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Always, whenever they both had a free moment, Ed and Stede ended up together in some secluded space.
It was hardly intentional. Each had plenty of things he could be doing—organizing his rows upon rows of fine silks and satins, mentally alphabetizing the number of ships he’d seized over the years, having a chat with some bloke or bird or other wildlife that happened upon the ship—and yet, in the end, they always found each other, and always could be found sitting somewhere, chatting and drinking and generally being disgustingly happy.
One such evening found Stede and Ed together in a cozy corner of the gun deck, sharing one of Stede’s sweeter bottles of sherry and laughing about something or other. The gloaming glowed golden over them, drawing their faces in bright warm highlights and dark lines of pleasure. And it happened that the light exposed everything, not simply the twin smiles and the shining amber of their drink. It exposed certain motions, too, and, after a few hours’ time sitting thigh to thigh, Ed easily took notice of the awkward shifting of his drinking partner’s hips. The laughs and smiles hardly faded, though.
“What’s got you flopping around like a landed fish?” He said, through a swallow of the saccharine liquor. “I haven’t even gotten to the really gory bits yet.”
“You think evisceration isn’t ‘gory’?” Stede chuckled incredulously. The chuckle got cut short, though, and the smile turned a little sour. Stede’s legs even went ahead and crossed themselves tellingly the other way. Ed took in all.
“I do. And I think you’ve got yourself a problem, my friend.” Setting down his glass, Ed stood up and stretched his back up and out. “If you want to take care of it, I’ll wait. I’ll still be here... as long as the booze stays with me.”
What had seemed to Ed the perfect out for Stede turned into a confusing moment of almost-stillness when Stede didn’t move to get up. He still moved, shifting his thighs whisperingly against each other in their shining gold breeches and gnawing at his lower lip, but he didn’t stand.
“All right,” Ed said, and put his boot down on the edge he’d just been sitting on, rather towering over Stede. “Just take a piss over the side of the ship, then, if you need to that bad.” Stede blanched, then blushed, then spluttered flatteringly.
“No! I—and...” Having said nothing, Stede proceeded in the same direction. “I—Anyhow... a gentleman doesn't... a gentleman doesn't... piss,” he averred through tight, reluctant lips. Ed's face melted into a smirk.
“Oh, yeah? What does he do to stop himself from ruining his finely polished decks?” Stede shrank a little under Ed's regard, but pressed on, glancing up at him and down to said finely polished deck at irregular intervals.
“He—he finds a—private moment. When it is convenient to him and his crewmembers. When it's acceptable to do so." He paused and leveled a firmer look at his companion. "And he doesn't talk about it!”
Ed let out a short, sharp laugh and seized Stede by the arm to pull him upright. Stede's limbs immediately coursed inward, seeking to tie him into an upright approximation of the knot he'd been in sitting down.
“I think a gentleman also likes to keep his fine clothes clean," Ed remarked easily, and drew them both a few steps closer to the edge of the ship. "It's private here, right? You're not busy here, right? Then come on. I could do with a slash myself."
Looking rather more like a haddock than a man with his glassy eyes and his mouth agape, Stede watched as Edward worked his way casually down the line of buttons on his trousers. Rather than doing anything himself, Stede’s head snapped up abruptly to lock their gazes once more.
“W-what—what if... someone catches me?!” He cried, with a dainty hint of a quaver to his voice.
“You don’t think that everyone’s done this before?” Seeing as Stede still wasn’t moving, Ed leaned over and pressed his shoulder against his friend’s for a bit of encouragement. “Trust me, they have. And if they catch you, they’ll catch us. And you can tell them it’s all my devilish influence that made the Gentleman Pirate sink to degradation.”
With that, Ed reached into his leather trousers, drew himself out, and had the slash he’d been promising himself—a rather nice one, too, one he could’ve had earlier, but he’d gotten himself distracted by Stede Bonnet and his company once again. He let a growling sigh go and glanced over at Stede, who, he thought, must never be convinced to do this, even if it meant he was going to wet his best pair of breeches.
But he was quickly proven wrong: The second after he’d started looking, something seemed to come over Stede. He let out a noise of his own, something strangled and whimpering, and tore down the front of his fall-front breeches to take himself in hand and let go a stream of his own, a long, jetting one that Ed could hear from where he stood—and that he had to tear his eyes from with more difficulty than he’d’ve ever guessed of himself.
In a few moments, Ed was finished and had tucked himself away again. He took a step back and allowed himself the perverse luxury of watching Stede finish himself off, hair alight in the fading sunshine; piss flooding in a remarkable arc into the ocean, colored finer than the remains of the sherry in their glasses. Ed would have been content to do so in perfect stillness and silence, but a slight jolt of the ship nearly unbalanced Stede, causing Ed to reach out and grasp the man’s shoulder to keep him still and upright.
After what had to be among the longest pisses ever taken, Stede finally finished, and, sighing and closed-eyed and weak, he turned around and ran face-first into Ed’s chest. The expected embarrassment never came from him, though—it seemed he was too lost in the post-piss bliss to give a damn.
“Sorry for the delay,” Stede murmured against leather, took half a step away, and sat himself in their spot again, encouraging Ed to do the same with a pretty gesture of the hand. “Now... what were you saying about proper gutting techniques?”
Ed was suddenly sure he’d never been so happy in his life.