Ed reforms Blackbeard like pouring hot glass.
He hefts the molten amalgam of the things he’s meant to be, watches them congeal in a crucible—the woodcut he’d seen in Stede’s book, the legends, the horrors, Izzy’s voice crooning always somewhere too near behind him. He’s thick with it all, lethargic, the temperature climbing, and he lets them drip red-hot and liquid into the cool embrace of the sea.
What emerges is Blackbeard, cast in a beautiful, uniform, crystalline drop.
He wields what he’s made, and the glass appears to tells the truth of him, perfectly transparent and stronger than steel. Ungiving. Absolute.
The world weathers hard against the glass, and it holds, it holds, it holds. This is the life, this is who he is, this is who he is, and he will do what it takes to prove it.
Somehow, not even the ocean is wide enough to keep Stede Bonnet away. He climbs on deck, roughened but lovely, different but the same. Ed stares, wide-eyed and hopes with everything he has that his glass facade, shimmering under the sun, does not reflect the truth of him. That whatever it is facing Stede at this moment is Blackbeard.
Stede smiles at him, because of course he does. Ed has presented him with what he’s made himself, and Stede takes the glass in hand oh so gently, like a tear, like a heart—oh god, Ed’s never felt so fragile—and he turns it over and between two fingers pinches the delicate tail.
“You shouldn’t have come back,” Ed says, mouth dry, because he can’t say how afraid he is that Stede is going to take him apart. How much he desperately hopes for it all the same.
Gently, Stede shakes his head. “I shouldn’t have left,” he corrects.
The glass tail snaps like a matchstick.
Alongside it, Blackbeard shatters.
