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There’s a veil. It was a wedding, of course there’s a veil, but this veil had given Ed pause the very moment he and his crew boarded the ship. How it had caught the sun, trailed down over the bride’s back. He couldn’t take his eyes off of it, even when his stomach gave a violent twist.
It’s delicate, and beautiful, all of those things Ed thought he could be, because—
No.
Shouts and gunshots ring out behind him. The soft sound of swords through flesh. Blood is splattered over his cheek, across the kohl over his eyes and temples. He’s careful when he touches the pearls, the rosettes. Don’t want blood on them. Don’t want to ruin fine things.
The bride was a pretty woman. Ed feels almost guilty, doing this. Ruining her big day and maybe shooting her through the chest at point-blank range when he didn’t quite mean to, then her would-be husband for good measure. So much for being done with his past. It’s just—well, he doesn’t understand how people get to be happy when his whole world has gone to shit, and seeing the bride and groom holding onto each other amongst the chaos made that angry thing roar in his chest.
Marriage is stupid, anyway. Fuck that. These rich assholes deserved everything they got today and then some, fuckin’ partying out on the sea like pirates don’t sail these waters. Not like Ed had ever thought about it himself, nope. Marriages always fail. His parents’. His—
No.
The veil is beautiful, though. Ed runs his thumb over the silk where it isn’t red with blood. It glides against his skin, smooth as anything.
Against his will, Ed recalls memories of silk in a different colour. Moonlight, and a heart that felt like it would beat out of his chest. Ed was hardly new to the impatient flutter of anticipation, but this had been a different kind. The kind that had built up in his belly and swelled to his throat. Had the bride looked at her groom like that today? Had she, too, felt hope for a future?
Ed’s fingers twitch. Doesn’t matter now, does it, not when it’s her blood on his cheek. Her body at his feet. Her death at his hand, just another tally in a long and tidy row of them.
“You don’t need this anymore, hmm?” he asks.
Her corpse doesn’t answer—they rarely do—so Ed is careful as he folds up and tucks the long gossamer length of the veil beneath his jacket, where no one from the crew can see it. Then, just for laughs, he cuts himself a piece of the cake with his knife and takes the cake toppers, too.
The frosting is sweet, if a bit too runny and warm from being in the hot sun. There’s a bite behind Ed’s eyes as he chews, swallows, runs his thumb over the hard pleats on the cake topper bride’s dress in his pocket.
The crew is quiet on the way back to the ship. They usually are these days. Ed reaches into his jacket to feel over the veil. He looks out over the horizon, and he lets his mind wander across the ocean.
Two bottles of rum in and the world has finally softened enough at its edges that Ed isn’t worried about cutting himself on them anymore. He sits in the dark of the cabin, unwilling to get up to light the lanterns and candles as the sea swallows the last orange bloom of the sun.
There's a cluster of knife gouges in the wall; Ed aims for it now with his dagger, his aim still true despite the fuzziness of his head and the lack of light in the cabin. The knife thunks solidly into the wood, and Ed wonders if his own heart made a similar noise when it was stabbed, or if it screamed and he just couldn’t hear it.
Fuck. Too dark now. Pressing in on him, making his breath short, tight. Nothing to hold onto, just empty air beneath his feet, like being tossed overboard.
Ed's never liked the dark, truth be told. Too much can hide there, too much space for his mind to create more monsters. He’s got enough of them already, dogging his heels. So he pushes himself up instead, unsteady against the motion of the ship and hindered further by the rum.
It takes him too long to light the first candle, his fingers shaky on the matches. Relief unknots his spine as he finally gets the wick to catch and it suffuses the room with the soft orange-yellow of the flame.
He wishes he weren’t alone. Been wishing that a lot lately, even as he barricades himself up in the cabin. Not his. Can’t bring himself to think that. Fuck. There’s that bite behind his eyes again. He wishes—wishes that he wasn’t alone, and he feels weak because of it.
A few more candles get lit, a few more monsters chased away as the shadows retreat. The room is a bit brighter now. Good. Ed turns, and a slip of white silk catches his eye. The veil. The blood on it. Big splotches down the gossamer train, stained over the detailing.
Like a white suit on a Spanish ship.
Picking it up off the dresser, Ed lets the fabric slip from finger to finger. Against the bare, tender palm of his skin it feels like water. Perhaps all his life he had enjoyed fine fabrics but just never let himself entertain the idea of having them. Even after rising through the ranks and becoming captain of his own fleet he never kept the fabrics for himself. His mother’s words from a lifetime ago made sure of that.
And then he was made to feel like he could have those fine fabrics, that he could have nice things and be soft and Ed, just Ed, and then it didn’t matter. Nobody wanted those things, that much was clear. His mum had been right.
Still, as he looks at the train of fabric on the floor, spilling over his boots, he aches. For himself, past and present. For what the future could have given him. It’s a hollow ache, worse than the ones that come from days with no food. This one feels like it could consume him, swallow him up inside-out until he didn’t exist anymore. Maybe that’d be nice, to just not exist.
The ship sways. Ed’s footing remains steadfast. How it always goes.
He’d thought about marriage, once. On a dock looking up at a purple sky, one ear trained on the brush behind him. Marriages failed, that was true, but not everything has to be broken all of the time. There has to be hope, otherwise everything withers and dies without it.
Ed had kept a mirror in the cabin. Didn’t even smash it up in his first purge, nor any of the subsequent ones since. Inside its frame his reflection holds the veil, Ed not quite meeting his own eyes. He’s been doing that a lot lately. Possibly since he took control of the Revenge. Easier to avoid what’s right in front of him that way.
Careful of the loose knot at the nape of his neck, he fastens the veil’s rosettes to his hair in the same place the bride had had it placed. The silk spills around him, like a waterfall. It smells like the sea, like the iron rust of blood and gunpowder. Somewhere, beneath it, something floral and powdery.
He wonders if taking his own guts out, hand over hand, would hurt less.
Picking up his pistol, the veil draping itself half across his face, Ed looks down at his boots, muzzle pointed to the floor.
It’d be poetic, he thinks, wouldn’t it, to die by his own hand right now, dressed like this? Let everyone see that Blackbeard was nothing more than a costume and a manifestation of all the dark things Ed had experienced throughout his life. Remind them that Edward Teach is the real one, the one who lived and felt and loved even past the point of heartbreak.
Because that’s what nobody tells you: you can hate them, but you’ll never truly stop loving them.
Let you see me like this, Stede Bonnet, Ed thinks. Tears blur his reflection before Ed can blink them back. See what you’ve done.
He could be right here, behind Ed. Ed could turn around and Stede would have to face what he created. Look the evil of the Caribbean right in the eyes. Ed cocks the pistol. Watches in the mirror, still not meeting his eyes, as he raises it to his temple. His hand doesn’t shake, but he isn’t surprised by that.
How horribly tragic, people would say when they learned of Blackbeard’s demise.
News would reach Stede eventually, wherever he is.
To kill himself wearing that, people would say.
Ed imagines a sailor’s death, wrapped in a sail with the silk beside him. Left to both decay on the ocean floor. That would probably be nice, alone in the darkness while the world continues to move even as yours ceases.
Does Stede’s still continue to move? Would it register the sudden stopping of Ed’s as if through an earthquake, or would it simply register nothing at all?
Ed hates him, but he loves him. Tears blur his vision once more, only this time Ed doesn’t try to stop them. They spill over, down his cheeks. A hitch grows in his chest. He thinks being cleaved in two would be less painful. On the handle of the pistol his hand finally shakes, jostling the barrel against his temple. He imagines himself to be a building ready to collapse in on itself, going from story to story.
The pistol clatters to the floor. Ed follows it, hunched over in a sea of bloodstained white silk. Strings finally cut, only he isn’t sure he’s a real boy. That was how it ended, right? Halfway through Ed had given up pretending he was doing anything other than stare moonily at Stede while he read.
The hitch shakes out of him in the form of a ragged sob.
The bloody goddamned fucking wedding. That could have been him and Stede one day, like Ed’d been fantasising about on the dock. Himself with a pristine white veil, both of them with flowers in their hair. Christ, he’d been happy, hadn’t he? Now he doesn’t know what he is, only what he isn’t.
Edward? Stede says.
He hadn’t drank enough. Or maybe he drank too much. Everything’s always wobbly these days—he can’t tell anymore. He breathes and takes in flowers, blood. The candlelight is hazed through the silk. Has he forgotten his heart, or did it finally stop beating?
Revenge used to never taste this sour, like wine left to turn to vinegar. It used to burn within him, as if he’d taken a shot of whiskey. He’d called his ship Queen Anne’s Revenge for a reason. But she’s long gone, and Ed’s inside another revenge entirely.
Edward, Stede says again, and for a moment Ed wonders if he actually had pulled the trigger. Maybe he got stabbed during the raid and he’s been dead this whole time.
It’s too dark in the cabin. There are still shadows lurking in the corners. They laugh at him and they use Stede’s voice. Ed stumbles to his feet, grabs the bottle of rum he’d been drinking before the sun went down. Nearly trips over the veil and manages to catch himself with a hand on the pockmarked wall.
Tipping the bottle back, Ed finishes the rest of the rum in a few clean swallows, gasping as he chucks it across the room. It doesn’t shatter; rather, it lands with a solid thump against wood. Ed watches it roll away, the edges of his world softening even more.
When he dreams, he won’t be alone.
Curling up on the pelt spread across the floor, Ed clumsily uses the silk to cover his body, then drapes it around his face. Blocks out the world. Falls asleep like that, but he doesn’t dream.