Archive of Our Own

London, England
November 1918

Stede Bonnet stands outside the military hospital on the outskirts of London with a manila folder clutched in his hands, feeling suddenly very small against the enormous stone building.

It’s a chilly day, the endless row of windows reflecting the clear blue sky, and he’s bundled a greatcoat over his uniform. He has a cashmere scarf wrapped around his neck, his only concession to the position he’s in now, caught between the army and civilian life as the Great War rages on. Further up the gravel path that runs along the front of the hospital, an orderly is pushing a soldier in a chair, the wheels squeaking with each turn. The man has no legs to speak of, and Stede cuts his eyes away.

Out on the lawn behind him there are a number of others wandering in circles in their pyjamas, distant looks in their eyes. Stede knows that feeling all too well. What he doesn’t know is what to expect inside this building. He could get anything from relief to devastation, and the breadth of all the possibilities is spinning and spinning in his mind in a whirl of anxiety.

There’s only one way to find out. He grits his teeth, climbs the weathered stairs, and pushes inside.

The hall is tiled in black and white, with a dark wood reception desk under an enormous staircase, over which a bank of stained glass windows stands guard, casting bright shapes across the floor. There’s a constant rush of voices bouncing off the walls, echoing. Doctors and nurses are quick-marching through on their way from one ward to another, and there’s the lingering smell of menthol, liniment, far too familiar for comfort. He swallows down the memories, his gut aching in what might be sympathy, and makes his way across to the reception desk.

The girl behind it looks up with impatience, but then she sees him and her expression softens. “Ah, Captain Bonnet. Who have you come for today?”

He’d never expected to speak the name again, and the words slip from his lips like a whispered prayer. “Major Teach. Edward Teach.”

She looks at the neatly typed list on the desk and scans down it with one neatly manicured finger, and Stede feels a swell of irritation that she doesn’t simply know where he is. The most important person in this building. And then her finger slides to a stop and she says, “Here we are. The Victoria Ward.” She gives him a small smile. “I hope you find what you’re looking for this time.”

“So do I.”

He knows this place inside and out after several weeks of this work, and he heads over to the left, beyond the great staircase. Through the door to the next hallway, the sound of happy chatter drops away slightly, and the cries of wounded men pick up instead, making him catch his breath. This place is only ever growing busier, every time he visits. Four years into this war, as more and more requests land on his desk, he’s truly beginning to wonder if it’ll ever end.

He finds his way to the door of the ward and pauses there, trying not to think about the fact that this room is usually for the amputees.

If Ed can be brave, he can be brave for Ed.

He pushes through.

~

Edward Teach is living a nightmare, that much he knows, and he has been for the last four years. Every time he thinks he’s reached the final circle of hell another one opens up in front of him.

Stuck in this hospital bed for the last couple of weeks, one surgery after another, he’s had nothing but time to remember it all.

He’d been living in Australia in 1914, working in the desert gold mines as an auditor, checking the numbers, fudging a few of them himself. He’d come into the nearest country town one winter afternoon and the whole place had been swarming with excitement. Horse-drawn carts and cars rattling up the wide main street, the old and the new together, sending up clouds of red dust. Ladies clustered outside every tea-room and salon in their pinched-waist dresses and big hats, leaning together as they shared their gossip. Blokes of every shape and size and age skipping down the street in shirtsleeves and braces, shouting to each other and laughing.

Izzy, beside him always, surveyed the whole scene with an unimpressed glare. “What the fuck.”

Ed leaned down and caught a newspaper lad by the collar as he ran past, bringing him to a sharp stop. “What’s happening here?”

And the small boy looked up at him with absolute glee, round-faced and round-eyed and innocent and yelled, “It’s war! Against the Hun!”

War was opportunity, they both knew that. He and Izzy, they’d met back in 1901, during the last war in South Africa. They’d caught each other out, in fact, doing what they do: a little bit of piracy, robbing the warmongers from the inside out. He’d done it by amending paybooks, adding a few shillings here or there; it all accumulated over time when you’d gathered a crew. Izzy had gone one step further, forging paybooks for non-existent soldiers. Instead of eliminating each other from the picture like they could have, they’d agreed to work together.

They’d never stopped. In between they’d cut a quiet swathe through the profits of the gold mines, fighting back against the rich. This war, a new war, just means another chance to do the same.

He’d been able to reactivate his old battlefield commission from the last war, sliding straight into a lieutenant rank, working up to major in the end. They’d done the training, they’d shipped out. They’d survived the first nightmare, eight months of hell on the Gallipoli Peninsula, by the skin of their teeth.

The second nightmare had unfolded in the muddy fields of the Somme, after they shipped out to France to fight on the Western Front. Fromelles was like nothing Ed had ever seen in his life. His first engagement in a whole new type of warfare, mechanised and hungry, chewing up men like they were nothing. That first battle, the German guns had thrown so much metal their way that it was like walking through a hailstorm, a swarm of bees, every single one another round of deadly force. As they struggled to cross the ground the men around him were eliminated, pulverised, reduced to nothing more than blood and bone.

He’d persisted, and he’d persisted, and he’d survived through sheer stubbornness and tactical genius and incredible luck.

And then one night, running across No Man’s Land under the thunder and rage of a barrage of shrapnel, he leapt over a coil of barbed wire and slid into a waterlogged shellhole, taking cover, and found himself face to face with Captain Stede fucking Bonnet. Nightmare number three himself. The man was splayed out on the side of the hole, boots scrabbling in the water at the bottom, trying not to slip further in. He was breathing heavily, hands clenched over the blood bubbling up from his gut. As another Verey light flared overhead and lit the whole world like searing daylight, Ed could see that his face was pale and terrified under the streaks of mud. He’d looked up at Ed with wide eyes and gasped, “You.”

“Yeah, me.” Overhead, more shells were blasting, the pressure thumping down over them, slinging stinging scraps of red-hot metal across the back of his neck. Ed should have moved. He should have saved himself. But instead he threw his pack down and dug into it, hauling through his gear until he found the correct field dressing. “You’ll be all right, mate.”

A promise none of them could make, but he’d made it anyway. He managed to stem the bleeding, managed to stop Stede from losing his guts. Kept him there, kept him safe, until the night had deepened even further and the fighting had grown more distant. By the midnight hours, Stede was shivering, shaking, and Ed shuffled closer. Pulled him into his arms, wrapped his coat around them both and and held him. Hummed a little lullaby his mother used to sing, warm against his ear.

In the morning, when the sky grew light again and the birdsong began to trickle out into the air, Ed jerked awake from a fitful sleep and thought Stede was dead. He’d had an unexpected pang of grief as he eased away from his stiff body. This man had been trying to catch him out, to crack his piracy ring for months now, the bane of his fucking existence from the day he’d marched into the officers’ mess tent in Cairo with a bright and cheerful hi all!

But something had shifted last night as they lay in the cold mud and stared up at the shattered shrapnel stars, watching the dark world bloom to brightness for a few achingly peaceful moments under every Verey light.

“I’m sorry,” Stede had whispered. “To have been such a problem. The rules—“

“The rules are made to keep people like me down,” Ed had murmured. “Don’t suppose it matters much to you, but it does to a lot of us.”

“I understand,” Stede had said, his voice growing even quieter. “I see it now.”

This morning there were shouts out there on the flat, the medics coming through looking for survivors. And just as Ed was working out how to get their attention without making himself a target, Stede gasped from the floor, and he spun back, understanding. Not dead at all. A moment later he was up and waving both arms, not one single fuck to give about snipers. “Over here!”

“Ed?”

The soft voice from the end of the bed jerks him out of his half-dreamed memory, and for a moment he thinks he’s still sleeping, still remembering. But that time, the first time, it had been Stede tucked up in the hospital bed, and Ed standing over him feeling grateful as fuck when his eyes fluttered open.

Now it’s Stede standing there at the end of Ed's bed, and his face is just the same as Ed remembers it from three months ago. He’s still golden and handsome and a little weathered and Ed’s.

He can’t do this. He slams his eyes shut and says, “No.”

There’s no movement from Stede. The ward just keeps rattling on around them both, men calling out in pain, hushed whispers from the nurses, the clank of equipment and the squeak of wheelchairs.

Stede doesn’t talk.

Stede doesn’t leave.

Ed tries to keep breathing without letting it turn into sobs, but he’s already failing at that, fuck. He gulps down the next breath. “You left,” he finally gets out. “You didn’t come.”

“I’m sorry.” Now Stede is moving, coming around the side of the bed, sitting down beside him with a squeak of springs, making the whole mattress tilt. His voice is fractured; he sounds stricken. “God, Ed, I’m so sorry.”

He can smell Stede, that familiar spice of him, the cold air still caught in his hair from outside. He can feel his warmth from here, radiating from his skin even though they’re not touching. He wants to touch him, fuck, he still does. He folds his arms tight and resists.

Stede waits for him to talk, but when it’s clear he’s not going to, he says, “I know you probably don’t want to see me at all, but I’m here for work.”

Fuck, that’s worse. He didn’t come for Ed at all. He bites his tongue hard enough to taste the copper tang of blood and says nothing.

“Edward,” Stede says.

Persistent fucker, doesn’t make himself easy to ignore. Ed ignores him anyway.

“Ed.”

And then Stede shifts again, and suddenly his hand is sliding over Ed’s, warm and smooth, and Ed cracks his eyes open to look. Stede’s stare is so full of sadness that it pulls an answering sob from his chest. He says it again. “You left.”

Hazel eyes, always so beautiful in the sun, catching and reflecting prisms of blue and gold and brown. In here, the light filtering through the pale curtains is too dull to see them properly. “I didn’t want to.”

There’s so much more Stede wants to say, Ed can see it. He doesn’t know if he wants to hear it yet. “What do you want?”

You, that’s the only right answer. But Stede takes a breath and lets it out. “I work for the Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau now. I’m a searcher, trying to understand the fate of men declared missing in action by interviewing those who might have seen them last.”

“Oh.”

He fiddles with the manila folder on his lap. “I’ve been assigned to investigate the case of Private Lucius Spriggs.”

Oh.

Stede ignores his renewed silence. “And since you were his commanding officer, and it seems one of the last people to see him alive, I hoped you might give me a statement.”

He’s being very neutral about it, and Jesus. Anyone else in this room might assume something basic here. Just a guy doing his job, looking for a random soldier because the case has been assigned to him.

But Ed knows better. This is Stede. This is Lucius, his right-hand man, before Stede walked out on all of them. This is his friend.

And Ed, yeah. Ed knows exactly what happened to him. “Can’t remember,” he says instead. “All a bit of a blur.”

“I’m sure,” Stede says sympathetically. “Take your time.”

This is not the first time he’s had a searcher through this week. And Stede’s not saying that, but he knows that he knows it, too. There’s been a steady stream of questions about the others in their company. Privates Boodhari, Nilsson, Black, Buttons, Roche, Feeney. All missing, every one. Jimenez and French, Fang and Khan, he knows where they are.

“Why Spriggs?” Ed asks, before he can stop himself. “Why are you here for him, and none of the rest?”

“Perhaps you can tell me,” Stede says, low and measured. And then, after a pause, he takes pity. “He’s the only one unaccounted for now.”

Ed snaps to look at him again. “What?”

Stede’s gazing at him, no less sympathetic than before. “We found the crew.”

Then that means… he knows. He knows about how it all fell apart. He already knows. He tries to take a breath, but his chest is suddenly heavy. “They’re okay?”

“They’re all fine.” He rubs his hand over Ed’s, reassuring, not pulling away. “Just worried about Lucius, as are his people back home.” Fuck. Ed’s trying to breathe, he really is, but the air keeps catching in his chest, and Stede’s face finally shifts from weirdly fucking serene to concerned. “Edward, are you all right?”

No, is the answer. No, not by any measure.

No is pretty fucking obvious.

Obvious enough that Stede finally stands up, turns away from him, calls—distant, echoing—for a doctor, as Ed’s vision goes black around the edges, and then the darkness consumes him completely.

~

Back in his little flat in London later that evening, Stede pours himself a brandy with shaking hands, the decanter rattling against the glass. He fills it close to the brim, and then he picks it up and gulps it down like water, ignoring the burn in his throat. When he’s drained it and set the glass down, he plants both hands on the edge of the sideboard and tries to steady his breathing.

Edward, oh, god. No less beautiful than he’d ever been, his short hair curling in perfect waves on top of his head, silver and onyx, the stubble of a beard growing through.

Shattered, though. Not his body, not the leg that had caught the brunt of the shrapnel, no, thankfully they’d been able to save it, though his knee will be a pain, but… emotionally. Stede had done that to him. He’d never believed he could have such an impact on a man like Ed, but he’s forced to confront the reality that he did.

And now Lucius is missing because of it.

He could push, he could pick at the seams, he could turn over every stone until he hauls out the truth that he already knows. And if he did, perhaps that would be the end of everything for Ed, too. They’ve already lost Lucius, haven’t they? He can’t stand to add Ed to the terrible toll of this war.

Perhaps he doesn’t have a choice.

It could only ever have gone like this, couldn’t it? He tries to tell himself that, but he’s a searcher, a man who unravels the detail of every moment gone wrong, until he finds his way to the heart of what happened. In his darkest moments, he unravels himself and finds… a continuous puzzle.

He slumps into his armchair, closes his eyes, and lets his mind wander back.

“I’m married,” he’d gasped into Ed’s mouth, his beautiful body pressing Stede into the bed of the little French inn they’d found on their only day of leave. They’d already stripped down to their smalls, and Ed was grinding against him in a constant press of hardness that lit a fire through his entire body, so focussed. Ed had gone still and pulled back, brows drawn together in confusion.

“What?”

“Married,” Stede stumbled out again, holding so tightly to Ed’s hips that he was sure there might be bruises tomorrow. “To Mary. Two children, Alma and Louis. They’re at home with their grandmother while I’m here and Mary’s nursing.”

Ed glanced down at them, tangled together in such a hurry that they’d barely got the door closed, packs thrown on the floor, clothes strewn everywhere, a shirt hanging from the light fixture and another from the curtain rod. Ed had tattoos winding down his arms, scattered across his chest. He was stunning. “Does it matter?”

“No.” Stede leaned up and kissed him again, pulled him back down, desperate to show him.

But Ed stopped him. “Why mention it, mate?”

Why indeed? He didn’t know how to articulate it. Because in that moment when Stede had enlisted for war, he’d stood in the line at the recruitment office and told himself he wasn’t running away, he was doing his bit. In all those moments where he’d applied his civilian accountancy skills, pored over the paybooks, and found the irregularities, and zoned in on Major Teach being at the centre of each one... Throughout the first court martial as Ed had stared back at him from the dock, magnetic and brooding and utterly lovely, he’d told himself two rights can’t fix a wrong, but perhaps it’s worth trying anyway. Ed had been acquitted, of course. Stede found he was glad about it.

And later, later, in that shellhole on that cold October night, Ed’s arms wrapped around him as his life fluttered and beat against the bars, so close to breaking out and flying free, he’d thought of Mary and the children with what felt like his last breath.

And then he’d taken another, and with the first new breath of the rest of his life, he’d thought of Ed.

“I need you to know that my marriage is over,” Stede said. “That I’m here because I choose this. I choose you.”

Ed’s eyes crinkled at the edges, scrunching with his smile the way Stede loved so much. “I choose you, too.”

It had all been a wonderful blur after that, clothes divested, skin slipping on skin, Ed’s mouth and Ed’s fingers and Ed’s hot breath mixing with his own, soft sweet kisses and then the driving force of his love buried deep inside Stede, because love it truly was, he saw that now.

He hadn’t seen it then. He’d lain awake in that bed later that night with Ed snoring in his arms, staring at the ceiling, and thought only of lust. Every cell in his body had turned toward Ed, aflame with the most desperate need. He wanted, oh, how very much he wanted. He’d never let himself want like this before, and he couldn’t imagine it ever being any different.

“We’ll desert,” Ed said the next morning, running a slow, considered fingertip around Stede’s nipple. “Change our names. Go somewhere like… China.”

China? “That’s… quite far.”

“That’s the point!” Ed was sparkling, almost effervescent with enthusiasm. “Our old lives will be gone. Dead. Never were.”

Mary. The kids. His job. The house back in Australia, everything they’d worked for. He’d left it all behind once already, hadn’t he? For Ed, he’d give up anything. “Yes.”

Ed’s breath caught in his throat as he held Stede tighter. “Yeah?”

“I think so.” Hell, the uncertainty was swarming him, even as he said it, because there was no other answer. “Yes.”

“Fucking… this is great!” Ed kissed Stede hard and almost bounded out of the bed, clambering over him, throwing on his clothes in a flurry. “You meet me by the fountain this evening. Think up some new names. Cool ones. I’ll sort out the rest.”

That had been it. The last time Ed had seen him before today. Pausing at the door of their room with that fond smile on his face, so full of hope. Stede had been so sure that he could work up the courage to do it. Walk away from this war, the rules be damned. Start a new life with Ed, the only thing that mattered. Leave his crew behind, his family, his entire sense of purpose up to that point, turn all of his focus toward Ed instead. Ed was everything.

He’d dressed slowly that day, each of those thoughts sinking into him like lead weights, his apprehension growing. How much longer could this war truly last, before everyone was dead and there was nobody left to fight? Surely it was almost over. Surely it wouldn’t matter to anyone if he was there or he was gone.

Mary. Alma. Louis. No matter what else he thought about, their faces kept coming back to him.

And then he’d stepped out of the inn in the twilight, and paused in the cobblestoned street, checking to make sure no military picquet was marching through. That pause, that single moment in time, was all it had taken for everything to fall to pieces. Because behind him there’d been the sudden click of a pistol, and Chauncey Badminton’s unmistakeable voice had growled, “Come with me.”

He blinks, snaps out of the memory. He’s sitting in his flat, here, now, and Chauncey can’t hurt him. His breath is still rattling in his throat all the same as he stares, watery-eyed, into this sparse space of his. It holds the most basic furniture he could find. This armchair for one. A narrow cot of a bed, never expecting to share it with anyone since Ed’s been gone from his life. It’s cold in here, too, and he drags himself up from the chair and lights the fire. When that’s crackling in the grate, he sinks down onto the floor with his back to the wall and stares at the lone window, as the shadows gather and the day shifts back into night.

You’re a monster. A plague. Chauncey’s voice echoes in his head. You defile beautiful things.

It’s true. It had been true then, and it’s still true now. That night he’d walked away from Chauncey’s fallen body after the man tripped and discharged his pistol through his own eye, stunned at the horrifying turn of events, again. The town was full of the busyness of daily life and the added rattle and roar of the military marching through, the shells still thundering on the distant front, and not one person had noticed the gunshot. Stede had made his shaky way to the edge of the alleyway where Chauncey had dragged him, swearing to end his life, accidentally ending his own.

From there he could see Ed sitting on the edge of the fountain, so close, his face turned up to watch the last shreds of colour leave the evening sky. And he'd looked so lovely and at peace that Stede had known in an instant, he’d known, that he couldn’t bring him to any more ruin than he already had.

He’d turned and walked away.

Kept walking through the night, along country lanes and muddy roads, past copses of trees blasted into toothpicks. Past ammunition trains and horse-drawn artillery and supply carts, past legions of exhausted marching men heading the other way, toward the front, until he’d blinked in the daylight and found himself standing on the doorstep of the hospital reserved for mental cases.

“Nurse Allamby,” he’d managed to say to the orderly who met him. “Please tell her I’m home.”

And then he’d slid to the floor in a haze of exhaustion, barely aware of the ruckus around him.

~

“Two months in the mental hospital,” he tells Oluwande the next morning, as they sit in a park with the pigeons pecking around their feet. “Diagnosed with debility and neurasthenia, though I've heard them calling it shell shock lately. Thankfully Mary was there to advocate for me, and eventually they ruled me permanently unfit for further service and sent me over here.”

I don’t fit here anymore, do I?

She’d been so sympathetic, his soon-to-be-former wife, even though he’d woken to find her considering a lethal dose of medication just to get rid of him. Once he’d talked to her about Ed and explained that he had no intention of returning to either the war or their marriage, she’d been more than happy to pull some strings for that diagnosis. A little fuckery. A relief, because it wasn’t entirely untrue, either. Since Chauncey, he’d jumped out of his skin with the slightest slammed door, and a round of fireworks was enough to put him on the floor.

“We were all worried, man.” Oluwande tosses a handful of seed, and the birds flutter and dive on it. “You and Major Teach just disappeared one night, and then only he came back.”

“Ed went back to you,” Stede says, whispered, repeating it to himself. He knows that, of course. “He’d been planning to leave.”

“He wasn’t happy about it, I’ll give you the tip.” Oluwande shakes his head. “All seemed all right at first. He was sad, but then Lucius went into his dugout and talked to him for a bit, and when he came out he was… different. Sat with us around the fire with us that evening, sang a few songs, seemed hopeful.”

“What changed?”

“I don’t know. Izzy went in there next and he came out different again.”

Israel bloody Hands, always there when things went wrong. “And Lucius?” Stede’s supposed to be writing all of this down for his report, but he’s not. He can’t. Not if it incriminates Ed, not if it risks the crew being caught.

Oluwande sighs. “We went over the top near Beaurevoir. Lucius stayed behind with Ed to take notes, and when we came back he was just… gone.”

The wind slides over his neck, sneaking around the edges of his scarf, suddenly cold. “Gone.”

“Gone,” Oluwande confirms. “No sign of him.” He gives Stede a grim smile. “No body. No… pieces.”

“All right, yes, I understand.” He swallows. “And that was when you were all—?”

“Abandoned? The next night. Went out on a raid. Got ourselves cornered, and by the time we got out of it Ed had… well. He’d left us behind. Took Jim and Frenchie back with him, and left the rest of us to our fate.”

“That doesn’t sound like Ed,” Stede manages to get out. “I can hardly imagine it.”

“It happened,” Oluwande says gently. “Hard as it may be to hear it.”

It’s beyond hard. It’s digging into his heart, sharp and unforgiving. “So you were captured.”

“No, but near thing. We managed to fight our way out and we hid in a ruined church for a few days. Buttons and Roach nearly ate the Swede, but we managed to convince them out of it. By the time we got back to the line, Ed and the crew were all gone.”

His mouth falls open unbidden. “But the orders!”

“Like Ed cared much about the rules.” Oluwande scoffs. “He’d managed to have them transferred, Jim told me later. Said the rest of us would be along soon. Maybe he forged the transfer, I don’t know.”

Ed’s always been brilliant at forgery, so brilliant that Stede had never managed to nail him down for it, even when he'd been hunting for those answers. “But you’d been reported missing in between.”

“Yeah.” Oluwande shrugs, tosses out the last of his bird seed. “Figured we may as well take advantage. Sneaked off the next night before they’d been able to muster, made it over here a week later.”

They’ve all found their way back. “So you’ve all deserted.”

Oluwande scratches the back of his neck. “I’m going to be honest with you Stede, we’ve all had enough.”

He hums in sympathy. “So has everyone.”

“We’ve done our bit. Damned if I’m going to keep killing other people or letting them try to kill me for no good reason.” Across the park there are children playing on the roundabout, three of them, shrieking with laughter that floats across to where they’re sitting. An innocent sound, like an echo of a world they've all left behind. “I keep hearing murmurs that it’s almost over. All we’ve got to do is keep moving. Use the skills Ed taught us. And you, of course. And we’ll be fine.”

He trusts them. He does. And he’s been ready for weeks to support Ed and the crew in any piracy they might decide to enact, sides thoroughly switched. But… “This still doesn’t tell us what happened to Lucius.”

Oluwande sighs. “I think he’s dead, Captain. I’m sorry.”

So are most of the people in his case files. For Lucius, he simply cannot give up hoping. “And you think Ed killed him.”

“Hard to say.” That’s a yes, just… disguised as something far more non-committal, far less devastating. "Maybe."

“Thank you for the information, Oluwande, and… for your honesty.”

It gives him very little more than he’d already had. He farewells Oluwande, watches him melt away into the shadows, where Jim’s already waiting, and feels glad to know they’re all out of the firing line.

He’s almost there. He’s so close to the answers.

He’s not sure he wants them anymore.

~

There’s one final stop to make before he sees Ed again, and he finds his way to a different military hospital, this one down by the docks. It’s just as busy as Ed’s, and the staff nod to him as he passes through the wards.

He finds the man he’s looking for in a bed at the very end, staring out the window.

“Hello, Izzy.”

Israel Hands, Ed’s closest friend for all these years. He turns slowly, his face stony. “Stede fucking Bonnet. Thought you were dead.”

He gestures cheerfully to his very alive self. “Unfortunately not, still kicking.”

“What do you want?”

He eases himself into the chair beside the bed. “I’m investigating the disappearance of Private Lucius Spriggs. I'm sure you remember him. Have you any idea what might have happened?”

Izzy’s eyes are flint-hard. “No.”

Well, that was simple. He sits there for another few moments, in case Izzy discovers anything else he’d like to say, but he volunteers nothing. At last Stede nods to his foot, bandaged. “What happened to you?”

There’s a flicker of emotion across his face, just a brief hint. “Gunshot wound. Took off my toe.”

“Hmm.” An injury renowned as one that people inflict on themselves to escape their service. “I suppose you’ve been lucky, then. You got sent to Blighty without having to lose anything important.”

This time Izzy’s lip curls properly. “You wouldn’t know a thing about what’s important, Bonnet. Not if it was staring you right in the face.”

He catches his breath. “I suppose we can all learn from our mistakes.”

Izzy looks away from him then, arms folded, staring out the window.

He’ll get nothing more, he knows that already.

His only remaining chance is Ed.

~

Ed’s up and sitting in the garden in his damn rattan wheelchair the next day, blanket over his knees like a damn grandmother, when Stede comes back. Ed sees him walking up over the lawn and twists in the seat, like he can somehow get away. But his knee’s fucking broken and he can’t do it, and so he sits there and curses to himself until Stede arrives. Still golden. Still with that face full of sadness and regret, and Ed can’t fucking stand it.

“When are you going to leave me alone?”

Stede settles onto the bench next to Ed’s chair with a heavy sigh. “When I have the answers, I suppose.”

He’s not planning on giving those, but hell. If it’s a way not to have to suffer seeing Stede like this, maybe he should. “What if the boy just had enough and left?”

“Oh, I’d love that to be true, Edward.” Stede’s sad eyes shift his way. “If you can tell me where he is, at least we’ll all have closure.”

Where he’s buried, Stede means. Ed’s lunch turns over in his stomach. “I’ll let you know if I find out. How’s your wife?” he asks casually, like it’s not a whole artillery shell lobbed in Stede’s direction.

He takes the blast graciously. “Last I heard, she was doing well. Met a lovely American doctor named Doug. They’re planning to marry when this is all over.”

Ed’s eyebrows take a journey to his hairline all on their own. “Didn’t think that was legal, being married to two people at once.”

Stede smiles, just a small one. “A wise man I once knew said, the rules are made to keep people like us down.” He’s quoting Ed’s words right back to him, only us means something different this time, and Ed feels that. People like them, who want each other regardless of what society thinks is right. “Besides, the divorce is already underway, very amicable. She helped me understand that we’d never loved one another at all. And it took both of us falling in love with other people to see it.”

There’s a light breeze wafting across the lawn. The quiet pop-pop of people hitting tennis balls somewhere nearby. A bird calling out a farewell as it flies overhead, leaves rustling in the breeze, everything quiet and calm, and Ed’s heart racing like a freight train in his chest all of a sudden. “You fell in love with someone.” And as if there’s not barbed wire now winding around his throat, “Good for you, man.”

“Edward.” This time Stede’s sounding exasperated. Ed won’t do him the favour of looking at him. “I fell in love months ago.”

“Oh.” Fuck, just put a bullet in his heart and be done with it. “Great.”

“Edward.” Stede’s shuffled to the very end of the bench now, leaning across, and then he says, in that low commanding voice, “Look at me.”

Ed does, like there’s no other alternative. And Stede’s eyes are brimming with tears, and his hand’s sitting right there, reaching, offering, and Ed’s pulled to him like Stede’s some kind of magnet and so is he, fingers connecting with that constant electricity they’ve always shared.

“I love you,” Stede says, his chin stubbornly set. “I am irrevocably, utterly, dementedly in love with you, and I always have been, and I always will be.”

Ed blinks away his own tears. That face, he’s dreamed about it every night. He’s thought about Stede every minute of the day, swinging from rage to hate to sadness to nostalgia to pure desire and back again. He’s had far too much time to think. “I loved you, too.”

Stede sits back heavily with a little intake of breath. Loved. He doesn’t let go of Ed’s hand, though. He goes through it for a bit, every feeling etched on his face, and then he says, “I did an impossibly terrible thing to you, and I’ll regret that every day of my life. Chauncey snatched me before I could get to the fountain, but I could have come back—“

“What?” Ed says. “What did you say?”

“Chauncey,” Stede says, like it’s not important. “Badminton, you remember. Childhood bully, happened across him in Amiens, kept running into him everywhere after. He was convinced that it was my fault his brother, Nigel, had died. But Nigel was shot by a German sniper, and if he happened to be standing up because he was arguing with me, then that was on him.”

Ed finds that his mouth is hanging open, and he closes it. “He blamed you for his brother’s death.”

“Unjustifiably! With all the evidence before me and a heavy heaping of guilt, even I can only conclude that it was not my fault.” His fingers squeeze tighter in Ed’s. “A different story when it comes to you, my love. That was entirely my fault.”

“Uh, I don’t know, sounds a lot like it could have been Badminton’s fault as well.”

Stede laughs. “Are you defending me all of a sudden?”

Fucking no. But. “Why didn’t you tell me, Stede? I could have helped.”

He looks away. The hospital is up on a hill, the whole town sprawled out before it, on the other side of that lawn. There’s an inn down there Ed can’t stop staring at, just like the one they stayed in that night in France, and he can see Stede’s eye’s been drawn there, too, remembering. For a moment, that memory trembles in the air between them, gasped breaths and words murmured against necks. “I was afraid I’d ruined you.”

“Mate, we’ve literally all been ruined by this fucking war.” It’ll be over by Christmas, they’d said at the start. It’s been four Christmases now, and they’re still here. Millions of others are dead. “It’s bigger than you or me. The only thing we’ve got left is, fuck. Putting the pieces of ourselves back together.”

Stede shuffles closer, hits the limit of the bench, presses his knee against Ed’s chair. “I want that. I want to help you, I want your help, I want—I want us to have a future. Together, Ed.” He bites his lip. “But Lucius.”

Ed scrubs his hands over his face. The beard is growing in, now that he’s out of the trenches and not required to shave all the time. Hair’s getting longer, too. He’s coming back into himself, growing back. And for the first time in months, he lets himself consider the possibility. Him. Stede. Finding a future together. Being friends again, being more.

But… Lucius.

He can’t step around it anymore. This is the end of the line in one way or another, and there’s either something on the other side of it, or there’s not. He can’t keep avoiding it.

“I pushed him,” he says. “Off the duckboards.”

Stede just stares at him. “Where?”

“At Beaurevoir. You were gone. He was there. Kept telling me it was okay to feel things, that I could just… I don’t know, fuck, start again.” He looks up, pleading. “He was right, but I just—I couldn’t hear it anymore. Couldn’t be soft and still get through that. Had to be hard for that, and he was too much softness, Stede. More than I deserved.” He’s pleading for Stede to hear it, to understand.

“You deserved every softness,” Stede says steadily, but he doesn’t waver. “So you pushed Lucius. Off the duckboards?”

“Yeah.” Into the mud that sucked people in and swallowed them down. They’d all seen it happen, another horror beyond all imagining until this war. They all knew to avoid it. Some of those mud patches were deeper than a standing man, and the people who fell in might never be seen again. “Pushed him in, walked away. Ended it all right there. I got my knee smashed a week later and I wound up here.”

Stede’s silent for only a moment. “He never deserved that.”

“No.” Ed regrets it pretty fucking greatly now. “Do what you need to do, Stede. Report me if you have to.”

He does the only thing he can do, and shifts in his chair to turn his back on Stede. On everything they could have had, then and now and into the future. He’s not a good person, and Stede can’t help but see that now.

“Ed,” Stede says, his voice drifting on the breeze. “Please.”

All he says, over his shoulder, is, “Take care, mate.”

Stede doesn’t leave at first. In fact he reaches out and presses a warm hand to Ed’s back, just below his shoulder. But then the hand pulls away, and the next time Ed’s able to look up through the silent tears, Stede is gone.

It's just Ed and his memories left, maybe forever.

~

Stede cries in the car. Finally lets it all out, lets himself sob over the steering wheel, cursing himself over and over again. He did this, not only Chauncey, but to Ed, and through him Lucius. It’s his fault that Lucius is dead, and it’s his fault that Ed’s going to have to live with this, too.

He makes it back to the Bureau office somehow, and sits in front of his typewriter, numb. The room is in motion all around him, his fellow workers industriously hunting for the answers that will bring peace to families at home. Most of the time, peace means closure. Finality. Confirmation that the end has already been written on a loved one’s story, because nothing hurts more than waiting for an answer.

Perhaps that’s why he was driven here to begin with, in penance for making Ed wait.

There are dozens of his fellow searchers at the long desks around the room, most of them women, a veritable hive of busy bees, the rhythm of their work marked by the click-clacking of typewriters. There’s a drift of cigarette smoke settling somewhere near the ceiling, and the corkboard walls are covered in battlefield maps and photographs and circulars. In the distance, a telephone rings with an incessant jangle.

Eventually Stede manages to gather enough resolve to thread a new sheet of paper into his own typewriter, and he slides the carriage to the start.

SPRIGGS, Lucius (Pte)

28th Battalion AIF

Missing in Action- Beaurevoir, France- October 1918

The next sheet is shorter than he'd hoped, but only as long as it can be.

Witness Statement:

TEACH, Edward (Maj)

28th Battalion AIF

Commanding officer of C Company. Last saw Spriggs at Beaurevoir on 6 October during an advance. Did not see his ultimate fate, considers that he may have slipped in the trench unnoticed.

He adds one more section at the bottom, too short to need a whole separate page.

HANDS, Israel (Sgt)

28th Battalion AIF

Recalls Spriggs having been with the unit. Does not recall any additional details of his final days.

He can’t type anything further. Can’t incriminate Oluwande or any of the rest of the crew, wasn't there to give his own answers. He draws a deep breath, pulls the paper from the typewriter, and inserts the next piece.

Dear Mrs. Spriggs,

I have queried your son’s fate with a number of people who knew him. As yet, I do not have an exact answer to provide, but I will continue to search until I find one, you have my promise. All of those I spoke with remember him as a kind young man who never hesitated to assist others, and you should be very proud.

He tries to maintain a professional distance in these letters, in the dozens he’s already sent to other families who almost inevitably learn, at some point, that their son or brother or husband has been dead all along.

But this is Lucius, who was so kind to him, so patient in helping him understand his own feelings for Ed, and he cannot leave it there.

I served with him myself before his disappearance, and I consider him a good friend. I wish I could bring all of us some peace with the concrete knowledge of where he is now, but alas, this has not yet been possible. I share in your concern and I hope very much to have good news soon.

He’s staring at the page as it blurs with tears. Never give false hope, that’s what they’ve always been told. Honesty, clarity, sensitivity. Prepare them for the inevitable. Don’t draw out the pain.

He doesn’t want to lose hope. He can’t give it up yet.

There’s a light touch at his shoulder, and he looks up to find Evelyn Higgins standing there with her cigarette dangling from her lips, her usual eyepatch in place. The coordinator of this whole place, the ferocious heartbeat behind it all. Her codename is Miss Blue, but he’s only ever seen her wear red.

“You working on the Spriggs case, Bonnet?”

“I am.” He manages to dash away a stray tear surreptitiously. Evelyn doesn’t take too kindly to perceived weakness. “Have you heard something?”

“Just met a guy down at the Royal Infirmary for a different case.” She blows a puff of smoke out the side of her mouth. “He mentioned Spriggs in passing. Thought you might want to talk with him.”

She slides a torn piece of paper onto his desk, claps him hard on the back, and walks away.

FANG, David

28th Battalion AIF

Stede’s stomach lurches one more time, and he’s already standing. He leaves the letter unfinished in the typewriter, snatches his coat, and runs for the door.

~

“Fang,” he breathes, relieved to see the man sitting upright in his hospital bed, that jolly smile still on his face. “I’m so glad to see you.”

“You too, Cap.” He waves down the length of the bed and back up again. “Got myself a nice case of mumps, earned myself a little vacation.”

“Not much of a vacation.” Stede pulls the chair up to the side of the bed. “How have you been?”

“I know what you want to know.” He cuts right past the niceties. “About Lucius.”

“Yes.”

He glances across the room, but all the nurses are occupied, and most of the people in the other beds are snoozing. This hospital has high ceilings, smaller rooms. There are white curtains slung around each bed, and sunlight spills across the floor between them. Fang beckons for Stede to lean closer and whispers, “He’s alive.”

It’s possible Stede has never felt so much relief. It punches through him in a stream of light, sweeping away all of the darkest edges of his grief. “Oh, thank god. Thank god, Fang, where is he?”

“Somewhere safe,” he says. “With the rest of the crew.”

“I just saw Oluwande this week!” He can’t help but feel indignant. “Has he been there long?”

“No, no, just turned up now. Pete called to tell me.” Another glance to see who’s looking, but nobody is. “I pulled him out of the mud myself.”

More relief, all of the pain melting. “You’re a hero, Fang. You’ve saved everything.” Lucius. Stede. Ed. All of them. “Where’s he been?”

“Hiding out on a little farm in France. Kept him down in the cellar. He was afraid Ed might come after him again.”

He huffs. “Ed will absolutely not be doing that.”

“I know. We all know.” Fang’s known Ed longer than almost anyone, other than Izzy. “Got himself back over here on a little fishing boat, disguised as an old washerwoman.”

He tries to imagine Lucius jammed in the bottom of a boat, and comes up short. “Not exactly his style, but as needs must, I suppose.”

“We're going to be fine. All you have to do is tell him how you feel.” He’s not talking about Lucius anymore. “You go to that man and don’t leave his side.”

“Never again, Fang, I can promise you that.”

He does as he’s bid without pause, thanking Fang all over again, exiting as fast as he can. When he strides outside again, he comes to a crunching halt on the gravel drive, because everything feels oddly different. Down the hill, there are church bells ringing, not the usual time, and Stede looks around. In the hospital courtyard nurses and soldiers alike are holding each other and crying, laughing. One soldier is swinging a nurse in a wild circle, her legs flying through the air, her skirts a blur.

“What on earth is going on?”

He says it to himself, but there’s a lad running past at full pelt, coming down the road from the school with his hat clenched in his hand. He turns and yells over his shoulder, “Peace!”

It should be a sunny day for this, surely, but it’s not. The world has not forgotten all that’s happened, just because it’s over. The clouds are pressing low and grey, and Stede takes one breath after another.

Peace.

He’ll never know it until he’s by Ed’s side again.

~

When he bursts through the door of the original hospital’s ward, having dashed past reception and down the hall, dodging laughing nurses and diving past invalided soldiers dancing on their crutches—

Ed’s not there.

Everyone else is in the same high spirits he’s seen as he made his way here, chattering excitedly. He catches hold of a nurse with bright eyes and asks her. “Edward Teach?”

“Discharged this afternoon,” she says. “He missed all the festivities, poor lad!”

Stede makes his way back out, slowly now, with his heart hammering in his throat. Where could Ed be? Where would he go? He stops outside, looking down over the lawn where they sat just this morning, and all of a sudden he knows.

He makes it to the inn at the bottom of the hill on foot, running like a madman, and skids to a stop out the front, catching his breath. The place is ramshackle, stone and mortar, slate tiles on the roof. Just like that one in France, and it squeezes his heart just to see it. The owner barrels into him just as he opens the front door, setting them both stumbling off kilter.

“Peace!” he shouts.

“I’d heard,” Stede replies. “Do you have a guest by the name of Edward Teach?”

He’s almost jigging as he passes by Stede, apparently without a care for who’s coming and going. “Aye, ground floor, end of the hall!”

He makes his way through the narrow hallway as the church bells keep ringing outside, so many of them now that it’s like birdsong all over again, as if the whole sky has been taken over with joy. The contrast to the constant thudding of gunfire that lives in his mind is almost jarring.

He passes door after door until he gets to the one at the end, and stops. This is it. This is forever.

It’s quiet in here now, everyone outside, heading for the square. He lifts his hand and knocks.

“Go away,” Ed yells from inside. “Not interested.”

And Stede would go away. He’d listen on any other day, but today, no, he can’t accept that. He tries the handle and finds that it turns. Opens it and pushes through, and there’s Ed sitting on a seat by the window, staring out into the grey day with his crutches propped beside him. He’s been crying, Stede can see that from here, and he goes over and goes down on his knees in front of Ed.

“Lucius is alive, Ed. They found him. He’s fine.”

Ed snaps to look down at him, cheeks streaked with tears, brows drawing together. “What?”

Stede runs his hands down Ed’s calves, prepared to beg. “It’s over. The war, the worry, the search, it’s all over.” All the love he’s tried to capture and contain is spilling over now. “Please, Ed. I choose you, if you’ll choose me, too.”

For a long moment it seems Ed is going to tell him no, as is his right. But then he reaches down and grabs Stede by the shirtfront, and pulls him up and almost into his lap. Stede braces both hands on the back of the chair for balance as he puts his forehead to Ed’s, laughing and crying all at once.

Ed's eyes are shining, warm in the daylight. “I choose you, Stede Bonnet.”

Stede bends in and kisses Ed then, for the first time since France. Presses their lips together softly at first, and then with increasing desperation, lapping into Ed’s mouth, giving him everything he can, until they’re both breathless with it.

When at last they pull apart again, Stede says, “Where will we go?”

The sky is the limit, now. Ed huffs another laugh and says, “I’ll go wherever you are.”

A new beginning, then, for all of them.

He’s been so lost all his life. Now, here with Ed, he’s found.