Chapter Text
“How would you feel… about owning a Ren Faire?”
“You know I hate the Ren Faire, Stede? I said so the other day.”
“Really? When?”
“WHEN WE WERE AT THE FUCKING RENAISSANCE FAIRE.”
Honestly, Stede should have seen this coming. Every weekend (or at least every weekend August - October, occasionally April - June), when Stede dragged, no… not dragged… “exuberantly brought” his family to their local Ren Faire, Mary always found something to complain about. It was a paradox - somehow the Faire had both too much alcohol, but not enough places to drink. Or that there wasn’t much for children to do, yet all the shows were geared towards kids. It’s too hot. It’s too cold. Even the most perfect, temperate September weekend was too “autumnal”.
The Ren Faire was Stede’s “happy place”. His only good memory in a childhood full of wanting things he couldn’t have. He’d managed to convince his parents that Renaissance Faires were “educational” and they wanted so little to do with him, they never fact-checked. They were almost too happy to be rid of him, so they could have their own weekends of Bridge games, golfing, gossipping, and whatever else rich, fancy, snobs got up to in their leisure time.
At home, Stede was shoved into a neat, tidy, constrictive box of order, rules, and denial. School was its own torture of alienation, loneliness, and fear. It was better to be invisible than to be mocked by his classmates - another paradox. Talk too little, and Stede would get labeled a “pretentious snob” and have his books stolen and thrown in the toilet. Talk too much, or be too enthusiastic when he somehow found someone with a shared interest, and get locked in the janitor’s closet for an entire weekend. Literally shoved into a box.
But at the Ren Faire, there were only possibilities. Stede was still more enthusiastic than a lot of the other patrons, but he didn’t stick out like a sore thumb. He found a group of people that became his “Faire family”. They brought ice packs on hot August days, and thermoses of warm cider to share on cold October nights. They sang together at the final Pub Sing, and came up with characters and developed bits with each other and the professional actors. One especially great season, Stede befriended one of the knights and got to help groom the horses every morning before gates officially opened to the public.
Stede met Mary when he went to college, where he was forced to major in economics but managed to sneak in a couple theater classes to maintain his sanity and not collapse into a total depression. Mary was… nice. Their dates were… fine. Their families were definitely more thrilled and excited about the relationship (and with that, a potential business merger) than Mary and Stede were, but Stede and Mary were too crushed from a lifetime of people pleasing and living up to their parents’ expectations to push back against them.
And so into yet another box. Working 9 AM -5 PM (more realistically, 7 AM - 9 PM) at his father’s company, married, kids, house in the ‘burbs with a white picket fence (literally). During the week, Stede only saw Alma and Louis when he was stressed and tired, but he’d pull himself together to read them a bedtime story (which he loved doing, but would love more if he wasn’t so unbelievably exhausted). His relationship with Mary was practically nonexistent at best, cold at worst.
Weekends at the Ren Faire remained Stede’s refuge. And the children enjoyed it, too. Up until a year ago, when Alma turned 12 and decided she was too cool for group costumes, they’d all dressed as pirates together... well, Stede and the kids did. Mary always wore a t-shirt and jeans, and joked that she was dressed “as someone who did not want to go to the bloody Ren Faire, Stede”.
Maybe it wasn’t a joke.
Stede loved his home Faire with all of his heart, truly. However, one glorious weekend a year, Stede and the crew (the “crew” being just Alma and Louis - Mary always stayed home “I have my limits, Stede”) would take the 6 hour drive to the most amazing, impressive Renaissance Faire on the East Coast:
Blackbeard’s Renaissance Faire.
It had delicacies. It had delights. But the coolest thing of all was a pirate ship on actual water. Stede’s local, landlocked Faire had a pirate ship, but Blackbeard’s was bigger, better, and, again, on actual water. It actually cruised around the harbor as raunchy pirate singing groups sang bawdy pirate shanties. Not that Stede got to go to those shows, because he had his tiny crew, but it looked like so much fun from the shore. And they did offer “pirate puppet shows” for the kids, which was still fun, even though the ship didn’t sail for those (something about “too much liability”).
The other incredible attraction was the joust, run by the most sought after, premier jousting company in the entire country: Knights to Remember. The pyrotechnics were spectacular, the combat looked realistic (it’s entirely possible that these knights were getting out some massive aggression and actually hitting each other - real commitment to their craft), always breaking lances into shreds.
No one could be bored at Blackbeard’s.
“Stede, why would you want to buy a Renaissance Faire?” Mary said, exasperatedly.
“I don’t know… to break the monotony? To be somewhere I’m passionate about? We only have this one life, Mary.”
“And you think our life is monotonous?”
“Don’t you ever feel… trapped?”
“Not so much that I’d want to do this! Stede, no, we’re not building a Ren Faire so that you can pretend to be a pirate every weekend.” Mary slammed her fists on the table.
Stede looked down. “I also may have already purchased some land? And drawn up some blueprints? And hired some contractors…and they broke ground yesterday?”
Mary stood up. “Stede, if you go through with this, I want a divorce.”
“Maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing?” Stede said quietly.
Mary sat back down. They looked at each other, and for possibly the first time ever, actually saw eye to eye.
—
Maybe one person could be bored at Blackbeard’s.
“It’s the same EVERY YEAR Izzy. It’s the Queen’s birthday, she comes to our shire for a celebration, yada yada yada, gets wooed, gets betrayed by the obvious villain, the wooer beats the villain in the joust, yada yada yada, happily ever after, and then we sing ‘Parting Glass’. The end. It’s all so fucking boring,” Ed yelled, kicking the giant “Ye Olde Turkey Legge” sign that took up way too much space in his office during the off-season.
“I like ‘Parting Glass’”, Ivan, Ed’s music director, mumbled to himself as he filed some paperwork.
“We all do, it’s a great song. But YEAR after every fucking YEAR?”
Izzy cleared his throat. “Back to the task at hand boss?”
“Right, yea, task at hand. Which was…?”
“Like I started to say before your rant. We’ve got trouble.”
Ed opened his mouth to go on a tangent. Izzy stopped him.
“Edward, focus. Please. For too long I have had to put up with your increasingly erratic moods, your lack of focus, your general disregard and disdain for our thriving business that is only thriving because I’m the one who puts the effort in, and now that business has been threatened.” Izzy scowled.
Oh? Well that was interesting. It had been a long time since anything was a threat. Ed sat back down and listened.
“What’s happening?” Ed said, intrigued.
“Knights to Remember has been poached. There’s some new Renaissance Faire in the middle of fucking nowhere throwing money around and they’ve managed to steal our joust troupe.”
Ed huffed, “We’re more than a joust troupe, Izzy”, but he sat back pensively.
They were more than a joust troupe. Blackbeard’s regularly swept the annual “Best of Renaissance Faire Awards” in terms of pretty much everything except food, which was admittedly mediocre, Ed thought as he glared at the offending turkey leg sign. But they had everything else - costumes, fight choreography, musical groups… completely unique pirate ship.
What they didn’t have was actual competition. There were of course, many other Renaissance Faires in the country that shared a lot of acts, but no one would dare be so brazen as to steal a practically proprietary joust group.
Fascinating
“Pack your bags, Izzy. We’re going to the middle of fucking nowhere”.