Ed notices Stede tucking flowers through his powdered wig in the captain’s cabin as they get ready together. He grows quietly fascinated watching Stede’s fingers as they sort through the flowers scattered on the desk, picking the smallest, brightest ones to loop gently into his wig. He’s never seen anyone handle anything so delicately before.
He steps closer, and Stede looks up and asks, “Would you like some in your hair, as well?”
Ed’s eyes widen at the question before he remembers he’s not attending the party tonight as Blackbeard. He can be anyone he wants. He can be someone who wears flowers in his hair. He might even like it.
“Yeah, sure,” he huffs in a small voice, and Stede gestures for him to take a seat.
Stede reaches around to pluck a flower from the pile. “May I?”
In the past, Ed has never liked people touching his hair; and though he barely knows Stede, he finds himself trusting him anyway.
Stede begins gently placing flowers in Ed’s hair, weaving the stems through his waves. No one has ever touched Ed so tenderly, with such great care as if he were reverent and beautiful and delicate. He feels himself melting into the soft press of Stede’s fingertips against his scalp.
“There,” Stede says quietly. “Go have a look.” He doesn’t need to find a mirror to see how he looks – he can read it on Stede’s face.
From then on, trusting Stede becomes an easier decision to make. Then something natural and instinctual, like breathing. Ed trusts Stede again later that night as he slips the red silk from his fingers, and once more a few days later when he asks Stede to run him through on the deck of the ship. Inhale. He trusts Stede with the next ten years of his life. And still, as he waits at dawn with his feet dangling over the edge of the dock. Exhale.
His vision tunnels. He’s cold. Suffocating.
“Like treading water,” Ed had said a lifetime ago. “Waiting to drown.”
Miraculously, he breaks through the surface. He has to force the air back into his lungs, will them to deflate and hope his body remembers how to fill them back up again.
“Breathing the same air,” Stede says to him. And it’s painful, and he hiccups and chokes, but slowly, gradually, it gets easier. He whispers his goodbye to Blackbeard as Stede lays him gently down on the bed. But his breathing is still jagged, irregular; one step forward before stumbling back.
He’s sputtering on salt water again when he finds a letter in a bottle. He finds the man who wrote it. He’s wielding a sword, and Ed trusts he won’t get gutted this time as he sprints towards him from across the beach. He inhales automatically as they intertwine, pressing their promises to each other's lips.
“Almost ready? Want me to put the flowers in your hair?” Frenchie asks.
“No thanks,” Ed exhales. “It may be our wedding day, but I trust Stede will be here any second now to do it himself.”
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