Why Don't You Just Bury Me Because I Am Now Dead. - Tumblr Posts
🪐 — EDWARD TEACH.
head snaps up as breath hitches in his throat, painfully catching on its way up. edward feels like he has been run through, sword lodging somewhere near his heart, but not quite there, because he doesn’t deserve the mercy of a swift death, of course he doesn’t. it’s the words, more than the feather light touch — so impossibly gentle — that makes him recoil, flinch away like stede is made of fire. he doesn’t get far, of course, there is a table at his back, one of the few things he hasn’t thrown away in his haste to get rid of him entirely ( he clearly failed. stede is still everywhere in the room, even empty as it is ). so he stays there, wide eyed and sight horrendously blurry, stede’s face coming in and out of focus. i love you, ed. it echoes like a gunshot in his mind, again and again. hearing it for the first time should have been sweet, like sugar in his tea and fancy marmalade on his tongue. but there are far too many tears for it to be so, and edward’s hands are bloody — both metaphorically and not. it shouldn’t make him want to scream, but it does. hand reaches out, blindly grasping at the front of stede’s shirt. he is bleeding on it, red on white glaringly obvious even in the dim light. edward can’t find it in himself to care.
❛ no. no — you can’t mean that. ❜ it’s weak, and it’s tired, voice still wrecked from crying. and edward wants to tell him to touch him, to hold him in his arms before he breaks. he can’t find the words for it, all that comes out of his lips in a choked off noise, halfway between a sob and stede’s name. so his grip on the fabric tightens, but instead of shoving stede away he pulls him closer. his head drops against his shoulder, then, and it’s not quite an embrace, but it’s the closest they’ve been since that day on the beach. despite himself, edward breathes him in, tries to commit the scent to memory although he doesn’t really need to. ❛ i waited. sat there the whole night. ❜ and then he waited some more, back on the ship, anchor still dropped down until it would have been suicide to just keep standing there so close to english soil. there would have been no act of grace to call upon, then, only execution. ❛ but y'didn’t come. ❜
SOMETHING SNAPS BETWEEN THEM when he speaks those holy words aloud, edward jolting out of his reach with an expression of shock across his face that even the streaked war paint cannot cover. & stede thinks he might choke on his regret that this is how he is saying it for the first time. ( in another life, stede whispers it against ed’s lips, their fingers entwined as moonlight casts them both in a silver glow. ) but then a hand grasps his shirt, dark blood soaking into the cotton on contact, & drags him forward. & stede half expects the glint of another knife to tuck itself beneath his jaw. but it doesn’t come. instead, edward seems to be collapsing in on himself, his forehead dropping to land on stede’s shoulder. & he cannot stop his arms from reaching for him for even a single moment longer, one looping around edward’s waist & the other curling around his shoulders. if nothing else, at least stede got to hold him in his arms, at least once. & when he thinks of edward sitting alone on that dock, waiting for him until daybreak, stede can no longer hold back his own tears. no matter how hard he presses his eyelids together, the saltwater still overflows in rivulets. ❝ i know. i know. & i’m sorry. i’m so sorry, edward. ❞ his voice is broken & garbled, his shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. though stede doesn’t know the words to explain it, edward deserves to know. he has to try. so he works to untangle his tongue, to remember what had happened that night. ❝ it was chauncey, he. he woke me up, he had a gun. he said — he said — ❞ his voice quivers at the memory, & stede’s hand curls into edward’s leather jacket, clinging to him as though he is a rock in a storm. ❝ he said that i ruined everything — that i had ruined you. ❞ the infamous blackbeard, history’s most fearsome pirate, turned lackey to the crown. ❝ i thought he was going to kill me. but then he tripped & the gun went off & — ❞ he breaks off again, his memories going fuzzy around that point. the next thing he remembered was opening the front door to his estate, leaving a trail of bloodied frootprints across the foyer. ❝ & i was afraid. i was a coward. so i ran. i ran away. ❞ his hand finally unclenches from edward’s jacket, trembling as it strokes gently over his hair. ❝ but i shouldn’t have. i know that now. i should have come to you. i never should have left you there alone. ❞