You're so keen for us all to be friends.” Izzy’s voice drips with scorn. “That's not how a sailing ship works. If you make friends then you have to watch them fucking die. It's not worth it.”
“I don't believe that's true.”
“There’s a fucking surprise.”
“I think we are friends now, you and I,” Stede persists, “whether you want to call it that or not. Just like you're friends with the crew. Oh, don't try to deny it! Denying it won't make it feel any less painful to lose one of us, will it? You can't go through life preemptively cauterising wounds that don't even exist yet.”
Izzy huffs. “It’s done me alright so far.”
“Has it?”
Silence again.
“Why did you lie to me about whether you and Edward had been intimate?”
“Been intimate. Jesus, can’t you just say fucked like a normal person?”
“Fucked,” Stede replies, promptly, just to see the look on Izzy’s face. It’s worth it - he looks like he’d have been less shocked if Stede had slapped him. “You lied about whether you and Ed had fucked.” The word feels a little strange in his mouth, but he persists. Pirates talk like this, he tells himself. Izzy talks like this, and he’s the properest pirate Stede’s ever met - even more so than Ed, who has clearly had enough of the entire profession. “But I think it wasn’t just fucking, was it?”
Izzy closes his eyes, as if even looking at Stede while they talk about this is too mortifying. “Not for me,” he admits.
Right, Stede thinks. It appears that this is happening.
Because you loved him,” he says, as gently as he can. “I think you still do.”
Izzy opens one eye and fixes it on him. “You going to gloat?”
“Is that really what you think of me?”
“You know what I think of you.”
But the funny thing is, Stede’s not really sure that he does.
“Izzy. You’re not answering the question. Why did you lie?”
A pause, and then - “I thought you might not like it,” Izzy confesses, very quietly. “Look, you don’t understand what it was like when you left, what it did to him. He was a shell of himself, I barely recognised him. I couldn’t risk ruining it all again, it’d kill him and I…fuck.” He scrubs at his hair, messing it from its usual pomaded neatness. “I don’t - hate… how things are right now. I’m actually starting to like it here, god help me, and I thought if you found out about me and Eddie you might make him send me away.” He looks Stede in the eye. “You could,” he states, as calmly as if they were speaking about the weather. “You know you could, if you wanted to - you did it once before. There’d be bugger all I could do to stop it.”
Stede considers this. He doesn’t actually think it’s true, is the thing. Not any more - perhaps not ever. “I don’t know if that’s as certain as you think it is. You know, when I won our duel–” Izzy makes a rude sound that Stede generously chooses to ignore, “–and you left the ship, Ed wasn’t happy then, either.”
“First I’ve heard of it,” Izzy says, frowning in suspicion.
“Yes, well, it wasn’t quite as… dramatic as the whole, uh, kraken situation.”
“No?”
“No. He just seemed bored. And, looking back, somewhat
depressed, I think. Nothing interested him, he just kept saying he wanted to leave.” At the time, Stede had been in denial about it. Telling himself that Ed was missing the adventure of his former crew’s piratical antics, rather than Izzy in particular. “I even planned a whole treasure hunting expedition on St Augustine to try to keep him entertained, I bought a real treasure map and everything.” He gives a self-deprecating little laugh. “Pretty silly, really.”
“Blackbeard, walking round with a fucking treasure map?” Izzy shakes his head, scandalised. “Fuck me.”
“He had fun, in the end,” Stede protests. “I think.”
“Course he did. That’s exactly the kind of stupid, unnecessary bollocks he loves.”
Stede smiles brightly for a moment, and then considers that stupid, unnecessary bollocks Ed loves might also be a description Izzy would apply to him, and feels a little less sunny.
“I wouldn’t ask Ed to make you leave, you know.” Fair’s fair, Stede thinks - Izzy has stopped trying to convince Ed to make Stede leave (or to kill him, thank goodness) and it would be frightfully petty to continue their feud in the face of his rival's surrender. “It wouldn’t be fair to Ed. And besides.” He nudges Izzy’s shoulder hopefully with his own. “You and I are friends now. Aren’t we? Why would I want my friend to go away just as we're getting to know each other.”
Izzy thunks his head back onto the outer hull and groans. “I should’ve let him kill me.”
“That’s a little bit melodramatic, dear, don’t you think?”
“I will shank you in your sleep.”
“Yes, yes. But first shall we see what Roach has made for supper?”
Izzy seems to consider this carefully. “Alright,” he concedes
And there's also this other, finished fic that was a reverse big bang project from a couple years back.
80k EdIzzy backstory that becomes steddyhands.
It was a collaboration with songwriter @dollothy.bsky.social who wrote original songs to go with the fic!
archiveofourown.org/works/577061...
