the crew acted like Ed was holding them all hostage. In the case of Jim and Frenchie, Ed truly did hold them hostage, and Ed genuinely tried to kill all the rest, so they had fair reason — but it had been days since Stede enacted his ‘Talk It Through As A Crew’ clause and tried to have everyone explain to Ed how he hurt them (physically and emotionally) and have Ed give them each an individualized, personal apology. “They’ll forgive you! Eventually! I know they will! You just have to give them time.”
“It’s not- their forgiveness I have a problem with,” Ed muttered, looking away again. “It’s yours.”
Stede’s eyes widened at that and his lips parted. “Ed, of course I forgive you! I-”
“So why can’t I forgive you, then?” Ed shot back, finally making eye contact, his voice breaking as tears gathered in his eyes.
Stede’s brows formed a gentle tent. “Oh, Ed…” he whispered, leaning forward to press their foreheads together, and Ed shuddered before melting into his embrace. “...I want to show you something.”
At that, Stede hauled himself back up to his feet by the table and left to root around through his sparse few belongings before returning with half a petrified orange.
The petrified orange.
“Oh, hey, it’s our treasure,” Ed said around a sniffle.
“Right you are, darling,” Stede said gently, his eyes twinkling as he sat down beside his lover once more and handed the orange half to Ed for him to study in his hands. “My daughter… Alma… She cut it in half. She kept one and gave the other to me.” Stede let out a small, bittersweet huff of laughter. “I love my daughter,” he said, quietly, “and I love my son, Louis, too, but Louis hardly remembers me, and Alma… she and I were close. We had the time to get close, before I… before I abandoned her.”
Ed looked at Stede carefully for a long moment before returning his gaze to the orange half, staring at it intently. “You never talked about your kids,” he murmured.
“I always wanted to be a good father,” Stede said, quietly. “I never disciplined them. You know that? I never so much as raised my voice. When I first saw little Alma as a babe, I looked at her and I promised her that I would be a better father to her than mine was.”
Silence settled over them both for a long moment. Ed looked up through his lashes at Stede, his brow slowly beginning to furrow as he spied the tears slipping down Stede’s cheeks.
“Turns out me being a better father than my own meant being no father at all,” he said with a mirthless huff, fussing intently with the cuffs of his plain blouse. “She was better off without me, I thought. And now I have proof, because I went back to try and make it up to her, to her mother and brother, and she hated me for it. They all hated me for it. Mary even tried to murder me, which, well-” his hand went up to the bullet Ed left in his shoulder, “-just serves to show me how much I was a parasite on her life.” His warm amber eyes met Ed’s dark brown, then, and he summoned a pained, trembling smile. “I thought I was a parasite on you, too,” Stede breathed. “I thought I was destroying you, and I never wanted that. I’d rather die. And so I… I left you. Because I thought I was saving you from a godawful man who destroyed and defiled beautiful things. …Me.”
Ed’s expression twisted and turned, shifting into flickering glimpses of anger, betrayal, hurt, sympathy, and love.
“But I was wrong,” Stede whispered, reaching up to slowly, tenderly tuck a strand of Ed’s hair behind his ear. “I thought I was undoing or- or at least stopping the harm I’d done by returning to my duties as a husband and a father and abandoning you. Instead I did just the opposite. I caused immeasurable harm to Mary and the kids by coming back, and by leaving you. You didn’t deserve that, Edward. They didn’t either.” A sob slipped out of Stede’s lips, then, then another, and soon he began to weep. “Oh, Edward,” he sobbed, “I don’t deserve you. I am selfish, I am broken, I am cruel-”
Ed surged forward and kissed him, then, clambering into Stede’s lap to straddle him, bracketing his face in his hands — one of which still held the orange half.
They continued like that for a long while, exchanging breaths as Ed slowly wiped Stede’s tears away with his thumbs and shed his own, before they finally broke apart and rested their foreheads together, their chests heaving for breath.
“I never let you speak. Before,” Ed managed. “You were trying to explain and I- I just… hurt you. And worse than that, I tried to destroy you back. I tried to kill everything you ever loved.”
“I forgive you,” Stede answered ferociously.
“You shouldn’t,” Ed growled back, shedding another wave of tears before resting his head on Stede’s shoulder, shuddering when Stede raised his hands to rub slow, soothing circles up and down his spine. “And just like that, you just keep treating me with- fucking kindness.”
“And I always will,” Stede vowed, his voice barely more than a whisper. “You deserve far more than I could ever give you. I vow my entire life to you, my love, my heart, for as long as you will have a wretched thing like me.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Ed rasped, sitting up again to stare tiredly into Stede’s eyes. “Here,” he murmured, picking up Stede’s hand and pressing the orange half into it, closing his fingers around the precious token. “Your daughter and your wife obviously thought you were worth something in the end. And I think you’re worth something now.”
Stede gave him a wan smile. “Ed…”
“If you’re a wretch, then I’m a bloody monster,” Ed said, quietly. “So maybe we can both be wretches together. I can love you and not forgive you. And you can love me without forgiving me. Most days I wish you didn’t.”
Stede let out a small, broken huff of laughter through a brittle smile. “Do you want me to- un-forgive you?”
“Yes.”
“...Would it make you happy if I did?”
“...Yes,” Ed whispered, meeting his gaze as he blinked a tear down his cheek. “Stede, I…” Slowly, tenderly, Ed traced his hand over Stede’s bad shoulder, over the two new scars on the left side of his abdomen. “I hurt you. I wanted you to hurt as bad as you hurt me, but I did more than that, I- destroyed your things, I tried to kill your crew! You can’t just forgive me for that! The only one of us who destroys and defiles beautiful things is me. Just look around you!”
Stede smiled a little wider at that and dropped his gaze, shaking his head before sitting up straight and tilting Ed’s head up, meeting his dark brown gaze with his lighter one. “I’m sorry, my love,” he said gently, “but I won’t un-forgive you. You can’t tell me what to do. I get to make my own decisions. And my decision is to forgive you for what you did when you were hurting. Because I love you, Edward. Unconditionally.”
Ed let out a long, shuddering breath before burying his face into Stede’s blonde curls. “...And I love you too.” He sniffled. “And I… I think I can forgive you. …I think I can.”
They held each other for a long while, breathing each other in and idly caressing each other’s backs.
“Fuck I’m hungry,” Ed murmured, dismounting from Stede’s lap and settling back in his chair to wolf down the rest of his food while Stede laughed at him, a bright and joyous sound.
They slept that night curled around each other rather than rigidly trying to remain on their own sides of the bed, nuzzled close as they could be, their hands curled around the other.
The orange half sat below the lighthouse painting.