Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Stede has always been Ed’s.

Well, technically, there was the brief pointless time before he’d met her: childhood, teenagerhood, a few very short and embarrassing years of young adulthood. But no, as much as Stede cared to remember, as much as he found worth considering, as long as Stede had been anyone, he’d been Ed’s.

Not—

Certainly not romantically.

Ed was the princess and due for queendom any second now, and Stede was merely the knight she’d saved from her father’s wrath after a training drill gone wrong. It just happened that in exchange for her mercy, Stede became the princess’ personal responsibility, and Stede from then on made it his personal responsibility not to let her down, not to waste her generosity in saving him the loss of his title and his patriation.

Though he started as nothing but a country knight— no land, and only a (forged, not that anyone knew) title, and a (sufficiently buried and forgotten) broken engagement to his name— with Ed’s gift of mercy Stede renewed his lease on life. Dedicated himself to training, to strategy meetings, to close personal attention on anything the princess might want or need.

Which is not to say she didn’t have a whole team of handmaidens and castle staff to ensure she had everything at her fingertips she might possibly desire. But Stede was her protection. Stede was the suit of armor that accompanied her to market when she simply had to have fresh pomegranate and there was none in the castle stores, and yes, she needed to pick them out herself, and when she batted her eyelashes like that, it’s not as though Stede would argue the point any more than he was ever given to argue with his future sovereign ruler.

Stede was the presence at her side that promised no harm would ever come to her, great or small, hangnail or handaxe, and he took his duty very seriously.

Not that Ed wasn’t a force to be reckoned with in her own right.

When he’d first met her, he’d wondered if maybe it was a cultural difference, that despite being a highborn lady, Ed could handle a sword, a knife, riding astride on horseback just as well as any young man, because Stede certainly knew where he came from that wasn’t a skill a young woman would be permitted to learn, but as he became more accustomed to his new country, it became more and more apparent it was just Ed.

And really, there were so many things about her that were just Ed, unique, and dazzling, and only ever her.

The way her laugh lit up the inside of his chest, and drove him singularly and insane to pursue it at any opportunity, even if ill advised and in the middle of a Very Important Court Meeting, No Seriously, Stede, This Is Serious Business, Stop Making Faces Behind Lord Chevers’ Head Even If He Is Sort Of Like A Pig.

The way she carried herself, beyond what could be ascribed to etiquette lessons or a lifetime of regality, but something intensely confident, effortlessly graceful, instilled with the kind of power that, whether clad in crown jewels and regal robes or a burlap sack, demanded your respect, your admiration, your deference.

The way she listens to him, the way—

Stede won’t make any presumptions. He wouldn’t dare. He already owes Ed his life, and he won’t tip the debt any further, even by mistake, of assuming a specific kindness in what she would offer anyone.

But—

He would like to think—

Stede has been by her side for years now— 6 years, 11 months, 12 days, come the winter solstice if his memory can be relied upon, and in matters of Ed, he does believe it can— and he has taken up the mantle of what was surely, at first, only Ed's burden of responsibility for him, and moved to a genuine protector, and would venture, even to say, a confidant.

She’s told him things as innocuous— though no less precious— as her favorite color and as privileged as what, if spoken to anyone else who might betray her confidence, would amount to high treason.

He’s seen her in— she’s entrusted him with— all states of being: sleepy early mornings, yawning late evenings, bitter cold winter afternoons where only his promise to stand by with a hot flask of tea could persuade her to appear anywhere outside of her bedchambers.

So it’s not exactly new that, as he accompanies her back to her rooms after a lengthy court proceeding where he watched her brow furrow deeper and deeper into simultaneous frustration and boredom one millimeter at a time, she gives a belly deep groan and kicks her point-toed slippers down the hall ahead of her.

“Hate those fucking things so much. My feet are aching.”

No, not new at all.

What is new is that, as they pass the slippers in the hall and Stede scoops them into his hold, he offers up—

“I could tend to them. If you like.”

Which is stupid.

Whatever else Stede might presume to be to Ed, he’s not her handmaiden, nor anything even close.

But try as he might, Stede’s never fully trained himself out of saying stupid things.

And Ed, apparently, is not fully cured of the notion to indulge those stupid things he says, because what she says is yes. Stopped in front of the doors to her chambers, her eyes wide with what Stede cannot place, she says yes.

And, whatever is contained within them, when Ed’s eyes are on him like that, big and open and asking, Stede could never find it in himself to retreat on his offer.

Oh, Ed’s eyes. Perhaps, in listing only a few of the ways Ed is exceptional, he should have started there. Perhaps they should have made the whole of the list. It’s only that he didn’t mention them in the same way that someone having lived their whole life in the country might forget to describe the sunrise. In its constancy, its unfailing beauty, it has not faded into the background so much as it has woven into their very way of life, and it would not even occur to them to bring it up. Surely everyone already knew the same way everyone knew one flutter of his princess’ eyelashes could stop hearts and stopper hourglasses.

But no, even if he was given to saying no to something he himself offered, given to saying no to the one person he’d sworn to serve, he’s only human, and not a particularly impressive one at that. There is no universe where he says no to those eyes.

So he swallows around the dryness in his throat and opens the door to her chambers for her.

And it’s not as though he’s never been inside before, but those were. It was different. Briefly stepping inside to ensure there was nothing more she required of him before he retired to his own quarters for the night. Hanging bookshelves when her knee complained too harshly of the stairs down to the castle library. Sitting vigil while she slept when certain whispered threats from a neighboring enemy became a hair too credible to risk her alone even in her bedchambers. Service, certainly, in the way that he only intended now to serve her, but.

Well, he couldn’t deny it, this was more intimate, more private, more— just more.

And that fact is cemented even further when she mutters something about needing to get comfortable and disappears behind a folding screen, curses her way through what Stede tries not to imagine is the unlacing of stays and the unclasping of buttons, colorfully and creatively, the way Stede only knows her to do in his presence, and then reemerges in a silk dressing gown, stocking free and bare footed.

She settles into the couch— the plush-stuffed, velvety, emerald green one he’d helped haul up here one sweltering summer day, and then moved, and moved again until she was perfectly satisfied with its positioning— and for a moment, she just looks at him, pinning him with those eyes.

Well, partially it’s her eyes, partially it’s Stede’s own nerves.

But he does have a duty here, and he moves towards the couch in a brief, aborted movement.

“Right, so—”

“There’s—”

“Sorry. Your highness,” he defers.

He sees her pause for a moment.

“There’s, uh, a balm in the cabinet, green tin. And shea butter, next to it.”

He nods, retrieves the requested items and a few folded flannels from the drawer below, and uses the delay as a hail Mary effort to steel his inexplicably fraying nerves.

It’s for nothing.

He sets the supplies on the low table in front of the couch, and unfastens his belt, letting his sword and his dagger dangle loose. He sets the belt to the ground and for the briefest moment his hands stray to his collar to loosen the clasp at his throat, an automatic action carried over from the fact that he only disarms himself in the privacy of his own room at the end of day as he readies for bed. Thankfully he stays them soon enough to play it off as an adjustment of his collar as he carefully lowers himself to Ed’s feet, but it doesn’t stop a flush of heat from reaching his face.

Doesn’t stop the flush of heat from threatening to boil as he settles himself on his knees and fully confronts the task ahead of him.

Ed, in her dressing gown, no stockings, and from what he can tell, nothing else besides.

There’s her feet, yes, delicate bones traced over with spidery black lines, but her dressing gown has parted just enough to reveal the knobby jut of a braceletted ankle sloping into the arc of one bare shin, one scarred over knee.

He sees for the first time that the head of the snake that occasionally peeks out on her rarely bare hand must slither down around her whole body, as it ends ultimately in a tail point that licks around the curve of her calf.

Distantly, he is aware that he has left his princess waiting at least several beats too long, and he dares not let it linger over from inconvenience into genuine discomfort, so he reaches first for the balm.

“Would you like me to start with the left or the right?”

“Uh— Right.”

Her voice sounds a bit hoarse, though Stede can only imagine it’s from the long hours speaking forcefully in court to ensure she is heard over the king’s— well, he’ll spare a description, because while Ed may be able to privately whisper her own treasons, Stede does not have his own Stede to defend him bodily should it ever come to that.

He opens the tin, scoops a dollop into his palm and warms it between his hands. Head down, singularly focused, only on the task at hand, he reaches for her foot and begins to carefully work the balm into the arch. As he presses thumbs, firm but gentle, through the muscle of her foot, he hears a sharp gasp, and his heart pinches for his princess. She must have been so weary on her feet.

He is grateful for the opportunity to bring her relief.

“How is the pressure?” he says, eyes still pointed down.

“Good,” she says, thought it’s clipped short, which she sometimes is with him after a long day, and he would never begrudge her that, but he must be sure—

“Not too firm? Not too soft?”

“Nah, yeah, s’fine, just— keep going,” she says in that same tone.

Well, her wish is, quite literally, his command.

He continues.

He works over the arch of her foot until the greatest portion of the balm has seeped into her skin, and then kneads into her heel, up into her ankle, down into the ball of her foot, between the tender gaps of her toes. He is focused, quite intently, on his task, staying the urge of tremors in his hands. Ultimately he seeks to ensure only that Ed receives the greatest comfort.

He does, however, retain room inside himself to be greedy.

To note and register, to store up for later, the details of his princess. The rasp of her heel, the glide of her arch, the sweet little fuzz of hair on her toes, textures rich and decadent under the sensitive pads of his fingers, the attentive palms of his hands. It does serve his true purpose to know what amount of pressure, where it should be applied, to take the tension somehow simmering even in her feet and liquify it out to the true relaxation she deserves. But that doesn’t mean he can’t savor it for himself, that he might know how to be the one to deliver that to her.

And once he feels he has truly delivered to her full satisfaction, he wipes clean his hands, and then more gently, her foot, and repeats the process anew on the other, the only interruption in the pattern a small ring on her smallest toe that he carefully removes and tucks into his pocket to return to her later so that no part of her be left unsoothed.

Finished, hands and foot wiped clean once again, he reaches for the shea and works only a thin coat through her skin, knowing already that between rough feet and greasy ones, she’d take the former any day rather than suffer a moment even with the shadow of being unclean.

Finally, when he cannot even pretend that his work is incomplete, he raises his gaze to his princess to confirm that she is, indeed, satisfied.

And—

All the various states, the bouquet of intimacies she has privileged him to see, he has never seen her like this.

Face flushed, mouth slack, eyes hooded, and most importantly, most notably, most likely to set Stede’s heart pounding— dressing gown tented.

She—

Well, his first thought is that she is like me.

And his second, following so rapidly behind it’s liable to snap the neck of the first—

“I could tend to that as well.”

She takes in a thready breath, lets out an even weaker exhale, so worn thin that Stede couldn’t swear to whether it was only a formless gust of air or, truly, the shape of his name.

“If you like,” he appends.

“Stede, are you sure you—”

Perhaps Stede should say, not to Ed, but just in general.

He wants her.

Has wanted her.

Will probably continue wanting her until he dies, ideally by her side.

Again, he is only human, and Ed, she is—

Words fail.

Beautiful. Stunning. Exquisite. None of them are sufficient, either to describe her or to describe how she makes him feel, but, as in all things to do with Ed, he can, at least, try.

Though again, not to try to express any of this to Ed.

He entertains no delusions. Ed is many things, and one of them is fiercely independent. The things Stede does for her, he knows she doesn’t need him to do them, she does not need him in general. Stede’s duty to her started and has remained stoked by the simple fact that she deserves it. And anyways, in that fierce independence, she has also made it clear time and time again that she will not be prevailed upon to marry, that when her title comes due and she can make proper use of the power she has been itching in anticipation of since the moment her father’s health began to decline, it will be hers and hers alone.

Ed has been saddled with Stede as her responsibility long enough— in point of fact, since about a week after they met— and Stede has not even the daydream of designs on burdening her any further, least of all with the insanity of his affections. As surely as he knows who she is, he knows who he is: a landless, nameless knight, spared from disgrace only by Ed’s benevolence.

So yes, he wants her, wants her in a way that aches, in a way that burns, in a way that stirs up feelings— the physical and the ephemeral— that he acts on only in the most private of his hours.

But he can— as he always has— take that want and fold it into the shape of servitude, of service to his princess.

So it is not a lie any more than it is the truth when he tells her, “It would be my pleasure, my princess.”

She only nods her permission, perfect bow of her mouth still hung at a part, but it is enough.

Stede reaches for the knot of her dressing gown, once again staying the shakes that threaten his hands on only the power of years of training to remain stoic in the face of more terrorizing challenges than this.

Terrorizing.

Silly word, to even draw the comparison, because this is the thrill of apprehension more than it is fear, though fear is unmistakably on roll as well.

And apprehension turns to something much more present, much more pressing, as he unknots the silk of her robe, carefully spreads it to reveal what he had earlier suspected: the perfection of her form, beautiful and bare.

Well, bare except the tattoos that spread across her skin. The snake, a three masted ship, roses, stars, a dragon. Idly, he wonders who put these there, who was privileged to press into her skin a permanent mark, and in turns he hates them and adores them, envies them what he selfishly covets and thanks them for the gifts they have left behind for Ed, for himself.

And bare except the trails of hair tracing down her belly, up her chest between the gentle curve of her breasts, across the halting spread of her thighs.

Halting as she shuffles restlessly in her seat, and it calls to Stede’s mind the attentions he owes her.

Far be it from him to ever leave her wanting, though he, again, cannot help himself a bit of selfishness, a bit of his own wanting. Into the spread of her thighs he places two kisses: to the left and to the right. And though he knows there are other places he would not be permitted to kiss, even in her service, this proves to be the right instinct. She takes a sharp inhale of air, gives him the sound of his name on her exhale.

Stede.

He kisses her again, higher, closer to where her flesh creases and her heat gathers, and he feels it on the skin of his cheek: the downy tickle of her hair, curling coarser and darker the higher he goes; the smooth warmth of her skin; the silky-solid drag of her cock.

The destination he is honor-bound to arrive at. The piece of her, honor or duty or no, that he would not be able to stop himself from attending to with anything but her word.

Towards it he follows his earlier instinct: to kiss. At the dark thatch of hair, at the base, chaste at first but not spartan, not devoid of heat. And then when she gives out a strangled please, when Stede is spurred forward by the shame of ever pushing her to beg and his own stifled wanting in equal measure, he abandons restraint. He gives her what he would want were someone to ever deign to touch him in this way: open mouthed, eager, spit, tongue, suction, from the proud exposition of her sensitive tip down into her most sheltered places.

He chases her pleasure in all the ways he would chase his own: fervently, and with the sounds she makes, the words that slip, hot and melted, from her mouth as his guiding light.

His tongue here: she whines. His fingers grazing there: a throaty moan. His mouth enveloping her whole, drawing her back into his throat until his eyes water, his thumb kneading gently into the space beneath her balls, and she scrabbles at the cushions of the couch, stammers out Stede— Stede— Stede, I’m gonna— comes down his throat.

Comes down his throat with a force of satisfaction that leaves Stede feeling as sated as if he had sat there on the couch himself.

He gives her a moment, wanting to leave her with nothing so harsh as a rough dismount, before pulling back and swallowing down her last remnants, wiping traces of spit from his face with the back of his hand.

He looks up at her once more, at the radiant picture of her, and even more than the feeling of her in his throat, this satisfies him: his princess, relaxed and spread and easy, completely unburdened, evidence of his job well done.

He stands, tidies away the jars and flannels, collects his belt, begins to refasten it around his waist.

Ed starts to a more upright seat, and something flashes through her eyes.

“Stede, wait—”

“Is there something else you require, your highness?”

Ed blinks, leans back into the couch, hands fluttering to the edges of her robe and pulling it shut.

“No, yeah, no. I’m— I’m good.”

Perhaps if he were a better knight, he might inquire deeper into the hesitation he suspects edges her voice, but as it stands, he’s not sure he can last one more moment in her presence without mortifying himself, either by soaking through his breeches or by saying something equally unseemly. But he isn’t, so instead he bids her good night and flees for his room.

As he undresses, finally in the forgiving dark, he finds her toe ring, forgotten in his pocket, and holds it in his palm, glinting and gold.

Chapter Text

Retribution for his impertinence comes swiftly.

Not from Ed, no, if anything, she is a casualty of the universe’s imprecise aim, a side effect of her necessary proximity to Stede.

And the punishment is not even direct, not to his knowledge. But he has too little faith in the universe to dismiss it as a coincidence when Ed comes slamming through the court doors, face torn up in fury, and, after Stede trails her to her quarters, reveals that her father has ordered her, and by extension, Stede, to the front.

“It’s bullshit,” she spits, flinging open drawers, and, not finding what she’s looking for, slamming them shut.

“Why has he given the order?” and then, “Is there something I can help you find?”

He keeps his voice level, but his gut is twisting. He hasn’t, they haven’t, she hasn’t been near the front since she rescued him from that fate when they first met, and it’s one of the main reasons he sleeps at night. Oh, him? He’s fine. He knew what sort of risk he was signing up for when he first fled his given life and given name, abandoned them as the untenable burdens he knew they would be. But the longer he serves at Ed’s side the shorter his nerves for seeing her even adjacent to danger fray. When he thinks back to all the threats that hung over her head in the earliest years of his service, he feels sick— with relief, with vestigial fear— over the thought that he alone, so green and untested, had been responsible for her safety.

“Can’t find my fucking pipe. He said there were preparations necessary for me to instruct and oversee since they would end up my problem soon enough as it is, but I’ve seen him, and I know it’s because he’s not fit for the troops. No court martial could stop them turning tail and deserting if they knew the state of their fearless leader.”

She slams another drawer shut and collapses lengthwise on her couch, not defeated, but retreating into her fury. Her brow is furrowed, her lip pouts. Though Stede can’t help but find himself taken by the near-sweetness of her frustration, he quickly retrieves her pipe from the drawer of the window-side table he knows it to be tucked in, and delivers it to her hands and an even sweeter face of pleased surprise.

“The—?” she begins to ask, but he’s already turned to another table— Ed’s chambers are packed tight yet neat with infinite flat surfaces for her ever expanding rotation of projects, picked up and set down at her random will— to retrieve her herb grinder from the ornate wooden box it lives in. He presents it to her and she takes it with a thank you tucked quietly into her chest.

He has not been dismissed, but he is not comfortable lingering the way he may have only the day before yesterday, before—

He takes a step back, and then another, before realizing he has now placed himself in an awkward hover around her space as she grinds up her green and packs her pipe.

But then she turns her eyes on him, asks, tinged with a plaintive note, for him to sit. Stay.

So he does, places himself carefully where the toes of her slippers press against the plush of the couch. He is not touching, deliberately not touching, but it is a near thing. She lights her pipe, draws it in with a deep, probing breath, and as she lets free the cloud of herby smoke she slumps further into the couch.

Her eyes are still on him, those intractable beams of light she wields with little consideration for who might be caught in the crossfire. And Stede is caught, for several moments, or possibly several years, as she watches him, brow still furrowed, though now he wonders if it is in concentration over frustration.

Finally she releases him, tilts her face in for another hit off her pipe, and with her next exhale comes a raspy request—

“Tell me a story?”

Stede has done this for her before.

In the few moments he steals for himself, he is a reader. Was, even more so, before. And of course, so is Ed, as much as she is anything else, which is to say she is a surprising bit of just about everything. So he doesn’t tell her stories found in the books they trade back and forth, but he does piece together from all her favorites.

Ed loves best when heroes defeat evil against all odds by staying true to themselves.

Stede’s tastes are maybe a bit more pedestrian: he loves a romance. True love, fated or forged or a ferrous mix of both.

He draws from both of their libraries in today’s tale, a fisherman who falls in love with a man cursed to be a sea monster, and he has just begun to reveal that their happy ending will only come if they both accept the sea as the home it has always been and the fisherman joins his love under the ocean. Expecting a gasp, he turns, only to see his princess asleep, tucked into the crook of the couch.

Both hands are clasped up against her chest, and the furrows have eased from her brow.

Stede’s heart stutters in his chest, a pang of tenderness squeezing the muscle tight.

He steals a few more moments, watching her breath flutter in and out, before he quietly leaves her to her rest.

After all, they leave for the front tomorrow. She needs all she can get.

The journey to the front is as slow, slogging, and brutal as he remembers it to be from the return trip all those years ago, and this time he doesn’t have the shimmering potential of a future at the other end of it.

Not that it is as morbid as all that, he probably won’t die out there, it’s just that there is no potential in the future: what fate he has to look forward to has long since been sealed. And it’s as good of a future as he could have hoped for himself; it’s the future tied to his that fills him with such unease: Ed’s.

Of course, Ed.

Because his own looks are done no great injustice by bags left under his eyes when sleep flees in the night, while Ed’s— delicate, beautiful— face cannot, should not have to bear the weight. He is built, or at least moulded through training, to withstand long hours of riding on dusty and unfinished roads. He cannot bear the thought of Ed straining through the same discomfort, flinching in anticipation of every heavy step. His upbringing, though he tries to forget it, has left him with a preference for fine things: smooth-woven sheets, downy soft pillows, the warmth of furs at night, but Ed is made for them. Each night as they make camp and Stede prepares Ed’s tent with what is most transportable instead of what would be gentlest against her skin, he must swallow his disgust.

And when they do finally arrive at the front, it will only be to the burden of leadership, of work. Ed is allergic to neither, excels at them, even, but she does hate to waste her own time, and he knows, as well as Ed does, that the moment her father is in the ground and the crown on her own head, this will all be coming to an end. Stede is fairly certain it does not count as treason to repeat her sentiments for context: that the war is pointless, an exercise in greed and pride that has done nothing but hemorrhage money and lives since it began, and that even an ounce of diplomacy would easily end it.

But, for all that Ed whispers in private, not even a princess is immune to such open acts of treason as she fantasizes about, so in the meantime, she plays at compliance where absolutely necessary, and Stede will, of course, accompany her at every step, with a smile on his face.

He will simply hate it as privately as he can.

Hate it, and hold fast to Ed’s ring in his pocket in the most pressing of moments, a reminder that for whatever she must suffer, Stede, at least, has been permitted to provide her relief.

That he might, again, be permitted the same if she requires it.

He doesn’t—

He wouldn’t presume the shape that relief might take, wouldn’t imagine it, how it would feel, how it would sound, how she would taste—

Wouldn’t, being as it is none of his business until her need arises, and not a moment sooner.

Though, with the strain of this waste of time bullshit trip— her words— it is no surprise that a need for relief might come sooner, rather than later.

They have struck camp at the front after a morning of riding that started before the sun, and it has been an afternoon so long as to bleed through the evening of Ed being pulled and pushed from one end of the encampment to another, being talked at and talked over by military generals she has every intention to make redundant in what could easily be less than a year.

Stede’s hand has cramped from how tightly it grips at the pommel of his sword, and he can only imagine the strain she carries in her shoulders from bracing against all the same.

Can practically see it, in the way she holds herself, the clench and the stoop, when she can finally call it a night and Stede follows her dutifully back to her tent.

Perhaps she does not need him now, perhaps she does not need him to follow her into her tent, to witness her shuddering sigh, but—

“Perhaps you would allow me to take some of that weight from your shoulders, your highness.”

She stills where she stands at the folding table Stede had struck to hold her effects, back still turned to him.

“What do you mean?”

Stede steps forward, once, bringing him only one more step from her in the closeness of the tent.

“May I touch you?” he asks.

There is a breath, one full inhale and exhale from her, and only a stuttering half step from him, before she says yes.

He is careful.

He starts slowly, at her shoulders, where the weight is gathered, with gentling motions of his thumbs, sweeping yet firm. She exhales again, thinner, trimmed of a bit of its heaviness. Encouraged, he continues.

Her nape is bare, the fall of her usually immaculate curls gathered in a bun that has gradually lost its shape to the challenge of the day. The line of her neck is unadorned, no necklaces, none of her usual jewelry. His hands are a poor substitute for the finery she deserves, but he will offer them anyways, working his thumbs to warm and soften muscle, from the hinge of her shoulders to the base of her head.

Her head, gradually slumping forward. Her breathing, gradually slowing, deepening.

“How— how are your hands so soft? Thought. I thought you were a knight.”

He flushes, though he does not still his hands. Perhaps his skincare routine is a bit elaborate for someone of his station, though he would not admit to that. Instead—

“I would not dare to touch you with rough hands.”

Her hands smack to the table before her.

“Princess?”

“Nothing, just—”

He resumes the pressure at her neck, splits it into a parallel drag across the slopes of her shoulders, then reunites his hands in the middle to work across the bow of her back.

“Yeah, fuck, yeah, that,” she agrees.

He works his hands, chases her sighs, the curving of her body in relief, gives her what he can through the heavy cloak of her dress. Only her neck sits bare, and the further she leans into comfort, the clearer it looms in Stede’s mind.

He longs to kiss, to grace delicate curve with delicate lips, but even he, fool that he is, knows that is too much, too close, to presume that level of companionship.

It is not thought or planning, but instead the recollection of the one time he was permitted to kiss, the place he belonged from which he gave that precious act of service, that drops him to his knees.

“Stede?”

“Please, let me—”

He does not immediately know what he is asking for, only the immediacy of his need, to do for her— anything, more, anything.

Her benevolence saves him the indecision, saves him as it always does. She reaches back a hand, scrabbles for her skirts as her words scrape over a litany of yes, yes, yes.

Stede stills her hand, guides it back to settle on the table, and he takes up the task of lifting her skirts with the reverence it deserves. They are heavy, and as he settles them around her hips, she bends fully with the weight. Leaves behind for Stede to feast greedy eyes over the endless expanse of her skin, kissed over with the same dark hair and darker ink she revealed to him before and just as bare.

Here.

Here is his place.

He begins, again, with her thighs, stooping lower to place a pair of kisses: one between the space of two black bands, its twin to the left of a blooming rose. As before, she gasps, breathes out his name, though it is not worn through, not at all. If anything, it is, as with any time she says his name, polished to bright and shining by the soft buff of her voice, though for how it sounds in moments like these, he might suspect it to be brand new, not his old name at all, but instead a new specimen, picked especially by her generous hand and bestowed upon him, as high an honor as the first title she ever granted him.

He follows his instincts to kiss, to lave tonguing affection, as they served him well— served her well— before, but this time, with the confidence to place his hands more firmly, more thoroughly, secured by the knowledge that she will not find them too rough in any of her delicate places. And delicate places he does go, though he meanders on his way, kissing her thighs, the curve of her cheeks, the small of her back, but ultimately he knows where he will land.

Though not without permission.

He pauses at the threshold, hands poised to part, to present that hidden place.

“May I?”

Her voice frays over the edges of a curse, a fuck, a half formed question of you want—?

“Would you like it?”

“Yeah, fuck, think I would.”

Apparently, he likes it too. Not that he ever expected he wouldn’t, but yes, yes, he likes it. Likes parting her cheeks, likes kissing in, leading first with his lips, and then when he hasn’t the reach he needs, his tongue. Likes the way she smells, still with her undercurrent of sweetness, but glazed over with something more raw, with more of a bite, after a day of riding, of dirt, sweat. Likes the way she feels, the heat under his hands, against his cheeks, his nose, the light rasp of hair under his mouth. Likes the way she tastes, salty, earthy, sour, sweet.

Likes the way she sounds.

Desperate, dragging, pleas, and god help him, he likes it.

To feel, for a fleeting and foolish moment, that there is something he can provide to her that she might want, might need, enough to ask for it so desperately. Enough to buck her hips under his touch, enough to rattle the table she leans against, enough to grind back against his tongue, seeking, just as he does, more, deeper, more.

Enough to ask, clear and specific, “Stede, touch me, your hand, please.”

And of course he will give it to her, will lament only for a moment that he cannot be in two places at once, that he cannot drive her forward with his mouth only to catch her on his tongue, but he will give her what he can, will give her what she asked, his hand, and where he touches her, she is not hard, not entirely, so he curves his palm, gives her a channel of pressure to work against. He goes entirely by feel, by sound, as he has since maybe the moment he pressed into her and his eyes closed, as he sank into the state of worship.

Oh, and what a beautiful feel it is, to serve as his guiding light. Her skin, the plush of fat and coil of muscle underneath it. Her cock, hot with blood, wet with her pleasure. He could die here, could serve out the very last of his days down on aching knees, sparing ever shortening breaths only to dive deeper into her.

But all good things must come to an end, and it is the end he is due her, so he cannot regret, will not regret, when her voice threads higher, her breath clips shorter, as she trembles beneath his mouth, as she spills over his knuckles.

Again, he pauses, gives her a moment to gather her breath before he draws back to take his.

As he does, he steals one last kiss, takes it from the wobbly heart inked at the upper curve of her left cheek.

“Fuck, Stede,” she says, just as wobbly as her heart.

He wipes his hand against his trousers, and then, just as carefully as he lifted them, draws her skirts back to her ankles. And then, with a little more care than even that, he lifts himself from his knees, breathes a moment more, and levers himself to stand.

She turns to face him, and what little breath he had collected, what strength he had returned to his legs, he loses.

The kohl she wears has blurred at the creases of her eyes, her bun has strayed even further from its perch, and a flush has taken up high and frantic in the apples of her cheeks. She is beautiful, but she is worn.

“Stede—”

“I should leave you to your rest.”

“Stede, I…”

She worries her lower lip in her teeth as her eyes search him, but Stede does not know what she is looking for, so he offers up the placid face of a knight ready to serve, as always, in substitute of whatever else she might want to see.

There hangs between them only silence for a long moment before Ed breaks it.

“Right, rest. I’ll just. Go to sleep.”

“Of course, your highness. Good night.”

He has already turned for the entrance to her tent when he finally hears night, and he swears there is something jagged in it, so he turns once again to check.

But no, she has turned herself, toeing out of boots and pulling at laces, all the normal preparations for bed.

He must be mistaken.

He tries to steer himself from any further mistakes, either in judgment or action.

He continues to serve her in any way she might need, of course, would not withdraw something freely given if she continues to be so gracious as to accept, but he keeps himself carefully at her feet, does not allow himself to rise above his station.

He does find other ways to kiss her, other tender places to take in his mouth and taste, daring only to imagine, later, as he turns over the memory in private, how it might compare to kissing her face, that perfect bow of her lips. How the thick down of hair reaching up her stomach might compare to the rasp of stubble that slowly gathers on her face when she can’t be given to shave, fucking again, every day with this shit. How the dip of his tongue into her belly button might gather a different, a sweeter, fresher taste, were he to trace it along her lip, to dare to tease into her mouth. How it might feel to gently tug the earrings that glitter across her ears into his mouth, cool and metallic and sharp as the glittering gem that trickles down her belly.

It also might give her over to giggles a tad less, he does admit.

But it is hard not to indulge, and he would plead in court that he not be blamed, when it sounds like this.

They are back in her chambers, finally, and she is laid out on that couch of hers, robe long since shed, as Stede balances over her on his knees, attending to her body with tongue and hands and lips, when he does take that risk, does venture into the little dip of her belly button, draws a tiny tug against the jewelry dangling from it.

And by now, he has heard her breathless with pleasure a few times. (Uncountable times across five very countable occasions.) And before even that, breathless with laughter an infinite more.

But it is something else entirely, something that warms his chest, warms all the way down through the rest of his body, to hear that breathlessness slide from pleasure to laughter and back again.

“Stede,” she gasps out, though it fractures into tinkling shards of laughter before she fully sticks the landing.

“Yes, my princess?”

“What are you— haa— ha!— doing?”

He has interrupted in the one way he ever would, with more attention with his tongue, with the barest nibble of his teeth, and he does once more before he answers.

“Do you not like it? Should I not continue?”

“I didn’t— fuck— I did not say that.”

He pauses for a moment, a moment of brief insanity where he raises a teasing eyebrow in question to what he knows will be her command.

She huffs, though he hears the thread of laughter still woven through it.

“Keep going. Please.”

And he does.

Then, and on from that day.

It is, at the same time, both the easiest and the most difficult his job has ever been.

His job has always been to take care of Ed, of course, and job or no, it is as easy as any instinct to follow. His body gives over naturally to the motions; it is as simple a choice to kneel for her to touch her sword to each of his shoulders as it is for her to touch her cock to his tongue, to push in.

The difficult part, which should come as no surprise, being that this has always been his greatest difficulty, is restraint.

He knows himself to be over-eager, to say too much, to want too much, to be too much. It is, after all, what brought him here in the first place. Given the opportunity to be someone’s rich and idle wife, no obligation beyond bringing one son into the world and having every other need handed to her, as with the opportunity, on a silver platter, he had turned up his nose, and turned it instead to the smell of adventure, of daring, of— maybe— true romance.

And is not a choice he would have undone, even in his moments of greatest challenge. At his most exhausted, cold, bone-weary and fatigued, his gut still reminds him that he is more suited to this than a life of passivity, of sitting around, no better than someone’s possession.

But yes, in this new chapter of service, his unceasing want continues to rear its ugly head.

Because apparently it is not enough to be able to touch her, to hear her sounds of pleasure, to draw the taste of it out onto his tongue, apparently what she has given cannot satisfy the depth of his hunger for her. No, he has to want it to mean something. He dreams that her wanting, her needing, is not just any human need— though he does often suspect, in her grace and beauty and benevolence, that she is beyond human— but something specific, specific to him, for him. He dreams that the look she gives him in those moments that he tends to her is not just pleading for release, but pleading for his touch, his closeness, his kiss.

It is a feeling that leads him to recklessness.

One afternoon, they are playing chess, and Ed’s eyes have started to shift out of focus, her gaze to dart around the room in distraction. It is not any surprise. Stede is not bad at chess, but they have played together for years, and he is no match for her tactical mind. She sees moves he doesn’t even know he intends to make, seems to rule the board as surely as she will one day rule her kingdom.

“We need new rules,” he tells her.

“What, you sick of me kicking your ass?” she asks, not even looking away from his face as she deftly captures a rook.

He huffs token frustration.

“No, but I think you might be.”

“Huh— your move, by the way— like, okay. New rule, knights can move in the shape of any letter, not just L.”

“Yes!” he says, and moves his knight in a circle and a curving tail to capture one of her pawns.

“What the fuck was that?”

“You said— you said any letter!”

“Yeah, that wasn’t a letter, what are you—”

He repeats the motion. “Lowercase Q!”

“That’s not— mate, what the fuck, this is a Q—” and then she takes one of her knights, swirls a circle and then a looping oval, finishing with a flare that lands dead on his bishop.

“Whatever you say,” he says, and he can’t help the smile that comes with.

She pauses for a moment.

“Right,” and drops her gaze back to the board.

He thinks a moment, moves a pawn, cannon fodder for his king, and she doesn’t rest for even a beat before advancing a pawn of her own.

“New rule,” he says, inspired, as she promotes the pawn she’d snuck past him to queen. “If you queen a pawn, they get married to your other queen and the pieces have to move in unison.”

She pauses, looks up in a brief moment of surprise, and throws her head back to laugh.

This is the dangerous part.

He makes her laugh, makes her toss her head back, bare the curve of her neck, shake loose with her joy tendrils of hair so that they frame her precious face, and he forgets himself.

He forgets himself, and he thinks about kissing that curve of her throat, about tucking back those strands of hair, parting them like a curtain so that he might kiss there too, might further adorn her face. He thinks about it so intently that his hand moves without his command— or hers— and does, indeed, tuck away the threading of one wisp of hair. It is so soft.

And then the last of her laughter trips, falls away, leaves her face sober and still, and he remembers himself.

Pulls his hand back, glances down at the board, and thoughtlessly moves his remaining knight.

He will think later how it is a bit on the nose that his careless action places it right in the center of the paths of her two queens.

Chapter Text

Despite Stede’s ongoing internal struggle, and the brief and embarrassing ways it bleeds out into the world, the days continue on, in the same patterns of routine that drive Ed to lament about how fucking boring it all is.

The king continues in his stasis of poor health that simply refuses to slip from terminal to terminated, Ed continues to be summoned into all manner of mindless meetings and overseeings, Stede continues to serve by her side— or at her feet, as the occasion demands— and Stede decides, eventually, that he can be happy like this.

After all, so long as he follows his mandate of service, he will have a place until his death, the same place he has wanted since it was first granted: by Ed’s side. And Ed has never wanted anyone else, so he is at least spared the agony of watching her become another’s. In fact, in a tradition established years ago when some presumptuous duke got a bit too close to Ed, and Stede had quietly implied the castle was riddled with bedbugs, Stede has been running potential suitors off at Ed’s behest with enthusiasm he has not had to fake ever since.

So yes, he can be happy.

He is Ed’s, and Ed is Ed’s, and all is as right in his world as he will ever earn.

So, it is, of course, mere days after he has come to terms with life as it stands, that it is all turned on its head.

The king dies.

The king dies in the wee hours of a Tuesday morning when everyone is already wrung dry from the bustle and strain of the Monday.

Which, if you ask Stede, is just as befitting of his lifelong habit of thoughtlessness and cruelty as anything else.

(He is dead now, so it is not treason. He’s checked.)

From the moment of discovery by some poor chambermaid Stede will have to see if he can’t sway Ed to pension out of service, it is all hands— including Stede’s— on deck. After all, the death of a king right in the midst of a war creeping into its second decade placed the kingdom in a place of great vulnerability, to attack both physical and in reputation, and it was imperative that there be no gaps in security, either in or out.

The current captain of the king’s guard, a man named Fang that Stede only did not fear because he had been permitted to respect and admire him instead, had mustered them at dawn, and it had been frantic rotations of watch duty and roll call of servants ever since.

By the time Stede was granted release from his part of the responsibility, the sun had tipped into golden afternoon light, and Stede had not seen his princess even once.

He knew, from a brief aside from Fang, that she was— at least in body, if not in spirit— safe inside the castle walls, but still, her absence from his eyes pulled at his heart, at the churning worry of his gut, through the whole day. After all, he had expected her to preside over the day’s events, to instruct the castle, with the fierceness she carried finally unfettered, through the transition he knew she so eagerly anticipated.

It is a cold gap in his chest to feel her missing, and he seeks to resolve it the moment he can be spared.

He does not even discard his armor before making his way to her chambers, and the steel blade at his hip clangs along with his nerves.

When he arrives at her door, he can only hold himself to wait a few silent moments after his knock before he carefully pushes in unanswered. The curtains around her bed are unopened, the lamps unlit, and the room is eerily silent.

Loathe to disturb that silence, even more so to disturb her, he removes his belt at the couch, deposits it carefully to the cushions, and steps to the side of her bed.

“Ed?” he asks.

The silence remains.

“Your highness?” he corrects himself.

“Stede?”

Her voice is brittle, coarse, rusted over where it usually strikes sharp and clean.

“Yes, I’m here.”

“I’m not gonna— I’m not coming out.”

“No, of course.”

Silence, again.

“Should I—” of course he shouldn’t— “Should I come in?”

Another pause, before there is a small, so small that only Stede would catch it, even if the room were packed to bursting, yeah.

He pauses, as he realizes what he has offered. He thanks himself for the cover of his armor, that he must slowly and deliberately remove each piece, as it is enough of an imposition to invite himself into her bed, let alone the harsh lines of steel and the oiled bands of leather he wears. It gives him time to consider what he has offered.

Companionship, he resolves.

Not even a princess would wish to be alone in a time like this, and before the advent of the physical comforts he has provided her, he has indeed been her companion.

It would not be right for him to presume she needs anything else, not right now.

Divested of his armor, he parts the curtains, and a tendril of golden light, slipping in from the window, escapes through the gap and paints itself across his princess’ face.

He is not sure what he expected, since his expectations have already proved wrong, but what he sees is her face, beautiful as ever, and haunted. There are no tears, nor evidence of them, no tracking streaks of kohl, no puff of red around her lids, no strained vessels in her eyes. And yet there is an emptiness in them, a look tossed so far into the distance as to leave them vacant entirely.

“Your highness?” he asks again.

She does not respond, and devoid of any other direction, he leans forward to kneel on the bed, close enough to assure her of his presence, but far enough not to drag her into his dipping of the mattress.

It is long into the silence before she speaks again, long enough that the beam of light has traced from her chin, past her lips, down the slope of her nose, and across her forehead to rest somewhere in the nest of her pillows.

“I don’t get it. I don’t get why I’m fucked up. I’ve been waiting for this day since mum— since I was like 14. I should be happy.”

Stede thinks for a moment, thinks about how he cried when he left home, cried again when he realized his parents had declared him dead even though it had severed the final risk that he might ever be compelled back, still cries some nights, though they are rarer and rarer still, when he remembers the girl he left behind.

But before he can shape this into something that might bring her comfort, she speaks again.

“Can you just hold me? Just— just hold me.”

“Yes,” he breathes, automatically. “Yes, of course.”

Automatic, yes, but not practiced. He has never had cause to “just” hold her, though, as she rolls to her side and he gingerly tucks himself along the line of her back, he knows “just” is only the word in the sense that it is what is morally right, what is fair, the one thing in this world that is still correct.

To hold her is not “just” anything.

It is the curve of her back against his chest, the heat of it soothing through the buzzing background ache of bandages and bracing clothing. It is his nose tucked into her nape, breath fluttering through the loose fall of her hair. It is his arm cupping the curve of her belly through velvet and silk, the curve of her belly soft as that same velvet and silk.

It is knowing, as the anchor of her in his arms trembles, strains, and then flies free into rattling, racking sobs, that he is permitted, with his touch, to bring her comfort, to bring her solace, to bring her, in a world straining with demands from enemies and friends alike, a soft, quiet place to land.

To land, to come undone, to fall entirely to pieces.

He promises, with his touch, with the murmur of his words, that he will hold the pieces together.

And he does, well into the dark of the night, when she passes first into sleep, and satisfied that his duty is done, he falls soon after.

Waking is a churn of sensations, each brand new and startling, and yet overwhelmingly good.

A churn of sensations, yes, but united in one singing symptom: heat.

The heat of Ed’s breath folded into the crook of his neck; the heat in his gut when he realizes that is who it is; the heat of her body in one long line against his.

The heat of her cock against his hip, searing even through her dressing gown, the worsted wool of his pants.

The answering heat between his own legs.

He’s on his back, leaned into her pillows, but for a precious moment, he relaxes further into it, reclines into the sensation. He’s never woken up like this before: the scant times he has woken anything but alone in his room, it has been to discomfort and fatigue. A crowded tent of other soldiers, lesser knights. On a couch or upright in a chair, sitting guard at Ed’s bedside. Sacrifices he willingly made, but sacrifices all the same.

But this is not a sacrifice, more like the opposite.

An indulgence, one he clings to greedily, not unlike the way Ed clings to him in her sleep.

And for a brief second, her grip clings tighter, her hips grind closer, her breath snuffles hotter against his neck.

But then she wakes.

Wakes and realizes what she is doing.

“Shit, Stede, I’m sorry—” and she moves, moves like she intends to move away.

Stede, occupationally, is not a panicker. His role requires he remain calm, collected, that he make decisions under pressure, both from circumstance and the clock.

Personally, however?

Yes, he can be given to a bit of panic, and that is the only justification he can call up for telling her no. For reaching up his hand and gripping her hip. For pulling in tighter. For saying—

“No, go on, take what you need.”

Which is a lie, or at least an omission of relevant facts.

Because, here in the earliest hours of the morning, where there is naught but the weakest trace of the sun to cast against him, he can, not so much admit, as be forced to confront that in this moment it is not only her service that drives him to her.

He wants her to feel good. He wants her to find the release that she deserves, that bolsters her health, body and soul. He wants her to be brought to pleasure.

But god, he does want it to be him, he wants to provide, he wants to touch, he does not want these moments of her bliss wasted on anyone who could never appreciate them for the precious artifacts he knows them to be.

Her hips stutter against him, against his grip.

“Are you— Stede, are you sure?”

There is weight in the words, a serious question, though they rest on trembling feet.

“Yes—” and he falters for a moment, how to address her. The last time, she was his princess. Now, she is not quite his queen. And certainly it would not be the right time to bring up such a question. He lands, unsteady footing, but his choice made—

“Yes, Ed, yes.”

If there ever was a dam holding back her want, it bursts. Her hands on him— which happen so quickly he barely has a chance to acknowledge the novelty— become reaching, frantic, matching the pace of her hips as she tugs at his clothes.

“Let me— I wanna see you, please—”

Yes, he thinks.

But, he thinks.

He has no real reason to believe that she might object to the state of his body beneath his clothes. It has served her well enough these past years. And they share a commonality he would be surprised to see her take issue with. However, erring to the chance that he is wrong, as he has been about many things before, he starts first with his pants: the easiest thing to rewrap and conceal should she change her mind.

She gives him reluctant space to fiddle with his ties and buttons, and he feels as much as sees her unknot her robe, push it to the side, bare herself in turn.

Once there is no more delay to be faked with the fastenings of his pants, he shoves them down and off, and is met with—

Stillness.

Silence.

Except the beat of his heart in his throat, and he can only bear it for a moment.

“Am— Is this suitable?”

Again, his words seem to volley her forward from her reluctance.

“‘Suitable,” fuck off, ‘suitable’,” she says, reaches again, all desperate hands desperately clinging to Stede’s hip and pulling him close, close enough that her cock catches in the crease between his hip and his thigh, catches, and, slick with it, slides.

“Perfect,” she breathes, “you’re fuckin perfect.”

And, hand on his hip, tilting him in, pressing, his heart ratchets up in panic.

It’s undeniable that it feels good, with her this close to him he cannot deny that he feels good, and desperation pushes and pulls inside of him: to pull her closer, to push himself further away.

He makes a compromise, a midway mark between the lofty heights he’s likely to totter off of and the place at her feet he knows he can belong. He shifts down, finds, even now, a new place to kiss. Tentatively, he places his lips over the peak of her nipple.

He has, by now, seen them enough to be familiar, even in the morning grey, with their perfection. Tight brown nubs at the crest of her equally perfect breasts. And those, they are no more than a handful, or as he is finding, little more than a mouthful. Privately, he likes that they are so different from his own, that it is no struggle to attend to every inch of them with just his lips, his tongue.

Or perhaps, he should say, familiar with the sight, though, when her answering sigh slips frantically into a whine, he sets himself studiously to becoming familiar with the taste, the feel, the texture against his tongue. Familiar, at every angle, with every kind of touch. With his mouth cupped wide, drinking up as much as he can dare to taste. With his lips drawn tight, working suction against only the bud. With the flat of his tongue dragging up from the base of her nipple and all the way across.

And once again, he is grateful that so many of her perfect parts come in pairs, that he can repeat his attentions to the other side, that he can draw up a second chorus of moans, of whines, of sighs, that he can stall at such great heights for a moment, a minute longer, before he begins to dip down the more well worn steps of his path and test his appetite against the banquet of her skin.

But—

Her hand catches at the back of his head, her voice catches in her throat when she tells him no, tells him wait.

“I want to feel you.”

He hears the plea, feels it deep in his own gut, answering in kind to the only sort of feeling he can imagine she’d ask for.

He rests a hand on her shoulder, palm split down the middle by the seam where her silk robe meets silk skin, and gently tilts her to recline on her back. Takes his hand, trails it down her chest, cups breast and belly in turn. Tilts up on his knees, tucks them astride her hips, though he holds back, leaves a respectful space, so that he can ask—

“Like this?”

Even with the room washed in greyscale, she is anything but.

Her skin, peeking out from florid velvet, burnished with gold and bedecked with ink.

Her eyes, devouring every hint of light in the room, twisting it up in her own special kind of alchemy, and casting it back, glittering and glorious across Stede where he waits for her word.

But there is no word, only that look, deep and fathomless.

“Ed?” he asks again.

She swallows. She nods. She says it.

She says yes, and Stede’s body, his heart, the two in tandem as they only become in her presence, answer in kind.

He eases the tension from his thighs, eases down to meet her, his slick heat against hers.

He watches her face carefully, watches for displeasure, for discomfort, for a change in the winds or his stars that will return him to the truth he still expects: that he is misunderstood, that this is not what she would ask of him.

He finds none.

Finds in her face only the easing of pleasure, as easy as he slides against her when he twitches his hips forward to offer her a bit of friction, a kiss of movement.

This, she likes this, he can see it as surely in her face, hear it in the breathless moan of his name, as surely he feels it in himself. He likes this, likes how he can feel the head of her cock nudge up against his clit, dragging and pressing. Likes how hard she is, how hot and solid, how he can grind down and give her over to gasping just as much as he is tempted to himself.

And the temptation, oh it is steep. The temptation to simply lose himself right here, to continue to drag his hips down, up, back again until he shudders to completion right here on top of her. She offers, again, ever, salvation, her hands reaching. He catches them in his, raises them to his face, presses a kiss to each palm, grounding.

“Stede.”

She tugs her hands, and his body forgets to let go, so along with his hands he goes, down, bending close, and oh.

The angle has shifted, and where her cock had been dragging parallel to him, sliding against his clit, now it presses, just slightly, no insistence, no urging, at the threshold of slipping inside.

“Ed, Ed—” and for one brief moment, he begs. “Can I—?”

And again, she grants him a yes.

Back, years and decades ago, when he lived under a different house, under the obligation of a different name, he was Catholic.

Catholic in a rigorous way, that started his early mornings with mass, on his knees, praying at the altar of what he was pharisaically informed to be holy. He always suspected them to be wrong about the definition of holy.

On his knees, feeling Ed sink into him in the early morning light, feeling the press, the stretch, the slide, he knows it for a fact.

Knows, intimately, the way he now intimately knows the feeling of Ed inside him, that there is a reason holy sounds so much like wholly.

Whole.

Holy.

That is how he feels.

That is how it feels to offer up his fullest act of worship, and to be rewarded with every bit of it, every rock and grind of his hips, reflected in the picture of her face, in the landscape of her body, in the melody of her voice, all stretched out before him.

It feels achingly, dazzlingly, distractingly good. Even with his sights so set on her, on the twist of her brow, the part of her mouth, he stumbles, halting and lost, down the path. Finds a motion that twists her hands up in the linen of his shirt and repeats it, rocks down against it over and over again, chasing the high of seeing a new shape of pleasure on her lips. Finds a rhythm that has her calling out his name, has one syllable sliding into the next, StedeStedeStede, and plays along to it until the beats go stale and stumbling.

He can’t even say how long he’s lost himself in the way a particular twist of his hips sends her thigh shaking before her hands start reaching, pulling him in close again, tipping his forehead against hers.

He understands her impatience, would likely register some of his own if every moment, even in repetition, weren’t so staggeringly new, and he is no more given to making her wait than he ever has been before.

He rocks forward in earnest, urges his speed and bears down on pressure, feeling tight, heat, heat, feeling it gather in the cradle of his thighs and swell and surge and burst.

It is only after the echo of his name stills from his ears that he realizes he has not just made her come, that, in fact, they have come together.

His ears burn with a flush, a buzzing, insistent red that has swept through his whole body.

Though this close to her face, his forehead still tilted against hers, it is hard to know what picture it makes. To make out any shade of discomfort or disappointment.

He waits, waits until he feels her begin to soften inside of him before he draws back, so that he might retreat tactically, to dismount and distance himself in one careful motion. Perhaps it is that he has found his limit as to what he can bear for her, or perhaps it is only that it is so fresh and raw, either way, he has no wish to interrogate any deeper.

He catches the threatening spill between his legs with the calf of his trousers, and then exits the cocoon of the bed in search of flannels to tend to any mess he’s left across his princess. It is cold, winter chill aching in the stones, and he is grateful that he finds his quarry quickly in her bedside table, though he’s never known her to keep them there before.

He returns to her side only to find her sitting upright, wrapped tight in her robe.

Her gaze is cast out across the sheets, as vacant and hollow as he found it the afternoon before, and her voice once again rusted through.

“I’m sorry, Stede. This won’t happen again. None— none of this. You understand?”

It seems the chill of the room has followed him into her bed, has snuck into his chest, icy and sharp.

“Yes, your highness, I understand.”

Another lie of omission.

He may not understand why, how, but there is a what he understands with perfect clarity.

He has let her down.

He will not do it again.

Chapter Text

Stede had lied, before, when he said it was the hardest his job had ever been.

Or he was mistaken.

But it is a mistake so grievous he can’t afford to have made it.

Because it turns out there are worse things than holding without having: there is also the not holding along with the not having. The not holding and not having when he, for a precious handful of weeks, did hold, did touch, did please.

And worse, even still, than that, is that things between them do not even go back to normal, after he had taken himself and his shame from her chambers and shut himself back in his room, the walls of it crowding him like a cell. Do not, and can not.

Because he is weak, and cannot lose himself to his weakness, not again. She had said this won’t happen again, and that was his mandate. If he had any hope of keeping to his word— or hers— he could not be alone with her. Now that he knew her touch, in his closest of places, now that he knew what it was to touch her, and he had lost the right to do so, he could not trust himself not to fling himself, begging and pathetic, at her feet the moment the cover of a closed door gave him the chance.

So, even though it drags through his chest, sharp and aching, to do so, he does only the letter of his duty. Accompanies her throughout the castle, stands guard at her side during meals, attends every single meeting, grueling and plentiful in their number, that is slowly and steadily leading to her official coronation. But it stops there. He does not offer his companionship through the evenings she reserves for herself, never follows her past the threshold of her door.

Asks, even, for the first time in their near seven years together, for a day to himself.

She is not cruel, she has offered them, has offered extended vacations, even, if he has family to visit, or whatever, whatever you wanna do. He had not said there was no family, nothing he could occupy himself with for days on end that would bring him any satisfaction were she not there by his side to share in it, but he had politely declined enough times that she stopped offering.

But he is at a point that, if pressed much further, may bend to breaking.

It is, unsurprisingly, the mess of his own feelings that pushes him to the edge.

Once again, there is little reprieve in a kingdom at war, and though the next morning, after— after they— after— dawns as frigid and unforgiving as the one before, the world remains in motion.

Stede is called to stand by for another meeting, and in that meeting, to the gathered flock of official advisors and her personal counsel, she reveals the ways she will spur that world forward. Most of the previous council is fired. Fang is granted his retirement. Stede will take his place as captain of the guard. And as such, in one week, will be accompanying her on a mission of diplomacy to their neighboring adversaries to meet with Queen Zheng and offer her proposal for the end of the war. There is a clamor of dissent, but she cuts it off with her word.

“The only reason we do not go sooner is to grant our riders time to send notice, to ensure that our arrival is not received as an attack.”

The Ed who speaks in these meetings is, of course, just as much the Ed he knows. The brilliance, the eloquence, they are all hers. But she is more deliberate. Careful. She will not allow her performance to be the reason she is misunderstood or misjudged. And the performance is elegant, is something to behold.

Still, though it is not his to miss, he does, misses the Ed he sees in private. The loose, easy way she talks, the way she laughs, the way she swears.

Misses it through every slogging inch of their ride to, across, and past the front.

As with many things now, it is worse this time around. Once again, he is resigned to the pain of seeing weariness and strain etch its way across his queen’s face and being in no position to alleviate it, though now even the hope of doing so has been thoroughly terminated.

By the time their meeting with Queen Zheng begins, even with a full night of sleep on a real bed behind him, he has frayed as thin as he has ever known himself to be.

Still, he appears by his queen’s side, sword sharp, armor sparkling, face set in the appropriate placidity, standing guard where he hopes he will not be needed.

Zheng is imposing, for all that she is a relatively slight woman. Something in the face, the way she carries herself, even seated. Something in the way she speaks. It is familiar.

Familiar, too, is the appearance of a knight by her side. His full suit of armor, his sword, the way he stands to her side, not hovering, but available at a moment’s notice. And familiar, in a startling way, in that Stede only recognizes it for what it is in that moment upon seeing it: his face, given over to a look of pure, pleasant adoration. Stede knows then that for all the schooling of his expressions, he often must look just the same.

Introductions set Stede on edge, though he knows it’s not his place to say, it’s just that there’s something about the way Zheng speaks, cordial, the way cordial actually is: sweet, but not in a way you can trust. But, for all appearances and purposes, she is perfectly pleasant when she extends her hand to Ed.

“Zheng Yi Sao. And this is Oluwande Boodhari, captain of the guard, and my partner.”

“Ed,” she responds, and swallows, halts for a moment that Stede sees Zheng register with a shrewd look that passes in the same moment. “And Stede Bonnet, also captain of the guard.”

Stede is still tracking back to my partner when Ed, waiting for no one as she often does, launches into it.

“Right, so, I reached out because I want to end this war. You accepted, and let me visit you on your home front personally because you want to end it too.”

“Maybe I just let you come here so I could kill you.” She says it casually, with a smile, like she and Ed are old friends, and Stede thinks maybe he’s hearing a different conversation, because Ed answers with a grin in kind.

“Nah, you hate wasting time and you hate provoking unnecessary violence.”

“Do I?”

“Three years ago, March, the battle at Arvid. Your army defeated ours—”

“I remember.”

“But there was a group of about a dozen of our soldiers that’d gotten separated from the main battle, and your army came across them after the balance had already tipped. You could have cut them down where they stood, but you knew your position, knew ours, relative to. So you didn’t. And wouldn’t again.”

Zheng’s eyes narrow.

“What do you want?”

“I want to give you Priesar.”

“And the conditions?”

“Not much, war ends, we sign a big peace agreement with a bunch of different sizes of fonts, you get your province back, I stop having to ride horses hundreds of miles every month to babysit encampments.”

“Free trade between our kingdoms?”

“Can’t get sumac anywhere else, and I really fuckin’ miss it.”

“And the border policy?”

“Same as it was before the war, before my dad fucked it, may he rest in piss.”

This startles— seemingly— a genuine— seemingly— laugh out of Zheng.

“Alright, Ed, you drive a hard bargain. I mean, not really, you sort of just handed me everything I wanted when you have the resources to ask for a lot more—”

“Playing the long game, I want that sumac.”

“But, let’s say we seal it with a cup of tea? Not much of a hand-shaker. The last warlord I met with spit in his.”

Ed grins, and a pot of tea is brought in, and Stede allows himself to relax by the smallest hair. Not enough that it would be noticed, but enough that he can feel it in his spine.

It’s not that he didn’t have every faith in Ed, but they were in enemy territory, and Ed had come completely unarmed, relying (as she should be able to) on Stede’s steel alone. He is grateful not to need it.

And perhaps he has relaxed a hair or two too far, because he hears his name from Ed, said like it has been repeated, before her registers her turned in her seat, holding out a cup of tea.

He takes it with a quiet thank you, sips it tentatively, and he can taste that it is made perfectly. Medium brew, dash of lemon, one sugar, no cream.

And then he realizes.

The look on Oluwande’s face, when he looks at his queen, as he has looked at her throughout this meeting, it is not just reverence, it is not just admiration, it is not just respect, it is not just adoration, it is not just fealty.

It is love.

It is the same way that Stede looks at his queen.

Because Stede loves her.

Loves her helplessly and hopelessly.

And in that moment he has no choice but to choke it down, swallow it back with his tea, let it settle in his gut like a stone. Has no choice but to carry that stone with him, across miles and days, as hidden away as Ed’s ring still secreted in his pocket.

For a moment there he did not need to carry it, not every day. He did not need to warm the gold in his hands, to worry it under his fingers, because they could attend to things much more precious and plentiful. He kept it in his drawer, let himself forget to return it to her every day and every night he saw to her in her chambers.

For once his hesitance had served him, because now that he is left with little else, at least he has this: her ring and his love.

He wishes he could return the latter.

After all, it serves no one. Serves no one for him to know it pulls at his heart to see her tired and suffering as they drag themselves back to the castle because he loves her. Serves no one for him to know it was so easy to stave off her suitors, not because they were not fit for her, but because he loves her. Serves no one for him to know that he craves her attention, her affection, her approval because he loves her.

So yes, by the time they have cleared the castle gates, Stede is one more stilted good night, one more awkward good morning away from finally, fully breaking.

So he asks her for a day.

He knows he is being aspirational in thinking that he might be able to sort the sick pit of his heart in one day, but he’s also not sure the gape of it can stand empty of her any longer than that.

So. One day. Sifting through final notes and needs in the council chamber, he asks.

“Your highness, I have a favor to request.”

“Yes?” He doesn’t understand the hint of light that illuminates in her eyes at this, otherwise he would find a way to call it up again. Would do desperate things, in fact, just for the chance. Would do even more desperate things to understand why his next words shutter the light in an instant.

“I wanted to request a day to myself. To attend to. To some personal needs.”

He does not expect her to say no, but he also does not expect silence.

“Would that— I understand the coronation is coming soon, but I could leave my instructions with—”

She blinks, focuses back on the notes before her.

“No, yeah, take a day, take two days, whatever you wanna do.”

What he wants to do.

Well.

He certainly would not characterize it as that.

He takes the day anyways.

Doesn’t really know what to do with the day when he has it, if he’s honest. He wakes up in his room as early as he usually does, with the dawn, and swallows down the urge to pull the covers tight, roll over, and go back to sleep, also as he usually does, before he realizes he just. Can.

So he does, pulls the covers up around his ears to block out the world, and burrows in deep. Over the years he’s accumulated a lovely collection of fine sheets and soft blankets: cozy down and sturdy quilted cotton. He’s made good use of the discards of the castle, mending what could be repaired, laundering what really just needed a stiff and thoughtful washing, and at this point he has a veritable nest. What an unprecedented treat, to be able to just luxuriate in it, to grab some extra, much needed rest.

Or it would be. If he actually could.

It should be a freedom, but it feels like the furthest thing. He tosses and turns under his blankets and the invisible itch that insists, even now, that there is somewhere he ought to be, something he ought to be doing, for several horrible minutes. He had been the one to ask for space from his queen, even if not in so many words, but instead of feeling freed from a tether he feels like a loose end, can only think of the spaces he cannot go. Cannot go to the throne room, the council rooms, certainly cannot go to her chambers, and where else would he even bother to go if not those places, if not to see Ed?

The garden has been fallow since before he came here, the kitchen is busy with work and doesn’t need his distraction, and he hasn’t the energy for a ride, which nixes the stables.

The last place beyond that he remembers spending any time in the castle without Ed is the library, usually on a mission to purloin something for her own collection, but still.

The soft blanket of silence that towering rows of books lend to the room, it sounds like a comfort he might stand to accept, so he settles on that as enough of a possibility to get up from his bed and dress. Plain breeches, plain stockings, plain shirt. He does not miss the pinch and the press of the clothes he wore as a young lady, but sometimes he does think about lace, about swirling patterns in velvet and silk. He puts on his belt, though he leaves the sword behind, only his dagger at his hip, just in case.

When he enters the library, he is not greeted by reassuring silence, but instead his name, from someone he’s almost certain he’s never met before— the jaunty lurch of his collar, the frill of a kerchief round his neck, the mutton chops, the smile, Stede thinks he would recognize him.

“Oh, hey Stede!” says the younger mystery man perched with one leg kicked up at one of the reading tables.

“Pardon, have— have we been introduced?”

“Oh, yeeah, no, sorry, forgot. Lucius Spriggs, ‘‘‘castle’’’ ‘‘‘‘‘librarian’’’’’.”

He sticks his hand out to shake, and Stede catches for a moment on how someone can put such emphatic quotations around something without moving their hands before he remembers to return the gesture.

“Stede Bonnet, um, captain of the guard, I believe.”

Because technically, he thinks, Fang has already retired and there’s no one else to be doing the job, but also Ed has not yet been coronated, and so legally all of her decrees are sort of temporary emergency measures, but also it’s not like anyone else—

“I know, I know, sit, you don’t need to hover among friends.”

“Friends?” he asks absently, though he sits.

“Right, yeah, I know, but like, I feel like I know you already, Pete never shuts up about you— Well, he never shuts up about the princess— queen?— Ed? So by extension— At any rate, love the man, but I’ve never met someone more enthusiastic about their job, and he works with horses. Yuck.”

“Pete?” Stede feels a bit stuck on a loop, nothing but questions, but these past few weeks the sensation isn’t exactly new.

“Right, yeah, one man horseshoe operation, my boyfriend, got me this fabulous new job.” At Stede’s blank look, he continues. “Bald. Bit shorter than me. Never has sleeves on any of his shirts?”

Stede snaps his fingers and points. “Black Pete the blacksmith!”

Lucius blinks. “Yeah, can’t believe anyone actually calls him that… Yeah, that’s Pete.” Despite the disbelieving twist, he looks immeasurably fond. “Anyways, what can I do for you? Need something for your girl Ed?” and he waggles his eyebrows.

His girl.

Suddenly, he can’t keep it in any longer, lets out a sigh that trembles and spills, tucks his face down into his hands.

“No,” and it’s practically a groan. “I took the day off. She doesn’t need anything from me.”

“Oh. Oh. Did she break up with you?” The last part is intoned like it’s meant to be a whisper, but the volume goes nowhere.

Goes nowhere but to boil up a flush of embarrassment in the tips of his ears.

“No, she didn’t— It’s not like that,” he tells the table where he tips further forward, knocks his forehead against the wood.

“Riight.”

Stede tilts his head to the side, musters up a glare at Lucius from the dregs of his sanity.

“I’m not being sarcastic! That’s just how I talk.”

He tilts back into the wood of the table, tucks his arms in a circle around his head. It’s nice and dark under the cover of his arms, maybe he can just stay here until the coronation—

“Wait, does the whole castle think the queen and I are together?”

“Um. No? Sorry, yes they do, at least everyone who works here, who knows what the stuffy bureaucrat royalty lords and ladies crowd thinks, and I mean, you do go everywhere together, and the way she—”

“Of course we go everywhere together, that’s my job.”

“Huh,” Lucius says, though it is very much a wants-to-say-more-but-is-choosing-not-to sort of sound. “So not a break up, just a regular day off.”

“Just a regular day off,” Stede says, because really, what else is he going to say? This is not exactly a conversation he is equipped to have, and it’s already embarrassing enough as it is.

“‘Kay,” and then Lucius’ eyes shift (more) mischievous. “Hey, wanna see where they hide all the books with the dirty stuff in them?”

Stede doesn’t know exactly what he’s getting himself into, only that he’s getting himself out of a different uncomfortable conversation, but he does say yes, and Lucius beams.

By the time mid morning has tumbled into late afternoon, Stede finds himself surprised to realize that he agrees with Lucius’ premature assessment of “friends”.

The boy— and, well, to be fair, Lucius is not really much younger than him, but there’s a sort of youthful spry about him, like he is not burdened by uncountable weights, and if he is, he certainly carries himself like he isn’t— is quick, funny, brash. And Stede tries very valiantly not to let it remind him of Ed, tries not to punctuate every new discovery as they pick through the library with the aborted thought that he can’t wait to show this to—

And for all that Lucius seems given over to nosiness, shows himself very quickly to be an incorrigible gossip— did you hear about Archie from the kitchens sneaking around with Jim from the armory? and oh this one reminds me of that one earl that visited once who gave half the castle crabs in only two nights— he does seem to understand, beyond that first baffling inquiry, not to prod at Stede and Ed’s relationship. Not that—

Not that there is one, beyond the relationship of faithful knight and benevolent ruler, which is a kind of relationship, which is what he means. No matter what the castle staff seem to think, and he tends not to listen to their speculation anyways. Why, Frenchie, who is an excellent musician when called upon to be, was once solidly convinced that peanuts were going to bring about the downfall of the whole kingdom. Clever man, as are the majority of the castle staff, at least those that Ed hired, but Stede gives very little weight to their rumors.

Anyways, the afternoon winds down, and Lucius tells him he really ought to actually take notes on the inventory Stede had inadvertently helped him through, but that he should come back any time, and Stede finds himself at another loose end.

Whiling away the bulk of the day with Lucius was certainly a relief, and he does think he’ll take him up on his invitation to return, but now he is faced, once again, with the prospect of empty hours, and no idea how to fill them. He does have a particularly illuminating manuscript Lucius had— so subtly— placed on the table immediately after encouraging him to borrow anything that struck his fancy, really, anything at all, but he knows himself, and he knows that the second he cracks the spine he will be consumed only with thoughts of—

“Ed!”

Stede is so lost in his thoughts that he doesn’t realize she is coming up the corridor to meet him until the toes of her slippers point into his field of view.

“Uh, hey, Stede.”

Stede looks up, catches a glance at her face, not sure what he finds in it, though it’s soft and open, and then he remembers himself, fumbles to frantically tuck the book in his hands behind his back.

“Your— your highness. Is there something you needed?”

Her open face shifts, flutters, her brow dipping into a little divot.

“Nah, uh, I wanted to bring you something? Actually?” and then she holds out a folded piece of parchment, sealed in purple wax.

Stede awkwardly rearranges his hands, face burning, and reaches out for the paper, manages to pop the seal with his thumbnail and unfold it without making more of a fool of himself.

He does not immediately understand what he’s reading.

“An invitation? To the coronation?”

“Yeah,” Ed tells her slippers.

“For me?”

“Yeah.”

“Won’t I be there as captain—”

She looks up at him, big eyes bigger with that magic she keeps in them, shimmering up through her lashes. “I wanted. Um. I wanted you there, as my. Friend.”

“Friend?” he echoes.

“Yeah, I mean, you are. Like my oldest friend.”

Oh.

Stede thinks he might be sick.

He—

Because—

Whatever he did, however he disappointed Ed, however he let her down the night after her father died, he’d had it wrong this whole time. He hadn’t just failed her as her employee, he’d failed her as her friend.

He swallows it down, the sick, the dread, the guilt, because he will not spin vulnerability any deeper in her eyes, no, especially not now.

“Of course. Of course I will be there,” he says, and he puts in it everything he can afford to, reassurance, affection, as a friend, respect. And then he waits, will not leave her feeling like he has fled in the wake of this gesture of kindness, though that may have been a mistake, because neither of them seem to know what to do with the silence that quickly falls.

Eventually Ed breaks their shared gaze, looks away, then brings her eyes back, shuttered down to their normal size, which is to say: still devastating.

“Right, yeah, so I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Yes, of course, your highness. Tomorrow.”

For once, he is grateful to be dismissed.

Chapter Text

The days leading to the coronation are a fresh agony, and Stede realizes now how often he thinks he is at his worst before he finds new and creative ways to be in pain, but he swears this time it really is the worst.

The word friend rattles and clangs around his brain, and he has no time alone with which to examine it for meaning, because the preparations for the coronation— political and practical— are in full swing and Ed has a packed calendar, which means Stede does as well. He has no time, but the thought takes root in him, snatches space in his schedule anyways, by stealing into his nights, by shoving aside sleep and making itself comfortable in his bed in its place anyways.

It’s only that—

If, to Ed, Stede is a friend, perhaps it is that trust of friendship that allowed her to permit him such physical closeness. Perhaps that was his mistake, that he imposed upon her something she read as familiarity when he intended utility, for whatever else his hidden feelings might say. Perhaps he pushed it too far.

When he was only tending to her, there was plausible deniability.

But that night—

It was undeniably mutual, something Stede had taken just as much as he had tried to give it.

And she must have seen it, must have seen how Stede had taken, just the same, her gift of friendship, and twisted it into something selfish, something desirous and wanting. She must have seen it, and the miracle is that she cast him only out of her bed.

That she still sees him as her friend.

Though perhaps that was a reminder, of his place, a reminder that he had reached too far and was expected not to do so again.

Ed rarely talks to him like that, is usually direct and plain, but Stede doesn’t— he doesn’t know. The less he sleeps, the less he is sure of anything, and the less sure he is, the less he sleeps, and he is certainly in no position to impose his concerns on Ed, certainly not with her coronation knocking on their doorstep, with her own face drawn under a lack of sleep. There are seemingly infinite demands on her wisdom and clarity, and he will not add to them. He can wait.

And, despite the endless blur of days preceding, the morning of the coronation does eventually arrive.

(She had scheduled it for early afternoon, said she was going sleep in, have a big, fuck-off breakfast, sit through the coronation, and then nap through the rest of the day. Damn anyone who needs anything from her, that’s what delegation is for.)

Stede is, of course, up with the sun, even though today is, ostensibly, another day off for him, and short of anything better to do, dresses in what passes for his best, short his sword belt and dagger, and wanders down to the library, hoping Lucius can help him fritter away a few hours before he can be only slightly early taking his seat in the throne room. Unfortunately, he finds the library empty, but he is really too fatigued to find anywhere else to hide out the rest of the morning, so he picks up a book at random, something filed under B for Battles, Historical (or Boring, Horrible, as Lucius says), something safely out of the realm of adventure or romance or anything else liable to call up further thoughts of Ed, and settles in to read.

He wakes to a hand on his shoulder and Lucius’ voice in his ear.

“Stede, Stede, you’re gonna miss the coronation.”

Shit.

He snaps upright, fumbles to a stand.

“How many— What time is it— Lucius— Fuck—”

Lucius is corralling him to the door, as if he isn’t already on his way.

“We have like five minutes, c’mon, c’mon.”

They slip into the throne room as quietly as they can, Lucius finding his seat in the back of the room and fading quickly into obscurity, but Stede has no such luck.

As captain of the guard— as Ed’s friend— his seat is close to the front of the room, and everyone else is already in place, their eyes falling heavily on him as he tucks himself into place.

Everyone, including Ed, who—

She—

He feels foolish even wasting mortal words when she, regal in her robes, leaves him questioning his prior dismissal of the divine right of rulers.

She is draped in velvet, trimmed in fur, sparkling with gold and ruby, and yet she herself is the most radiant thing in the room, and she is looking right at him. Is smiling. Is giving the nod for the cleric to begin the ceremony.

It is a great deal of reading, religious and political and historical, and Stede hears none of it, not one bit as it drones on and on and on.

He watches Ed instead.

She looks happy, but not in a shining, obvious way. Outwardly, to most anyone else, she likely looks serene and regal, but Stede knows her. Knows the private glimmer in her eye, the sweet twitch of her lips, the tiniest crinkle around her eyes, and he watches it. Watches her so closely that it is only when he sees her brow furrow, when he watches her take a halting step back, that he realizes.

It’s not nearly enough time to do anything, not with his hips bare of his belt, not with his reaction slowed by fatigue and his own foolish head lost in the clouds, no, not enough time at all.

When he registers the figure barreling down on Ed with a knife poised in attack, all he has the time, the space to do, is the one thing left to his instincts—

To get between her and the blade and pray.

When he opens his eyes, it is to find himself for the second time in Ed’s bed weighed down with the knowledge that he has disappointed her.

It’s unmistakable in her face as she sits in a chair by his side. And, in fact, beyond disappointment, she is angry, though if there was any doubt in her expression, her voice resolves it near immediately.

“What the fuck did you do that for?”

He tries to sit up, so he can meet her eye properly when he asks her what she means, but a howling pinch in his gut at the motion answers the question unasked.

Right. The coronation. A blur of body and auburn hair. Someone had tried to stab Ed. Between the memory of pain in his gut and the fresh imprint of it now, Stede is fairly certain someone did stab him.

And now Ed is angry, though he really can’t fathom why.

“I was just doing my job—”

“Your job? Your fucking job?” Ed laughs, though it’s far too bitter to find any shred of humor in it, leans back, and then just as quickly leans in. “Is it ‘just’ your job to fuck me? To die for me? To—” and then the splintering of bitterness in her voice fractures into something much more fragile, much more lost. “To be my friend?”

Stede feels just as lost as she sounds. Technically it is his job to die for her, though he doesn’t think it will help to point it out, and besides that, the way she spits out the word “just”, he guesses there will be little comfort in thinking any of the other comforts he tried to give her rested only on the pretense of obligation.

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“What I want?” She laughs again, though it’s a frailer thing, and slumps back into her seat. Her next words are quiet, plaintive, free of demand or even expectation. “I want you to say you feel the way I do.”

His words, along with his heart, stall out in his chest. “The way— what way?”

She looks down at her hands, fiddles them through the skirts of the coronation robe she still wears.

“I dunno, I dunno, I figure. Things between us, they’re easy. Like breathing. You understand me. You like me. We teach each other things. We laugh. We just— you just. It’s been such a hard fucking few years, and every time I can remember being happy since my mum died, it’s been because of. Because of.”

Ed looks up, eyes ever wide, and Stede swallows.

“You.”

“Oh, Ed—”

She kisses him.

She kisses him, and he has to repeat to himself that thought, she’s kissing me, a few times, before he realizes I can kiss her back.

There is a feeling, after a long day in his armor, after every piece is shed, after his clothes are stripped and the bandages around his chest unraveled, when the tightness in his lungs finally releases, and he can draw in, properly deep, and breathe.

Relief is too small a word, for that, or for this.

She kisses him, and he kisses her back. She threads her fingers into his hair, and he tangles his up in hers. She leans in, presses deep, takes a gentle hold against his bottom lip and starts to tug and he—

Gasps, falls back against the pillows, pushed down by the burning in his gut.

“Oh, fuck, Stede, sorry, fuck, sorry—”

He winces around a breath and fixes his eyes back on her precious— panicked— face as her hands hover.

“It’s okay, darling, I’m okay—”

“The fuck you are, if you popped those stitches—” Her hands still in their worrying. “‘Darling?’”

“Yes, is that okay—?”

“Yeah, okay, yeah, I wanna be your darling.”

“Lovely. That’s lovely.” And it really is, but there is also a hole in his gut, and his nap in the library was not nearly enough to repay his sleep deficit, and also he thinks he’s felt every human feeling and likely a few animal ones all in the last few minutes, and really, he’s exhausted. His head sinks into the pillows and his eyes slide closed.

“D’you think— you think that your darling could join you in that big bed? For a cuddle?”

“Yes,” he says around a cracking yawn. “Yes, I think she could.”

And he is right, she is right, right up against his side, snug and warm and safe, when he drifts off not a minute later.

He wakes again, somewhere in the dark between evening and morning, though he has no sense to which end he’s closest, but he does have a sense for something much more pressing:

Ed, tucked up in the crook of his arm, outer layers of her robes kicked free and clad in just her chemise, dozing away.

Seeing her like this, soft in sleep, calls up something in him so tender and sweet that he’s not sure he can hold it all in his hands. It feels like—

Like the realization that he loves her.

Like the realization that his love might be wanted.

Like kissing her for the first time and knowing, though they were not wasted, every other way he had kissed her would fall away, would pale against even the word kiss in light of what it truly meant to touch her, meet her, greet her lips with his own.

He studies her, studies the feeling, as she rests, as he rests. Roves his eyes over the slope of her brow, turns over in his mind the shape of easy, touches a finger gently to the corner of her mouth, thinks back on the taste of her kiss.

She snuffles, hums, and burrows deeper into his hold.

“Sorry,” he says, a whisper, just in case he hasn’t actually woken her.

“Sssh,” she says into his armpit. “S’not morning yet, so I’m not awake.”

“No, of course, darling.”

She stills in her burrowing, and she peels back to raise her face and look at him.

“‘Darling.’” she repeats.

“Yes, don’t you like—?”

“Yeah, I just.” She pauses, a breath that burrows deep. “I gotta know, okay? This isn’t just something that— that— what is this to you? What am I, because I don’t wanna be your boss, Stede, I hate that—”

He can see her panic, can see it folding her face, drawing her into herself, and his own panic is ripping through him all the same, taking the words that sit on the edge of his tongue and twisting them into knots.

But his bravery has always stood tallest in her service and this is no exception.

“Ed.”

He reaches out his hand, catches hers, gives a gentle squeeze, and her frantic eyes finally fall on him in focus.

“Ed, I love you. I love you.”

Her jaw wobbles, sticks her lip out in a pout.

“Like— like what— like—”

“Just like you said. Breathing together. Being near each other. It’s—”

It’s hard to—

Happiness is a slippery thing in his life. Pride at a job well done. Peace when there is a lull in the demands on their time. Feelings tied up in duty and diligence, those are the language he’s taught himself, though he’s not sure that happiness was ever his mother tongue.

But if there is anywhere, if there is anyone he has ever thought could teach him—

“You make me happy too.”

“Oh.”

“Is that— is it good?”

“Yeah, yes, it’s good.” She sniffles. “Can— can I kiss you again?”

“Oh, yes.”

She has to do a bit of shuffling, him a bit of adjusting, so they can meet each other comfortably without straining her knee or pulling his stitches, and she doesn’t untangle their hands for a moment of it, but when they do, oh when they do.

This kiss is better than their first. Better for the expecting it, and the presence of mind he has, less clouded by whatever they must have dosed him with to sedate him through his stitches, and for the understanding of what it means, to know that he loves Ed, that she knows this as well, and accepts it, welcomes it even, just as she is welcome in his arms as he kisses her and kisses her and kisses her.

Eventually the flurry of their kisses slow, soften, stop, and Ed draws back, her eyes still shining in the dark, though if it’s tears, Stede could believe they are not from sadness.

“We should—” she starts.

“Get some rest?”

“Yeah,” she says, and her face quirks in a smile. “One of us got themself gut stabbed for no fuckin reason and they need time to recover.”

“For no reason— Ed, I couldn’t let you—”

Her face softens, pinches.

“I know. I know. Just don’t do that again.”

“Okay,” he says, and gently draws up their joined hands, presses a kiss to her knuckles. “I promise.”

“‘Kay,” she says, and her lashes flutter, blinkblink blink, and oh.

“Sleep,” he reminds her, reminds himself.

“Yeah,” she says.

“And then we have the morning.”

“Right.” Unconvinced.

“And we can have breakfast together, and— and I can kiss you in the daylight.” It burns through his cheeks to say it, but really, he does want to, does want to see her like that, because if she shimmers in the moonlight, under the sun she shines.

“Oh.” Blinkblink blink. “Okay yeah, let’s do that.”

And then she shimmies down, settles comfortably back into the crook of Stede’s arm, and just as quickly shuffles back up.

“Yes?” he asks.

“Kiss me goodnight?”

And of course.

He tucks his hand up, caresses the crook of her neck until his touch skates over the edge of her jaw so he can carefully tilt her in, give her soft, give her tender, give her all his love to hold, to keep safe, at least til morning.

When she wakes him the next morning with kisses scattered across his cheeks, his brow, the tip of his nose, he knows she has.

All in all, recovering from a stab wound earns mixed reviews from Stede.

There’s the stab wound of it all, of course, the stinging, burning hole in his gut, and the blood and the puss and the ooze. Changing bandages, limited movement, swaying between brain scattering pain and brain addling pain killers and never really landing in the realm of comfort.

And then there’s his nurse, about whom he has no complaints— except maybe that she keeps making him laugh and he keeps having to swallow it down so as not to tug at his stitches. No, he hasn’t any complaints about her, her touch soft but firm, her attention close, her care unceasing. He adores her, and reminds her as often as he can now that it is allowed.

No, the problem, the difficult thing—

It’s the guilt.

He should have been faster. He should have been more alert. He should have brought even just his dagger with him to the coronation. He should not have spent the morning a scattered mess, and then asleep, and then running late to perhaps the biggest event of his life. But he didn’t, didn’t do any of the things he should have, and did only the last, most desperate thing he could, and burdened Ed in one fell swoop with the terror of seeing him injured, the fear of having to watch him die, and the responsibility of caring for him in the aftermath as his body stubbornly drags its feet through healing.

On the first day, he can barely sit up, and she won’t even let him try it for more than a second before she swoops in, fussing and frustrated, knock that off, I’ll do it, here, just— Gets him settled against a mountain of pillows, under a field of blankets.

He repays her with the morning kiss he promised, and just as his dreams have promised, she is radiant. The sun catches on the threads of hair sneaking loose from her braid, paints flush and gold across the apples of her cheeks, gilds every wrinkle and pore, every sweet inch of her skin.

She is beautiful, and to sit in bed and bask in her beauty, it’s not a gift he would quickly turn down, it’s just that—

It scratches in his skin, leaves him restless and itching, just to sit here. Every nerve in his body is urging him up, up, out, to attend to his duties that have lain fallow for now the second day counting. If he felt the constant gap between what Ed deserved and what he offered her before, now, when she gives him her affection, her care, her kiss—

He was already deep in deficit, and every moment he lays idle, he feels the bottom of the pit drop further out.

“What’s wrong, what’s that face?”

Ed’s question drags him out of it, makes him realize that he’s stopped making his mechanical way through the breakfast that was brought to them on a silver tray, and is instead staring off into the middle distance.

He’s not sure what to say, how to offer her the truth without burdening her with it.

“I can’t— I can’t stay in bed all day.”

“Says who?” she asks, frowns around a bite of toast. “I mean, yeah, I dunno, I get bored in bed all day too, but you’re definitely allowed to.”

He latches onto it, bored, can keep her from being bored, can keep himself busy, without placing too much on her out of his own neediness.

“Yes, bored, couldn’t stand it, you know, hard to keep busy in bed.”

Ed arcs her eyebrow, tugs her lips up in a cheeky smile, though she says nothing, grabs the mostly empty breakfast tray and stands from her bed.

Even with her merciful retreat, he turns bright red at the implication, which is sort of—

They’ve had sex.

He can recognize it for what it is now, with all the gift of hindsight. They’ve had sex multiple times, sex that Stede highly suspects, given the— all the— anyways, it’s not impossible that she wanted to have that sex, specifically, with him. Far be it from him to speculate as to why, but what does he even do with information like that? Will they have sex again? How does he know, if it’s not being offered up as a service or a comfort, when it should happen again? How do they—

“Here, want me to help you up?”

He blinks up at Ed, stood by the bedside, arm out in offer.

“Oh, um, yes, but.”

But he’s down to his underwear under the covers; Roach had apparently stripped him of everything else, including the bandages around his chest, in order to treat him, and laudanum had alleviated some of the self consciousness, but he’d still kept the blankets tucked tight under his armpits the whole night, throughout the morning. And again, only some of the self consciousness.

“Do you know where my shirt went off to?”

Ed’s face twists up like she’s smelled something foul.

“Pretty sure Roach burned it, cause of all the blood mostly, and also ‘demonic energy’. Here, let me—” and then she whirls away to her wardrobe, starts flipping through it with rapid and practiced hands.

She comes back with something glowing and golden, gilded to match the shine of her face.

“Does this—?”

“It’s beautiful.”

It falls from his mouth, unfiltered, but wholly true.

She shakes it out into the shape of a robe: a field of buttery yellow trimmed in curling gold, wide sleeves, generous swaths of silk and comfort.

Logic tells him that she can’t mean anything else except that this is for him, but he struggles to believe it. Besides her, he hasn’t touched something this fine in nearing a decade.

“You wanna—?”

“Can I?”

“Yeah, let me just—” She tips him carefully forward, just enough to pass the robe across his back and reach one sleeve out for him to thread his arm through.

It’s no small feat, requires all of his concentration to maintain his grip on the blankets around his chest with one arm while clumsily punching the other through the channel of silk, and there are so many things nipping at that concentration: Ed’s palm at his back; her other hand guiding the sleeve of the robe; the cool slide of silk over his feverish skin; the stab wound. However, he does manage, and then, after several deep breaths, manages to repeat with the other arm, manages to secure the lapels of the robe over his chest and stomach without baring himself to the world.

“Need a break?”

“Yes—” he shudders another heavy breath— “Please.”

“Are you sure you wanna get up, cause—”

“I can do it.”

It comes out a more insistent tone than he would normally take with her, and pulls, wobbles him between the different spikes of embarrassment from demanding her help or wasting the whole day in bed.

She says nothing, waits by his side.

He gives himself to the count of ten breaths before he tries again.

“Okay, to the table, I can get to the table.”

And he’s right! He can! He doesn’t even pop any of his stitches!

It does take longer than he’d like, and there are a few thready moments where he shifts from keeping the appearance of leaning on Ed’s support to actually falling into her arms, and he does have to catch his breath for a solid minute after he falls gracelessly into his seat, but damn it, he does it!

Ed is still looking at him rather dubiously, even after his breathing returns to normal.

“So, what do you wanna do now that you’re up and at ‘em?”

“Oh. Hm. Well I thought I’d write the rota for the new guard schedule—”

“Mate, you gotta be joking—”

“The old one turns over next week and I’d like to get out ahead of it—”

“Do you know how sick days work?”

“I— Well. No. No, I don’t.”

Ed frowns.

“Sicks days are like, you’re busy as fuck for months and months and then you get pneumonia and finally you have a god given excuse to tell everyone in the castle to piss off while you catch up on your book and lounge around in nothing but your silkiest robe. Except instead of fluid in your lungs, you’ve got a hole in your gut.”

“But—”

“But nothing, who’s gonna be mad? Not me. You’re the captain of my guard, as long as you’re out of commission, far as I’m concerned, so am I. Like, safety, or whatever, though to be honest, I just wanna hang out. We’ve been so fuuucking busy.”

And put like that, it is much easier to accept. As always, they move as a pair, but if Ed sees this little disruption less as a handicap and more as a break, well—

“Alright then. How about a game of chess?”

Chapter Text

In hindsight, it makes sense, but that first day really is the worst of the healing.

There are growing pains, figuring out how to speak and move without straining his stitches, but once he does, he falls into— well, it’s not normalcy, but a new normal he can at least wrap his mind around.

Ed keeps him tucked up in her bed, won’t hear of him convalescing out of her sight for even a minute, and they play chess, and she reads to him, and—

And they kiss.

And they cuddle.

Sweet, comforting movements and motions just for that sole purpose, just for comfort, just because Ed likes it.

Of course, Stede likes it too. There are so many things he couldn’t feel, couldn’t know when he remained under artificial distance. Things like: Ed’s skin feels better, softer under his palms when there is no map edge for his hands to avoid falling off of. Things like: Ed’s hair tangles up in his fingers just so that Stede can give the slightest tug while they kiss and she will whine. Things like: Ed’s mouth tastes just like oversteeped Earl Grey first thing in the morning, a bit bitter, a bit acidic, but he wouldn’t waste Earl Grey and he won’t be wasting those kisses.

Things like— a few days later, when he’s nearly back to full mobility and they’re taking full advantage by lounging around on the couch and trading kisses— what it feels like when Ed wants him.

Ed is perched in his lap, the simple phrase of which in no way accounts for how it pulls in his heart and stirs in his gut to see her slowly inch, one kiss at a time, from next to him to closer to him to fully astride, the way she ducks back, shyly tucks stray hairs behind her ears, peeks at him through fluttering lashes. Ed is perched in his lap, and they are kissing, and Stede has his hands carefully settled on her hips, steadying her just as much as himself, and Stede is finding out things to do with tongue and teeth and lips that none of his books ever did justice to, and he is starting to feel that embarrassing heat stirring in his gut, between his legs, when Ed drops her hips down and he feels. Heat, and something pressing, pushing towards hardness, enough for him to understand, in what fuzzy, distant way that he can, that she wants.

Though she’s the one that asks, pulling back and breathless “What do you want?”

He gives her an answer, the only answer, in a state like this, that he can give.

“Anything you want, Ed.”

He tries to tuck back into the crook of her neck, to kiss, the way he’s found she especially likes, but she pulls away. Stills.

“No, Stede, what do you want?”

He blinks. Opens his mouth. Closes it. Tries again.

“Would you like it if—?”

The sound Ed makes is something akin to an indignant kitten, and Stede would laugh, except that along with it, she pulls back completely, retreats into the corner of the couch, crosses her arms, and frowns.

“Ed—?”

“You know I’m already in charge of basically everything?”

“... Yes?”

“Gotta make rules and laws and proclamations. Even before David kicked it, I was in charge of so much shit that got foisted on me, and it’s only gonna go up from here.”

“Ed—?”

“I don’t wanna be in charge of our relationship too, man.”

“Oh.”

“Like, I know you just got stabbed, but I don’t want this to be like before, y’know? I don’t want to be guessing, I want to know what you want.”

What he wants— What he— What does he—?

“C’mon, Stede. One thing. Something you want.”

He can’t—

He had fantasies, he’s sure of it, but at the thought of actually asking for any of them, the idea of demanding, wanting, reaching out and taking—

They flee. His mind is blank.

Ed sighs.

Though, honestly, she does not seem angry, does not seem frustrated, or at least not with him. No, if anything she seems— She seems sad.

“Look,” she says. “It doesn’t even have to be about us. Whole kingdom is your oyster, okay? What’s one thing you’d change around here if you could?”

He digs deep. Thinks of every feeling of dissatisfaction he’s swallowed down over the years, of every disappointment and discomfort he’s suffered in the name of duty, unmarked and without complaint. Looks inside himself and tries to find something he’s missed, something he learned to do without but never really forgot, something he wanted that wasn’t Ed.

“I wish—”

He hesitates.

Ed nods, smiles, go on.

“I wish the castle still had a garden.”

“Great, that’s a great idea, do that.”

“Sorry, what?”

“Yeah, resources at your disposal, the treasury, whatever you want, borrow staff from the fuckin’ uhhhh wherever, I don’t care. Get the garden back together.”

Stede stalls. Stutters out. Flushes red in embarrassment, because of course he would bring up something he—

“Ed, I have no idea how to do any of that. I couldn’t—”

“Bullshit you couldn’t! You know more about plants and flowers and shit than anyone else I know, and fuck couldn’t besides, your queen just said you could.”

Well, if his queen—

Ed is smirking, pleased, like she knows she’s said the magic words, though it quickly softens into a sad little smile.

“C’mon, Stede, you deserve to do just one thing just for you.”

“Okay,” he allows, and then quickly amends. “I can try.”

“Fuck yeah you can,” she says, and then clearly sick of being flung far from his side, wriggles up underneath his arm and leans in close. “Just don’t ask me for help with any of it. Damn place is full of spiders.”

He tightens his arm around her, drops a kiss into the crown of her hair, and much more quietly, much less sure, he does think to himself—

Maybe I can.

The garden sits in the center of the castle, the whole building built like a hollow square around this central plot of— what is now— waist high grasses slowly being choked by raspberry bushes that fruit, rot, and shed every season. Ed was not wrong about the spiders, though she neglected to mention the flies that congregate with the fruiting and gorge themselves until the first frosts of winter wipe them out, and then come back anew with the dawning of the next spring. Stede suspects that whoever originally designed the castle did so with the thought that even those housed in the inner walls would have something beautiful to look at, fresh air to invite in through the window, but with the disrepair of the garden, the flies and the smell of rot, no one can stand to open their windows, he’s sure. He certainly can’t.

And he knows it wasn’t always like this, though he hadn’t asked, but when he first came to the castle the garden was only slightly overgrown, still had a few flowering plants thriving out amongst the rambling growth. But season by season he had watched it fold further and further into itself, paring down from bushes and flowers and grasses and trees and vines to the battleground between rot and weed it had become. He can’t even say for certain which year it was that the stink of late summer, the bugs that came with it, became too much for him, only that there was one fall he closed his window and the following spring did not open it again.

When he comes to it the next morning, early with the sun, the garden is exactly as he remembers it from whenever it was he last bothered to spare it a glance. By some small mercy, it is still early spring, so the stink has not yet set in, but the image left in its place is as chilling as the last reaching fingers of the winter. The grass has not yet rebounded into its full height, is dry and brown and cracked to its knees from the weight of the since melted snow, and the raspberry bushes are naked of their foliage, spiny skeletons telling wiser men to keep away.

Thankfully, Stede is not a very wise man, and what’s more, he has a mission, a task, a duty. This garden has gone neglected long enough, and Stede has taken up the mantle to see it to rights, so he will offer it, as he has with everything in his life, his very best effort.

Even if he’s not really sure where to start.

And maybe that’s where he needs to start. A list? Yes, a list, of supplies, of tasks, of goals he’s working towards.

Which leads him back inside, towards the library, which is not a retreat, it’s just practical, he didn’t bring pen and paper to the garden with him, and even if he had—

“Ohmygod, Stede!”

And then he’s being hugged, which makes him gasp, equal parts surprise and the tugging in his gut wound.

“Oops, sorry,” and then Lucius— for that is who it is— pulls back.

“Hello?”

“Yeah, hi, whatever— You’re okay! I saw you get stabbed, like, yesterday.”

“Oh. Yes, I guess, I guess you did.”

Lucius rolls his eyes, tugs him towards the table, gestures to sit. “So what’s up?”

“Oh, yes, I’m restoring the gardens, so I need to make a to-do list. And if you could point me towards anything on botany or agriculture, that would be—”

“Not at all what I meant, I meant you got stabbed at the coronation, and no one’s seen you leave Ed’s chambers since then, and it’s been like a week.”

“Oh, well— Oh.”

Lucius pumps his eyebrows. “Yeah, so, y’know, spill!”

Stede flushes red. It’s one thing for the castle staff to be speculating about him, but for Ed to be caught up in it, for people to be assuming that she would deign to—

“I don’t think it’s anyone’s business.”

“‘Kay, well, everyone is already assuming that Ed’s been pegging you through the mattress since your stitches were tied off, so really it’s up to you if you wanna set the record straight.”

Red flush turns to crimson burn.

“She’s not— pegging?— It’s not like that.”

Lucius gives him an unimpressed mmhmm.

Though—

If everyone already thinks—

Would it be so bad to ask Lucius some advice? Lucius already seems to possess far more worldly knowledge than Stede, and if Stede is meant to be on his great big solo journey of doing things he wants to do, maybe he can ask—

“I think— I think we might be together? Courting?”

“You think?”

“How would one be able to tell, usually?”

“I dunno, it’s different for everyone, like I said, pretty much the whole castle already thought you were doing that, like, years ago, so I guess, what made you think things have changed?”

“You can’t tell anyone,” he hedges, though he suspects it’s pointless. “But she kissed me.”

“Gasp!” Lucius says.

“And I told her I loved her.”

“Gayer gasp!”

“And we’ve been sleeping together—”

“I knew it—”

“In her bed, not like that, just sleeping.”

Lucius hums, arcs an eyebrow. “Yeah, Stede, I’m pretty sure you’re together. I’ve had less intimate relationships with people I was engaged to. What did she say when you told her you loved her?”

“That it was a good thing.”

“Don’t think she would’ve said that if she didn’t want to be together. Which makes sense, she clearly adores you. Wait, what are you doing down here and not up in the honeymoon suite snogging your queen?”

“Oh, um. Well, she basically told me to get a hobby.”

“Yowch.”

Stede hums. Because it’s— Everything she said made sense, she shouldn’t have to be saddled with responsibility for both of them just because that was how it always had been. But Stede still finds himself dodging the sting of rejection, the fear, the same fear that’s always plagued him, that who he is already is not good enough for her.

But Stede is a doer.

He has always been able to shoulder into the gaps between his adequacy and true excellence and work stolidly forward.

And this will be no exception.

Besides, with Lucius’ help, he might even have fun!

He does actually have fun.

A lot of fun, a lot more than he expected to.

The first day is pretty tidily eaten up with plotting and planning and list making, but by the next morning, he has a set of tasks to start with, most of which he can accomplish alone— love you, Stede, but I don’t do manual labor, ask Archie, she’s always looking for an excuse to go outside, like an under stimulated husky, that one is— and a more abstract plan of where to go from there once he exhausts those.

He starts with collecting debris from the garden, all things loose and fallen and burnable, which requires a lot of bending to the ground, but by the third time he has to stop halfway bent to breathe through the pain in his side, he realizes it would be a lot easier on his body if he just bent at the knees and crouched down instead, and after that it’s much smoother sailing. By midmorning he has a barrel of loose branches and twigs and someone’s abandoned underwear— eugh— and very shortly after that, the satisfaction of watching it all burn up and out of his way.

Next is weeding— which is not his favorite term, everything currently in the garden naturally grows in their area, and he plans to keep it that way. It’s only that he prefers not to let any one species choke out another, would like to cultivate some diversity, see if he can’t tempt insects that aren’t flies, and with them, visiting birds. But the weeding— portfolio management— takes up the full day, bleeds fully in to the next, such that he comes back to Ed’s chambers that first night with only enough time for dinner, a bath, and a kiss goodnight, and is up with the sun again in the morning, eager to check that box on his list.

Unsustainable growth patterns curtailed by the following afternoon, he swings into soil management. Tilling, watering, supplementing from compost, just feeding life back into earth that has been drained of everything it could give for years, and then for years beyond that, had even more demanded of it, and that’s when he realizes.

Because gardening is exhausting. Requires him to wear uncomfortable clothes: thick canvas and leather gloves to protect him from himself and his tools. Contorts him into positions that strain and ache. By the time the day comes to a close it is all that he can do to clean, feed, and water himself before falling into bed by Ed’s side (which is as nice a place to be as it ever is). And yet, every morning, despite the ache in his bones, he finds himself bounding out of bed, dressing in his work clothes, kissing Ed goodbye, and racing off to his next task.

Because as hard as it may be, he likes it.

Likes the turn of earth in his hands, likes the smell of dirt and green (or what was once green), likes seeing the evidence of his effort clear on the ground, foot by square foot. Likes knowing that he is laying the foundation to create something, something that will likely make other people happy, and even if it doesn’t will certainly make him happy.

He likes it.

It’s nothing like being a knight. The same toil and sweat and tears, the same demand on his body and his mind, and yet his only reward as a knight is another day of the same, if not a higher call for risk, for effort, for strain. It’s nothing like being a knight. He doesn’t like being a knight.

He doesn’t—

He doesn’t like being a knight.

His hands still in their task, one trowel full of turned earth hovering above the divot where he’d pulled it from.

He doesn’t like being a knight.

The thing he’s been as long as he’s been anything, the thing to which he’s dedicated every ounce of who he is, the thing that has consumed so much of his life that there’s been no room for anything else, let alone the consideration that—

He doesn’t want to do it anymore.

Maybe he’ll be a gardener, maybe he’ll help Lucius in the library, maybe he’ll get really into language learning and be a court translator, but— but—

He doesn’t want to be a knight.

He drops the trowel, picks himself up out of the dirt, and runs to Ed’s quarters.

By the time he bursts through the doors, he’s breathless, but the words start spilling out by themselves anyways.

“Ed—”

She starts from the couch, dropping her book, her face of a shock of concern.

“Stede is everything—?”

Stede meets her at the couch, settles her back in the cushions, and catches her hands up in his.

“Everything’s fine darling, I just realized I don’t want to be a knight anymore.”

“Okay, yeah?” She looks confused. “Why’d you come bursting in here like something’s on fire?”

“Ed,” he says, deliberate. “I just told you I don’t want to be a knight anymore. I don’t want to be the captain of your guard. I don’t want to be a knight.”

“Oh— Oh! Stede! Stede!!” She detangles their hands, cups his face, squeezes, drops her hands again, fidgets them before flinging herself bodily around Stede, wrapping him in a hug.

“You don’t want to be a knight!” she repeats, all bubbling and giddy.

“I don’t! I don’t want to be a knight!”

“Fuck being a knight!” She pulls back, lets her hands settle on his shoulders and shake. Her face is split wide with a grin. “You’ll never be a knight again if you have anything to say about it!”

His face is pulling wide to match. “And I do have something to say about it! I say, never again!”

She falls into him, catches his face back up in her hands, and starts dusting his face with kisses, powdered sugar across the apples of his cheeks, the tip of his chin, the curve of his jaw, the point of his nose.

And she had done this once before, the sweet flurry of it, but he hadn’t really caught it then, what with the stab wound, how baldly affectionate it was. But—

But he catches it now, feels the full flush of it, feels the pitchy buzz of it tune down into a hum as her kisses settle closer and closer to center, until her lips are meeting his in a drawn out slide. The flush thickens to a rush, a heady stream of heat and lips and heat. He feels it pick up, he picks it up, leaning in closer, pressing in deeper, and there’s a swell, something that might burst—

“Stede,” she says around a breath. “Stede, I love you, do you know that? I love you.”

“I—”

He—

He doesn’t know. Doesn’t know that he knows, at least, and he hates to even think— It’s not her that he doubts, could never be.

She smiles, that same sad smile she gave him the night they talked about the garden.

“Believe me anyways?” she asks.

And for whatever else there is, for whatever cuts up in his chest, for him, for him—

He wants to.

Oh how he wants to believe her.

Chapter Text

Now that Stede has words to put to it— Ed’s own words, explicit confirmation— it actually does become easier to stoke his belief, to see it in the little things, that she does love him, that she must.

Like, every night that they reunite in Ed’s chambers after a long day of ruling on her part and toiling over the garden on his, she asks him if he had a good day. Not what he accomplished, not what progress he made, not to itemize his tasks and report that he is making good use of his time, just if he had a good time doing it.

Like, he reaches a sticking point in the garden, can’t tame back the raspberry bushes on his own, and he spends his whole day screwing up the courage to tell her that he needs help in the garden, and she just says “Yeah, get Archie to help you, like I said, resources at your disposal and all that. You probably won’t even have to convince her, but if you do, just tell her I said so,” like it’s nothing, no trouble at all.

Like, they’re laying in bed together one day, both of them having snuck out of their work for the day a bit early to do their new favorite thing— wrapping up in Ed’s silkiest robes and doing absolutely nothing but twining and untwining their hands and trading kisses— and Ed says “Oh by the way, if you needed help moving your stuff in here, just let me know.”

Casual. Easy. Like of course his things, he belongs here, in her room, with her.

And to be honest, he had been feeling like he belonged here lately, hadn’t even thought to go back to his room since he’d started on the garden. It’s only that—

“I don’t really have any things to move.”

“What?”

“I don’t really—”

“No, I heard you, I just— that can’t be right, what about your books? Clothes?”

“Well, I don’t have books of my own, everything I’ve ever traded with you came from the castle library. So, already, technically, yours. And my clothes—”

He doesn’t want them.

Besides the sturdy gardening gear he’d cobbled together from older things of his and the abandoned gardener’s shed (after a serious wash), he didn’t have anything down in that room that he’d miss if it burned in a fire. And outside of gardening, he’d actually just been wearing Ed’s things. Nothing— no day wear, no dresses, but— dressing gowns, robes, nightgowns, loose and soft lounge pants and airy shirts. Finer, softer, more comfortable on his body than anything he’d had before.

And— And—

“I think I’m due for a wardrobe update.”

Ed positively lights up.

“Oh, oh, let me set you up with my tailor, baby, please.”

“Oh, well do you think he would be okay with— Do you think he could work with my—” He stumbles around articulating it because Ed had just called him—

“Oh, yeah, Stede, for sure, he’s my tailor right? He knows how to be discreet.”

Stede flushes, though it’s not self conscious? He’s just pleased, happy at the chance to do another thing he suspects he will like, with someone he likes, someone he loves—

“Clear your schedule for tomorrow, baby, we’re going clothes shopping.”

And they do, though not til after breakfast, mate and five more minutes of cuddling that turns into ten that turns into a midmorning nap and then blinking awake to Ed urging him up, up, let’s go like he was the one that pulled her bodily down into bed and flopped on top of her like a warm, purring blanket.

He doesn’t mind though, mostly it thrills him to see her so excited, and to feel himself stirred up with just as much excitement.

They wind through the castle to a corner he can’t ever remember visiting and enter into a room that is positively dripping in fabric.

Bolts of brocade and velvet and satin are bursting from shelf-lined walls, bits of lace and silk and braided trim spilling from baskets tucked in corners and leaning off of tables, a rack of pegs sporting spools of thread in every color of the rainbow and a few more to boot.

Oh, he wants to touch, wants to run his fingers over every inch, mark out and catalogue all his favorites.

“Here,” Ed grabs his hand and pulls him to a particularly vibrant bolt: teals and golds and reds woven and shimmering together. “Feel this.”

He reaches out, traces one finger along the line between gold and green, but the weave is so smooth there’s no ripple in it, just silk, silk, silky soft all the way down.

“Just got that one in, but it’s for a private commission, so don’t go getting any ideas.”

Stede snatches his hand back, turns, an apology already on his lips, but the owner of the voice is wearing an amiable smile.

“John!” Ed confirms, matching his smile. “I brought you a present.”

“Oh,” and then John leans down— an impressive feat given Ed’s already impressive height— to smack a kiss to the air next to Ed’s cheek. “Tell me you’ve brought me some of those skirt patterns from next door, I’ve had my eye on their looks since before you opened the border.”

“Better, I brought a new customer.”

John leans back to his full height and sticks Stede with an appraising look that drags from his toes to his top and back for a solid age.

“I can work with that. What’re we wanting? Special outfit? Wardrobe staples? Shirts and britches?”

Ed adds her gaze to John’s, looking at him, not so much expectantly as encouraging.

Stede takes a deep breath.

“Actually, I was wondering if you might be up for something a bit… Complicated?”

John just beams.

The actually explaining of it is— or rather, would be— the most mortifying minutes of Stede’s life, stumbling through explaining his anatomy— and what even to call it? None of the words settle right on his tongue, and eventually he just lands on “chest”— and the fact that he wants something supportive, but not restrictive, not masking but not emphasizing, something he can just put on like a shirt without all the rigamarole of everything else, and just get on with his day. In style, of course.

Would be mortifying, except the near clinical way John takes all this in, and then takes his measurements, nodding when he understands and asking very even, unassumptive questions when he doesn’t. And clinical certainly doesn’t mean cold, John is as friendly with him as he had been with Ed, makes quips and laughs easily when Stede finds it within himself to answer them back, but he is a consummate professional, and by the time the last of his measurements are gathered, Stede is finding himself back in the sense of ease and elation he’d first felt when he stepped foot in this magical room.

“Right, that’s about it then. Just need you to pick out some fabrics. I can make this work for any of my linens, cottons, or wools, and I’d put money on myself that I can work some magic with some of the heavier weight cashmeres if you’re aiming to feel really fresh.”

“Oh, excellent,” and Stede stills his hands back from clapping in excitement, and then realizes he doesn’t really have to, claps away anyways. “Let's say 30 crowns? Five pairs of trousers and how many tops do you think you could make for that budget? And don’t stretch yourself, I can always commission you again.”

“Just a tick,” and then John starts scratching at his note paper, figuring it up.

Ed looks at him quizzically.

“What is it darling?”

“Nothing, guess I’m just surprised you’re not, y’know, telling me not to spend the money or something. Happy about it though,” she quickly reassures.

“Oh. Oh, no I. I have my own money? A fair amount of it actually?”

“You— huh?”

“Well, I’ve been working in the castle with minimal expenses for years now. So, yes?” What he doesn’t mention is the tidy sum he’d brought with him when he first ran away from home, but that’s neither here nor there.

“Oh. Oh. Cool, then.”

“Wait, darling, you were going to pay for me to have a new wardrobe made—?”

“Well, yeah, I like seeing you in—”

“Five.”

Stede takes a very deep, deliberate breath, so as not to bite off the head of his very kind new friend who is very kindly going to make him some new and complicated clothes, even though he is very invested in what Ed was going to say.

“Five?” he confirms.

“Yep,” John nods. “Five tops to go with five trousers, and that’s all accounting for some very generous wiggle room.”

“Excellent, John, thank you,” Stede says emphatically, then turns to Ed and offers her his hand “Well, shall we go shopping?”

She smiles, and immediately pulls him by the hand, beelining to the back corner of the room and bringing them to a stop in front of a deep-blue-with-a-touch-of-green linen.

“This one,” she says knowingly, then retreats. “I mean, if you like it, but, I dunno, would probably bring out your eyes.”

Stede reaches out a hand, feels it under the pads of his fingers. It’s a linen, but a fine one; it has that earthy, honest texture of any good linen, but all the softness of a well made fabric. And handfeel, if he’s being truthful, was going to be how he picked out all of his fabrics; obviously he likes color, he just hadn’t given it much thought, what would actually look best on him.

But he does quite like the idea of something that sets off his eyes.

They end up adding it to John’s to-do list, and after lots of deliberation and a truly heartbreaking elimination round where Ed reminds him that baby, we can always order more at least three times, they add some worsted wools in vibrant patterns, some breathable cottons, and one absolutely exquisite cashmere.

Stede can’t ever remember having so much fun. Getting to while away an entire afternoon digging through beautiful fabrics in bright colors and bold patterns, getting to sink his hands into texture after delightful texture (with the exception of a stubbly, loop covered fabric John had said was just for towels that Stede absolutely loathed), all with his best friend by his side, answering him at every turn.

And—

She had said that, before. That Stede was her friend. And now he understands— tentatively though it may be— that he is that to her, still, but also that he is more.

That when Stede thinks Ed, thinks my friend, thinks my love, thinks of all the things he would do for her, all the distances he would go for her, all the sacrifices he would make for her, he can’t help but wonder, can’t help but ask, when they are back in the privacy of their chambers, snug up on the couch as they so frequently are—

“Ed, I was. I was wondering.”

“Yeah?”

“When we— when we had sex before.”

Ed looks up, coming to attention from the easy lull she’d been in.

“Yeah?” she asks again, slower, more deliberate.

“I really did like— It feels good, Ed, to make you feel good.”

“Uh— Uh-huh.”

“And I wanted to know— I think so— Or I want to think so— But it would be really good to hear you say it— that is, if you do—”

“Stede, you can just ask me, promise.”

He breathes in deep, screws in all of his courage. “Is it the same for you? Do you— Do you also want to make me feel good?”

The question is barely out, just enough to reassure Stede that she’d truly heard it, when she says yes, emphatically, breathlessly, yes.

“Oh.”

And then she shifts, slips like water from his side down to her knees, poised at his feet and looking up, looking for all the world like he is her world, and she says—

“Let me show you?”

And yes— finally he can admit it— to himself, to her—

“Yes, yes, that’s what I want.”

Her face lights up like he has given her a gift.

Then she reaches for the waist of Stede’s pants, slowly, not hesitantly, but giving him time to change his mind, asks can I? Stede can only nod; he’s traded his power of speech in for the knowledge of what this is, where it is going. He asked, he wants this, he understands that Ed wants it too, but that does not save him from the overwhelm, the way his body floods with a pounding beat of anticipation from the moment Ed’s hands settle in his waistband and start to pull.

There’s still a moment, a little gap between the things he’d once accepted as fact and the truth he is trying so hard to embrace, where his fear tries to creep in: she won’t want him once she sees, he’ll disappoint her, she’ll realize, now, in the clarity of the lamp light—

He tells the fear to fuck off.

Tells it that he’s the same Stede that ran away from home and forged his own life and now that parts of that life don’t suit him anymore, damn it, he’s well on his way to forging a new one, and— and maybe he needed some encouragement, or really, a smack over the head from the universe, but whatever! He’s doing it!

It works, long enough for him to breathe through it, long enough for Ed to carefully slide free his— hers, really— their silk pants and fold them neatly over the arm of the couch, for her to run her hands up his thighs, just as gentle, just as smooth as if they were still wrapped in silk.

Long enough for him to see, to really see the way she looks at him.

Moon-bright eyes peeking through the shades of her lashes, mouth parted just a touch, like it had simply fallen that way and she had focused herself so fully on him that she had no thought to close it again.

“Are you okay? To keep going?” she asks.

He nods, quickly, because he wants—

“Comfortable? Want to move?”

He takes a moment, asks himself, goes looking for the truth.

And he finds that, no, actually, he doesn’t want to? Likes—

He likes that he can lean back on this couch, that Ed will kneel at his feet— because— because she wants to— that he can rest above her and see her and watch her and know with certainty that if it is too much for him, if his fears begin to outweigh his courage, that this will stop, and that he will not have taken anything from her to do so.

Also—

Also.

She looks good on her knees.

The silk of her dressing gown is dripping down and pooling around her like ink, expanding her edges and dwarfing her in them. Her hands rest on his thighs, not still, but petting and reaching, and yet waiting for his command. The dark of her eyes remains fixed on him, all the depth, all the affection, all the want— yes, it is want— on him.

If he had any restraint, it slips.

“No, Ed, this is good, it’s good, will you— would you— please—”

And thankfully in this she does not make him specify, only leans in, lets the smoothe of her palms over his thighs push and part them until she can press one kiss the inside of his right thigh, and then tilt— tilt to the side and— press another kiss to his left.

A matching set.

A perfect pair.

It catches him by surprise, the hiccup of a sob.

Ed pauses, looks up at him. “Stede? You okay?”

“Yes, darling, I am.”

And really, he is. Has just been shot through the heart with the smallest piece of evidence that has taken every feeling, every deep, keening howl of want, every echoing declaration of love that rattles about his chest and very quietly held up a mirror to it, has seen with absolute and undeniable certainty that his need to care, to touch with tenderness and service, is not alone or unreciprocated. He is okay. He’s going to be okay.

Only—

“Please, Ed, don’t stop.”

“‘Kay. I won’t.”

And then she dips back in, paints over the stamp of her kisses with a second set, one to each side, a reassurance, a declaration of intent, and then she trails in closer.

Being kissed by her, it’s different than kissing her.

The way it makes him feel, his body heating and loosening, it’s similar, but at the same time, it is so so different, because before, he could let it, the want of it, fade into the background, could turn it inwards until his wanting was about touching her, tasting her, hearing her come apart in his hands. But now, with her lips pressing warm touch into hot flesh, he can do no such thing, can only feel in the forefront of his mind, in the demanding pulse between his legs how much he wants her, needs her to touch him.

She does not make him wait, though she rushes nothing.

The first touch of her tongue is—

His mind provides him with unfittingly stilted words like deliberate and thorough, the heat of her touch starting low, pressing in, and dragging high, but what his body sings out in fevered pitch is good god, fucking finally, is Ed, is his voice cracking around “Ed!”

Her tongue dips down, in, up again, and Stede fists his hands up in his own shirt because if he doesn’t have something to hold onto he thinks he might fly off the earth entirely, but then Ed pulls back, and he makes a sound that later, if pressed, he would never admit to.

“Put your hands in my hair,” she says into the crease of his thigh, because in truth she has not gone far. “If you want to, I mean don’t yank, but you can. You can tug.”

And then she nuzzles back in and his hands fly to her hair before he can question it, though the temptation to do so is not high; the feeling of his hands woven through the soft strands of her hair, threading his fingertips down to the root so he can do as she asked, to get a solid, even grip and tug, it is as securing, as strong a promise of safety as he could ever need.

And as far as his other needs go—

As their pitch climbs higher, so do her movements, and it’s so overwhelming, warm and slick and soft, that he can’t even really categorize it, can’t even really break down the shape of her movements, can’t sort them into discrete parts, and even if he could, he’s not sure he has the language to make any higher meaning of them than they already possess. He’s never felt like this before, like his whole body is warping and twisting around the shape of his own pleasure, like his arms are for holding Ed closer so that his hips can hitch up higher so that his thighs can tremble with the sheer, indulgent excess of how singularly, obliteratingly good she makes him feel.

It’s like slipping into too hot water: the gasp of it, the way it envelops his whole body, the way he will drown in it if he is not careful, the way the heat is so much that it rises from hot to cold to sharp.

And that’s how it feels, the press of Ed’s tongue, the worry of her lips, circling closer and tighter and closer.

Sharp, not like danger, not like pain.

Sharp, like the edge of his trowel cutting easily through the earth. Sharp, like his shears clipping away dying branches so life can flourish in its place. Sharp like precise, focused, exacting in its care.

And that is exactly how he falls over the edge, with her care, her attention, her love dialed right in to where he can feel it the most, feel the great intensity of it reach up, coil inside of him and drag his orgasm bodily out, shivering and shuddering.

Chapter Text

Stede doesn’t realize he’s crying— has been crying?— until Ed tucks up against his side and brushes a thumb across his cheek, smears the thin river of a tear into a shallow puddle.

“Okay, you’re okay,” she murmurs.

He just nods. He is, whether he can say it or not.

“Wanna get in bed? Lay down?”

Again he nods.

She starts to stand, and pull him with her, but then her knee gives, and Stede ends up steadying her as they move to a full stand, and it pulls a laugh out of him, a soggy, limp thing, but he doesn’t feel it any less.

They make their way to the bed, both approaching the same side together, and then Ed pulls back the covers, waits for him to climb in. His hand automatically goes for the hem of his shirt, and then he realizes there’s no dressing gown nearby, no dark of night to cover him. He only hesitates for a moment, though, because he just—

He’s sick of it, of discomfort in his discomfit, the way shame shapes itself physically in his life.

He just wants to feel silk on his skin, feels Ed’s skin on his skin, and if Ed hadn’t balked at his tears— or any of the rest of him!— why would she start now?

He lifts his shirt free from his body, discards it to the ground, and climbs into bed. When he situates himself back against the pillows, he does not drag the covers up over his chest. He leaves his arms open for Ed to tuck into them. And Ed does tuck in, head in the crook of his neck, arm draped over the swell of his belly. Stede pulls the blankets up around them both, and for several moments, several minutes, they just hold each other and breathe.

Eventually, Stede realizes that the tears have slowed, have dried, and he feels compelled to say— not as a defense, but because he wants her to know—

“I’ve never had that before.”

“Me neither,” Ed says, tickling into his neck.

“Oh,” he says. “Oh, never?”

“Nah, I mean, when would I have? Not like I’ve had people lining up to risk their neck or their balls to get with me.”

He had never really thought about it like that, that as easy as it was to want Ed, no one had dared to do it, no one until him. He also hadn’t thought— he hadn’t—

“Oh no, Ed,” he says, realization dawning.

“Oh no what oh no?”

“I— I just got on my knees for you, I didn’t even say anything, I just assumed, why on earth did you let me?”

Ed is silent for a heavy moment.

“I wanted you to.” There’s something more behind that sentence, but it’s holding back.

“But?” Stede tries.

“And,” Ed finally corrects. “I didn’t know. Didn’t, um. Didn’t think it was fair to ask for anything else. And. I thought maybe this was just what it was like.”

Stede squeezes her tighter, involuntary, fierce. “Ed, no, no, I’m so sorry—”

“It’s okay.”

Stede makes a sound, the beginning of a protest.

“I don’t really want you to be sorry about us. Plus, we talk now. Pretty good, I think. Right?”

“Yes,” Stede agrees, because— “Yes, always.”

“Okay then,” Ed says, and it’s a small thing, as she snuggles in tighter, but Stede doesn’t press, trusts her okay to be okay.

“What about you?” she asks. “Kinda seems like you— It definitely felt like you knew what you were doing.”

“No, I— I read a lot. No, where I came from, it was never— I didn’t, it wasn’t the sort of thing I thought I could do. And then I was engaged to be married, and I ran away before they could make me.”

Ed tilts back, flicks those eyes up in shock.

“You were engaged?”

“Yes, but it wasn’t— It was arranged. Political. I was as good as sold off to the highest bidder. And I couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t be somebody’s wife?”

“Couldn’t marry somebody I didn’t love.”

“Oh.”

They lapse into silence for another moment, Ed fidgeting and fussing until they’ve shifted against the pillows, Ed now on her back, settling her head against his bicep and twining her hand up in his.

“So, um,” she starts up again. “Did you figure out you were, y’know, Stede before or after you ran away?”

And—

Well, now that he thinks about it.

“I’m not sure that I ever did. Figure out that I’m Stede, that is.”

She makes a questioning little hrm?

“I don’t— maybe it’s different for you, but I ran away from home, and I couldn’t go back, and so I had to become the opposite of what I left behind. Self sufficient. Tough. Able to make my own money. And Stede— could be that. Or he could figure it out. And he did. Stede survived. And who I left behind just— didn’t.”

Stede is surprised to hear a choke in Ed’s voice when she replies.

“It actually— I don’t think it’s that different for me— shit, I’ve never— Fuck.”

Stede waits, patient, lets her sort through her thoughts while he sorts his fingers through a few strands of her hair. Finally, she speaks up again, though her voice is still thready.

“You knew my dad.”

“Yes.” He does not bother to keep the distaste from his voice.

“He was, y’know, he was him, and I dunno that I was thinking about it like that as a little kid, but now I feel like I was just terrified that I’d grow up to be that. I didn’t want to be that. I liked soft fabrics and I liked pretty things and I liked my mum and—” She stumbles again.

“You ran away from that and you found something else you wanted to see survive,” Stede continues.

Her breath hitches on a hiccup, but she manages a small but emphatic yeah.

They breathe together, rest together before Ed pipes up again.

“Don’t get me wrong, I do like who I am. I like being Ed. I like my body. I like my life.”

“Yes, I— Me too. It’s strange to think about, how I got here, but I think, now at least, I’m comfortable.”

“Yeah,” she says, then pauses for a moment. “You took off your shirt.”

“I did.”

“What changed?”

He thinks about it, worries at it, wonders for a moment if he should admit— but no, he’s not harboring shame for the people who left it with him, not anymore.

“I think it was less about the shape of my body, and more the fact that it was mine.”

He breathes out with it, lets the air go and tries to send with it any little remaining bits of him that still cling to that feeling.

And he thinks about how his body felt, just inside of this last hour, how it felt good, correct, right.

“I think— I like my body too. I don’t think I would change anything. Though I like—” He flushes, because even if he has resolved to do away with shame, it still takes practice. “I like your body too, your, um, do you—” and now he just doesn’t want to say the wrong thing—

“My dick.”

“Yeah, yes. I don’t think I’d trade, but I wouldn’t mind knowing what it felt like, you know?”

“Well, you—” and then it fades into mumbles.

“What’s that, darling?”

“You could. If you wanted.”

“How do you—?”

“Maybe I just show you,” she says, and levers up like a spring. “Stay there.”

She scampers off to the spare closet, the one with the sheets she doesn’t really like that only come out when wash day has waited a hair too long, digs around for a moment, and comes back to the bed with—

“You got me— a strap-on?”

Ed sinks into the bed, fiddling with the thick woven straps that web in and around a base of leather and a metal o-ring that hold a lightly curved glass cock.

“Pff, what do you know about strap-ons?” she says, deflecting.

“Ed, I told you, I read. A lot.”

“Yeah,” she says, still fiddling with the straps. “Technically, though, got it for. For me. Or us, I guess. But then I wasn’t sure if you would want to, and then I didn’t wanna ask and then— Well, anyway. Yep.”

“Ed,” he says, and reaches out his hand, settles it where hers fidget. “Yes, I want to.”

She looks up at him, eyes held open in hope, sparkling and wide. “Yeah?”

And he has no reason to keep her waiting, no reason to hesitate, because yes, yes, he wants to.

Because—

Because he’s never seen it before in his life, but it already feels like his. The rings and buckles are a brushed gold, the straps and leather a deep walnut brown, and the glass is threaded through with a twisty sea of blue, teal, green. It could not have looked more right if he had picked for himself, and he hadn’t. Ed had, had picked this, wanted to see him in it, feel him in it.

And Stede, also, would like to, would like to know how it looks, how it feels.

“Yes, Ed, yes, it’s perfect,” he breathes, and she breathes a matching sigh, relief. “Help me put it on?”

“Yep. Yep. Just lay back, gimme those legs, yeah?”

He lays back against the pillows, kicks away the last clinging bits of the blankets. The air is cool against his bare skin, but with summer inching in and his heart rate humming higher, it’s a relief before it’s anything else.

Ed picks up one of his feet, her grip gentle but purposeful, her thumb pressing in and sweeping an arc across the arch of his foot, but even with the deliberate motion, he can’t help a little giggle at the sensation, a bit of a wiggle in his toes. Ed’s look of focused determination splits into a grin and then she drops a kiss to one of his wiggling toes before guiding his foot through the looping straps.

And then she repeats the motion, switching hands to rub into the arch of his other foot, to kiss his toe, and poke it through the straps.

“‘Kay, lift— gimme a bit of a shimmy—” she says, and he complies, watches her tug the strap closer to where it belongs, until she is leaning above him, poised between the crook of his legs, hands resting in the crease of his hips.

And then she goes from leaning to settled, sinks in between his legs, laid out on her belly. She braces one hand against the leather base, palm flat, the glass of the cock jutting up between the spread of her fingers, and moves it until it’s settled against him, just right. Her hand holds it steady, firm, against him while the other fiddles with the straps and tightens them down, first at the waist, then snug against his thigh.

He can only watch. He’s not sure that he breathes.

Her hands, her palm and her fingers are warm against him, warm and soft and he has watched her work with those hands, has seen them dance deftly over chess pieces and needlepoint and knives, but none of that compares to the work she does now, the devoted work of nudging him inch by breathless inch into a feeling that is just so— it is just.

Correct, right, exactly as it should be.

She drags her palm back— drags a shudder out of him with it— and shifts and shuffles, switching one hand for the other, her left now cinching at the straps and her right— and her right she wraps— long, delicate fingers, steady, firm grip— around his cock.

“Oh god, Ed,” he lets out.

“Yeah baby?”

She looks up at him, tips him into the gaze of those fucking eyes, those eyes, wide and wanting and matching the part of her mouth where it flutters her breath.

“I like that,” he says. “I like this,” he says.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah.”

And then the part of her mouth falls fully open and she tips her head in, darts pink tongue through kissed-pink lips, drops the grip of her fist, and licks.

She licks, lathes her tongue flat and wide, down to meet her fist and then up across the tip, licks his cock.

“Shit, fuck, fuck.”

She hums, flicks her gaze up at him, and then sinks down to do it again.

On the upstroke, she pauses for a moment. “Put your hands in my hair?” But she doesn’t wait for an answer before she drops her mouth open, down, around his cock, and he has no choice but to comply, to tangle his fingers up in the roots of her hair and hold on for his life as she sinks down, further down, pulls up, and falls back in again.

And he can’t really feel it, can he, can’t actually feel the flutter of her throat, the suction of her cheeks, the hot, dragging slide of her tongue, can only feel the dull pressure of the base against him, can only feel his own body and the pulse of his blood, but also? Also, what he sees is Ed bobbing her head, working one hand around the base of his cock, tangling the other tight in the strap around his hip, eyes shut tight, even as little tears slip free. What he feels is Ed humming her pleasure all around him, rocking the base with the drag of her movements, rocking her own hips against the sheets. What he knows is that Ed would do anything to make him feel good, and he does, he feels so good, he feels so fucking good.

He feels so good he needs— he needs somewhere to put it, needs to move with it, and so he tugs gently at her hair, tries to still her.

“Ed,” he says. “Ed.”

She lifts her head slowly, reluctantly, trailing the tip of her tongue to lick at his cock until the last possible moment.

“Yeah baby?”

“Can we— Can I fuck you like this?”

She pauses, one blink, two, and then she’s a flutter of motion and yeah, fuck yeah you can, yes, clambering up to drape herself over Stede and drop a kiss to his lips and then rocking back to fumble frantically with the knot of her robe, shrug the silk off and toss it irreverently to the side.

“How should we—”

“I can— just like this, yeah?”

And then she drops her hips, grinds forward, the curve of her half hard cock nudging up against his.

“Yeah?” she asks again.

“Yes, yes, Ed—”

She hitches her hips up, once more, and then again, and then she slows and stills.

“Okay, I’m gonna—” She leans across him, reaches into her bedside table, and settles back with a small vial in her hand. “I’ll do this part, this time.”

He doesn’t argue; in truth, he’s not sure he can count on steadiness in his hands, surety in his movement, and besides, she had said this time. The unsaid promise of a next time.

She tips some of the vial into her palm, glistening and oily, lets it trickle up the lines of her fingers, and then braces her other hand against her thigh, reaches back to touch.

Stede can see the moment she makes contact, the sigh of relief, the way her eyes fall closed, her mouth open. And then her arm works and her brow furrows and Stede’s pulse pounds.

He’s never—

Well, he has, with his fingers, with his tongue, has fucked her, knows where to touch, how to feel, what to press, but this is different. And— and he wants to do it right, wants it to feel right for both of them, so it’s probably for the best that she will be perched above him in a place of some control.

And it does feel right, feels good, when she says she’s ready, tips a bit of oil over his cock and slicks it across with her palm, when she braces her clean hand against his shoulder, holds herself up above him, and inches steadily down.

“Oh fuck,” she says, when her hips are settled solidly against his.

“Fuck,” he agrees.

Because—

Because he’s inside of her, because he’s inside of her and she’s pressed close to him and he can see the jagged rise and fall of her chest and the smear of her cock, bowed down somewhere between hard and soft against his belly, and she’s beautiful.

Tiny little word for a big-band feeling, swelling up in his chest, reaching out his hands to rest on her hips and then slide up her sides, cup her chest, to drag back down, catching her nipples under the pads of his fingers before they skate across her tummy, but yes—

“Ed, you’re so beautiful.”

“Fuck,” she says, and then she lifts her hips, and then it’s a whine. “Fuck, Stede, you too, you look so good like this.”

“Yes,” he agrees, unthinking, but also, not entirely untrue, because if he feels this good, if it bubbles up and through him so thick and real, how can it not show on his face, on his very skin? It must, it has to, or he might drown in it.

And, and as it is now, he is drowning in it, that same feeling that called him to shift, to move.

“Ed, can I, please—?”

She slows her rocking, though she doesn’t still, tells him yes, and he delays not more than a moment, settles his hands back at her hips, his feet sturdy against the mattress, and gives into every pleading instinct to press, to thrust, up, in.

It punches an oh out of her, drags out a fuuuuck on the retreat.

He manages a few more hitches of his hips, another handful of motion while he drinks in the spill of her pleasure across her face, but he can’t settle, not really, because the truth is, she’s too far away.

He stanchions one arm underneath himself until he’s sitting up, Ed cradled in his lap, and wraps her in close for a kiss, a kiss that lands for only a glancing moment, because Ed is trembling, tumbling words and breath across their lips.

“Oh my god, baby, yes, fuck, yes.”

Her arms, free from keeping her steady, wrap around his shoulders, and she holds tight to him as he holds tight to her.

This is better, the closeness, the warmth of her body, the press of her chest against his, better, better, good, but he wants perfect. He wants the perfect press of his body into hers, he wants to kiss her while he does it, he wants everything and all, and he knows she will give it to him as sweetly as she’s ever given him anything.

He asks, just to hear her say it.

“Ed, can I lay you back?”

“Mmmyeah?” she says, tripping high on the end, not, Stede thinks, because it is in question, but because he has been a bit unfair, chosen that same moment to push up another thrust, another rock of his hips.

“Yeah?” he asks her again, this time with a magnanimous pause of his hips.

“Please, yeah, p—”

He still doesn’t have it in him to make her beg.

He cradles one hand up behind her head and uses his remaining strength, the rest of his body to keep close even as he tips her back, as he pushes her into the bed, and this, right away he knows this is perfect. He knows, and his body does too, the feeling of it as he snaps his hips forward: there is no stuttering, no stopping, no pause, only the smooth rush in, the slick slide out, perfect, perfect, perfect.

“Stede,” Ed says, though it’s more of a whine, more Steeeeeeede. “Stede, that’s so good, it’s so fucking good.”

She’s still holding tight to his shoulders, but now her legs wrap up around his hips, cling just as tight. Tight, her whole body tight, tangled with his, and from the drag, the pressure at the base of his cock as he rocks it into her, he knows, he can feel, even there, the tight, the heat, the slide.

It’s nothing like when they fucked before.

Now, he can touch her freely, can feel her answering touch without excusing himself away. Now, he can hear her say good, good, you’re so fucking good, can tip forward and answer into the shell of her ear yes, darling, yes.

Now, he can kiss her.

And now, when he feels the simmering heat, the constant hum of pleasure in his body, focusing, narrowing and swelling up into something with a name, something with power in its chest, he’s not scared, he’s not ashamed, he’s thrilled, full of the electric thrill of rising up so high and seeing, in the slack of her mouth, the whine of her voice, the furrow of his brow, that he’s brought Ed right along with him.

He keeps going, hips moving faster, pushing harder, pressing deeper, desperate to take that sprouting seed of pleasure and watch it bloom.

And with just a moment more, just another stroke of attention, the furrowed bud of her brow, her eyes, her lips spread wide open, and he feels her— hot, sticky, wet— come between them.

It is just as much a release for him, and with it goes every shred of strength in him. He has just enough left to pull free of her body before he collapses against her side.

Automatically— he assumes, he wouldn’t bet on two firing brain cells between them at this point— her arm comes up around him, holds him close, and they breathe together, let the rapidity of their pulse pound down to a pause.

Eventually, she speaks.

“I love you,” she says.

When he answers her, it is his whole heart that he offers back.

“I know that. I know.”

Chapter Text

It ends up that Stede doesn’t show Ed the garden. Not right away, anyways, even after the worst of the overgrowth has been tempered, even after he is planted in its place everything he’d like to see bloom. At first it is an accident of the fact that Ed is a very in demand ruler of an entire kingdom, and then when things begin to settle into routine, he consciously holds off.

It’s not that he doesn’t want her to see; he’s very proud of his progress. He just wants to show the space, not only brought back from the brink of destruction, but truly flourishing. He wants ripened fruit and flowering blooms. He knows she would accept and adore less— after all, how patiently has she loved him, even as he stumbled through finding himself?— but he finds that he favors a little bit of spectacle, likes to not just surprise her, but to sweep her off her feet.

And how can he not, when it is so much fun? His reveal of his favorite of the clothes he’d commissioned from John had set her on him in a flurry of kisses that had flattened him to their bed. When he’d woken her with breakfast in bed the morning after a late night meeting, her eyes had widened so big and deep he thought they might spill over with tears. When he presented her with a custom chess set where both sets of pieces had a second queen in place of the king, the little shock of surprise on her face had split wide into infectious giggles.

Now that he gets to do things for her, gets to truly know what she likes, not just what he felt he owed her—

And that’s really what it had been, trying to right a skew of balance Ed had never even considered to exist, his own obsession with deserve and duty.

But now, now he finds that he much prefers to give her the things he wants to give, and finds the added benefit that she prefers it too.

So he works to finish the garden, and he works, too, to find other things he likes, things he wants.

Works hard, thinks harder, worries it over in his head, and as he is settling final touches— pruning back a vine here, adding a bit of mulch there— he decides that he would like to ask Ed to marry him.

For whatever Ed has said about marriage in the past, Stede is willing to show his hand to the chance that he might be an exception to that rule.

And what’s more, he’s never known Ed to do anything she does not want to do. She can tell him no, just as surely as he can say no to her.

But it is something he wants.

He wants to know, the same way he knows that he belongs to Ed, that Ed belongs to him.

And he has her word, which she has always kept.

But he loves a symbol, he loves pageantry, he would love an excuse to see her in lace and silk, saying it for the whole world, voice singing as loud as his heart has since the day he met her.

And, he is also learning, Ed loves to give him the things he wants.

So yes, at the very least, he wants to ask.

And he hems and haws over it, if he will reveal the garden separate to the proposal, give himself double the opportunities to put on a show, but in the end he cannot give up the idea, what a perfect picture it would make to declare himself to her amid a field of flowers and plants and all the evidence of his own happy work.

He sets to planning, finds a ring, writes a speech, tears up the speech, writes another, gives up the whole idea of a prepared speech as a bad job, and then when he has no other reason to delay, he picks a day. He will propose to her on the very next Tuesday, because they both agree that Tuesdays are usually miserable, and he would like to give them both a reason to remember them fondly.

So very casually, Monday night, as they are readying for bed, he tells her he’d like to show her the garden in the morning, if she’d like to see, and she just coos out an ooh, yes, and tucks in for sleep.

Stede tucks in beside her, though admittedly he gets little sleep.

He’s just so excited. He wants to see her sweet face when he shows her the garden and he gives her the rings, wants, as much as he has ever known how to want, and so for the first time in several weeks, he is up with the sunrise.

He lays there, lets the sun inch further and further into the room, does not wake Ed, because as eager as he is, he is not restless. He has time. They have time.

So when Ed eventually snuffles her way into waking, he takes his time with her, takes his time kissing her and wishing her good morning, and then when she starts grabbing, pulling, needy little tugs after any bit of him she can reach, he wishes her a very good morning. And then they tangle up together and doze, letting the heat of their bodies melt into the incoming heat of the day. Eventually Ed has to pee and then when she comes back she settles at the table, nibbles at the last of the bread from their late night snack, sips at now-cold coffee, and after a moment Stede joins her, and it’s so easy, so comfortable, routine, every-day domestic that he almost says it right then and there.

He manages to hold his tongue, though it takes all of his strength, the weight of the words heavy and ready to slide off every time he catches her eye and sees it crinkle with her smile.

When eventually they are dressed, and he has guided her, hands carefully over her eyes, into the garden, and then has stepped back, et voila!, he is so glad he waited.

Because he has been down in this garden every day for months now, and so yes, he knows what it looks like, and he designed it, so he understands that it is beautiful, is perfectly balanced between color and green and fruit and growth, he knows this.

But when Ed sees it for the first time, so does he.

When her eyes open, they immediately spring wide, her mouth with it in a gasp, and then she turns, slowly once, and then in a giddy spin that lands in his arms.

“Stede,” she says, grips his shoulders, shakes.

“Yes, darling,” he says.

“Stede!” she repeats, smiling so wide it splits into a laugh.

His own smile is splitting too, and he laughs with her.

“Fucking— This shit is amazing, I can’t believe how good it looks, it’s not even the same place.”

And he doesn’t totally agree, he can still see the same old stone benches, and the raspberry bushes he’d wanted to keep; it still holds its bones. But yes, he agrees, sees as she does, how beautifully brand new it is in this shape, how much fuller, how much more alive.

“Well, go on!” she says, shakes his shoulders again. “Show me, fuckin show me everything!”

He clasps her hand in his, and he does.

Shows her where he dug in a canvas and rock barriers to hold back the raspberries, shows her where the native flowers and grasses mingle together, where he built the trellis now climbing with sweet peas, shows her every bit with pride and her hand snug in his, never pulling away, her attention never wandering even as his does, rambling on down paths of soil compositions and water schedules and sun-exposure mapping.

Eventually the tide of his— garden-related— excitement ebbs, and he guides her to sit.

“Oh, nah, not there, baby, I’m allergic to lilies,” she tells him, and steers him to sit in the grass near the wildflowers. He lets her move him, thinking he certainly knew about the lilies, but it seems he’d forgotten. The thought passes quickly, though, because he has much more pressing matters on his mind.

He lets Ed get settled, skirts tucked up under her to keep the grass off her legs, and then he swallows his nerves, and tells her.

“I have something to give you.”

“Okay, yay,” she says, face still flushed with the smile she’s carried all morning.

He reaches into his pocket, closes around it, and then folds it into her palm.

She stares down at it quizzically. “My toe ring? Thought I lost this one.”

“No, I had it. I kept it, after that first time I touched you. I didn’t mean to, but I wanted so badly to have any part of you that I just couldn’t— I couldn’t help it. I carried your ring, and I carried it with me always.”

“Oh,” she says. “Well, you can have it—”

“I don’t need it, I don’t need to carry your ring anymore. But—” He swallows again, reaches into his pocket once more, and presents the ring, the one he chose for her. “I’d like you to carry mine.”

He can hear the bees hum in the flowers, he can hear the light breeze in the grass, he can hear his own heart beating away in his chest as she looks at the ring poised between his fingers, as she just looks and looks.

Eventually her voice breaks the silence, breaks over the syllables.

“Are you— are you asking me to marry you?”

“Yes, Ed, I am.”

She doesn’t say anything, so he figures he ought to actually say the words.

“Ed, will you m—?”

She snatches up the ring, and throws herself at him.

“Yes, fuck you, absolutely yes,” she says between kisses, between crawling into his lap, between leaning so far into him that they begin to tip together, and she catches the back of his head.

Catches his head and lays him back in a bed of wildflowers, blankets him with her touch, tucks in kisses and caresses.

And though, for the first time in a long time, he is not tired, it is the easiest rest he has ever found.