REC: to live with your soul in the grave

[silverusagi]

to live with your soul in the grave (7558 words) by nameless_bliss
Rating: Teen And Up
Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Blackbeard | Edward Teach/Stede Bonnet, Blackbeard | Edward Teach & Mary Allamby Bonnet
Additional Tags: Misunderstandings, Grief/Mourning, Brief suicidal thoughts, Introspection, Angst with a Hopeful Ending

A brilliant 'Ed meets Mary' fic. In this one, Ed goes full Heathcliff and digs up Stede's grave and then just lies there in misery until Mary stumbles across him.

A woman stands a handful of feet away. Ed is disoriented for a moment—but then he realizes she’s wearing black, clutching flowers, so he supposes it makes more sense for her to be here than him. He sighs. He’s not in any sort of mood to deal with this. He opens his mouth—

“What the fuck are you doing?” she snaps.

And Ed is so thrown that he mumbles, “Fuck are you doing?” before he can stop himself.

“I was going to bring flowers to my husband’s grave,” she says evenly, “but then I found that someone has desecrated it.”

“Mary,” he says. The name feels foreign in his mouth.

“How do—?” she starts. But she’s sharper than that, and a moment later she says, “You sailed with him.”

Ed doesn’t feel the need to confirm.

“He talked about you,” Mary says, after a stretch of uneasy silence. “Wouldn’t ever fucking shut up about all of it, actually,” she adds, and Ed feels an odd pang somewhere in his chest. “So, which one are you? Calico Jack? Izzy Hands?”

Ed could almost laugh, because of course she thinks he’s one of the bastards. Then again, he reckons she’s right. “What did he ever tell you about Blackbeard?”

She shrugs. “Not much. Brought up the name once or twice, but. It was all about the name, right? He never said anything that mattered, just tacked ‘Blackbeard’ onto every story like a… a bragging right.”

Ed grits his teeth against the unexpected twist of that knife. But it shouldn’t be surprising. Stede didn’t abandon Ed just to go home and make small talk about him to his wife. If Stede had anything nice to say about him, he wouldn’t have fucking left in the first place, would he?

“But you’re not Blackbeard,” she says.

“Aren’t I?”

“You don’t have a beard.”

Ed feels his lip twitch. “It’s coming in.”