Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Izzy doesn’t use an alarm clock. He sleeps shallow and dreamless and the second the sun is up high enough to flood his room with morning light, he’s wide awake and there’s no use trying to fight it.

He used to sleep just fine, back when he was twenty-three and shooting up before coming down, drunk enough to forget who he went home with, waking up with a pipe shattered in bed beside him and the glass pieces embedded in his skin.

Now he lives a life of military efficiency. He wakes early and has his coffee machine timed to start, drinks it black with two eggs and an orange. His body aches, the remnants of broken fingers and fucked up knees and a shoulder that never set quite right. It’s a low, distant hum of pain, never enough for him to really do anything with.

Izzy will be the first to arrive at the pub, like he always is, signing off on shipments and taking stock. If Edward shows up at all, he’ll come just before last call, when Izzy is already dead on his feet and can’t say no to a single thing.

Though, truthfully, he rarely can.

Every morning looks exactly the same, until Izzy shrugs on his coat and arrives at the station and finds the Central Line has been suspended. He digs his nails into his palms and breathes out through his nose, allowing himself a proper thirty seconds of outright rage before he steps out onto the pavement and hails a cab.

It’s an indulgence, really. The weather is fine for London, grey and mild. Ten years ago, he would’ve walked. Ten years ago, he would’ve woken up in a shit flat in Hackney with a cutlery drawer full of roaches and Edward passed out in his jaunty fucking chef’s coat. Things change.

He has the cabbie let him off a few streets down from the pub, unwilling to deal with the traffic at St. Pancras and already itching to set his morning back on schedule.

The sidewalks are blessedly empty, save for the usual addict strung out in front of a shop window because it’s too early for anyone to arrive at work and shoo them off. Izzy lights a cigarette and exhales, the only vice he’s allowed these days. The air is wet and he holds it in his lungs, thinking it might rain after all.

“Excuse me! I’m so sorry, excuse me!”

Izzy turns and raises his eyebrows at the man scurrying across the street, his arms waving in an attempt to catch his attention. He looks distinctly out of place in the general squalor of this area of Pentonville, dressed like a particularly effeminate history professor in several layers of clothing.

“I’m terribly sorry,” he says again, red in the face and clearly sweating. “Could you possibly offer me directions?”

Izzy exhales a cloud of cigarette smoke, not bothering to aim anywhere other than the stranger’s face. “Maybe,” he says.

“Oh, thank you.” He rummages through several pockets before coming up with a hand-written note in purple ink pen. “I’m meant to have an interview at eight o’clock, but I’m afraid I cannot make heads nor tails of the instructions they sent.”

“Vernon Square,” Izzy reads, his cigarette held between his teeth. “Can’t you just check your phone?”

“Dead, I’m afraid,” he says. “You see, I took the train in from Surrey and wasted my battery trying to figure out my transfers. I never do bring a charger, though I always end up needing one. Truly, I should just invest in a new model but - "

“It’s just up that hill,” Izzy says, cutting him off. “A big old set of buildings, looks like an insane asylum.”

“Well,” he says. “That sounds ominous.”

Izzy hands back the note. “It’s almost eight.”

“Oh. Well. Yes. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Really, you’re terribly kind.”

Izzy snorts and turns without saying goodbye. In the reflection of a dark shop window, he can see the man jogging up the hill, looking for all the world like he’s never ran once in his life. He listens for the distant clatter of his brogues on the cobblestones until it fades into the sounds of the city.

—

Edward arrives, predictably, just before midnight. He’s wearing the same clothes Izzy saw him in last night and his eyes are red rimmed and glassy. He wonders for a moment if he might be high, before Edward collapses onto one of the bar stools and Izzy realises he probably just crawled out of bed.

He pours him a drink, a pint of whatever he has on tap, and sets it wordlessly down on the counter. “Izzy, Izzy, Izzy,” Edward says, a brittle edge to his voice.

“Not tonight,” Izzy says. “Ivan and Fang have been working double shifts without you for two weeks. I had to close the kitchen early today. Spent all afternoon interviewing while the boys manned the bar and I still stuck around for closing. It’s not fucking sustainable.”

Edward grins at him, his hair down around his face, streaked with more grey than even Izzy has these days, despite the ten years between them. “Oh, come on now,” he says, edging his way around the bar. “Don’t be like that, Iz.”

Edward has him up against the back wall, one hand tight around his wrist and the other snaking up his chest, settling flat against his collarbones. “I’m so fucking bored,” he whispers into Izzy’s ear. He smells like day-old whisky and cigarettes.

When Edward kisses him, he bites hard enough at Izzy’s lip to bleed and his hand settles lightly against his throat. Izzy knows every inch of those fingers, every callus and catch of skin. His eyes flutter closed.

“We’re alone?” He asks.

“The door isn’t locked,” Izzy offers.

“Don’t give a fuck.”

Izzy starts most nights out on his knees, his jeans sticking to the perpetually tacky floor, his leather boots creased at the toes when he sits back on his heels, waiting for an instruction. Sometimes Edward uses his fingers first, mapping out the flat of his tongue, testing his gag reflex until he retches onto the floor. Other nights, he doesn’t have the patience.

When he guides his cock into Izzy’s mouth, it’s almost gentle, for a moment, until Edward’s nails dig into his jaw and he murmurs, “Open up.”

When they were young and Edward was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, sweet-eyed and skinny and dressed in denim that never quite fit him, he would choke Izzy out before they could get anywhere at all, leaving him unconscious at his feet.

They’ve both learned, since then. Edward can see it when his vision begins to fade and his pulse hammers in his ears. He’ll loosen his grip, slip out of his throat, just enough to keep him upright.

Edward grinds Izzy’s nose into his pubic bone, and he can’t swallow down the sounds he makes around his cock, unable to breathe, his lungs burning. “I should’ve knocked you around a bit first,” Edward murmurs, one hand fisted in his hair. “You always look your best that way.”

It’s been a while since Edward sent him home with two black eyes and Izzy palms at the front of his own jeans at the thought.

“Ah, ah,” Edward kicks his hand away, his boot knocking against his wrist. “Not tonight. You’ve been a fucking brat this week. Complaining non-stop. I’m barely keeping myself from eating a fucking bullet these days and all you can think of is keeping the bar afloat.”

Izzy would flay himself open to keep Edward entertained, but no matter how much he bleeds for him it’s never enough. So, he keeps the bar afloat. He keeps money coming in. He pays their rents out of the same bank account, wire transfers automated and on time. He lets Edward fuck his throat until he comes.

It’s all Izzy can fucking do, and Edward still sighs like he’s left wanting something when he leaves Izzy kneeling on the floor, coughing phlegm and cum onto the linoleum.

“Clean that up,” he says idly, finishing off his beer in a single swallow. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

—

“Oh, hello again.”

Izzy doesn’t look up, because he doesn’t expect someone to be standing on a relatively crowded morning train to King’s Cross trying to fucking speak to him.

“Excuse me!” That voice is something he remembers though, pitched high and irritating, and Izzy nearly groans.

The lost man from Pentonville is grinning at him, his hands clutched around the thick strap of a leather satchel. “I knew it was you!” He says, eagerly. “I saw you across the platform, and I thought perhaps we might have the same morning commute now.”

Jesus fucking Christ, Izzy is going to have to change that.

“Guess you got the job then,” he says, his eyes flicking up to the bright subway map above him, counting down stops.

“I did, actually!” He says. “All thanks to you, of course. I never would have made it in time, otherwise, and I’m sure you know, punctuality is key.”

Izzy nods, absentmindedly, hoping that will be the end of it.

“And I wanted to thank you, properly.”

“Right. Don’t mention it.” Please God, do not.

“I’m Stede, by the way. I’m new to uh - well - to London, honestly. I’ve been staying with a friend in Surrey, but I’m here now. You might, well, you might just be the only person I know in London. So, I was hoping I could get your name this time.”

For a moment, Izzy considers telling him to fuck off. He imagines grabbing him by the throat, marking his fresh milk skin, making those eyes of his bulge. Then he thinks about the bite of metal handcuffs and the grim fucking excuse for food in prison, the muggy heat when summer comes.

“Izzy,” he says.

“Oh, what a wonderful name. Izzy,” he repeats, as if trying it out for himself. “And what is it you do?”

“I own a pub.”

“Oh, lovely! Near where we met, I imagine? I’d love to visit. What’s the name?”

Izzy thinks of lying, but he’s fucking exhausted and his shoulder throbs with the imprint of a bite mark deep enough to draw blood. He didn’t feel up to showering when he got home, so it’s likely well on its way to infected. Edward might be bored, bored out of his fucking mind, but these days Izzy is just tired.

“Blackbeard’s,” he says. “Local clientele, mostly.”

“Well that’s certainly me now,” Stede says, his eyes shining as if it’s a joke Izzy is in on. “A local!” He rummages through his bag, leaning his entire body weight onto a subway pole to keep from toppling over, and pulls out a handsome leather-bound notebook embossed with a monogram.

“Blackbeard’s,” he repeats slowly, as he writes the name out with an emerald ink pen. “I’ll be sure to stop by.”

“Right,” Izzy says, unable to handle another second of this interaction without the aid of nicotine. “I’m getting off here. Have errands to run before opening.”

“Oh, of course. Entrepreneurs, always busy. Have a wonderful day, Izzy. I’m sure I’ll be seeing more of you soon.”

He doubts it, honestly, because Izzy will modify his whole damn morning routine if he has to. The second he steps outside the station doors, a good mile out from the pub, it begins to rain. Izzy pulls up his hood and lights a cigarette.

—

He still wakes without an alarm clock, up with the sun, but these days he sits and reads objectively terrible Tom Clancy novels at his kitchen counter until the clock on the stove hits eight. There was some trial and error involved, but after a fair few weeks, Izzy learned that if he leaves his flat at eight, he’ll be at least thirty minutes too late to run into Stede on the tube. He takes the back roads in from the station, keeping off any streets that have even a chance of connecting to Vernon Square.

It’s tedious, but worth it. His mornings remain blessedly silent.

Edward still comes and goes at odd hours and leaves bruises around Izzy’s throat, just low enough to hide under a buttoned shirt collar. He seems distant, though, when he sits at the bar waiting for Izzy to close up, nursing some of the good whisky he pulled from the top shelf.

“What the fuck’s the matter with you, then?” Izzy asks, hanging the dish towel over the edge of the sink to dry.

Edward looks up at him with a reptilian tilt to his head, as if he has to parse his words to understand them. “Everything,” he answers, eventually. “You done here? I’m coming to yours.”

“Yeah,” Izzy answers, biting back a sigh. He locks up with the knowledge that he’ll be laid out tomorrow, unable to arrive as early as he usually does. He times both dishwashers to start at midnight and resets the alarm at the door.

Edward is waiting at the street corner, an unlit cigarette between his fingers. “I’m not taking the fucking train,” he says. “Go call us a cab.”

“Izzy!”

“God damn it,” he breathes, just as Edward turns around, a Cheshire grin spreading across his lips.

“Izzy?” He repeats, a hand on his shoulder, digging deep into the bruises there. “You’ve been hiding a friend I don’t know about?” He asks, as Stede stumbles to a stop in front of them.

“I haven’t seen you on the tube, lately,” he says. He’s wearing a tweed waist coat over a satin white collared shirt. His slacks match, the colour of autumn leaves. God, he can’t fucking stand him.

“Haven’t seen you on the tube,” Edward breathes into his ear, mimicking. “Hello there,” he steps out in front of Izzy, commandeering Stede’s attention. “Name’s Edward. I’m Izzy’s best mate and I can’t believe he’s been hiding you away.”

“Oh hardly,” Stede says, looking Edward up and down with wide eyes. Izzy knows that expression, he’s seen it a thousand times before.

Izzy has always looked at Edward and seen a flicker of the boy he once was, not even twenty and fucking feral, with a match-strike temper and so little to lose. But he knows Edward is still beautiful now, that time has done little to change that, and Stede looks speechless, like he’s lost his chatty temperament to the slow play of Edward’s smile.

“I gave him directions,” Izzy says, saving them both the pain of several more beats of silence.

“Well, that’s unusually nice of you,” Edward offers.

“I’m Stede,” he stutters. “Bonnet. I teach history, up the road.”

Izzy snorts, despite himself. Of course he actually teaches history.

“My favourite subject,” Edward says, like he didn’t drop out in year nine to run drugs in Croydon. Izzy would be impressed if he could name the current fucking Prime Minister, much less any of the previous ones.

Stede eats it up, of course, his eyes alight. “Oh, mine too. I adore teaching it. I focus on the seventeenth century to modern times, mostly. I can’t say my students are as keen as I am, but I try.”

“I’m sure they’re lucky to have you as a proff,” Edward says, his voice pitched strangely high, lacking the curl of smoke that he speaks with these days. “It’s important to have a teacher who really cares, you know?”

“Jesus Christ, Edward,” he murmurs, pinching at the bridge of his nose, warding off the tension headache behind his eyes.

Edward ignores him, slinging one arm over Izzy’s shoulder and pulling him close. “We own a pub, just off the high-street. You’ll come for a drink, won’t you?”

“What - now?” Stede asks.

“We’re closed,” Izzy says. “We close early on Wednesdays.”

“Closed to the public. But we're always open for friends. So what do you say, Stede Bonnet? Care for a pint?”

Stede looks between them, like he might be waiting on Izzy’s reluctant approval. Izzy doesn’t give it and Edward’s grin wins out. “I’d be delighted.”

Izzy walks ahead of them, impatience engrained and hard to tamp down. He’s not sure he could take these streets slow if he tried.

Edward says something that is lost to the traffic of Pentonville and Stede laughs. His thumb and forefinger are twisted in one of Stede’s loose white sleeves, rubbing idly at the material. Stede is gesturing grandly with his free hand, describing something with a smile wide enough to spot from several streets away.

Izzy unlocks the front door again and considers that this may not be the worst outcome. Edward clearly has something to get out of his system and Stede looks like he might just come along for the ride. And once Edward stops answering the phone and tosses him aside for a twenty-something university student, Izzy can go back to his normal commute without Stede Bonnet pressing up against him, trying to talk.

Edward breaks everyone’s heart, after a while.

Izzy busies himself behind the bar, drying off the glasses left on the rack, after he pulls two pints from the tap without asking their preference.

“Are you not going to join us?” Stede asks, high and hopeful, perched carefully on a bar stool.

“Nah,” Edward says. “Izzy doesn’t drink. When I met him, he was doing lines of coke off the fucking train platform in Clapton. Ain’t that right, Iz? He’s on that A.A. shit now. Sober and all, a teetotaller.”

Izzy’s hands tighten around his towel, but he doesn’t correct him. He certainly doesn’t remind him for the hundredth time that he’s never been to A.A. or N.A. or any derivation thereof because he knows what religious shit they’re peddling and Izzy can handle himself just fine.

“Oh, should we - should we not be - ”

“It’s my job,” Izzy says, cutting him off.

“He’s here every day,” Edward adds.

After a few anxious glances back at Izzy, Stede and Edward eventually slip into an easy conversation that turns excitable and bright the second Stede begins recounting the historic myths and mysteries that he likes to work into his lessons. He’s talking about two missing princes in the Tower of London and Edward is watching him with his chin propped on his palm.

“That’s fucking wild, mate.”

“Isn’t it?” Stede asks.

Izzy has managed to dry off everything left on the rack and poured drain cleaner down the kitchen sink with some kettle water to help it settle. He ticks off the morning’s deliveries on the calendar hanging in the back office and finishes the food prep Ivan hadn’t gotten to before closing.

When he steps out of the kitchen, they’re still talking. By now, is sounds as if their conversation has made it round to the Bermuda fucking Triangle, and Izzy closes his eyes for a moment, breathing deep.

“I’m going home,” he says.

“Oh!” Stede looks up suddenly, stopping mid-sentence. “I’m so sorry, it must be getting late, I’ll just - ”

“Stay a while, Iz, sit down with us. You’ve been very antisocial.” He says it like a threat, grinning with all his teeth.

“No thanks. You’ll lock up?”

Edward shrugs, turning back to Stede. “Sure.”

Izzy sets the spare keyring down in front of him. “You know which one locks the front door?”

“The gold looking one,” Edward says with a wave of his hand.

“They’re all gold.”

“I’ll figure it out, mate.” Izzy knows a dismissal when he hears it.

“Good night, Izzy!” Stede calls, once he reaches the front door. Izzy doesn’t answer.

—

He goes a week without seeing Edward at all and Izzy handles it well enough. He goes to the gym until his fucked up fingers can’t curl themselves around a barbell anymore and he drinks an extra cup of coffee in the morning and shoves Fang out of the way when he tries to make idle conversation during an afternoon shift.

The front door creaks open at ten, a half hour before he’ll open for lunch. “We’re closed,” he calls.

“Oh, I’m so sorry to interrupt.” Stede stands hesitantly in the doorway with Edward’s leather jacket folded in his arms. “Ed said you’d be here, and I had a break between classes. I hoped I could drop off his jacket with you? He left it at my place last night. It’s going to be chilly this weekend and he doesn’t seem to have much in the way of warm outerwear, you know.”

“Ed,” Izzy echoes, disbelieving.

Stede doesn’t look like a man scorned. He looks just as cheery as he always did, his hair swept aside with pomade like it’s the forties.

“I was planning on coming earlier, but I wasn’t sure if I’d beat you to it. I’m a morning person myself,” he continues. “Always have been. It’s so quiet, isn’t it? The only alone time I could ever manage when - well,” he stops, absentmindedly running his hands over the patchwork on the shoulder of Edward’s jacket. “You know how it is.”

Izzy really fucking doesn’t.

“Leave it on a chair,” Izzy says. “I’m opening, I have to finish getting ready.”

“Oh yes, of course, well. I hope I’ll see you again soon, Izzy.”

He doesn’t answer and eventually he hears the door click shut.

—

Edward slams him up against the brick wall by the bins at half-past two in the morning and fumbles with his belt buckle, hissing his name. “Izzy, Izzy, Izzy.”

“Didn’t think you’d be back here today. Thought Bonnet was keeping you busy. He dropped off your jacket, you know. Said you left it at his place.”

Edward grabs him hard by the chin and spits into his open mouth. “You jealous? Don’t worry. I don’t do this with anyone else. Now get on your knees.”

Of course he doesn’t, because who would let him? Who else would give him this?

“Get me wet,” Edward says, pushing past his lips. Izzy uses his tongue, lets it get sloppy, already hard despite the pain in his knees. He looks up at him, watches his parted lips and his fluttering lashes for as long as Izzy can get away with it.

When Edward finally notices, he slaps him hard and pulls him to his feet. He makes quick work of Izzy’s belt buckle, pulling his trousers down just above his knees. “Now be a good boy and turn around.”

He must not be moving fast enough for Edward’s short temper because he shoves Izzy hard against the brick, scratching his cheek and forcing a gasp from his chest.

He’s distantly surprised. Edward has taken him dry with some regularity, but he’s usually screaming into a mattress, not out in a fucking alleyway. “Are you - “

“No,” Edward says, one hand tight around the nape of his neck. “I’m not interested in spending another night in a jail cell for indecent exposure just because you can’t keep your fucking mouth shut. Snap your legs together, c’mon.”

They haven’t done this since they were young, when Edward would be too stoned to do much more than throw an arm over Izzy’s waist. He shivers as soon as Edward presses between his legs, still slick with spit. If he closes his eyes, they might be back in Hackney, sharing a bed but rarely sleeping.

Edward’s height forces him onto his toes, and just as his breath is starting to pick up Izzy’s leg cramps and he cries out, scrambling at the brick. Edward immediately slaps a hand over his mouth, muffling the sound, though he doesn’t let up. Izzy can tell he’s close, even as the pain in his leg seizes and spreads to his lower back.

“I thought I told you to keep it down.” He comes a moment later, his hand still clasped around his mouth. Izzy adjusts his stance and kicks his toes up against the wall to ease the pain and Edward must be feeling generous because he runs his hand through the mess between Izzy’s thighs and strokes him just how he’s always liked it, using his own cum to ease the way.

Despite his cramping muscles, or maybe because of it, Izzy is deliriously close. He stays silent though, when he comes onto the brick. Edward remains pressed against his back, breathing heavily into the nape of his neck, until finally he moves away, pulling up his own jeans and watching as Izzy does the same.

Izzy sinks to the ground, stretching his leg out long in front of him, wincing. “You’re getting old,” Edward says, taking a seat beside him.

“So are you.”

Edward knocks their boots together, an absentminded thing. “Yeah, I am. But I’m not the one who needs to fucking stretch before sex now am I?”

“Fuck off, Ed.”

He smiles, for just a moment, though it could be a trick of dim light. “Hand me a cigarette, will you?”

Izzy fishes one out from the crushed pack in his back pocket and they share it between them. “You know,” Edward says, finally. “Stede has a whole bedroom that’s just filled with clothes.”

God, Izzy does not want to hear about Stede Bonnet and his frankly absurd life choices right now, but Edward really is smiling this time as he exhales smoke between his teeth, so he asks, “How much clothes can one man possibly have?”

“No clue. Guy’s insane.”

Once they’ve burned it down to the filter, Izzy lights another cigarette and inhales deep. Edward waves him off, content to sit with his head tilted back against the brick. It’s cold for March and Izzy’s muscles are starting to tense back up again from sitting on the cobblestones, but Edward still looks perfectly content.

“How long?” Izzy asks, finally. “How long are you going to keep doing this?”

“I don’t know,” Edward says, not bothering to pretend he doesn’t understand the question. “It’s different.”

“Different how?”

“I don’t know,” he says again. “But I really am getting old, Iz. I feel it, all the fucking time. Every time I wake up. But I don’t feel that way with Stede.”

Izzy doesn’t answer. What could he possibly say to something like that? He lights another cigarette.

—

Izzy has barely unlocked the front door when Stede Bonnet marches into the pub, tugging a thirty-year-old man along beside him like he’s a wayward middle child. He makes a mental note to keep the damn thing locked until the exact second he plans to open, lest Stede continues to appear like his own personal poltergeist.

”Hey there, Izzy.” Stede says brightly.

Izzy looks between them, his eyes narrowed. “What do you want?”

“Well, I wanted to stop by before things really picked up for the lunch hour, because Ed told me you were hiring,” Stede says. “And my young student here has plenty of kitchen experience and is currently looking for part-time work, isn’t that right?”

The man looks at Izzy with something of a bored smile. “Yup.”

“And,” Stede continues. “He’s terribly diligent, well, generally, though you could be better with your assignments, dear boy. You’ve been late twice, now. But I can certainly vouch for both his charm and his work ethic.”

Izzy doesn’t have the fucking wherewithal to conduct an interview with Stede standing beside him, rolling up and down onto the balls of his feet. “You worked in a pub before?” He asks.

“I’ve worked a lot of places,” he says.

“Roach here is a student of medicine,” Stede cuts in. “But my understanding is that in a former life, he apprenticed under a butcher.”

Izzy turns to him, eyebrows raised, fighting a smile at the unsettled tone of Stede’s voice. “Butchery to surgery,” he says.

Roach shrugs. “Meat’s meat.”

Izzy barks out a laugh while Stede hisses a reproach at his student. “If you last a Saturday night and Sunday brunch shift, you’re hired. You'll get wages for both days either way. Be here by half past four.”

“Saturday, four-thirty. Sounds good,” Roach drawls. "See you in class, professor.”

Stede waves, grinning, and turns back to Izzy. He doesn’t appear to be in a hurry to leave, so finally Izzy sighs and asks, “What else?”

“I was wondering if you’d like to come grab a coffee with me? I’m rather low energy this morning, I’m afraid, and you have some time before opening so - ”

“No,” Izzy says.

“Oh, okay. Understood. I know you’re terribly busy. Perhaps next time then?”

Izzy imagines how easy it would be to take him apart, separate him into pieces. “I doubt it.”

Despite his tone, Stede seems to brighten up, as if he’s pulling it from somewhere deep inside himself. “Alright, well. Have a lovely day then, Izzy.”

—

Roach is, somewhat infuriatingly, very competent. He knows his way around a kitchen, requires less training than Ivan ever did, and seems generally apathetic to Izzy’s temper.

They both take smoke breaks out by the bins and they stand in absolute silence until Roach says, “Are you fucking the professor then?”

Izzy chokes on his cigarette, wheezing through smoke, doubled over against the brick wall. “What?” He snaps finally, his voice hoarse. “Of course I’m not.”

“Oh,” Roach says, seemingly disinterested. “‘Kay.”

“Why would you - you know what? Never mind. Don’t fucking mention him again.”

Roach stubs out his cigarette against the brick. “Sure thing, boss man. See you inside.”

—

Izzy is halfway through a shift and his entire body aches. He’s seconds away from calling it quits and texting Roach to cover him when Edward arrives with Stede at his heels. They waltz through the pub with a flourish and greet every patron they pass. Stede even stops to wave at him, a tiny, excited thing.

Decision made, he pulls out his phone and asks Roach if he can be here within the hour. He answers with the speed and thoughtlessness of a young person. ‘no can do. class tonight.’

Izzy curses under his breath as Edward and Stede commandeer a corner of the bar. “Hey, Iz, pour us some drinks, will you?”

For a brief, cathartic moment, Izzy imagines smashing every single glass in the whole damn pub.

”We went to the British Museum.” Edward tells Fang, who had stepped out of the kitchen the second he heard Stede’s singsong greeting. “It was wild. They nicked some crazy shit, mate. Had all sorts. Like Egyptian walls and Roman statutes.”

“Greek,” Stede corrects him, idly. He thanks Izzy when he sets two pints down in front of them. Edward simply takes a long drink and keeps talking.

“And Stede knows where all this stuff is from and all the crazy stories from like thousands of years ago or whatever. That fucking place, man. Can you imagine? Stealing all that cool shit and just putting it out behind glass?”

“I’d keep it, if it were me,” Fang offers.

“Me too!”

“But then other people wouldn’t be able to enjoy it and learn from it,” Stede insists. “Even though, well, yes of course they did take those artefacts from their home countries.”

“Izzy,” Edward calls, but he refuses to turn around. “You ever seen a mummy, mate? Like a real life fucking mummy in a coffin?”

“Sarcophagus,” Stede says.

Izzy doesn’t answer and Edward quickly turns his attention back to Stede and Fang. They linger beside the bar, babbling on about Poseidon’s fucking trident and Hadrian’s wall.

“At least the Roman artefacts weren’t stolen,” Stede says. “They just left those here. And we found them hundreds of years later.”

Fang is eventually called away with orders and Edward and Stede take over a table in the corner, sharing room-temperature chips and giggling to themselves like children. The crowd thins after eight, with only a few regulars sitting at the bar, nursing their pints.

Izzy is handing off another glass when he catches sight of them, their heads bowed together. Edward murmurs something and ducks down to press a kiss to the backs of Stede’s hands.

Izzy stands there for a moment too long, watching them as the hollow feeling in his chest spreads like numbness down to his fingertips.

“Mr. Hands,” says the man, watching him. “My drink?”

“Right,” he rasps, setting it down in front of him. He flees to the kitchen and doesn’t look back.

—

Some days, when he really needs it, Izzy goes back to Hackney. He wanders familiar streets winding between unfamiliar buildings, old warehouses that survived demo in the nineties only to be converted into posh studio apartments twenty years later.

He walks by the council estates where most of their crew grew up. Despite all the changes, those remain untouched and still fucking desolate as all hell. Sometimes, he even stops at his old street corners and plays a guessing game with himself, wondering where he would’ve eventually given up the ghost if Edward hadn’t taken him in.

The weather is beginning to turn and Izzy is debating heading back home when his phone rings. Edward always hated texting, with his lack of patience and shitty eyesight, something he’s spent years refusing to acknowledge.

“Heya, Iz.”

“What do you need?” He asks, holding his phone with his shoulder as he lights a cigarette.

“Rude,” Edward drawls. “I was just checking up on you. Heard you’re not at the pub today.”

“Took the day off,” Izzy says.

“Is everything okay?”

He sighs smoke. “I can take a day off, Edward.”

“No, I know. You’re just a fucking nutcase that never does. Figured I’d check and make sure you weren’t dying or something mate.”

Izzy stares up at the white-grey stretch of overhang. “Do you know when I last took a day off?”

“Uh - " Edward hesitates. “This feels like a trap and also you know I’m shit at this kind of thing.”

“November, last year. Took three days.”

“Oh, right.”

“And you didn’t call me to see where I was then.” Edward was too busy hooking up with a tattoo artist that tagged her name along the outside of his calf.

Edward groans. “I knew you were going to be a dick about this.”

“I’m hanging up,” Izzy says.

“Fuck you too!” Edward calls over the phone before the line goes dead.

The park at Hackney Downs used to be a drug haven, rife with gang activity and regularly raided by the cops. Now, it’s well-kept with families set up on picnic blankets in the grass and joggers in bright lycra doing laps along the square.

Izzy sits on a newly painted park bench and looks out at a busy street that used to be referred to by the locals as Murder Mile. He has never felt older, watching this city move along, cleaning up its act and leaving men like him behind with so little left to live for.

He tilts his head back against the wood and wonders if Edward has the right idea of things. He usually does; he reads the tides before they turn. Izzy just gets swept away.

—

“Heard the professor and Mr. Teach tracked you down yesterday,” Roach says.

Izzy looks up at him, his fingers nearly slipping against the edge of his knife. “What?”

“They were looking for you yesterday. Told them you called out.”

“Them?” He echoes, his hands falling still on the cutting board before he takes off a finger.

“Yup. Professor especially, thought you might be sick.”

Izzy inhales, slow and steady. “You and I are about to make a deal,” he says.

Roach watches him with a distant sense of curiosity, like he’s not terribly concerned with much of anything that Izzy has to say to him.

“If Stede Bonnet ever asks about me again, you tell him nothing. Not where I am, not where you think I am, not your opinion on how I’m wearing my fucking hair. As far as he’s concerned, you act as if I don’t exist.”

Roach shrugs. “‘Kay.” He says, turning back to his own cutting board. “Though, in case you’re wondering, the professor thinks you’ve got hair like a young Gregory Peck.”

“One more word and I’ll have you tending the bar.”

Roach groans. “The bar is boring.”

“Then shut the fuck up.” It’s more of a plea than anything.

—

“I thought you said this place was nice.”

“It is!”

Izzy hears the sound of Stede’s voice before he sees him, and he ducks out from behind the bar and dips into the kitchen as quickly as he can. Through the cloudy window, he watches as Stede drags in a young man by the sleeve, another student, presumably. “It’s terribly authentic, don’t you think?”

“That’s one word for it.”

He grabs Fang by the arm and shoves him towards the door. “We’re switching,” he says. “I’m in the kitchen.”

“Why?” Fang asks, before he looks over his shoulder and spots Stede waving like a madman from an empty table. “Oh. Boss’ boyfriend is here.”

“Just give me your fucking apron,” Izzy says. He pulls his hair back with a black bandana and tries to ignore the sound of Fang’s distant laughter as he flirts with the kid Stede dragged in.

“He’s sweet, that boy,” Fang tells him, pinning their order up on the magnetic strip. “Stede always brings good people ‘round, don’t you think?”

“Get back to work,” Izzy says.

—

The weather outside is unseasonably mild and sunny, leaving the pub nearly empty as the many citizens of London flock en masse to green spaces and outdoor tables. Izzy takes advantage of the slow afternoon to go over their books for the month. He flips through their checking receipts, matching them to the deposit slips. He left his glasses at his flat, so he needs to hold each one a little farther away than he ordinarily would just to read the numbers.

Edward has been coming to the pub with some frequency, only to stay for an hour or two and then fuck off with Stede Bonnet the second he shows up, dressed to the nines, ready to sweep him off his feet. Today is no different.

“I’m telling you, man,” Edward is saying, shrugging on his coat and tucking one of Stede’s colourful silk scarves around his neck. “City kids don’t learn to swim.”

“Surely that’s not the case,” Stede insists. “It’s - it’s a life skill!”

“For you island boys maybe. Don’t none of us know how. Hey, Iz!” Edward calls. Izzy does his best to pretend to be diligently looking through their records, but Edward sees right through him. “Iz - Izzy! You know how to swim, mate?”

He sighs, looking up. “Yeah,” he says.

Edward does a double take. “Wait, really?”

“I was born in Blackpool.”

“What? Were you? No one’s from Blackpool, mate.”

Izzy shrugs. “I am. Until I was nine, anyway.”

Stede is looking between them. “I thought you've known each other for many years.”

“Twenty-something,” Edward says.

“Twenty-six,” Izzy tells him.

“And you didn’t know he was born and raised in Blackpool?”

“Hardly raised,” Izzy says, but Edward speaks over him.

“Well it never came up, did it?”

Stede looks somewhat disbelieving. “His hometown never came up? Edward, you know the names of each of my cousins.”

He shrugs. “I dunno, man. For Izzy and me, it’s not like that. We don’t know those things, the stuff from before we met.”

It’s true and honestly it suits Izzy just fine. His life before Edward is a haze of memories he’d rather not have. He likes to think he stumbled into existence the first time Edward grinned at him, manic and wild, and told him he had plans for them both.

Stede looks back at him, a small frown at his lips, and Izzy grits his teeth.

“Fuck off, you two. I have work to do.”

—

It’s been weeks since Edward so much as touched him. He would’ve thought it was calculated, an effort to break Izzy down until he’s ready to fucking beg, but he knows it’s something far more sinister. Edward follows Stede around like a stray, dressed in cashmere jumpers with his hair tied back out of his face.

So when he finally deigns to show up, when Izzy stands toe-to-toe with him in the middle of the pub and calls him a rich man’s fucking lap dog, Edward has him on the floor quick enough to bruise his ribs and make his breathing shutter to a stop. He backhands him hard across the face and Izzy gasps for air with blood on his teeth.

“I should take a fucking tooth for that,” Edwards says, reaching into his mouth and pulling.

“Ed! Izzy!” Stede Bonnet is a flurry of movement, a messenger bag being thrown to the floor and his soft little hands pulling at Edward’s shoulders, forcing him to stand. He steps in front of him, his hair out of place, looking for all the fucking world like he thinks he’s capable of protecting Izzy from something.

“Get the fuck out,” Izzy snaps, wiping at his mouth and pushing himself up into a sitting position. His breath comes out in a wheeze and he grabs at his ribs, bracing them.

“I certainly will not! Whatever you were fighting over - ”

“We weren’t fighting,” Izzy says.

Edward is watching Stede with wide eyes, glassy in the low light. It’s not a familiar thing on Edward, fear. He hasn’t seen it since he was still young, holding a knife to a man’s throat for the first time.

“This is how we solve things,” Izzy says, when it becomes clear that Edward doesn’t plan on speaking up.

“By - by, beating each other senseless?” Stede asks, his voice pitched high as he turns to face Izzy. “Goodness, you’re bleeding.”

“No shit.”

“Stede,” Edward whispers, as Stede kneels beside him, dipping into a pocket for a cloth handkerchief to press to Izzy’s split lip.

“It’s fine,” he says, shoving Stede away.

“Stede,” Edward says again, like he might swallow his own tongue.

“We’ll talk later,” Stede says, sounding angry for the first time since he ran across the road on that dreary fucking morning in Pentonville.

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “You don’t know shit, Bonnet. You think you understand him, that you understand me? We weren’t fighting, we were well on our way to fucking.”

Stede flushes a deep red, starting at the tips of his ears. “Oh,” he whispers.

Edward says his name again and Izzy can hardly stand it. “I’m leaving,” he says, forcing himself to his feet and bracing his ribs with his spare hand.

He doesn’t remind them to lock up, finds he doesn’t much care one way or another. Let the place fucking burn down if they want it to. He’d make good use of the insurance money. Izzy would buy a boat and sail out to the Atlantic and he’d never see land again.

Chapter Text

It’s nine in the morning and Izzy finds himself really, truly hoping the place was ransacked overnight, that Blackbeard’s Bar and Grill will be closed for good. Maybe he’ll burn it down himself; open up the gas taps and strike a fucking match.

He’s never had much in the way of luck. Instead, Stede Bonnet is leaning against the locked door of the pub, holding two takeaway coffee cups in his hands.

“Jesus Christ,” Izzy murmurs, not quite caring if Stede can hear him.

“Good morning.” He’s smiling, but he still looks wary.

“Why are you here?”

“To apologise,” he says. “I figured you’d avoid me, so the best way to find you was to come early enough to beat you to the pub.”

“To apologise,” Izzy repeats, his eyes narrowed.

“That’s right.”

“For what?”

Stede foists one of the takeaway cups into his hand and then steps aside for Izzy to unlock the door. “For - well - for interrupting. You’re right, I didn’t understand what was going on and it wasn’t my place to get involved in the manner I did.”

Izzy watches him, unsure of what to say.

“I’m not actually an idiot, you know.”

Izzy raises his eyebrows.

“Well, not as much as I seem to come off, anyway. I know you don’t like me. That you’ve been trying to avoid being around me since we first met.”

“Doesn’t take a genius,” Izzy says. His ribs ache, a deep, thrumming pain. He’s broken them often enough to know exactly what it is. He takes another shallow breath.

“No, I suppose not. And that first morning I was truly desperate. You were the only person I’d seen who even appeared to have an idea where they were, and I was willing to give it a go even though you looked like you might deck me at a moment's notice. But after that, on the tube - well. You looked like you were a million miles away.”

Izzy doesn’t know what to say to that, how to respond to Stede’s chipper voice turned solemn. He doesn’t know how to look at him without imagining Edward’s hands clasped around his, kissing each of his knuckles in turn.

“I’m divorced, you know.”

Izzy did not know, of course he didn’t, because he knows as little about Stede Bonnet as he can possibly fucking manage. “Does Edward?”

“Oh, of course. I told him straight away.” Stede says, waving it off. “It’s a bit of a silly story, to be honest. I did everything that I thought I was meant to do. I went to university and married my childhood sweetheart, spent our honeymoon backpacking across Thailand, and then had two perfect children with ten perfect fingers each and my wife’s blue eyes.” Stede breathes in but never quite exhales. “And it’s so difficult, you know, explaining just how miserable I was. I did all the things I was supposed to do. But goodness, I was unhappy.”

Izzy can’t imagine the storybook life Stede has led. It’s hazy against the damp chill of council housing and coke cut with morphine and the bodies he left bloody at Edward’s feet.

“But you know something, Izzy? I think you might be able to understand it.”

He doesn’t. He really doesn’t.

“What do you want?” He asks, finally. He takes a sip of the coffee Stede brought him. It’s richly brewed and doesn’t have a single grain of sugar in it. He must have good instincts for this kind of thing, because Edward certainly doesn’t know how he takes his coffee.

He reaches for Izzy’s free hand, holding tight. “I’d like to get to know you.”

He barks out a single, hysterical laugh. His split lip pulls and stings and he tastes blood. “You don’t,” he says, tugging his hand from Stede’s grip. “You’re a fucking history teacher.”

“Professor,” he corrects him.

“And I’m a felon. Ed might have escaped a prison sentence, but he’s still just as much of a criminal as I am. You’re in the wrong place, Bonnet.”

“I don’t think I am,” Stede says, trotting along to catch up with him, leaning over the bar. “Ed and I, well, we have several long conversations ahead of us. But I’m confident that we’ll get this sorted. And it’s okay, you know, I’ll bring you around eventually. I’ve been told I’m very convincing, when I need to be.”

“You don’t need to be.”

Stede’s voice rings out like a song. “My dear, I most certainly do.”

—

The boy from Stede’s class comes wandering in with an armful of books and a sour expression. He taps his foot impatiently while Izzy finishes ringing up a customer.

“What?” He asks, finally, turning to face him.

He has wide, fluttery eyes and smiles like he expects something from him. “I was hoping you might know where Professor Bonnet is. His phone is dead again and I’ve been trying to reach him all day.”

“No,” Izzy answers. “I haven’t seen him.”

He knows where he likely is, can imagine him and Edward alone in bed, gazing into each other’s eyes like they just stepped foot out of their own shitty romance film.

“Lucius,” Fang calls, poking his head out of the kitchen door. “I thought I heard your voice.”

“Hey, babe,” Lucius says, leaning around Izzy to blow him a kiss. “I was just in looking for Stede. He can’t keep his phone charged to save his life.”

“I don’t think he’s been in today, has he Iz?” Fang asks.

“Yeah, so I’ve heard.” Lucius huffs, a tad dramatically. “When I was assigned to tutor for his lectures, I didn’t think there’d be this much child minding involved, to be perfectly honest.”

Fang hums sympathetically. “Shall I make you a drink? On the house?”

Izzy turns to him, disbelieving.

“Thanks love, but maybe another time,” Lucius says. “I still need to find the professor.”

“Try the boss’ mobile,” Fang suggests. “They’re probably together.”

“Oh! Great idea.” He fishes out his phone and taps out a quick message like it’s second nature, barely looking down at his screen. “I’ll catch you later, Fang. Thanks for the help.”

Fang waves him off and the second Lucius is out the door, Izzy turns to him. “Seriously?”

“What?” Fang asks, defensively.

“He’s all of eighteen.”

“He’s twenty-six,” he says with an indignant sniff. “And besides, boss has come ‘round with worse.”

“Edward sets a low bar, Fang.”

He laughs, bright and easy, and steps back into the kitchen. “Good one, Izzy!” He calls.

—

Edward doesn’t come around at night anymore. The latest he’s at the pub is six o’clock, when Stede’s Thursday lectures let out. Instead, without any warning at all, he starts showing up in the afternoon, freshly washed and with his hair pulled back from his face. Some days, he tends the bar during a lunch hour shift or plays shitty eighties hair rock in the kitchen. He and Fang fake a waltz across the empty floor before they open for brunch. He’s never tight-wound and vicious anymore and late at night, during his long commutes home, Izzy mourns it.

Six months ago, he would’ve begged Edward to take one fucking shift at this God forsaken pub. Now he just wants to grab him by the shoulders and shake this out of him.

“You need to start planning shifts, if you’re suddenly working again,” Izzy says. Edward is mopping the floor, though it’s a rather half-hearted effort and Izzy expects he’ll need to redo it in the morning. “We have Roach on staff now, and he’s shown up twice for a shift you decided to just appear for.”

“Thought you could use the extra help.”

“We can,” Izzy says. “But you showing up whenever you feel like it isn’t extra help. You need to tell me when you’re coming in.”

Edward wrinkles his nose. “Look, this isn’t a nine-to-five, man, I’m not gonna keep to a schedule or whatever.”

“We own a business, Edward.”

“It’s more yours anyway,” he says, waving a hand.

“Your name is on the fucking lease right beside mine.”

“Maybe it shouldn’t be.” Edward is staring down at the floor like a petulant fucking child.

Izzy steps out from behind the bar and wrestles the mop from Edwards hands. “Hey,” he snaps. “Fucking look at me, Edward. You want to leave? Then leave. But let me remind you how you’ve paid rent the past ten years, huh? How you’ve had money for alcohol and pot and cabs because you hate the fucking tube for some inexplicable fucking reason.”

“You’d have to buy me out,” he says.

Izzy raises his eyebrows. “You’ve got no fucking clue how I set this place up. You were nose-deep in pussy while I was working with the solicitor.” It’s a bluff, of course it is, as if Izzy would ever go behind his back.

Edward doesn’t seem to think it is though. He snarls, grabbing Izzy by the front of his shirt. “You’d be dead if it wasn’t for me,” he says, so close that he can feel his breath on his cheek. “You’re got fucking nothing to you mate, you’ve always just done what you’re told.”

Izzy knocks him back with a punch that sends Edward stumbling into a table, nearly losing his footing. A few months around Bonnet and he’s already gone soft.

“What the fuck?” Edward snaps, a hand to his cheek. It’ll bruise, he thinks viciously. Edward will carry his mark for once.

“Come on,” Izzy says. “I know you haven’t forgotten how to fight.”

Edward always knew how to use every inch of height to his advantage, but the second he reaches for his throat, Izzy knees him in the balls. It’s a bit of an amateur move but it’s damn effective and Izzy is livid with him. “Jesus fucking Christ, shit. What the fuck, Iz?”

Izzy manages to land another punch and Edward wipes his mouth, smearing blood across his chin. He looks so fucking beautiful that he doesn’t move out of the way in time when Edward lunges at him, tackling him to the floor.

Edward straddles his waist and flips his hair out of his eyes. “You gonna fucking apologise then, you asshole?” He asks through bared teeth. He leans in close and Izzy headbutts him hard, causing them both to hiss in pain.

Izzy grabs a handful of his hair and Edward knocks his head back against the floor in retaliation. After a short, desperate scramble, he flips Izzy onto his stomach and presses his entire weight against his rib cage. His ribs haven’t healed and he can’t breathe; he’s barely able to even exhale. His chest aches and his vision swims and God he hopes Edward will fucking do it. He hopes he’ll stay there until Izzy’s heart stops, that he’ll get his own hands dirty for once.

Instead, he backs off, leaving Izzy gasping on the floor, blood smeared beneath his fingertips. Edward’s chest is heaving, breathing hard enough for him to hear when he says, “Fuck you, Izzy.”

“Get out,” he coughs onto the floor. Edward is not moving, so Izzy yells it with all the strength left in his shattered fucking chest. “Get out!”

He stays there long after the door slams shut, unable to bring himself to move. Chairs are knocked on their sides and the floor is dotted with blood and scuff marks. He’ll clean it in a minute, he tells himself. He just needs a moment to rest his eyes.

—

For the first time in many years, Izzy is late for work. He wakes with the sun but can’t bring himself to get out of bed. Instead, he stares at the ceiling and follows the dotted black of mould in the corner, just above the windows. It’s something he can never quite get rid of, no matter how often he scrubs it away. It always comes creeping back.

It’s pouring rain by the time he leaves and Izzy has to towel-dry his hair after the walk from King’s Cross. He goes through the motions, barely acknowledging Roach and Ivan when they come by at eleven to open the kitchen.

Izzy pretends for a while that his body is empty except for the air in his lungs, that he’s automated and efficient and without any thoughts at all. He’s putting away dishes in the kitchen when a plate suddenly slips from his fingertips and smashes to pieces on the floor. He looks at the white spread of ceramic and for the first time in twenty years he wants something chemical to combat the hollow feeling in his chest.

“Hey, Izzy, you alright there, man?” Ivan and Roach are watching him, eyeing his white-knuckle grip on the edge of the counter and the sweat trickling down into his collar.

“Fuck off, I’m fine,” he manages through gritted teeth.

He shoves past the both of them and shuts himself in the office. It’s a small thing, carved out of the back wall, with barely enough space to fit a full desk. He sinks down onto the carpet and digs his cigarette lighter from his pocket. He holds the palm of his hand over the flame until he can’t keep the gasp of pain from escaping his pursed lips.

He does it over and over until his skin is raw and already beginning to blister. He’s breathing easier with every pass, but the ringing in his ears is persistent and unwavering.

Izzy closes his eyes and flicks the lighter again, holding it tight as the door cracks open. “I thought I told you to fuck off.”

“It’s me.” Stede is windswept and a little damp, wrapped in a long trench coat with an expensive looking plaid scarf tucked around his throat. He looks like an advertisement for springtime in London and Izzy chokes out a laugh. The ringing in his ears is deafening, threatening to take over, to drown everything out until the last sound he hears is Stede Bonnet’s fucking voice.

“What are you doing here?” He croaks. “Edward isn’t in.”

“I know.” Stede sits down beside him, close enough that his God-awful yellow Wellingtons knock against the side of Izzy’s boots.

“Then why,” he asks, closing his burned hand into a fist and holding tight to the pain. “Why are you here?”

“Roach called me. He and Ivan thought something was wrong. I didn’t - I wasn’t sure if you’d want to see Ed.”

“Well, I definitely don’t want to see you.” He can barely breathe, for a moment, like Stede sucked all the oxygen in the room through his big fucking mouth.

“Hey,” Stede says. “It’s okay. If you want to talk about it, I’m here. I can listen.”

Izzy intends to tell him to go fuck himself. Instead, somehow, the words just don’t come out quite right. “He was nineteen when I met him.”

He tells him everything. How at first, Edward was just a means to an end, a young new runner that would pinch off heroin from his supply when Izzy needed it. But then he took Izzy by the hand and told him he had bigger plans, better ones. He saw something in the drug trade that the low-ball London dealers in the nineties didn’t. But Edward never could get his hands dirty, so he used Izzy’s instead.

Izzy spent the better part of a year between withdrawal and relapse until Edward held a scalpel to his chest and etched his own name just below Izzy’s right nipple. “There,” he’d said, grinning down at him as blood ran into the hollows of his ribs. “You’re mine now. So stop fucking up what’s mine.”

It scarred messy, no longer legible as anything but white lines against his skin, but Izzy still knows what it means. And so he did Edward’s dirty work, became his most trusted enforcer, committed more in his name than he was ever caught for.

“Why?” Stede asks him, when he finally comes up for air.

It’s a question no one has ever asked; not his legal team, paid for by Edward’s carefully laundered money, not the men who worked for them before the whole operation came grinding to a halt. Certainly not Edward.

“It was that or overdosing on a fucking train platform in Clapton,” he says.

His eyes are closed, his head tilted back against the flimsy drywall, so he doesn’t see it coming when Stede leans in close and presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth.

“I’m so sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry those were your only options.”

He wonders, distantly, how many times he’s kissed Edward like that. “I’m not,” he whispers. “I’m not sorry.”

Stede doesn’t respond, but Izzy can hear him rifle through his pockets, tapping away on his ancient little smart phone. He peaks one eye open. “Edward’s at yours then?”

“Uhm - ” Stede hums for a moment, like he’s stalling for a lie. “Yes, well, I thought it might be best. After speaking with Ivan. I know you two haven’t exactly - well - I wasn’t sure.”

“Tell him I’m fine,” Izzy says, putting him out of his misery.

Stede sets his phone down on the grubby carpet and reaches instead for Izzy’s burnt hand. “This will need seeing to,” he says softly, turning his palm up to the light.

“It’s fine.”

“Everything is fine for you, Izzy,” Stede says, a tone to his voice that he can’t quite place. He sighs then, sets his shoulders straight, and he brightens in that same nearly imperceptible shift. “Ed’s told you I have quite a spacious home, right?”

“He told me you’re using a bedroom as a closet,” Izzy tells him, unimpressed.

“I am!” Stede says. “Best decision I’ve made in years. I do have functional guest rooms, if you must know. It wasn’t a terrible sacrifice to spare one. And truly excellent bedding, as well. No sense in cheap bed clothes, I always say. You’re spending a third of your life there, it may as well be an enjoyable experience. Now.” He stands, brushing himself off, eyeing some kind of invisible dust that only he can see. “Come on.”

Izzy raises his eyebrows. “What?”

“You’re coming home with me.”

He barks out a laugh, but it takes something from him. His hand throbs, a steady, grounding pain. “I’m not.”

“You really must,” Stede says, reaching out a hand in an attempt to pull Izzy to his feet.

Izzy is already walking the thinnest tightrope he’s been on since he went sober, and Stede Bonnet is looking down at him, asking him to serve up even more of his dwindling sanity on a silver fucking platter. “I can’t do that.”

“Ed insisted,” Stede says. “He said he’d hunt you down and tie your wrists to your ankles and drag you across Mile End if he has to.”

That does sound like Edward.

He thinks for a moment of begging. Stede is a soft touch, he wouldn’t force him to go through with it. Because Izzy cannot watch Edward wear Stede’s clothes and share his silk sheets and make breakfast in the morning, eating off each other’s forks like a domestic fucking fever dream.

“Please,” Stede says, instead.

“Edward didn’t say that.”

“No,” he agrees. “But I am. Come home with me. We’ll watch something dreadful on television. I’ll make my hot chocolate which I’m reliably told is the best in the country.”

“I’m not one of your children, Bonnet.”

“No,” he agrees, smiling. “I know that. Come on now. Roach has already closed up. He texted me an hour ago.”

It hasn’t felt like an hour, certainly not double that. He wonders what time it is, how long he’s been locked in this fucking office, whether the rain finally stopped.

“Okay,” he whispers. “Let’s go.”

Stede calls a black cab, waves one down on the main stretch while Izzy shakily exhales cigarette smoke. “You’ll have to put that out, dear,” Stede reminds him.

“I know.” He takes one last, lingering drag.

Izzy stares out the window, unwilling to look Stede in the eye, even in the relative darkness of the cab. It doesn’t take but a minute for Stede to strike up a lively conversation with the cabbie, chattering on about the horse chestnut trees coming into bloom and seasonal allergies and London's spring weather.

“Just up here is fine,” Stede says, once they turn onto a sleepy little street corner in Bow, just over the bridge from Bethnal Green.

“God,” Izzy sighs. “Of course you live here.”

The street is narrow and shaded with trees. Each terraced house they pass is more beautiful than the last, with period windows and newly painted wrought iron gates.

“Oh I know,” Stede says, following his gaze and leading Izzy down the darkened cobblestone road. “It is rather extravagant for central London, but I simply could not resist. I wake up to church bells each morning, you know. And to have the park right nextdoor.”

“I meant here,” Izzy says, waving a hand. "You’re one stop away from me.”

“Oh?” Stede laughs, stopping before a brightly painted blue door with flower boxes on each windowsill as he fishes a set of keys from his pocket. “I’d wondered. Edward said Mile End, but he is rather terrible at these things. You’ll simply have to visit as often as you’d like.”

Izzy swallows his reply when he sees Edward waiting in the doorway, wearing a silk dressing gown with his hair pinned back out of his face. He feels a surge of vicious satisfaction when he sees the bruising around his eye, still raised and swollen, spreading in a fade of purple to a cut high on his cheek.

“Hello, darling,” Stede says. “Show Izzy to the sitting room, will you? And absolutely no fighting. I’m just going to set the stove on and grab some bandages. You both are to be on your best behaviour. Izzy, dear, shoes at the door, if you will.”

Izzy unties his boots as Stede busies himself in the kitchen and Edward disappears down the hall. He finds the living room easily enough. It’s just as loud and over-done as the rest of the house, jewel-toned and extravagant. Edward is sprawled across one end of the sofa, staring idly down at his phone.

“You look ridiculous,” Izzy tells him, taking a seat as far away from him as he can possibly manage.

“I’m comfortable. Besides, I’m not the one that just had a panic attack at work, mate.”

A familiar wash of shame creeps up Izzy’s spine. “It wasn’t a panic attack.”

“Stede thinks it was probably a panic attack.”

“Some days I fucking hate you,” Izzy says, and it’s the truth. This kind of love, it always comes full circle eventually.

“Some days I hate you too, Iz.”

Stede arrives not a moment later with a small basket filled with what looks like first-aid supplies. Edward watches them carefully, tracking every movement, but he doesn’t say a word.

“You really should wash this first,” he says, sitting beside him and inspecting his palm. He guides Izzy’s hand up to the light of a stained-glass table lamp. “Run it under cold water, maybe a good soak.”

“It’s fine,” Izzy says.

“It’s really not,” Stede insists. He sprays some kind of cool liquid onto his palm, and it stings in a way Izzy has come to associate with hospital visits and tattoo parlours. His fingers are soft and careful as he applies an antiseptic cream and wraps his hand in dry gauze.

“That should do it for now,” Stede says. “I’ll bring you some medicine for the pain.”

“I don’t take meds,” Izzy says, as the exact moment that Edward murmurs, “He won’t take it.”

“Just ibuprofen,” he insists. “Nothing more.”

“I’m fine,” he says, and Stede must hear it in his voice because he drops the subject in lieu of checking on his hot chocolate.

Edward and Izzy remain silent, sitting resolute and still on their own sides of Stede’s monstrous velvet blue sofa. Edward only moves to set his bare feet up on a tufted ottoman, stretching out like it’s a deliberate thing. Izzy spots a flash of emerald painted toenails and immediately looks away.

“Now,” Stede announces from the doorway, balancing three mugs in hand. “I’m no cook, but I’m a damn good hot chocolatier.”

Edward snatches his right out of Stede’s grasp. “Extra peppermint?”

“Of course.”

He takes a seat between them and hands Izzy his own mug. “I put a scoop of instant coffee in yours. Ed says you don’t quite share his sweet tooth.”

Izzy snorts. “No one does. Edward used to buy Valentine's chocolates on sale in March and live off them for a week.”

“It’s a great idea,” Edward says, easily. “Easter too. Christmas. You can make out like a bandit if you plan things right. Izzy just doesn’t know how to appreciate anything sweet.”

“Right,” Stede says, reaching for the remote, cutting off Izzy’s biting response. “Ordinarily, I’d let you both choose since you’re my guests. But I also don’t want to start another argument this evening. So I’m choosing for us and we’re watching The Thing.”

“Nice,” Edward says.

Izzy looks at both of them in the dim light of a living room straight out of a mid-century catalogue. Edward, a man with a Scotland Yard dossier that could fill a book, sipping at hot fucking cocoa while a history professor sits between them and plays mum. He starts laughing then. It bubbles up from his chest in an uncontrollable, sudden bark. He’s doubled over, unable to stop, and Edward starts laughing too.

“I know, right?” He says, grinning at him from over Stede’s shoulder, like he knows exactly what Izzy’s thinking. “It’s fucking nuts, mate.”

“Well,” Stede says, peevishly, once their laughter finally begins to falter. “I don’t understand what you both find so funny, but I’ll have you know, The Thing is an excellent piece of cinema.”

“God,” Izzy breathes, his head tilted back onto the sofa. “Start your film, Bonnet, and shut up.”

—

When he wakes, it’s not to the usual play of light across his bedroom floor. Instead it’s to the sound of Edward's breathing. He’s wrapped in a tasselled yellow blanket and stretched out over the couch, his head butted up against Izzy’s thigh. He can hear movement upstairs, doors opening and closing and the distant rush of pipes.

Izzy manages to sit up straight, his neck aching and his back protesting every movement he makes. He lets out a soft sigh of pain, but finds that despite everything he slept better than he usually does.

By the time he manages to get himself into the kitchen, Stede is back downstairs, fully dressed with his hair carefully styled to the side. “Oh hello,” he says, his voice soft, mindful of Edward still asleep in the other room. “Tea?”

He hands Izzy a mug and a wooden box with an assortment of loose-leaf teas with matching silicon bags. He almost comments on it, almost says he hasn’t used anything other than PG Tips in his entire fucking life, but instead he picks out some neutral smelling black tea and adds a splash of milk to his cup.

“I imagine you’ll be wanting a shower? You should really clean your hand while you’re at it, besides.” Stede says, sitting across from him. “I have everything you’d need, even some clothes that would fit.”

Izzy looks him up and down, raising a single eyebrow.

“Oh come now, it wouldn’t be that bad.”

Izzy sips at his tea. “It really would. Besides, I’m going back home.”

“Oh, right, of course. Well, I’ll walk you to the station. I go via Bethnal Green anyway, so I’ll be headed there myself in about twenty.”

Izzy frowns up at him, ready to ask why but Stede beats him to it. “It’s a Thursday, darling, I have class.”

“Right.”

“I’ll go organise my things and then we can be off.”

Izzy sits back in one of Stede’s wood-carved kitchen chairs and peaks through the doorway into the living room. Edward is dead to the world, his hair undone and hanging over his face, one hand thrown over the edge of the couch, his fingertips brushing the plush carpet. He always did sleep well, something Izzy was distantly envious of but more often simply caused him concern. He thought for sure he’d be killed like that, deep asleep without hearing the footsteps on the hardwood.

“That’s what I’ve got you for,” Edward always told him, slapping at Izzy’s back.

“Ready?” Stede shrugs on a coat, floor length and knit grey and blue. It matches his hand-held briefcase and frankly it’s fucking absurd.

“Yeah,” he rasps.

They walk in relative silence to the station, but before they part ways onto opposite platforms, Stede grabs his wrist and says, “Maybe we’ll see each other during our morning commutes again? I always get the same train.”

Izzy desperately wants a cigarette. “Maybe,” he says.

Stede smiles at him like it’s a promise.

—

He makes the same train as Stede once or twice a week, not quite willing to sacrifice any more of his mornings just yet. Every time Stede sees him across the platform, he grins wide enough to split his soft cheeks open.

“Calm down,” Izzy always tells him while Stede practically hums with self-satisfaction.

Stede tends to chatter when they walk from King’s Cross up to the split in the road where their commutes finally diverge. He talks about history, sometimes, and his upcoming lessons. Mostly, though, he talks about explorers, naming captains and famous voyages and listing off book titles that he insists Izzy must read.

Izzy always stops to light a cigarette along the way and Stede always ducks aside to give money to the junkies sprawled in the hollows of the old brick buildings that tower along the street. He knows them by name, and they know him on sight. Izzy suspects that if he could manage it, he’d walk every street from King’s Cross to fucking Hackney, just to get to know them all.

Sometimes, he wonders what it might have been like when he was twenty-six, to meet Stede Bonnet on a high-street instead of Edward Teach.

“They’re just going to use that for drugs, you know,” Izzy says, watching him.

“They know best what they need today,” Stede says softly.

Izzy is about to respond, ready to bite out words he’s heard Edward say a hundred times before about the reliable nature of fucking drug addicts, but instead Stede reaches for his hand, holding it tightly for a moment before letting go.

“It must have been very hard,” he says. “Getting yourself off that stuff.”

He wonders what Stede envisions stuff to be. Izzy’s world was once a variable cocktail of controlled substances and narrowly avoiding choking to death on his own vomit. “Edward got me off it,” he says.

“I don’t think he did. No one can force another person to change. They’ve got to do it themselves.”

“You didn’t know me back then.”

“You’re right,” Stede says. “Though I wish I had.” He smiles then and Izzy stays silent, looking down at the wet pavement, his hands stuck deep in his pockets.

“You’re going to be late for class,” Izzy tells him eventually, so they start walking again, and this time when they part, it’s with another soft kiss to the corner of his mouth.

“See you, Izzy.”

He watches Stede the entire way up the hill until he disappears out of sight.

—

Edward shows up at the pub just before closing, later than he’s been in months. He’s wearing a pair of his own black denim trousers with a top that is all Stede. It’s a soft yellow with a collar low enough to show the hawk tattoo below the hollow of his throat.

“Stede thinks I owe you an apology,” he says. He still has the remains of his black eye, dotted purple and red at the edges, highlighting the cut of his features like fucking makeup.

Izzy scoffs down at the countertop, scrubbed spotless. “Yeah? And what do you think?”

“I think,” Edward says, taking a careful step forward. “I think we’re both real fucked in the head, Iz.”

He shrugs, not willing to disagree. Edward crosses over the bar and sets his hands on Izzy’s shoulders. “And I think we’re fucking terrible for each other. We know how to get all the worst bits from all the worst places.”

Izzy swallows hard and pulls away.

“Hey.” Edward catches his arm, dragging him closer. “Stop fucking - Jesus Izzy, you make everything so fucking difficult.” He kisses him, not like he’s ready for a fight but like he wants to, like it’s as simple as a kiss.

When he pulls away, Izzy whispers, “What the fuck?”

“I think we’re terrible together, just the two of us. But what if it wasn’t just the two of us anymore?”

Izzy opens his mouth and finds himself unable to speak.

“Stede wants us both home tonight. After closing.”

“You’ve lost the plot,” he says, a little breathless.

“Yeah, mate, and it’s fucking excellent. I’m in a whole new book these days.”

They walk together to King’s Cross, enjoying the mild turn in the weather. “Did you always want this?” Izzy asks him through a cloud of cigarette smoke, before he loses the courage. He plucks at the sleeve of Edward’s jumper for emphasis.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?” Izzy echoes.

“Yeah. Maybe I did want all this shit. But the way we were, it was just easier.”

He knows bits and pieces about Edward’s childhood, strung together through the stories he would tell with a blunt between his fingers, blowing smoke rings up towards the ceiling. It hits the same beats as every other kid they knew; a father that drank too much or a mother trying to make ends meet, a distant relative to take them in if they’re lucky, foster care if they’re not.

He’d always stop just short of the truth, and Izzy never questioned him. Some things were just easier.

“A few months in a professor’s bed and suddenly you think you’re smart.”

Edward laughs. “Smarter than you anyway.”

“You fucking wish.”

He was though, he always was, brilliant in a way that was effortless and unearned. Izzy might’ve hated him for it, if he wasn’t so desperately in love with him from the start.

They’re silent on the train ride to Bethnal Green and Izzy wishes he could still smoke on the tube. Instead, he grits his teeth and tries to avoid Edward’s reflection in the darkened windows.

It’s hardly five minutes from Stede’s front steps to the station gates, but he still lights a cigarette the second they hit the pavement. “You alright there, man?” Edward asks him, looking smug. “You’ve been chain smoking all night.”

Izzy shoves him with one hand and he laughs when he stumbles on the cobblestone. “Shut the fuck up, Ed.”

“I miss when you used to call me boss.”

“I never called you boss,” he lies. Izzy inhales smoke, holding it until it burns.

“Don’t have a panic attack,” Edward says, watching him from the corner of his eye.

“I’m not going to have a fucking panic attack. Also, if I were, you saying that isn’t exactly fucking helping.”

Edward holds his hands up in surrender and waits by Stede’s front gate for him to finish his cigarette and stub it out on the heel of his boot. “You ready?”

No, God, of course he isn’t.

Stede is waiting in the hallway, clearly having already caught sight of them through the stained glass framing the front door. Edward tugs off his boots and throws them under the hall-tree, so Izzy does the same.

“Make him a fucking coffee or something,” Edward says after pressing a dry kiss to Stede’s cheek. “Before his blood pressure goes through the roof and he drops dead.”

“That seems unlikely, dear,” Stede says as Izzy flips him off. “But coffee sounds lovely, doesn’t it?”

Izzy follows him into the kitchen, where Stede busies himself with the kettle. “Instant or would you like me to brew some fresh?”

“He’ll drink anything,” Edward says, leaning against the counter. “It could taste like cat piss but if it’s still recognisable as coffee, he’ll have seconds.”

“Instant is fine,” Izzy says, speaking over him.

“Ed,” Stede says, turning to him. “Why don’t you go get changed?”

“Why?”

“Because I want to talk to Izzy and you generally make that very difficult to manage.”

Izzy barks out a laugh and Edward looks put out, his eyebrows pulled together in a familiar scowl. “Rude.”

Stede softens it with a kiss and sends him upstairs with a gentle push to his shoulders. He continues fussing with Izzy’s coffee, adding a splash of milk after asking if he has a preference. He’s humming a tune he finds distantly familiar.

“Why am I here?” Izzy asks him, finally, watching the flush of red start at the base of Stede’s throat.

“Oh, to talk I suppose.” Stede sets the mug down in front of him and takes a seat on the opposite side of the table.

The kitchen is quiet, save the tick-tick-tick of a grandfather clock in the hallway and the sound of Stede’s spoon against his own teacup. He can’t fucking stand it any longer. “He loves you,” Izzy blurts out. “I get it. I don’t understand but - I get it. You don’t need me here for this.”

Stede reaches for his hand, grasping it tight, though he’s careful of the bandages still criss-crossed over his palm. He sighs his name. “You’re right, I don’t need you here for this. But I’ve found there’s so little in life you truly need, isn’t there?”

“Is that a fucking quote or something?” Izzy asks.

Stede chuckles. “No, not quite. Look, Izzy, I’m forty-six years old and have spent forty-four of those years deeply, deeply in the closet. Up until I met Ed, I’d never so much as kissed a man before.”

Izzy snorts into his coffee mug. “You’re serious?”

“Oh yes. The idea of even - well - admitting to myself that I was attracted to men, it took years to manage. And London, I’d heard stories about London, you know. Soho and pride parades and all. I thought I’d make up for lost time, moving here. But once I got here I knew immediately that it wasn’t my scene. I’m too old.” He smiles then. “Too boring. More content to visit antique shops than gay bars.”

Izzy raises his eyebrows. “Have you tried to take Edward to an antique shop?”

“Oh goodness no. I’m not quite that obtuse.” He’s silent for a moment then and Izzy carefully pulls his hand away, cradling the mug in his palms.

“I spent so long avoiding everything I wanted. And when I left home, I promised I wouldn’t do that to myself again. I refuse to lose any more time.”

He feels out of his depth, totally lost in Stede’s earnest, soft story telling. He can hear the pipes shutter to a stop upstairs, and a door creak open and closed.

“And it’s very important that you realise, Izzy, that I saw you first. And I thought you were terribly handsome and equally unhappy and frankly I wanted to try my luck with you.”

Izzy laughs. “What? Is that what you thought you were doing?”

Stede sniffs indignantly. “Don’t tease me,” he says. “I hardly know how to flirt with anyone, much less other men. My ex-wife used to tell me I come off like a rather excitable puppy.”

“She’s not wrong,” Izzy offers.

“And then I met Ed and of course you hated me, so I figured that ship had sailed, as it were. Until I walked in on the two of you together.”

“You’re saying you want to fuck me.”

“Oh yes,” Stede says, nodding. “With Ed, of course. And not as a one-time thing. Rather, I thought maybe you’d like to join us, as, well, I’m not sure yet. Ed assured me there was a fifty-fifty chance you’d give me a black eye to match his if I outright propositioned you, so I do hope this isn’t terribly unexpected. He promised to talk to you before you both got here.”

“Oh, he did. And he’s probably listening in from the upstairs landing,” Izzy tells him.

“Almost certainly. So, what do you say?”

“You could’ve just kissed me.”

Stede grins. “Oh no, I like to talk things through. I’ve kept far too many secrets to be bothered with miscommunication at my age.”

“I’m so much older than you, Bonnet. Call yourself an old man one more time.”

Stede laughs and the stairs creak with Edward’s footsteps. “So can I kiss you?” He asks, a tad shy, just as Edward appears in the kitchen doorway, a dressing gown cinched tight at his waist.

“You never asked before,” Izzy manages.

“You’ve been kissing Izzy?” Edward asks, playing at jealous. He stands behind him, running his fingers through Izzy’s hair. He shivers at the touch. “I thought only I was allowed to do that.”

“Hardly a kiss,” Stede says. “More like a peck, really.”

“Yeah,” Izzy breathes, as Edward’s fingernails scratch at his scalp. “Yes. You can.”

Stede kisses him sweet and eager like a teenager who doesn’t quite know what to do. Izzy cups his cheek with one hand and thinks that he hasn’t done this since his twenties, when he narrowly avoided the AIDS epidemic by some sheer fucking luck.

He pulls away then and Stede makes a soft sound of protest, but he’s already turning towards Edward, his eyes narrowed. “Have you been tested?”

“For what?”

“Are you fucking joking?”

“What, did you get fucking tested?”

“Of course, I do every year. I don’t always know who you’re sleeping around with.”

“Uhm,” Stede hums, looking rapidly between them.

“I’m not fucking carrying anything, Iz. I think I’d know by now. My dick would’ve rotted off or something.”

“Jesus Christ. You are,” Izzy starts, through gritted teeth. “Impossibly fucking reckless. You’re getting a full fucking screening next week.”

Edward looks like he wants to slap him on instinct, remind him that he’s not the one who gives orders. Before he can succumb to the habit though, Stede says, “Well, truthfully, not much we can do at this stage. So, in the meantime, Izzy, maybe you could kiss me again?”

“You’re just as reckless,” Izzy breathes against Stede’s lips.

He hears Edward hum in his ear. “I know, that’s what I like about him.”

Chapter Text

Izzy’s not sure what he expected, a one-time thing to fulfil Stede’s rich-boy curiosities or an experiment in misplaced jealousy. But instead, once a week, Stede coaxes him home with promises of dinner and dessert like he’s a stray fucking cat and then Edward leads them both to bed, pulled along the same invisible string.

Sex with them is easy and reliable and Stede laughs when Izzy’s hands trail down the backs of his thighs, endlessly ticklish despite the calluses on his fingers. Edward alternates between watching them with an unreadable expression and fucking Stede like his life depends on it, like this all might just float away if he doesn’t act quickly enough.

Honestly, Izzy understands the impulse.

Stede is vocal and sweet with two fingers crooked inside him and Izzy’s mouth on his cock.

“He’s good at it, right?” Edward asks, holding Stede in his lap and grinding up against his lower back. It’s just enough to take the edge off, but not much more than that, and Izzy knows exactly what he’s holding out for. “Izzy’s got the best fucking mouth.”

Stede’s eyes are pinched closed and one hand is resting lightly on the top of Izzy’s head, the other entwined with Edward’s. For his part, Edward is mouthing at Stede’s neck, kissing from his shoulder to his earlobe, whispering into his skin.

He moans Izzy’s name, his hips canting up just a bit, as much as he’ll move out of fear of choking him. One day he’ll take him properly, have Stede fuck his mouth until he can’t see straight, but this is enough for now.

“Make him come, Iz,” Edward says.

Izzy does as he’s told.

—

His flat feels empty most days, grey and monochrome compared to the saturated clutter of Stede’s house. He wonders, distantly, if this is why Edward simply invited himself to stay indefinitely. He hasn’t been to Edward’s place in years, but he can imagine it’s not changed much from the filth he used to wade through in Hackney.

And that must be how it happens; how nights in bed turn to nights staying over and Sunday shifts handed off to Ivan and Fang while Izzy cooks a full English breakfast that Edward only ever picks through. He refuses to leave clothes there, despite Stede’s truly absurd closet-room that now houses the small array of t-shirts that Edward always shuffled through and two dozen new ones besides. It feels a little too permanent and leaves Izzy without an escape valve when the sun rises.

Izzy showers quickly and walks back into Stede’s bedroom with a towel wrapped around his waist, searching for the jeans he left abandoned on the floor.

“Bonnet,” he calls from the top of the stairs. “What did you do with my clothes?”

“Oh, just a second, dear!” Stede comes jogging up the steps and ducks into his dressing room, returning with a pile of neatly stacked clothing in his arms.

"These aren’t mine,” Izzy tells him. The sweatpants are soft to the touch, like a child’s blanket. They smell of Stede’s fancy drier sheets, lavender and crisp spring air.

"Oh, no, I bought them for you,” Stede says. “Ed has a pair and they’re his favourite lounge clothes. I thought perhaps you might like them as well. I guessed at your size though. If you’d prefer your own, they’re in the wash but should be finished in an hour or so.”

“You bought me clothes,” Izzy says, running his thumb along the seam.

“I hope you don’t mind. I just want you to feel comfortable while you’re here.”

And he is, of course he is. Edward lazes around the house like an overgrown cat, sunning himself on the softest available surfaces and balancing little pots of nail varnish at his side. The fridge and pantry are always well stocked with fruit and vegetables and homemade hummus from the Lebanese place down the street.

“Thanks,” Izzy manages and Stede kisses him on the cheek before returning to the kitchen, inevitably watching his pot of red sauce like it might burn to a sludge at any moment.

Edward is sprawled in front of the television while some inane reality show plays reruns. “Oh, nice,” he says, looking up when Izzy sits down in the armchair by the window. “You’ve got a set too. Best joggers, mate. Like wearing clouds.”

Edward reaches idly for a can of the flavoured sparkling water that he and Stede both inexplicably live off of. They have names like Pamplemousse and Peach-Pear and they leave them littered around the place for Izzy to collect and stick in the recycling bin when it starts to really drive him mad.

“You’re never drinking here,” Izzy says, suddenly. It was a rare thing, before Stede came along, catching Edward sober.

“Oh.” He tears his attention away from the television. “Yeah. Well. That’s because Stede doesn’t want alcohol in the house. We’ll have wine with dinner though, if we go out.”

He never thought for a single fucking second that Edward Teach would ever drink wine with dinner. It takes him an awful long time to ask, “Why?”

Edward rolls his eyes. “Why do you think, Iz?” He genuinely doesn’t know and when he opens his mouth to respond Edward says, “‘Cause of you, asshole.”

“We own a pub,” he says slowly, feeling vaguely as if he’s stepped into an episode of Twilight Zone.

“Yeah, he knows. He said he wants you to feel comfortable here,” Edward mimics Stede’s voice.

He makes a pretty good play at it too and from the kitchen Stede yells, “Who’s mocking me in there?”

“I’m not mocking you, I’m mimicking you,” Edward calls back. “There’s a difference.”

Izzy swallows, his mouth suddenly dry, and turns back to his book though he can barely read a word of it. The house smells like basil and garlic and he’s wearing clothes of the softest material money can buy and Edward is laughing at the television screen. The ringing is back, sudden and deafening and setting his heartbeat fast. It’s almost like adrenaline, but instead of making him sharper it feels a bit like falling.

“Iz?” Edward asks, sitting up now, watching him.

“We’ve fucking killed people Edward,” he hisses, working on getting control of his breathing, but he’s not quite able in inhale. “Jesus, fuck we’ve - ”

“Yeah alright,” Edward is perched on the arm of his chair, one hand on the flat of Izzy’s back and the other splayed just above his heart. “Breathe, man. Or Stede’s gonna come in here and then we’re gonna be in real trouble.”

“We’re bad people,” he manages, and Edward nods his head.

“Yeah, mate, I know. And the world is a fucking travesty ‘cause men like us aren’t rotting in a fucking prison cell. But you know what, Iz? I’ve made peace with that shit. I’ve stopped caring about it.”

“How?” Izzy chokes out.

Stede is standing in the doorway now, looking like he might flutter over at any moment. He’s still holding his wooden spoon, dripping sauce onto the floor.

“If someone’s gonna judge us, if there’s a fuckin’ devil down there, that’ll come later, mate. And I’ll accept that shit with open arms because neither of us can take back anything that we did. But right now I’m just gonna be fucking happy, yeah?”

Izzy exhales through his nose, following the steady metronome of Edward’s breathing. “Is it that fucking simple?”

“Yeah mate, it is. It really is.”

Stede has one hand over his mouth, watching them with bright eyes. “Are you fucking crying?” Izzy rasps.

“He cries at everything,” Edward says, just as Stede sniffs, “I’m misty eyed. Also, dinner is ready. Probably. I’m never too sure about this sauce,”

“You gonna be alright there?”

Izzy looks down at his hands. They’re still shaking, but his breathing is less shallow and his vision isn’t threatening to close in around him. “Yeah.”

“Right.” Edward holds out his hand. “Then come on.”

—

“Izzy,” Ivan says, poking his head through the kitchen door. “Boss’ boyfriend is here for you.”

Stede is waiting for him in front of the bar, a book clutched to his chest and a bright flush to his cheeks. “I’m late for class!” He announces.

“Then why are you here?” Izzy asks, eyebrows raised.

“I wanted to drop this off with you first.” He thrusts his book into Izzy’s hands. “It just came yesterday and I couldn’t wait to give it to you. But then I got a bit off time this morning and my train was delayed and - ”

“Bonnet,” Izzy says, finally, cutting him off. “Go to class. You really are late. Your wrist-watch is never wound properly and it’s ten past.”

“Oh goodness.” He leans over the bar and presses a quick kiss to Izzy’s cheek before rushing towards the door. “I’ll see you later! Don’t forget to tell me what you think of the book!”

Ivan is watching him with a slow, molasses smile. “So,” he says.

“Don’t,” Izzy bites out.

“You and the boss’ boyfriend.”

“Ivan,” he snaps. “Don’t fucking start.”

He doesn’t look at the book until he’s back in the kitchen, alone and well removed from Ivan’s wandering eyes. It’s a historical recount of the lost Franklin expedition. Stede brought it up to him a week ago and Izzy had spent an embarrassing amount of time online, reading through Wikipedia pages so he could ask more informed questions during their morning commute. He sticks it away in the back office until things begin to slow down after lunch and he has the time to sit at one of the empty corner tables and read.

He’s nearly two chapters in when he finds the first sticky-note, written in Stede’s flourishing cursive. Some of this is outdated, it reads. New forensic evidence. You’ll see it in the documentary I picked out for next week.

Stede left more of them scattered throughout the book, some with notes on accuracy and others with his own reactions to whatever the author was describing. One just has a bubbly exclamation point drawn in red ink pen.

“Good book?” Roach asks when he comes in, shrugging his coat off as he goes. “You’re smiling.”

“Fuck off,” Izzy tells him.

He intends to finish it after he closes up, but Edward stops by to guilt-trip Izzy into leaving the dinner shift to Ivan and Roach.

“C’mon,” he says, leaning back with his elbows on the bar, looking out over the slowly filling tables. “It’s a Tuesday. They’ll live without you. And it’s my night to cook and Stede always whines about how you’re only ever home on his nights to cook.” He’s wearing a satin bomber jacket in forest green. It looks expensive and it fits him perfectly and Izzy has to admit that Stede does have an eye for beauty.

“Fine.” He grabs his jacket and checks his pockets before picking Stede’s book off the back of the bar and tucking it under his arm.

“That’s fucking grim, mate,” Edward says, snatching it out of his hand and peering down at the cover. “Is that a dead body?”

“A sailor,” Izzy says. “His body was preserved in the permafrost they buried him in.”

“That’s insane. It’s just like mummies. Why didn’t Stede give me this book? I fucking love mummies” His nails are a clear aqua marine.

“Because you hardly read,” Izzy reminds him, though he’s always suspected it was due at least partially to his refusal to get his vision checked. “You’d just pretend to flip through it and then watch a TV show instead. Besides,” he continues. “Bonnet already found a documentary about it.”

Edward grumbles and pretends for a moment that there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of him actually reading a fucking book, and then he says, “Maybe you should visit Cutty Sark with him. I can’t be bothered with that shit. And he’s been dying to go.”

“Absolutely not,” Izzy says. “I’ll come for dinner but I’m not going on fucking dates with him.”

Edward grins. “Hey, I didn’t say anything about a date. That was all you, man. I wasn’t insinuating nothing.”

Izzy moves to shove him and Edward cackles as he dances out of the way. “Gotta be faster there, Iz,” he says. “I’m always two steps ahead.”

He waits for Edward’s gloating to trail off before he trips him, sending him hands-first down onto the pavement. Izzy hasn’t laughed so hard in years.

—

Edward has been wandering listlessly around the pub all afternoon, half-heartedly working, but more often simply pretending to be busy in-between chatting with their regulars.

“Why aren’t you with Stede today?” Izzy asks him, finally, once he’s locked up the register and swept the floors and wants nothing more than to go straight to sleep, despite the hour.

“His kids are in,” Edward says, sighing dramatically, and it sounds familiar now, as if they’d been talking about this for a few weeks already. Izzy tends to tune out any conversation involving Stede’s family, when he can manage it. “Visiting from Barbados for the next two weeks.”

“Barbados?”

“Yeah. You didn’t know? He’s from there, man. Old money. You know what that means, plantations and shit.”

“Jesus Christ, Edward.”

“What? It’s true. He comes from a rich white family in Barbados,” he says, effecting an old posh English accent. “How do you think they got all that cash?” He’s rubbing his thumb and forefinger together, mouthing money. Izzy rolls his eyes.

“So you’re not going to meet the kids I take it?”

“Fuck no,” Edward says. “What the fuck am I gonna do around kids, huh? I’m a fucking drug lord.”

“You own a pub,” Izzy says. “You haven’t been a drug lord in years.”

“Oh yeah, that’ll go down well. ‘Hi kids, this is Uncle Eddie, he only used to be an internationally wanted criminal.’”

“Internationally investigated criminal. They seized our assets but it’s not like you were ever charged. And I think you’re moving too fast there, with the uncle thing,” Izzy offers, but Edward cuts him off.

“‘And this is Pissy Izzy. He spent four years in prison for voluntary man slaughter because they couldn’t get him on anything else.’ Anyway,” Edward says, flicking his cigarette butt out into the street. “Wanna fuck?”

Izzy stares up at the sky, muted and blue through his sunglasses, despite the overhang. “Sure.”

“I know we’re different with Stede around and all, but just to be clear,” Edward says. “I’m still gonna make you fucking cry.”

—

“What are you reading?” Edward asks, stretched out naked across Izzy’s sheets. They’re not as comfortable as Stede’s, but they’re newly cleaned and smell of washing powder and Edward’s honey-citrus conditioner.

“Robert Scott’s diaries,” Izzy answers, turning a page.

“Why’re you reading some bloke’s diary?”

“He was an explorer,” he says. “He raced the Norwegians to the South Pole. Nearly made it in the end, but he died, got lost in a storm.”

“Why?” He asks, rolling to his side and flopping down over Izzy’s chest. “That sounds like the dumbest fucking idea anyone’s ever had. What’s the South Pole gonna do for us, huh?”

“Nothing,” Izzy agrees. “But he wanted to be there first, the first man to ever step foot in that specific spot.”

Edward grumbles over the stupidity of rich white people and their desire to die in the most unfathomably unlikely ways. “The fucking Arctic, mate, no one wants that unless they’re proper mental and haven’t got enough problems in life. You couldn’t pay me.”

Sometimes, the way Scott writes, the Arctic sounds exquisitely peaceful, as if you could simply drift off and remain in the ice, frozen in time. But he doesn’t tell him that.

“Read it to me?” Edward mumbles into his collarbone.

He thinks of refusing, but Edward’s breathing is soft and close to sleep and so Izzy reads out loud as Robert Scott recounts the final days of their expedition. He expects him to drift off within a single entry, but Edward’s eyes remain cracked open as he absentmindedly traces the spiderweb tattoo that stretches across Izzy’s ribcage.

“Had we lived,” he reads, “I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions.”

“So he knew for sure he was fucking dead?” Edward asks, his lips against his skin.

“Yeah. He knew for a long time.”

Edward hums. “Do you think he regretted going?”

“No,” Izzy says. “I don’t think he did.”

“Keep reading,” he whispers, and so Izzy does.

—

Stede sits at the bar before opening and sighs into a tall glass of pineapple juice.

“You’re worse than Edward,” Izzy tells him eventually, taking a seat beside him. “Moping around like this.”

“Oh goodness, I’m sorry dear. I don’t mean to bring down the mood.”

“What’s wrong?” He has to force himself to say it.

“Just with the kids leaving, you see, it’s always hard to say goodbye. I know I did the right thing, that we did the right thing, with the divorce and all. But afterwards I just couldn’t bear to stay. Bridgetown is a rather insular community, as you can imagine. Everyone knows everybody else, and I thought I might try and drown myself in the ocean if I had to suffer them any longer once Mary and I split up.”

“But you miss your kids,” Izzy says.

“Yes,” he smiles, a little wet around the corners of his eyes. “I wasn’t the most attentive father, too wrapped up in my own misery, but it doesn’t mean I don’t love them.”

“Why don’t you visit more often then?” Izzy asks, because it seems rather fucking obvious to him and this feels distinctly like some kind of inane rich-family problem.

“Oh, you know how it is. Limited time. Mary always takes them on holiday abroad over the summer and Alma has horseback riding camp for two weeks in August and - "

“God I was right,” Izzy murmurs, pinching at his nose. “Use that fucking money of yours on a plane ticket, Bonnet, instead of stained-glass fucking lamps.”

Stede laughs then. “You’ve caught me. I always have been a bit of a coward. But maybe you and Ed would enjoy something of a holiday with me. The weather is still lovely in November when we have half-term.”

Izzy snorts. “No thanks.”

“Oh, you’re sure you can’t be convinced?” Stede asks, slurping at his drink.

“I’m going to take that straw away if you keep drinking like that.”

He smiles at him; he’s always fucking smiling at him. “I’ll bring you around.”

“You really fucking won’t.”

—

“Your hair’s getting long,” Edward hisses into his ear, before he takes a handful and pulls. “You trying to tell me something?”

Stede breaks off their kiss to add, “I think it’s rather dashing.”

“No one says dashing,” Izzy says.

“I know! It’s such an under-used word.”

Stede kisses his way down Izzy’s scarred, fucked up body, and Edward holds his jaw steady in one hand, not allowing him to look away. He feels like a voyeur, just like he always does down on his knees at Edward’s feet. Stede’s lips follow the line of his hip bones, and his fingers trace idly over silvery patches of skin where hair doesn’t grow anymore, scar tissue and raised keloids.

It feels like something he shouldn’t be seeing and Edward whispers in his ear, “Isn’t it crazy? That someone his age can have no marks at all?”

“Hey.” Stede drags his blunt nails idly down the insides of Izzy’s thighs. His cock twitches and Edward chuckles low in his ear. “I have a fair few. A rather large scar on my knee from when I fell out of a tree when I was eight. And this one!” He points down at his bare ankle. “Slipped and fell between rocks while hiking with Mary. I hate hiking.”

Edward’s thumb traces a scar left from a bullet, thoughtful, his breath light against Izzy’s cheek. He thinks he knows what Edward is thinking, when he looks down at Stede’s shoulders with nothing but freckles marking his skin. He hopes that it stays that way, that Stede lives his entire life with his handful of childhood accidents.

“Stede,” Edward groans, finally. “If you don’t hurry up down there, I’m just gonna fuck Izzy.”

“You could ask,” he drawls, tilting his head back to look at him.

“Nah,” Edward kisses his cheek. “I know I don’t need to. Now come on, sweetheart, stop poking at his scars and start poking at another - ”

“You’re such a fucking dickhead.”

“You won’t be saying that in about ten minutes.”

He’s right of course, he always is.

—

As an unspoken rule, when Izzy closes the pub early on Wednesdays he locks up and goes straight to Stede’s house. Edward rarely surfaces on those days anyway, content to remain at home rather than brave the noise of the city.

He unlocks the door with the key Stede had given him, hooked onto a keyring with a tiny metal ship attached, and doesn’t bother announcing himself as he slips his boots off and sets them neatly under the hall tree.

“Okay, but if you’d just sit still - "

“Mate, I could not be more still if I was a fucking statue. I am statuesque.”

Izzy leans against the doorway to the living room and watches them. Edward is sitting on the floor between Stede’s legs as he balances a wooden hairbrush in one hand and a series of elastic hair ties in the other. “Do I even want to know?” He asks.

“Oh, hello darling,” Stede says, looking up at him. “I’m learning how to braid.”

“He’s torturing me,” Edward says.

“Hardly. Alma kept asked me to French braid her hair like her mum does. I figured I’d be prepared for next time.”

“Ouch,” Edward mumbles, wincing whenever Stede pulls too hard. Izzy can hear soft-spoken instructions whistle from Stede’s smart phone. “Oh bugger. I messed up again.”

“At this rate, I’m not gonna have any hair left for you to practice with.”

Izzy makes himself a cup of tea to the litany of their bickering and sits on the other side of the room, watching Stede pick up and drop the same strand of Edward’s hair a half-dozen times.

“Jesus Christ,” he says, finally, after he decides he can’t quite take it anymore. “Shove over.”

Izzy watches the video tutorial on Stede’s phone once through and combs back Edward’s hair with his fingers. “You’re starting too low,” Izzy says. “And with sections that are too big. Try this.”

Stede isn’t exactly efficient, but he’s not losing chunks of hair anymore between his fingers. After a few false-starts and a solid twenty minutes of effort, Edward’s hair is plaited into a wonky looking French braid, tied off with a little black elastic band.

Edward tilts his head up to look at them. “Am I beautiful now?”

“No,” Izzy says. “It looks a mess. And all that bushing fucked up your hair.”

“You’re always beautiful, dear,” Stede says, pressing a kiss to his forehead. “Now sit still. I’m going to try again.”

—

Izzy hates Stede’s stupid glass French press. It’s inefficient and tedious and the results vary every time Izzy tries to make a brew on his own. Usually, he sticks to tea when he stays the night, but today is a slow, sunny bank holiday and he wakes to the siren song of coffee.

He folds his arms on the counter while it brews and opens one of his newest books on Arctic exploration. Stede and Edward left early for a special exhibition at the Natural History Museum. A morning spent around hundreds of screaming children sounded like Izzy’s worst nightmare, so he didn’t cave to Stede’s wide-eyed pleading.

He’s idly sniffing at the coffee pot, wondering if he waited long enough or altogether too long, when he hears a knock at the front door. It’s rapid-fire and strong, someone impatient, likely a delivery man eager to get packages dropped off before noon. Izzy is content to ignore it until he hears the unmistakeable rustling of metal against the lock.

He doesn’t hesitate. Izzy opens a drawer and grabs the sharpest cooking knife, something obscenely expensive with Japanese writing engraved onto the blade, and toes off his house slippers, creeping barefoot into the hallway. He’s tucked against the hall tree when the door flies open, hidden by a mass of Stede’s floor-length coats.

He has the knife flat against his forearm, ready to strike when Lucius steps into view, holding a file full of papers to his chest.

Izzy immediately lowers the knife, and the sudden movement must catch Lucius’ eye because he screams, throwing his entire folder of documents up into the air.

“What the fuck,” Lucius shouts as papers rain down around them. “Is that a fucking knife?”

Izzy shrugs. “Wasn’t sure who was at the door.”

“You weren’t sure who - God, Stede, Stede!” Lucius yells down the hallway. “Izzy has finally snapped and is trying to murder me with a - wait.” He turns suddenly to Izzy, his hand still clasped over his heart. “Why are you here?”

“It’s a bank holiday,” Izzy says, crouching down to pick up some of the papers from the floor. “Pub’s closed.”

“No, I mean. Why are you here.” Lucius gestures widely.

Izzy focuses on shuffling the papers into relative order, unsure of what to say.

“Oh my god,” Lucius whispers. “I was right. Roach owes me twenty quid.”

“Excuse me?”

“You are fucking Stede.”

“You bet Roach twenty quid that I was fucking Bonnet?” He asks.

“Yeah, and I paid up! Roach told me he asked you. I should’ve known he was lying.”

Izzy shoves the papers at Lucius’ chest and starts walking back towards the kitchen. “He did ask,” he calls.

“Oh my god you’ve been lying to us all along?” Lucius follows him like a particularly erratic shadow as Izzy wipes down the knife and sticks it back into the protective sleeve. “You’re like an angry little mastermind spy.”

“No,” Izzy says. “We just weren’t fucking then.”

Lucius collapses into a kitchen chair. “Wow,” he whispers, a little breathless. “Well, you’ve really taken it out of me this morning, Izzy Hands. I’d love a cuppa.”

“You can make your own fucking tea.”

“I’m the guest,” he says, peevishly.

“And this isn’t my fucking house.”

“No.” Lucius watches him with bright, knowing eyes. “But you look pretty at home.”

Izzy glares at him and reaches over to switch the kettle on. It’s as far as he’ll go. He pours himself a mug of luke-warm coffee and says, “Bonnet’s not here, by the way.”

“Oh yeah, I gathered that. Which is incredibly annoying. He said we’d grade the mock exams today because we have to have them back on Wednesday and of course his phone is dead and Ed isn’t picking up.”

“He really needs a new one,” Izzy sighs into his mug.

“Yeah, good luck convincing him though. He thinks if he gets a new phone, he won’t know how to use it. He’s totally spooked over the fact that none of the latest models have home buttons anymore.”

Izzy snorts. “He needs a fucking Blackberry or something.”

Lucius laughs. “You’re lucky I’m old enough to even remember those.” He whips out his own phone, with a glaring pink case and a tasselled charm hanging off one corner. His thumbs fly across the screen. “God, he fucking owes me.”

Lucius disappears for a moment without a word, but Izzy can hear him stomping all the way to the study. It’s a room in the back of the house with windows overlooking the garden and an antique wooden desk set alongside an old, unused fireplace. It’s Izzy’s favourite room in the entire place, though he’s never told Stede that before.

When Lucius returns, he’s holding a fist full of coloured ink pens and a legal note pad. Izzy raises his eyebrows at him. “Are you staying here?”

“Yep. I’ll get through as many exams as I can until the professor gets home and then make him deal with the rest. Why?” He asks, spreading his papers across the whole of the kitchen table. “Is that a problem?”

Izzy’s only real plans today were to finish his book and take an irresponsibly long shower. “No.”

“Good,” Lucius says. “‘Cause I wasn’t planning on leaving even if you tried to make me.”

Izzy tucks his book under his arm and toes on his slippers. “Like I said, it’s not my house.”

He showers until the entire bathroom is filled with steam, clouding out the mirrors and clearing the weight in his lungs. Izzy rarely takes his time in here, usually distracted as he is by Edward’s wandering hands or Stede calling his name. Today though, he plays with each little dial controlling the frankly hedonistic number of water jets and shower head settings and stands under the spray until his fingers begin to prune.

Stede has all kinds of creams and lotions dotted on the bathroom countertop and Izzy breaks open the most neutral smelling one he can find and rubs it into his skin, fighting off the itchy, dry feeling that usually has him avoiding hot showers in the first place.

He can hear the tinny sound of music from downstairs where Lucius is grading papers and so Izzy retreats to Stede’s bedroom, quietly closing the door behind him. The first time Stede brought him home, he had promised comfortable beds, though it took several attempts for either of them to convince Izzy to sleep anywhere other than the living room couch.

When they finally did, it was a fucking revelation. The sheets are exquisitely soft, and the heavy quilted duvet is paired with knit throws and far too many pillows for just one bed. Izzy lays down with his book and begins to read, impossibly removed from the ice and wind of the Arctic.

The afternoon sun peaks through the bay windows and casts the room in shades of gold. Izzy is comfortably warm and the air still smells of Stede’s lemon and poppy candles and it’s all enough to lull him to sleep.

It feels as if no time has passed at all, as if Izzy’s eyes have only just closed when he wakes with a jolt to the sound of the bedroom door opening.

The sun is close to setting now and the room is cast in shadow. Izzy’s book is laying open on his chest and he reaches for it just as Edward takes a seat on the bed beside him. “Well, Lucius said you were hiding away all day. But I didn’t expect you’d be napping.”

Izzy rubs at his eyes, setting the book aside. “It’s my day off, you arsehole.”

“I know. It’s just that I haven’t really seen you sleep all that much. Figured you were a little robot all these years, running on never ending batteries and spite.”

Izzy flips him off, somewhat half-heartedly. He didn’t put any product in his hair when he got out of the shower and it’s falling into his eyes, still wanting for a trim. He moves to push it back but Edward catches his hand. “Don’t. It looks good like this. Like when we were kids.”

“You were the kid,” Izzy reminds him.

Edward hums like he’s not bothered enough to argue. He runs his fingers through the ends of Izzy’s hair, parting it to his liking.

“How was the museum?” He asks, his voice still hoarse with sleep. He clears his throat.

As if a spell was broken, Edward sits up, suddenly a mirror image of Stede. “Oh it was awesome, man. Fucking dinosaur bones and shit. And hey, Stede found that penguin egg from the book he gave you. Like the exact fucking one. Took a picture for you and everything.”

“Yeah?” Izzy asks, closing his eyes again.

“Yeah, man. Some cool shit. Anyway, you can stay up here if you want, but Stede’s ordering Indian and we figured you’d be hungry.”

He is, distantly, but he’s loath to get out of bed. “You know,” he says. “When we had all that money, we should’ve been spending it on proper posh beds.”

Edward laughs. “Right? And soft sheets and those nice heavy blankets. God, did we have it all wrong. These crazy foam mattresses, it’s like you’re slowly sinking into a Venus flytrap.”

It’s fucking exactly like slowly sinking into a Venus flytrap, but Izzy scoffs anyway and sends him off with a wave of his hand. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

“Oh, Lucius is staying for dinner, by the way. So play nice.”

“I’m always nice.”

“I dunno, man. He said you tried to stab him this morning.”

“I didn’t try to stab him. I grabbed a knife when I heard someone obviously trying to come in through the front door, because Stede Bonnet lives in this ridiculous house without any fucking security.”

“Oh, true,” Edward says, hesitating in the doorway. “I keep meaning to call someone to install cameras, but I always forget. It’s nuts, right? He doesn’t even have an alarm system. Plus these windows are the antique kind that you can snap open with a fucking switch blade. I know, I’ve tried.”

“I’ll get someone to come by,” Izzy says. “I know a guy who can secure the windows too. But you’ll have to be here to let them in and supervise if it’s a weekday. Stede will be in class.”

Edward clicks his tongue and gives him a false salute. “Can always count on you, Iz.” He leaves the door open and Izzy can hear the sound of Stede’s laughter bubbling up from downstairs. He stares at the ceiling for a moment longer, following the intricate crown moulding. He lets out a single, heavy sigh, and pushes himself out of bed.

“Izzy!” Stede calls, the second he appears in the living room. “How was your nap, dear?”

Lucius mouths dear from where he’s sitting in front of the ottoman, a laptop balanced on his knees.

Izzy flips him off and takes a seat beside Stede. “Fine. Edward says you found the penguin egg.”

“Oh, yes!” Stede says, pulling out his phone and immediately presenting Izzy with a photo of a single off-white egg. There is a small window cut into the shell and the placard reads, Emperor penguin egg, collected by Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s last expedition to Antarctica. He can see a hint of Stede’s reflection in the glass, grinning.

His grip tightens on the phone, suddenly unwilling to give it back. Edward is watching him knowingly and Izzy thinks he ought to slit his own fucking throat to spare himself the indignity of loving this man. He swallows thick. “How long did it take you to find?” He asks, finally.

“Oh, ages.”

“Yeah, seriously.” Edward says. “I left him after the fifteenth little room he investigated to go look at the spiders. Did you know there’s bird eating spiders, man? Spiders that can eat fucking birds.”

“Couldn’t you have just asked someone?” Lucius pipes up.

“Oh! You’d think, wouldn’t you!” Stede says, suddenly outraged. “You wouldn’t believe the state of museum guides these days. They hardly know anything about their own artefacts. Some of them - some of them hadn’t even heard of Apsley Cherry-Garrard! Can you imagine?” He asks, leaning over to press his hand to Izzy’s forearm.

He tries very hard to bite back a smile. “I cannot,” he says, solemnly.

“But I found it in the end!” Stede says. “With no help from these supposed experts.”

“Chill,” Lucius says, shoving the laptop at him. “Not everyone can have two PhDs and like deeply niche obsessions. Now pick out your curry, I’m starving.”

“Oh, I’ve been craving a korma. What about you, Izzy?”

He waves a hand, settling into the sofa. “Pick something,” he says. “You know what I like.”

Lucius snorts. “I’ll bet he does."

Stede flushes pink and Edward laughs with his head thrown back. “Lucius!”

“What?” He asks.

“You’re being terribly rude.” He says, stuttering, pretending to scroll through the menu as if he doesn’t know exactly what he wants already.

Izzy closes his eyes to the sound of their bickering and thinks about the three penguin eggs, smuggled from Antarctica at great cost, hollowed out and housed behind glass. He would have lived and died in this city, without ever knowing that they were there.

“Izzy?” He opens his eyes. All three of them are staring at him, as if waiting for something to happen.

“What?”

“Are you unwell?” Stede asks.

“No.” Izzy has lived a life of survival; he’s marched his winter journeys. “I’m fine.”

Stede frowns at him, unconvinced, but Edward draws Lucius’ attention away by attempting to commandeer the remote and dictate an agenda of Love Island.

“Are you sure?” Stede asks, speaking low into his ear.

Izzy leans in and kisses him, soft and easy, barely a swipe of tongue against his lower lip. He rests their foreheads together for a moment, feeling Stede’s breath against his cheek. “I’m good,” he promises. “I’m good.”

—

Izzy wakes to Edward climbing out of bed, playing a fairly complicated game of Twister to keep himself from stepping on either of them as he makes his way onto the floor. He can tell by the light that it’s late, later than he usually wakes, and Izzy sighs a yawn.

“Stay in bed,” Edward whispers. Stede stirs at his side, one arm thrown over Izzy’s hip.

“It’s Saturday,” he says into the pillow. “Brunch shift.”

“Yeah, I’ve got it. Already texted Ivan.”

Izzy sits up half-way, leaning on his forearm, his eyes still blurry with sleep. “You’re going to run the brunch shift?”

“Yep,” Edward says, pulling on a pair of trousers he’d stripped off last night and left crumpled on Stede’s otherwise spotless floor.

“Without me?”

“Yep,” he repeats. “You two should come for a late lunch, once the rush is over.”

Izzy’s not sure what to say to that, so he watches as Edward finishes dressing and pulls his hair up into a high ponytail. He blows a kiss from the doorway and Stede mumbles a sleepy, “Have a good day.”

Once he hears the front door shut and the heavy click of those antique fucking locks, Stede murmurs, “Go back to sleep.”

Izzy never falls back asleep. Once he’s awake, his thoughts won’t let him go, lost to the habit of movement. “Please,” he whispers.

Izzy wishes he had a book in reach, something to keep him occupied, but once Stede smushes his face up against the nape of his neck, he decides he’ll just wait for him to fall asleep again before getting out of bed.

He closes his eyes and sinks into the familiar practice of imagining the ceiling of his and Edward’s first flat, water stained and dotted with mould. The picture doesn’t stay though, he’s missing details, like which wall the windows were on and the texture of the plaster.

Stede’s chest rises heavy against his back and he remembers, suddenly, the sound of his grandmother’s voice when he was still a child, calling his name from the edge of a beach in Blackpool. He’d been so taken by the water, the sound of the waves crashing against thousands of little stones. It was like rain against their windowpanes, without the chill of bad weather.

Stede is breathing steady and slow and Izzy falls back asleep to the pull of the tides.