OPEN RP

[funhinged]

we out here

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we got canon divergence for polyonymous

[funhinged]

[ Stede doesn't intend to go to the beach, strictly speaking. Sort of in the sense that he hasn't got any intention on hand at all when he starts walking in the first place.

And in the sense that he doesn't really remember the bit between-- between after, and when he looks up and works out that he's somewhere else. There are tear tracks drying on his face. Maybe that's good. Maybe he's done crying. Chin up. All that. Bit cold. Not freezing. Also good.

He's having a hard time thinking, and that might be a good thing too, and then he's hearing the waves. There's a squeezing fist in his chest roundabout where he reckons his heart is.

Shouldn't be here, probably. Should have-- well, gone the other way, he supposes. Gone someplace else. Anywhere. Then again, it's late. He's late. Way late, too late, bound to be past the point where Ed would have waited, surely.

Will he think the worst of him? Was he secretly a little relieved not to be met, once he had a minute to think about it? Oh, that hurts to think about, actually. Oh. Makes him miss the part where he couldn't think at all. (Does it matter either way?)

It takes until he's set foot on the dock to register that someone's sitting on it. Long hair, grey in streaks, know it anywhere. Unfairly pretty.

Stede does one of the things that Stede does best: makes a high-pitched, half-wheezed, strangled noise in lieu of knowing what to do with himself. Which is arguably as good a greeting as any in this rugged world of piracy. ]

feral jail idiots on main

[funhinged]

[ In this rough and tumble seafaring life, sometimes pirates simply end up thrown into some middle of nowhere jails together.

Who amongst their population hasn't? Perfectly normal, perfectly natural. Peak adventurousness, honestly. Kind of a fun story, even.

Stede naturally kicks up a little fuss the entire way there, though. On principle. He kicks up another little fuss about the fact that no one has opted to allow him and Ed to bunk together even though they got brought in together. It's honestly really rude?? That's his friend????? He hasn't seen him since they got apprehended, how is he supposed to just cope with that?

Ghastly conduct, really, very atrocious. He makes sure to tell the guards he's seen latrines with more optimal layouts than these cells. They do not care.

Obviously the next most vital step is to stick his face up to the bars and immediately start on some bullshit. ]

Psst! [ World's loudest 'psst' award. Subtlety is for men who are in the mood to think about things they are doing. Someone probably tells him to shut up from a different cell and he doesn't actually give a shit about it. ] Ed? You in here? You didn't get too roughed up by those brigands, did you?

[ Like he guesses they can burn the building down if they've been up to that sort of nonsense, but it's better if they haven't been getting up to that at all. ]

no waiting for s2 we write it ourselves

[funhinged]

[ It takes a lot of doing, catching up with Ed to start with. Blackbeard. The Kraken. All of the above. A lot of apologizing to the crew, a lot of explanations both ways, just to sort of get started.

Stede left another family, when he went home. One that actually-- well, one where he actually fit. That grew on each other. And everything apparently went pretty fucking poorly at some point after that. It wouldn't be fair not to apologize, take ownership.

It's his fault, really. Things won't be the same between him and anyone involved again, probably.

And maybe he does ruin things, and maybe he knows that, and maybe it's not fair to swan back in and pick up what's left of his crew and go trying to track Ed down to make things right. Maybe he's selfish for it. But he can't really bear the thought of not trying. Whatever happens, if absolutely nothing else, he wants Ed to know.

They're still a lot of mediocre pirates. Slightly moreso than usual, really, with their numbers cut. It's a big part of why it takes so much time to get anything lined up. At least half of their schedule is trying not to screw something up so badly that they die. At least one nice thing about Blackbeard being such a big name is that keeping track isn't hard.

So some shoddy piracy, some shoddy Fuckeries, some unconventional methods. Stealing ships. Using fake names, because it defeats the whole point if he goes about advertising himself. Stede Bonnet is dead. He got mauled and/or run over and/or crushed by a piano and/or was actually quite ill and/or probably a few other things that trickled into the hearsay. And that's fine. Stede hears the funeral was nice enough.

The biggest miracle of all is wrangling a time to get at Ed alone for a start. People give him a berth most of the time, but it always seems like Izzy is playing the hanger-on. But they manage, even if the window is likely to be far too brief. The universe does do that for Stede an awful lot. Bend some rules.

It's a quiet night. Some port back-alley, a couple of frankly embarrassing close misses already out the window. He makes his intersection, though. He manages. Probably mostly because Ed stopped to have a swig of something that Stede can smell from here.

(One part painful to look at, see the fallout for himself, one part remembering Ed is beautiful.)

Now, of course, it's only juuust occurring to Stede that he never once thought ahead to exactly what he'd say first. ]

You changed your look. It's very avant-garde.

[ Fuckin nailed it. ]