Work Text:
Stede Bonnet had never fallen in love, before. He did hope that could excuse him from failing to recognize any of the signs. Of course it hadn’t been any kind of option, with Mary. He had approached Mary, and marriage, in much the same way he had approached his schooling, and later his business concerns. To whit, by ignoring them in favor of any number of more interesting past times, right up until ignoring life’s various ignominies was no longer an option for him.
He could not, he would not, ignore Edward Teach. Blackbeard, the terror of the seas. Villain of storybooks— a man whose flag could send a Navy running. Stede had read the tales, he had heard the rumors, he had, in his most secret, self-indulgent imaginings, pictured in his mind’s eye that man, that legend, and pictured the adventures they might have. That was before: when his ship was just a dream and lifting Mary’s skirts once a fortnight was all the pleasure he had to look forward to in this world.
Never in those dreams had he seen anything that could even hold a candle to the reality. Blackbeard, in his leathers, prowling about the deck of Stede’s Revenge like a cat who hadn’t yet made up his mind if he’d like to be let in from his life on the streets, quite yet. Just as likely to savage all the guests with his terrible claws as settle in next to a body for a cozy night by the fire.
Stede wouldn’t have even known how to imagine it, before it happened to him. It was everything about him: his hair, and his eyes, and his body, yes— oh yes! But it was also his energy and his voice, and even, perhaps especially, the push and pull aura of menace that hung about him. Sometimes thick, occasionally just the finest gossamer, all but forgotten, but just a part of Blackbeard as the deep furrow between his brows and the scars that littered his skin. He wielded that like any of his other weapons, with expert precision borne of long practice.
All of this information, laid out plainly, led to one very obvious fact. Well, obvious was perhaps being just a bit harsh. It would be easy enough for anyone to overlook, really. It was entirely understandable! There had been no single action on either of their parts that had led to it. Stede hadn’t received a bolt of revelation from the skies. If Cupid’s arrow had found it’s mark, then it had done it’s work slowly, over weeks. His love for Ed hadn’t revealed itself in the flash and thunder of lighting, but rather it was like the warm, banked glow of the hearth. It rose and fell, sometimes just the trace of glowing embers, enough to warm himself by but no more, and sometimes the crackle and flare of a newly stoked fire, so swelling and huge inside of him that he felt he couldn’t contain it.
It spilled out of him, this feeling. He felt lifted by it, he felt lighter than air, ebullient and irrepressible. He walked on clouds on those days, and when circumstances forced him down, he could still find himself warmed all over by but a glance, or the curl of a smile half-tucked into a beard. He lived in ignorance, then. Free and feckless, but for his duty to his fellow pirates, and they he was finding easier and easier to please.
The first crack in this armor of his own obtusity was an evening like many others they had shared. He and Ed were having a merry conversation over dinner, shut up into Stede’s quarters, as they often took their evening meals— away from the press and the activity of the crew. A captain’s privilege, and one he enjoyed indulging. They ate, and they talked, and they passed a bottle of cognac back and forth between them.
And each time Ed drank, Stede watched him. He watched his fingers as they curled around the body of the bottle. He watched his lips as they closed around the mouth. He watched his neck as he tilted his head back, and he watched his throat work as he swallowed. What was this sympathetic magic, he wondered, more than half driven to distraction, that made his belly feel warm as another man drank?
But his eyes would linger at the bit of dampness on Ed’s mouth, on the fine bones of his wrist as he brought the back of his hand up to swipe at it. He had, Stede couldn’t help but notice, very beautiful hands. That was the first of it and, of course, like any fire given enough fuel, it quickly got out of his control.
That was the first of it, and the last of it, it’s culmination, was this:
Late of an evening on the Revenge, the humid air close and heavy upon them. The moon was waxing gibbous, and a ripe and golden orange where it hung over the ship. The crew had spent the day following some lark of Frenchie’s, and had bedded down early after the excitement of being forced to retrieve several of their number from the choppy waters. Ed had impressed him in the kitchen, riffling through Roach’s disordered supplies and producing a more than passable supper— albeit one that leaned heavily on marmalade.
They had retired once more to Stede’s rooms, this time with a bottle or three of bubbly, and Ed was stretched out on the sofa, stripped down to just his trousers and with one arm thrown over his face. Stede himself was in the lightest of his summer linens, down to his knee breeches and a shirt so gauzy it was rendered practically transparent just by the moisture in the air. His stockings and his shoes had been long abandoned, and he leaned comfortably back into his armchair, his toes digging into the soft pile of the rug as he considered the differences in candlelight and moonlight, as they both moved over the planes of Ed’s bare torso.
“You ever plan on putting me out of my misery, mate?” Ed asked, arm still over his eyes.
Stede startled, he hadn’t been aware Ed was even still awake. “Good god, man,” he protested, and held a hand to his racing heart.
“Eh?” he asked, then moved his arm to shoot a glance at Stede. “Oh, right, sorry.” A short pause, then, “Well, nah, no, not really.” He pulled himself upright out of the cushions like he was clawing out of his own grave. Stede watched him; he was always watching him. Ed righted himself on the sofa and sat leaning forward, his elbows on his knees.
“What’s this about misery, Ed?” he asked, his brain catching up with matters. “You’re not miserable, are you?” Something in his chest tightened.
“At first,” Ed said, his voice low, just loud enough to be heard. “At first, I thought you were just dumb— an innocent. Then I thought, no man, not Stede! Stede’s just playing dumb, to get you to make the first move, old Blackbeard, old man, he’s a canny one, our boy. And now!” he clapped his hands together to punctuate this last statement. “Now! Now, I think you might be the blindest motherfucker to ever live.”
Stede’s mouth hung open. “I— er, I? What? Edward?”
“I want to suck your cock, man! Haven’t you noticed? I want to kiss you until our mouths bleed! I want you strung out and keening below me, Stede, and I’ve wanted it for weeks!” Stede didn’t know how he could choke on his own spit while his mouth felt dry as a desert, but while he was trying to sort himself out Ed plowed onwards, his words spilling out in a rush. “I’ve been following you around with the moon in my eyes, Stede! I’ve not been subtle!” He gestured to himself, naked but for a pair of leather trousers.
Stede got his voice working, “You want— me?”
Ed hung his head, and his hair spilled forward to screen his face.
“Ed?”
His head snapped up. “Yes! You lunatic, yes! Yes! Can I spell it out any plainer?”
“No! I mean, yes! I mean—”
Ed cut him off, “God, man! Look, I’m going to ask you a very simple question, and I will be listening raptly to your response, got it?”
Stede nodded.
“Do you,” Ed illustratively pointed to Stede, and then himself, “want me?”
Stede nodded again, then cleared his throat and spoke, “Yes.”
“Thank you, god!” he said, and he dropped off of the sofa, onto his knees.
“Oh, oh! I, Edward?” He watched him as he crawled closer across the rug. He couldn’t take his eyes off him, not for anything. There was a heat in Ed’s eyes that seemed like it might be a partner to the one Stede had been carrying around in his chest. A sense of exaltation rose up in him, a thrill that quickened the pulse and attuned the senses. “Ed,” he breathed.
Ed crawled closer, until he reached Stede’s parted legs and gently, firmly, parted them even further, running his hands up Stede’s bare calves and making space for himself there. His lovely hands continued their path up, lingering warmly on his knees, just for a moment, before pushing up his thighs. “You want this?” Ed asked him, his voice deliciously rough.
Stede had to clear his throat. “Yes! Yes, Ed, I want you.”
His hand’s paused in their task, suspended perilously just over the placket to Stede’s breeches. “Say that again,” he demanded.
“I want you, Ed, I want you! I want you so much, I— oh, christ, Ed!” he broke off as Ed’s hands reached their destination and had Stede’s buttons undone and his smallclothes down in a blink.
“I want you, too,” he said, underlining his point by reaching into Stede’s pants and taking him firmly in hand.
Stede’s entire body felt like it was melting. The fire inside of him was going to burn through his bones and his flesh and leave nothing but a husk behind. He would die from it, sacrificed on the pyre of his own love, another of Blackbeard’s victims. He would die happily.
“Oh, Ed,” he whispered, opening eyes he hadn’t even realized he’d shut, looking down. Their eyes met and held. Ed grinned, a big, true, honest grin, one that wrinkled the corners of his eyes and scrunched his nose. He was still smiling when he bent down and took Stede’s cock in his mouth.
“Fuck!” he swore, and his hands came up to light on Ed’s face, and then slide into his hair. He cradled his skull in his hands, Ed’s dear, sweet, precious skull, and fought to keep his hips still as Ed alternated suction with the undulating press of his wicked tongue.
Stede’s brains had been thoroughly melted out of his ears when Ed drew back and asked him a question.
“Hmmm?” Stede inquired.
“I said,” Ed repeated himself, flushed and grinning, “Penny for your thoughts?”
Stede was finding it very hard to focus on anything but the way Ed was moving the very tip of his tongue very delicately and precisely over the bottom of his front teeth.
“I think,” he replied, working hard to enunciate his words, “that you are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, Edward Teach.”
Ed smiled, and his chest seemed to puff up with pride. “You think that? Really? About me?”
“Oh, yes, Ed. Unassailably, empirically beautiful. Better than gold, Ed. Finer than, than silk, or cashmere. You’re perfect.”
In a flurry of movement Ed had left the floor and was straddling him, and then, as quick as that, they were kissing. Stede did not have much experience to speak of here, but he was more than content to let Ed push his head back into the antimacassar and kiss the breath from his lungs. Especially seeing as how it gave him such a good oppurtunity to touch. He skimmed his hands across his shoulders, and pushed them through the trailing ends of his curling hair. When Ed’s hand took back up it’s work on Stede’s cock, he clutched at his back until he feared his fingernails dug furrows.
“Ed,” he implored, desperate for release, desperate for it to go on forever. “Ed, my love, so beautiful.”
He felt Ed rock against him like he’d received a blow, but Stede was already too far gone. His hand flew up once more to Ed’s face, to cup against his cheek as his mounting pleasure peaked, and he came in Ed’s hand, and across his belly.
“Fuck me,” he heard distantly, from the deep outer reaches of his new realm of pleasures. “Fucking— fuck, Stede, fuck.”
After a moment’s pure and perfect bliss, a rustling of clothes brought his attention back to reality. He opened his eyes to see Ed taking himself in hand, painting himself with Stede’s own come and jerking his hips into the fist he made.
“Oh, you beauty,” Stede said, watching him at his work. He had the best seat in the house. He could feel every movement, hear every breath. He was close enough to see the sweat beading at his temples, the perfect furrow of his brow. He wanted to be closer.
He reached his hand out, a tentative foray that took him just to the low point of Ed’s navel. Still, Ed was quick with the program.
“Yes,” he hissed out, his own hand falling away. “Yes!”
How could Stede deny that kind of enthusiasm? It took him a few tries to get used to the angle, but before he had even really found his stride Edward was doubling over. He was still up on his knees, and his forehead came down to rest on Stede’s temple. He was breathing harshly, and between those breaths he spoke, pleading, “Say it again. Again, Stede!”
“My love,” Stede said. “My own beautiful heart. You’re perfect, Ed. You’re perfect, and you’re mine.” And that was it. Ed’s whole body stiffened, and then he was coming, shaking apart under Stede’s hands.
He smiled. Why wouldn’t he? He was in love.