#I feel like those are just Ed's default tags for your Izzy yikes I'm sorry

[tatteredxsails]

❛ i would let you rip me apart if it meant loving you. ❜ (izzy for ed!)

I have... love, for you, Edward.

That fucking awkward pronouncement had started it all. Words came out of the man that they'd never spoken to each other freely now. It didn't matter if Edward scoffed at them. If he greeted them with a look that meant he was thinking of his knife. Thinking, thinking, but not moving to pull it from its sheath.

When was the last time someone had told them they loved him? He had been certain that what he was feeling between himself and Stede was love. It was bright and new, something exciting in a way he was certain he'd never felt. But they didn't say it. Not about each other. Not to each other. What he had with Izzy wasn't meant to be spoken. Izzy pronounced love in the way that he studiously cleaned and packed Edward's pipe before handing it to him. In the way that he carried out his orders and acted as his voice and hands in the world. Love was a thing that was done, not something that was said.

Not like this. Not again and again and again.

He wanted to rip Izzy apart. Fuck, he'd been trying, hadn't he? As if some answer to the end of his pain was buried beneath Izzy's skin or could be spilled from the marrow of bones so small the joints between them could be parted with scissors.

Edward braced his hands on the wall on either side of Izzy and dropped his head to his shoulder, breathing in the smell of him. Familiar and different all at once. There was a sweet sickness about him now, born from the things that Edward did that neither of them spoke about. It was possible that an infection could take Izzy away from him. Maybe he'd pull Edward through death's door with all the hooks and chains of rotten fucking love that he had.

Maybe they could fix things. Maybe he could just... accept this. Accept that this was all that his life would ever be and the only love he would know or deserve was that of a man that may as well have been his shadow.

He turned his face to Izzy's neck and pressed a kiss there, the scruff of his beard prickling against his skin.