Ok but Stede changes his name because everyone thinks he's dead and Ed hears about this dashing Captain Thomas and how he's been making a name for himself and hey maybe this is another pirate he can meet cause yeah it's not like Stede Bonnet is the only unique person out here on the ocean! Take that Stede! Ed's gonna move on from you!
And he orchestrates intercepting their ship and it turns out Captain Thomas is just that motherfucker Stede with a bit of facial hair and tight pants and boots and a fucking open shirt with some of his chest showing and his hair all windswept and god. fucking. dammit.
this is by far my favourite piece ive done for our flag means death. and rhys darbys face is a dream to paint would do it again! let me know what you think if you got this far, request smth, leave feedback! would love to make more friends around here :>
It’s done. Writing this gave me so much joy. Thank you all for following along with my daydream for them. Here, the last chapter of the re-falling-in-love and final happy retirement of Ed and Stede, for my own peace of mind, till they grace our screens again.
The Lighthouse
Chapter 6
In the bright and blazing hot May of 1718, Captain Oluwande Boodhari of the Revenge stood on the deck of his ship with all his crew and watched his first mate, Fang, marry his laughing navigator to his beaming deckhand. Everyone seemed to be feeling sentimental, but Fang looked to be feeling it the most. When the deckhand had placed a poesy ring on the navigator’s finger and then kissed him, amid the whistles and yells of the crew — one delicately possessive hand curled about his neck — Fang buried his face in his hands and wept. Fang’s small but strident pup, Jolly Roger (rescued from a recently raided ship) ran to whine and leap against his legs, and made him laugh. The watching captain laughed too, and shook his head. Then he caught the eye of one Jim Jimenez across the deck, and at the look they gave him blushed all the way down to his toes.
The deckhand and the navigator were bareheaded and barefooted, but dressed in shining silks, and the crew was decked in gold and velvet and lace, and anyone happening to see them might have been pardoned for thinking it was a very sophisticated party, aboard the Revenge; but amid the music and the dancing, after, the repeated toast (yelled, sung and shouted) was "To piracy!" And the matelots shouted it louder than anyone.
Later, belowdecks, amid the general cloud of sentiment and lust that had descended on the ship, the navigator and the deckhand lay tangled around each other abed, and murmured to each other. The things they said at first were not particularly poetic, but there was a poetry in the air about, a mood in the moonlight, that made everything seem magic, and their expressions suggested they'd never been near anything so beautiful as each other's brandy-soaked breath and sweaty faces.
Read the rest here; or read from the start.
And finally look at this lovely Ed by @lemonschnecke. I began writing this last chapter first, and I looked at him whenever I wanted to remember how Ed at peace with himself would be:
i think about how ed said he was so bored. how ed said there was no passion, no life, that he was just waiting to drown, in pirating, in all that he was doing, in the work of his lifetime, the work that gained him a reputation far and wide as history's greatest pirate. how he he was so bored and tired of it all that he contemplated death for an escape.
and then i think about how he he spent a few weeks, maybe a couple of months, with stede bonnet, who had run away from a life he could at best described as monotonous to find passion and life and something worth living for, stede bonnet who also didn't know if he wanted to live, even when he found that new spice -
and i think about how its in the thought of each other that they found the spark of life and the joy and the fun. how they have lived whole and full lives, but when stede thinks of love, its those weeks with ed that come to mind. when ed says its better alive than dead and his eyes are fixed on stede, and he signs his life away because life with stede, even under the yoke of the british, is better than a life on the seas without him -
these *fucking guys* man.
they really love each other. decades of life, and it took those weeks/months together to make it all worth while, for the very first time.