#casanova-esque!steve

[hitlikehammers]

PART ONE: Fail-Pirate!Eddie/Castaway!Steve (Pirate AU)

🌊Under the Water (Our Hearts Will Dream Again)🌊

Chapter One: Man Overboard

You’ve gotta understand: the truth about Eddie?

He’s shit as a pirate. Like: an absolute disgrace. Of all the bad names associated with the trade, if trade is what it can be called?

He might just give it the worst.

So, y’know. That’s nice.

Like, he knows his knots, he is excellent with his hands thank you kindly, and he ties those motherfuckers like a pro, too! So what if he just sometimes confuses his hitch for his stopper, they’re both knots, they both do the job of knotting.

(Mostly. They only lost a boat the one time.)

(As in lost-lost, not the ones that were retrieved in time but landed Eddie on scut anyway.)

Which doesn’t touch on his absolutely abysmal record at the looting end of things. He doesn’t mind taking from the well-off, but he does mind adding it to the ship’s take every time they make land; he maybe lies about how bad he is at the stealing, the all-important plundering of the job, because he ends up finding the people outside the center of town at every port, the ones who line the edges and he drops what he takes with the ones who need it there, where they can’t escape on the water, can’t live in motion on the whims of the waves and find their needs in the flux of a life unanchored.

So he’s not the worst thief, for the right victim. But his spoils never make it back to the ship so: it probably makes him pretty shit at the job to hand, in the end, either way. Add a mark to the tally.

And then, gods: don’t get him started on the taking of…other things. Who aren’t things, they’re fucking people and they deserve respect not…what the other people sailing under his colors seem to believe them useful for instead.

Eddie’s been sick over the edge of the stern, hidden by shadow even if it’s unnecessary because fuck, the rest of the crew is full-occupied with their plundering, and that’s the reason he spews over in the sea, the waves always feeling a little extra angry for his pollution of their waters and that’s fitting. It’s fitting that he’s defiling something sacred with the weakness of his stomach—but not his soul, not his morals or his sense of humanity, fuck’s sake, so: at least there’s that.

He guesses.

Admittedly, though: Eddie doesn’t care so much that he’s a shitty fucking pirate. It’s not piracy that led him here, that charted this course for his life.

It’s the Ocean.

Which, sure, that may strike either cliche or obvious, too soft and poetic or else just downright pointless to underscore because he made a conscious choice to live at Sea, especially given the laundry list of reasons he’s absolutely abysmal at the life-on-the-water thing. But it is the truth. The best and biggest truth he’s ever known, rooted deep enough to fuel his steps and guide his path to here, right here, being exceptionally bad at luring fucking fish in a tiny little dinghy that the crew who hates him decided was perfectly fitting for the anticipated catch and okay, fine, if you were going to base expectations off of prior performance then maybe, and also, also maybe being here, ending up precisely right here—laughingstock of his profession, maligned by his crew, foisted upon barely-a-boat to catch barely-a-fish because y’know what, he’d have become a goddamn fisherman in the fucking first place if he was any good at that—but maybe right here, like this would look like failure to anyone else, to everyoneelse but, y’see—

Eddie Munson was a boy, once.

And he remembers, crystal clear, from the touch of his mother’s hand on his shoulder to the smooth slide of the menacing-but-magical looking shell, with its pointy end for tiny hands to grasp and hold to, and it’s big spiky cone of a head to hold to his own, up against his ear as his mother guided his elbow up and whispered just listen, you’ll hear the ocean tell you its secrets—and he loved the ocean, loved the feeling of the soft foam of the tide on the hidden sands far from the harbor, loved the little creatures that scuttled in and out of the water when the waves crept up, loved the hint of a big fin, maybe real or maybe just imagined something that big, that dangerous, that beautiful breaching the horizon: Eddie wanted to know all the ocean’s secrets.

And when he’d held the shell of his ear, he’d heard them: whispered close and roared fierce alike and he’d felt weightless, giddy; just just floating.

Magic, like the shell in his hands.

And it didn’t matter when his father found him years later, stumbling drunk from the tavern where he spent money they couldn’t afford, finding Eddie with the conch pressed tight to his ear, almost too small now as he’d grown but still desperate for the secrets, the sound of the waves that seemed to reach out and know when they needed to break louder, faster to drown our the shouting, to wash over the way his father had hauled him up and thrown the shell to break a window and sneered your idiot secrets, boy, there’s no ocean in that fucking shell, s’the echo of your own coward heart that you hide in, there, stupid fucking—

It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter, not because Eddie got knocked to the floor much like his shell, after; not because it made a kind of sense, because if the secrets of the ocean were the mirror of his heartbeat then of course they were faster and louder when his father came home drunk, sometimes he chest got sore over how his heart raced on those nights; and not because when he finally gets his feet back under him, when his father’s wood-sawing snores signal the coast is clear and he can creep out and search in the dark for his shell and find it, cracked from the spin of the handle-like bit so he just has to cradle the wide bell careful in his palm and ignore the slice of the spires into his skin, ignore it for the sake of finding, finding—

The waves. The secrets. His own heartbeat like the thunder in a storm and it doesn’t matter because if that sound is his own heart, then, then it’s like the ocean’s secrets are in his own chest, a little.

Like if the ocean had a heartbeat, there’s something of it pressed inside his own.

And for all that his father tried to whip that wonder away from him, straight out of his hands? That reality is somehow more magical. And Eddie’s been drawn to the pulsebeat of the sea—devoted, even, almost like a lovesick longing—ever since, so.

Failing at pirating, including the fishing part? Isn’t a failure.

Because he’s on the Sea. And that’s all he’s ever really wanted.

It’d help his pride if he got like, one fucking fish, though. Even a tiny one. Though they’d probably mock him worse for a minnow than for nothing so: small mercies, maybe, that he’s pulling up untouched bait.

Still he sighs, and takes a moment, rakes his gaze over the setting sun on the water—they’re far enough out now that there’s no sight of land, just the ripples nearby that smooth into pure water stretching aft and aft further out and Eddie doesn’t have a shell but if he presses his hand to his chest and over his ear at once it’s almost, almost—

He both hears and feels his pulse jump, like the secret is a warning, and he believesthat’s it’s both because it’s the only explanation for the way he turns, at that precise moment that the water moves uncannily agitated, and lifts up something weighty, a heavy shadow, and—

“Man overboard!” Eddie’s voice cracks as his hands reach for the oars and he rows before he thinks because the Ocean told him to look—and maybe it’s childish, and foolhardy, and a silly winsome fantasy he should have left behind ashore long again but…

He can’t tell if the man—because it’s a man, indeed, he can tell now that the water has calmed, and how else to explain its sudden surge to command Eddie’s attention, to call him in close and then ease the way to the waterlogged body—but Eddie can’t tell if the body moves at all save at the water’s own whim, can’t see yet if the flesh is too pale or worse, too blue, and—

“Man overboard!” he cries out with feeling, now; he’s far from the ship but not so much that no one will hear screaming if not yet discern the words and he just needs them to know, needs them to be ready, especially if it’s somehow one of their own and he just repeats it, too of his lungs, shrieks it to the sky as he reaches the man’s form, facedown in the water, and that alone seizes in Eddie’s chest—why tell him a secret if it’s only a heartbreaking one, yet he cannot, will not be picky, he will never reject the confidences of the Ocean no matter how it chooses to disclose its mysteries, even its tragedies; he curses his crewmates for the pitiful size of his little vessel, a joke upon his lacking hauls but now he has need for size and sturdiness as he reaches for the body—broad and leant further mass by the water itself and far more precious than a hundred fish for feeding and for trading, this is a life and he strains to balance the boat and heave the man aboard so not to capsize them both and leave the circumstances worse for his help—

“Man,” he manages to screech before he tumbles back, but with the man in his arms to drag along into the dinghy and he knocks his own breath a little for the fall but the man’s here, and they’re upright, and Eddie scrambles on his knees toward his new charge and he—

Should not have wasted time trying to steady his lungs, really, because this man, on his boat, dragged from the waters, he, he is—

He’s absolutely breathtaking.

Eddie gapes at him, at the play of the sunset on his soaked hair, his skin—pale, but not blue, not dead yet—he is stunning even like this, what unimaginable beauty must be possess when he’s not—

Oh hells, yes, right; he—

Eddie probably needs to fucking check if the breathtaking man is breathing, before he contributes to losing something at sea far more precious than an improperly-knotted boat.

>>>CHAPTER TWO

✨permanent tag list: OPEN (lmk if you want to be added/removed): @pearynice @hbyrde36 @slashify @finntheehumaneater @wxrmland @dreamwatch @perseus-notjackson @estrellami-1 @bookworm0690 @imhereforthelolzdontyellatme

divider credits here & here & here

🌊ao3 link here

[hitlikehammers]

PART TWO: Fail-Pirate!Eddie/Castaway!Steve (Pirate AU)

🌊Under the Water (Our Hearts Will Dream Again)🌊

Chapter Two: A Most Compelling Gaze

CHAPTER ONE // Chapter Three on 28 March 🌊

also on ao3

He might be a piss-poor pirate, but Eddie’s not an idiot. He knows this was intended as a test—for the both of them, according to the Captain:

To test your loyalty after so many missteps, Munson, can’t help but doubt your commitment to this ship Reefer Rick had cackled at him through those rotting teeth of his; and to tease out the worth of the heftiest catch you’ve managed to date!, and they’d all laughed then, the whole of the crew, even those Eddie counted as the closest thing he had to friends, though their bellies shake less, their chuckles carry less an echo, and that’s something, maybe.

Maybe.

So yeah: Eddie’s well aware it’s a test, setting him up to babysit the castaway? It’s also to have a fucking laugh; probably more geared toward the latter, if only because they won’t fucking stop.

Because it’s one thing to imply attraction to the 'pretty-boy flotsam that was too big for even you to miss, Munson', because one, they’re pirates, degeneracies of all stripes were in their natures, Eddie’s known preferences being the very least of the lot and certainly far from unique, and two: fuck but yes indeed, even Munson couldn’t miss the heaven-sent vision who was now resting in his care, or capture, depending on who was asked.

Eddie didn’t see much difference, if his heart fluttered when he looked upon that face each time; if his pulse eased and the sun shone brighter through grimed window panes like sorcery, when Eddie watched the man’s chest rise and fall: alive, color back in his cheeks, his lips, and gods be good or cruel in turns, those lips—

But the crew, of course, can’t stop with the obvious; oh certainly not.

No: they have to cackle and ask more lewd lines of implication, most egregious—and of course most popular—being variations on oh yes, yes, too big for even the Merry Moron Munson to miss, but is the catch big elsewhere, hmm? Did you stick him with your pole, forwent the hook altogether? Or maybe he’s so large even you could have snagged him by his coc—

Eddie does his best to ignore all that, and just stand watch over their formerly-waterlogged not-quite-prisoner, scooped from a not-quite-wreckage, as in: no wreckage. None anywhere near, and the Captain had demanded they look and look hard, not chancing leaving unclaimed booty on the water but—nothing. The man came from nowhere. The crew’s more suspicious than curious.

But that’s another thing Eddie never fit in with, when it came to his shipmates.

And if—if, in the purely hypothetical instance—but if Eddie does retreat from the taunting behind the closed cabin doors where they’ve laid the mystery man to recover, and hopefully soon wake? Maybe Eddie retreats to the room he's babysitting in part because...he blushes easy, alright?

That’s not a crime, save one of his birth; nothing he can do to fight against it. So much as learned well in his youth: he knows keenly when it’s best to run.

Behind the doors to the cabin where the pretty mystery man too large to miss is lying in an oddly-clean bed for the vessel. That’s just a happy coincidence of the sort Eddie doesn’t normally stumble upon, so he’s got no interest now in staring the gift-washed-up-on-his-metaphorical-shore in the mouth.

“Your mouth will get dry.”

Eddie startles hard enough at the bedside of the Mystery Man to splay on the floor, knocked to bruise: he hadn’t realized he was gaping.

The sprawling as he stares up from the floor doesn’t seem to…incline his jaw to closing.

Mystery Man—who’s awake, good god, he’s awake, alive and awake and dry and warm, Eddie scrambles to pull himself up on the bed frame and he can feel the man’s warmth, and his skin’s got a golden sort of gleam that Eddie hadn’t noticed before but oh hell that does absolutely nothing to stop the stirring in Eddie’s trousers, holy fucking hell—

And oh. Oh, then the Mystery Man is reaching, slowly, blinking just once before he slips a fingertip under Eddie’s chin and nudges his lips closed with a pop.

He feels so warm. Eddie cannot goddamn swallow.

“Sorry,” the man’s turned half on his side, half on his stomach now, peeking almost adorably, almost shy but no, no: far more coy the way he looks down at Eddie, sitting up but still on the godsdamned floor. “I’m just kind of really partial to not drying out.”

Eddie blinks, stares, tries to parse the words around the echo of the touch; mouth. Dry. Right.

Right, he…right.

In hindsight, it’s either a very odd or very suggestive comment, but Eddie doesn’t intend to have access to hindsight any time soon, certainly not soon enough for it to matter, because the Mystery Man is blinking at him, and his lashes look like the patters on the hard outsides of a scallop, so long and previously delicate, fanned out to cast their own shadows, catch their own light.

“You’re awake.”

Which: obvious. Idiotic to state plain. No wonder they call him ‘moron’ as a rule on this ship, he does nothing to prove it wrong, though in fairness here and now: how in every hell imaginable is he supposed to be anything but dumbstruck by the eyes open, fixed on his, close-on to glowing with the amber shift of them, like fine whiskey he’d never had the coin for but has once or twice proven light enough fingers to snag. But they’re more than that, even: the same color but caught inside the sunset-meeting-moonrise where it lilts along the water, the copper starburst of it with the soft shift of the waves in greens, bare hints of blues—intoxicating.

What else can Eddie be but a fool, in sight of those eyes?

“Mmm,” Mystery Man hums with a quirk to his lips and stretches between the linens as if they were silks, rather than hole-ridden, and quite suspiciously stained; “for a bit.”

Eddie halts, pulse kicking a little extra hard because—

“A bit?” And his voice doesn’t squeak. It doesn’t squeak.

The way the man’s mouth curls upward calls Eddie out as a bald-faced liar.

“Your friends are,” the man licks his lips as he seems to consider his words; “quite colorful in their attempts at humor.”

Good god, the things, the things they’ve been saying, that this man has heard, about Eddie, and, and—

“You’re stuck here with me?” Mystery Man tips his head, half askance but also almost half apology which: in light of the moment, it’s the oddest thing to concern himself with.

In light of the man’s everything, it is the most absurd concern Eddie has ever been led to entertain.

“I wouldn’t say it quite like that,” Eddie manages to speak almost-evenly, with his heart still thudding loud enough to muffle his own words back to his ears. He’s almost proud of the effort made.

He’s absolutely proud of how it seems to be at least part of what provokes a full smile out of the Mystery Man, and if Eddie’d thought his eyes could, did glow? Gods above: this smile itself, but then compared in turn to the warmth that rises through Eddie to see it, a soft banked fire that rises from his toes and licks around his limbs, swells in his chest: oh.

Just, just oh.

“Good,” the man grins at him, sounds the like warmth Eddie feels, with an extra hint of satisfaction, a gilded edge of teasing maybe, even: “I wouldn’t say I’m stuck with you, either.”

Eddie let’s himself have a moment, even two or three, just to bask in the light of it, the way his pounding heart’s shifted to fluttering: no less frantic but more like how flames can dance, erratic but so clearly life-giving, evidence shone inside their light. He lets himself have the moments before he clears his throat, and tries so best to act like a grown man with some shred of dignity. Only a shred.

He’s not asking for miracles, here. Or: none beyond the vision wrapped above him in a pirate’s best bedding.

“How are you feeling?” Eddie finally manages to ask a question of import.

“Oh,” the man almost startles, or else his brows quirk a touch in something close to confusion before he seems to take stock of himself.

“Mostly alright,” he concludes with a nod; “I’d just gotten,” he chews his lips and oh, perhaps Eddie asked after the well-being of the wrong person in his room, his heart back to drumming because all hells, but that is a sight.

“Disoriented,” the man settles on; “the water was,” but he stops short, cuts himself off and something in what’s not said feels important and Eddie may have chased it if not for how shiny the man’s lips still looked.

“I’ll be fine,” the man smiles soft, then, assured him genially; “you needn’t—“

“They’re suspicious,” Eddie blurts, suspects he lands on it like a die rolled at random in the hopes he’ll say something other than you’re exquisite or the like. At least he rolls random but safe, not to mention true.

“You,” Eddie narrows his gaze, means to nod down to the unexpected quality of the man’s clothing and—

Meets the tufting of chest hair where the bedclothes end beneath the throat. Oh.

“You wore finery,” Eddie manages, and barely that, maybe not even that because his eyes catch the careful drape of the white cloth softer than anything Eddie had ever felt, drying as best as possible across mismatched seating, hoping to catch sunlight when it couldn’t be trusted just to the deck for the breeze, but however it drapes: it is very much drying. And very much not being worn. Which, which means—

Eddie might start believing in the deities for the simple fact that he hadn’t fully processed until this very moment that the beautiful Mystery Man was wholly bare beneath an ownerless shift that someone had scrounged up when they’d stripped his sodden form, drenched from the waters after rescue—and that, aside from the longshirt?

The man was nude under the sheets in front of him.

Especially given his height—about to Eddie’s own but even lying down, hells; even sleeping his frame was more impressive, more expansive somehow—but either way the shift was from a woman once braved back to the vessel, clearly, and it didn’t stretch far past the Mystery Man’s waist and—

Oh, oh, Eddie may have chosen the exact moment to consider belief in the gods just so he could wish them fire and damnation and a swift death for the way his blood rushes southward, the way his eyes dart to the line visible under the coverings where the shift has tucked even higher, under the clear peaks of firm but unbothered nipples—that peek through the linens very much as if they should be bothered, nay, worshippedas a gods-damned rule—but the line of the shift runs just below those tempting buds now, and Eddie is going to damn all the gods to their own hells because of course his eyes drift lower, to where the line was expected to fall; lower to where a different line of a clear curve and shapebetrays itself with an almost casual grace beneath a single thin covering, so close to Eddie’s face, Eddie’s lips—

“This?”

Damn all the gods to every conceivable hell.

Eddie tries to suck in a steadying breath when he looks up, grateful the man’s eyes are cast down but cursing the deities to burn in punishing flames for eternity when he sees the man’s hands near his throat, the linens pooled closer to his waist and the shift pulled down to betray more of the thatch of curls at his chest, but his fingers are threaded through something shining, something metal: a chain, not good but brighter, the likes of which Eddie’s never seen, not Pirate’s gold with its enchantments but similarly beguiling; otherworldly.

How did he still have it, where none of the crew had pocketed it before they left him in Eddie’s charge? How had Eddie missed it in the hours between?

“They think you royalty to ransom,” Eddie chokes out as the man tucks the pendant under to the shift he pulls back up just the slightest bit, and Eddie wills himself not to dwell on what that means for its too-short hem; reveals to his own heart that his will is lacking in the extreme before he barely sighs out: “or some competition to send to the plank.”

Because the clothes, even without the adornment at the neck, betrayed wealth, either by birth or business. Neither was particularly kind or tolerated by a pirate crew.

And ostensibly it was part of Eddie’s job, here, to discern to which the man belonged.

But before Eddie even has a chance to collect himself to something more pressing, if not imposing, the man takes it in his own hands to turn serious in a way that…that feels weighted, heavy in the air. Like the clouds hand spread palms to press upon mere mortals, Eddie none to be spared.

“There is no one who would pay my ransom in any manner you’d deem fit,” the man speaks solemn, but resonant, even if he’s tone is just above a whisper; the words themselves are honest, and that pangs deep in Eddie’s heart—who could not miss this man? Who could not desire nothing more in this world but his safety, his return to their side?

Unthinkable.

“And I swear to you upon all that I am,” and it’s the resonance, again, the way it almost shakes intangible things in the air around them, as if the vow it in as power somehow, or else isn’t actually the important piece of the statement at all:

“I do not deal with, or approve of, the trading companies that pollute these waters,” and there’s a pause, and it strikes heavy too; somehow mournful; “and so many others.”

The man’s voice dips then, there’s no clear reason for the way an echo rings but it does. It rings inside Eddie’s bones.

“I believe you,” Eddie breathes, a little shaky with it just for the gravity still in the room; “but that means we will have to concoct an alibi to get you safely back to shore."

Because Eddie believes him wholly, even if he cannot articulate the why—still, though.

The crew saw tell of riches. They will need a reason—not a particularly ironclad one, none of them are especially sharp—but some means of convincing them to let the beautiful man return to his home. No matter how Eddie wishes he wouldn’t, and not only for his own selfish, foolish wants—if it’s true they’d pay no ransom, Eddie can barely stomach the notion of returning this near-heavenly creature to such people who cannot see his worth.

He begins to ponder, concoct a tale, but then the man intervenes, definitively:

“I did not intend to get to shore.”

There’s something certain in his tone, but something strange likewise in his words. Eddie isn’t sure if it’s their cadence, or their order, or maybe the words themselves.

“You are very curious,” Eddie doesn’t hesitate to say, when an answer eludes him for enough heartbeats in a row.

“I am aware,” the man smiles crooked, but his eyes dance, prismatic.

“You have the most compelling gaze.”

Eddie has to blink a good many times, and swallow around his galloping pulse, to realize he hadn’t spoken. Longer still to process the words hedid not speak.

When it hits him, though, the curse of his easy flush sets his cheeks aflame.

And the breathtaking mystery man smiles wider, stealing breath he’s already taken entire: greedy.

Eddie is flooded with heat, with; with want.

“Does your compelling gaze have a name to match?”

Eddie nearly chokes on the thump of his heart because, how is a man so suave and charming real, and how is he mostly-baker, barely covered laid out before Eddie Munson?

Unfathomable.

“Eddie,” he coughs out, like the syllables get knocked by his riotous heart; “and,” he 

does not squeak, he 

stammers at a particularly high pitch:

“And you?”

“We are…where?”

Not an answer, nor a question Eddie expects. It must show, because the mean leans his chest, and his wholly unreasonable patch of curls between his pectorals just a little bit closer to ask anew, as if to clarify:

“Where would the stars place us in the night?”

Location. Bearing. Right, yes.

“New Providence is far in our wake by now,” Eddie answers in truth, which was part of why the man’s appearance made so little sense, especially in absence of a wreckage.

“Hmm,” the man hums, and strokes his chin—which should not be attractive, which should not somehow find a new way to ramp up his heart rate, and yet.

Eddie can feel the wild pumping graze the neck of his shirt.

“I am known by different names in different places but, no matter,” the man shakes his head and smiles before the first half of the sentence has a chance to make as little sense as it deserves; before he speaks but not just speaks, reaches for Eddie’s hand where it’s still gripping the edge of the bed where he still sits on the floor and Eddie thinks he means to shake it.

No.

No, he lifts it swift to his lips—so >i>soft—and kisses quicker than a blink before giving back Eddie’s hand and smiling oddly…oddly genuine—

“Eddie of the most compelling gaze,” that’s the genuine thing, he means that and Eddie marvels for it; “call me Steve.”

Steve. Steve. The name flows, sings, swims a little like the man’s own eyes. It suits so true.

“In our alibi,” Steve picks up, and it’s unfair for Eddie to call it sudden; it >is>feels sudden, but he has no concept of how long he’s sat and tried to brand to feeling of lips on his knuckles, perhaps minutes at least; “do you suppose there’s a tale to be woven that could keep me aboard with you, for a time?”

And it’s a surprise, but Eddie’s learning: this man, this Steve, is steeped in secrets and surprises. And maybe Eddie wants to devour him entirely.

Asking to be kept here? To stay, near Eddie, where he may have some chance to try and catch him in actual fact, instead of laughable happenstance?

Oh; he’ll give the deities another chance, in that case.

“You’re in luck, fair Steve,” Eddie chances a little hint of a flirt, mostly in heat, for show, but Steve lights up and he lets himself hope as he stands only so he can bow a bit theatrically and look up through his curls with a wink when he says:

“Weaving the perfect tale just so happens to be my strongest skill.”

And he thinks that’s the end of it, that he sticks on a high note but then Steve’s eyes drag across him, up and down where he’s stood in full height before him for the first time and those eyes: they expose him before those lips quirk at the corners and the voice speaks simple and clear but strikes somehow, inexplicable, like a pie down Eddie’s spine as Steve breathes deep, sighs smooth:

“I do not doubt you in the slightest, noble bard,” he says with feeling; “but I find myself unconvinced you’re not selling the rest of your attributes short.”

At which point Eddie may or may not turn on his heel and make for the deck to fetch water for his charge before the blood-rush to his cheeks sets some precarious too-parched woodscrap to flame and put fire to the whole fucking ship.

✨permanent tag list: OPEN (lmk if you want to be added/removed): @pearynice @hbyrde36 @slashify @finntheehumaneater @wxrmland @dreamwatch @perseus-notjackson @estrellami-1 @bookworm0690 @imhereforthelolzdontyellatme

divider credits here & here & here

🌊ao3 link here

[hitlikehammers]

When It Turns Out You're In Love With the Sea but also THE MAN YOU LOVE IS LITERALLY THE SEA (Steddie Pirate AU)—COMPLETE

(or: remember when I mentioned MYTHOLOGICAL THEMES in the tags?)

🌊Under the Water (Our Hearts Will Dream Again)🌊

Chapter Eight: No Idle Exaggeration

✨NOW COMPLETE✨:

START AT CHAPTER ONE // TWO // THREE // FOUR // FIVE // SIX // SEVEN

also on ao3

Eddie’s body fails him wholly, in that moment, bones trembling and breath catching and knees wholly giving out but in that moment, his crumbling frame is not the only phenomenon to take place.

Because when he pitches forward, those cool-firm-familiar-beloved-too-strong hands are already catching him, already pulling him close to a similarly familiar and beloved chest that’s rising and falling against Eddie’s cheek with real breath, that’s beating fast and full and almost frenzied but there’s a restraint in it, not of feeling but of rhythm: like the, like it’s the—

Like the whole goddamn Ocean is held in the chambers that draw in, and beat out, again and again and again; like the world entire, above and below the water’s pulsing reassurance, intent and devoted to the fixed point that is Eddie’s needy ear pressed against the sound.

It helps. It does help. He can breathe, a little; he can’t stop sobbing but he doesn’t think that’s really in the cards any time soon no matter the strength of the heart under him, the undeniable proof of life-life-life—it’s not foolproof. It cannot stitch every tear in him left festering these long weeks alone but; but.

But gods, does it help.

“-eloved, sweet angel, breathe with me, gentle and sure, listen, just listen,” and Eddie is, now; he doesn’t know what time must have passed but his weight’s leaned wholly in Steve’s arms, translucent only on the surface now, it seems, to the point of iridescence in the moonlight with a certain ebb and give to the shimmer—like the Ocean dances with the moon—and it’s a transfixing sight, maybe moreso with the wavering focus through his own ceaseless tears as he shakes in Steve’s—Steve’s—hold as Steve’s chest lifts him with the strength of the tides as much as the soft cradle of the surf, a lingering hold that does not dare halt in the middle, between inhales and exhales lest there creep any doubt in the break—for Eddie’s sake.

Wholly for Eddie.

“Hold onto me, darling,” and Eddie hadn’t noticed Steve’s litany of gentle endearments hadn’t paused any more than his breath or the heavy, unassailable knock of his heart to Eddie’s cheekbone; Eddie doesn’t notice the words having never stopped until they shift, and even then it takes a moment, a few cycles of breath before he processes them, murmurs at the same pitch, in the same lull of life through lungs and blood through veins.

Eddie grips tighter to Steve’s shoulders, hopes that’s sufficient and Steve only reaches, breathes and hums and never once shifts Eddie’s head from its place above his heartbeat as he bends, as he scoops Eddie’s from his boneless knees into what he thinks may be a bridal carry but that will shift him too far, that will move the beat away and if he loses his breath again, he whines at the threat, the terror rising in him—it wasn’t real, it was only a dream, the truth a nightmare he’s barely survived this far and won’t much longer, can’t after this; not after this—but he had nothing to fear, not further loss to weather because Steve…moves, bends, flows effortless as he cradles Eddie’s head to the center of his chest, safe against the drum of the undertow not seeking to wash him away but envelope him with its force and carry him always; then reaches with a strength so far beyond a man, yet seemingly as effortless as him curls Eddie’s legs around his middle, keeps hold at his thigh in case he can’t brace himself and he’s not sure he can, in truth: he needs Steve.

He needs Steve’s strength as a practicality; he needs Steve’s hold as further proof.

But it’s like that, with his unwashed hair split and wild burrows tight to Steve’s tidal heartbeat—it, too, stronger than any human chest should hold, more might in the sound than Eddie thinks the heart itself was build to stand and yet it echoes like a lullaby, like a promise wrapped tight and true inside the kind of sound a child has to imagine is the closest to be found alongside the voice of a god; it’s twined around his frame and held up in his arms, held close to his heartbeat and kissed at the temple for every second step, surrounded as best he can be by proofproofproof of the unimaginable, that Eddie is carried to the chambers that has been theirs, together.

Eddie is being carried there by Steve, so that they might be there…together.

Eddie’s not sure he ever wholly stopped his tears from falling, but gods: the sobbing reclaims him as the weight of it hits him anew: this space, this haven, this home, and all of the loss and the heartbreak—

Theirs. Together: theirs, and as Steve settles them soft upon the bed and wraps his legs around Eddie all the close and tighter, his hold all the more firm and unflagging, Eddie thinks also: theirs, and maybe mending where it had shattered so completely. Beyond all possibilities, even the smallest shards and crushed fragments ground to dust unrecognizable are somehow impossibly shifting toward whole again—because here, here, is Steve.

Eddie’s chest clenches but…not in a wholly bad way, or perhaps no degree of bad about it at all as Steve settles them, curls around Eddie like a cocoon, fostering the rebirth of a self that Eddie had thought lost, the version of him whole and in love and held close to a warmth that was close enough to love to be more than all he needed in this life; Eddie’s eyes flicker idle toward the door and he burrows into Steve all the closer, suddenly afraid Steve will try to wedge the entrance for privacy, but Eddie won’t be able to bear it, he won’t be able to watch him with both eyes and not still think his own sight a liar, a figment of a broken mind, he—

“They won’t bother—“ Eddie blurts out quick, his muscles tensing but his pulse still strangely so steady even if it seems to transmute speed into strength, still it should be racing, terrified; he isn’t wholly sure why he volunteers the proof that his crewmates had written him off as a lost cause as his main argument for keeping Steve precisely where he lies, here, but.

Eddie’s never claimed to be of the most sound mind on any day of his entire life; and damn it all if the days that have preceded this moment could even rightly be counted as life, for the pain in them. For the shell of him that barely moved and scarcely lived.

He forgoes making sense of anything, save the sound of Steve’s breath, the beat of his pulse, the coolness of his touch that isn’t cold but refreshing, something protective in it that lends it the most untenable contradiction of warmth that tremors through Eddie’s limbs, sparks feeling in them again.

“They know not to bother you,” Steve acknowledges Eddie’s nonsense divulgence with something close to vehemence, certainly a cutting, steel-line of a thing as he gathers Eddie’s closer to him, wraps him tighter where the patch of curls are slowly softening from sea grass to fluffy hair on his chest.

“Your care was not theirs to interfere with, nor theirs to commit to,” Steve hisses so low it’s nearly a snarl when he adds: “to be trusted with.”

Eddie almost shivers for the razor edge in the words but: he wouldn’t. Not ever. In fact he feels just about the exact opposite, as if safety and protection, reverence and a vow deeper than words is flooding his mind, the breath he’s slowly regaining as if the promise beyond speaking is why he’s able to gasp that very breath back at all.

“Not that you made it simple for me,” Steve cocks back at the neck to shoot a narrowed gaze downward, one that Eddie’d believed he’d never see again save in the tortuous dreams that would plague him until rest claimed him, granted him clemency; “I have never restored my human form so quickly in all of time, do you understand that?” Steve fusses with the linens in tucking Eddie into the bedding, close and tight; “Every source of nourishment I could find across the sprawl of my entire being, the whole of the body of my First Form taking in the strength to heal, so as to pass it to you as you chose to neglect your wellbeing, to let yourself languish, as if you are not infinitely precious,” Steve’s voice halts when Eddie whimpers, when Eddie feels his eyes prickle, then the tears fall anew when the words sink in, when the truth of the voice being hereseems undeniable, despite…everything, despite the sense-memory of Steve’s blood-tacky chest stilling under Eddie’s hands—

But then there are hands moving Eddie, and Eddie whines again to be ripped from the comfort, the reassurance, the certainty in the motion, the breath and beat of Steve’s chest but hands cradle his face ever so gently, but intent still, almost urgent as eyes that have darkened closer to amber again pierce him to the soul:

“Did you think it was all exaggeration?” Steve asks, somehow both incredulous and heartbroken and it leaves Eddie feeling just the same, lifting his hands to cover Steve’s and take comfort in how they’re laced together immediately, no hesitation: there’s no hint of incredulity in that.

“I told you the Ocean was a part of you always,” Steve tells him with a vehemence that tips the boat, like the Ocean responds to a call upon its presence; “I asked you to feel it for yourself, the way I made the whole of me move and give in time with your pulse that night,” and Steve’s gaze may ask if Eddie recalls clearly enough but oh, Eddie remembers, of course Eddie remembers Steve’s body on his body, taken needy and as a gift received and given into his body, carnal yes but so far beyond, like it replaced the blood in his veins with the salt of the Sea.

“And then so much more,” Steve confirms it, tracing his lips without every looking away, not once and Eddie feels the strangest sensation where his heart should be racing for the gravity in it all: it’s almost like it shivers instead, shudders deep, like the breaking of the waves as Steve breathes against him:

“I gave you my Heart,” he exhales like a holy thing: “to keep.”

And the shuddering continues, the ebb and flow of the tides, and Eddie…Eddie witnessed with his own eyes a resurrection. He saw a man beyond a man, saw an entity beyond Eddie's imagination come to him, merge for him alone it seemed, felt, no—no, Eddie knew as much, from the foreign familiar lump of a more sacred thing out from his heart; Eddie had felt it when Steve, undeniably his love, clutched him and caught him and cradled him close with strength exceeding any human, any beast, anything Eddie’d seen or heard of or known: but also more tender than Eddie knew a thing could be and survive all the roughness of the world: as if both existed…beyond. Just this world.

“Your Heart,” Eddie whispered, runs words back through his reeling mind: the Ocean was a part of you always, without exaggeration, and the feeling of being one with the water when Steve rocked into him, when Steve held him close and whispered how the Sea was in him, how he’d been right to dream it so all along; he takes a halting breath, not afraid exactly but overwhelmed, in truth, before he slides a palm of his own to his chest, presses to his sternum hard enough to ache, and feels, really tries to touch the sensation below and consider it, because when he does, when he’s not lost to fancy, or too overcome with hope tangled with disbelief inside the miracle of his love returned to him—when he reaches down and feels the rhythm—

Eddie knows his heartbeat. Doesn’t everyone, isn’t it the thing that lives in the background perpetually until it surges to the fore to be known in fits and bursts? It’s intrinsic, and Eddie is keenly aware of its deep hum, the music of it. And the thing is: this is still music. Elevated, almost; familiar, and welcome almost beyond what he’s always known, ecstatic to be held and kept, to listen to and feel close, thoughtful the whole of him but—

It is not the same heartbeat he’s lived with all his life. Because it’s not the same heart, either. Because Steve gave him, to keep because mortals needed it; and all the whole Steve had said and held as truth that Eddie was of the, the, he’s—

“Your heart,” Eddie whispers, marvels; doesn’t ask it like a question because as unfathomable as it is, it’s only less so than the depths of the Sea itself and if he takes that for all that it is, takes Steve for all the he says and does and feels clear in Eddie’s own veins, for Steve here and holding him, watching him with affection and unwavering care: there’s a sense in it. It’s impossible, but he felt Steve still beneath his hands. The possible is maybe not so simple an idea to name anymore.

“Your heart,” Eddie says once more, slow and considering, massaging the almost-beat, whole-formed rhythm under his ribs; “because you, you’re,” and he looks askance at Steve, needs his strength again because he can’t say it; in case it is impossible, and it is only for absurdity’s sake that he concocts such foolish fucking notions, he cannot be the one who says it first—

“Because I am the Ocean.”

And of course Steve saves him, steps in to carry him and lend his strength entire without ever needing to be asked. And it’s not as if the words weren’t the ones on Eddie’s tongue, or else, not that close, more stuck in his throat around the sea-sway of his blood rushing, impossible but real. It’s just the way it’s said. The sky is blue. The grass is green. Eddie’s heart belongs to the Sea. The Sea is sometimes a man named Steve.

Eddie’s heart belongs to Steve even stronger, even fiercer; even more.

But…his brain is less quick to be convinced than his heart is, and there are still slivers not of doubt, but of something staticy and numb, catching on the rough snarls of impossible.

“You mean, you’re,” Eddie’s desperate mind grapples, and he thinks it might be something like the death rattle of sanity, on the edge of epiphany; “you’re like,” he clears his throat; “like Poseidon?”

It’s not that it makes more sense; Eddie thinks maybe it’s just an easier scope of a thing to pretend to grasp at.

And Steve, oh…oh his Steve: first he wrinkles his nose, then he lifts it ever so slightly in the air as he huffs a laugh, almost offended by Eddie’s fumbling clinging to the final remnants of what counts among the even tenuously tenable.

He’s so godsdamned beautiful, and Eddie is so irrevocably in love.

“The many gods have liked to play at controlling me, fickle children,” Steve comments flippantly, as if he’s remarking on the shade of the trees against the setting sun, and whether he buys into superstitions for its shade; “they come and they go,” and then his lips curl and his eye sparkle; he looks less idly bothered and more wry, even mischievous:

“I sometimes like to play along in kind, for sport,” he confesses, muffling a spat of laughter into Eddie’s hair; “it is usually enough to spurn them when I stop indulging them,” and spurning gods, in the manner Steve shares it, sounds no less than a giddy fucking lark before Steve tuts, and Eddie can hear the eye roll that accompanies his little dry chuckle as he still downright despairs:

“They always have the fragilest egos.”

And Eddie takes a moment in the lingering levity to ponder just what has become of his life. And yet, in Steve’s arms that are more warmth now than anything else, the hum of his beating life a resonant constant through every place he presses to Eddie’s frame, his breath real and hot through Eddie’s curls, at the shell of Eddie’s ear: he finds an answer to the question land superfluous. He doesn’t truly give a damn what’s become of his life in rational terms. His heart feels back to swelling, so full and stretching further again, like life is soaking back into him, has already made roots to keep once more: for Steve.

Roots…roots, Eddie thinks, somehow made of Steve.

“I am not a god,” Steve huffs a little, and his hair’s mostly human strands when he flips it just the slightest bit; also Eddie would beg to differ, because Steve may not be that sort of his but Eddie’s spent too many hours just staring at him, gazing upon him to not be fully aware and convinced that Steve is a fucking god, so—

“What I am,” Steve leans in pointedly, eyes Eddie so meaningfully; “is the Ocean.”

And again, he says it so…simple. Like it’s a plain fact that requires no context. Like it’s an obvious, commonplace declaration.

Like it makes any godsdamned sense at all but…Steve’s hand is in Eddie’s hand, playing over his knuckles, and okay. Okay.

Eddie can try to…figure out what that means.

“So,” he draws out, impressed his voice is a little more of a human sound now, just Steve’s presence, his proximity, his living-breathing realitypumping life into the cracks of him;

“Like a naiad?” Eddie ventures, because his mother told him other stories, when she told him of the shell-secrets; “or a, a nymph?”

Eddie winces at that because no, Steve’s isn’t nymph-like, if the stories were at all to be believed, and even if they weren’t, the name just doesn’t match the touch of him, the body that had laid against his body, the feel of him to stretch and fill—

No. Not a nymph. But when Eddie winces for the suggestion?

Steve laughs, reaches for Eddie’s cheek and draws him into the kind of kiss that’s more smile than anything else, and chuckles warmly as he strokes Eddie’s jaw, the sound just pure joy.

“You have such a lovely mind,” he tells Eddie with nothing but warmth, and wondering; “no, though both have been my companions, from time to time. The sirens and bisimbi, the mermaids and the selkies, the nixie and the kelpies and the kappa, even the rusalki who get a very underserved reputation, they’re actually not bad at all,” Steve tips his head like there’s a story, no, more like so very many stories; “I’ll have to introduce you to a naiad especially, my oldest friend,” Steve’s smiles small, the kind of grin pressed close to the heart and Eddie knows yes, he must meet this naiad—a naiad?! The best friend of the Ocean, who is, just to keep on track, Eddie’s own lover and beloved?!

It is too…it is so much. Yet it is starting to settle like wonderment, like excitement in him. His love is just casually asking him to meet the family, as a matter of course.

What’s the ocean’s equivalent of butterflies in his stomach, given that his blood’s been co-opted by the waves?

“These are creatures and spirits who call me their home,” and no, no, Eddie is not petty as to bristle at someone, anyone, anything else calling Steve home, especially when something of such unthinkable and almost ungraspable magnitude may very well be in the process of being revealed him. Eddie is not that petty.

He’s not.

“But they are not Me.”

And Steve may say it with that simplicity, that almost-flippant obviousness, as if whole concepts of being, of the earth and existing on it, of loving and what a heart can hold: as if he’s not rewriting and remaking them entire as he lies wrapped up around Eddie’s body, as he strokes through Eddie’s hair with…with an uncanny way of watching the wayward waves of his curls, now that he thinks of it, now that he considers the snags Steve never catches as he glided like pure comfort through the strands.

“I am,” Steve toys with his lower lip, so strangely human, so tempting to Eddie’s gaze, Eddie’s own lips; “Elemental, and came to be upon the shaping of their world. Though throughout whole epochs I only changed the stretch and span of my First Form,” and here Steve’s hand pauses, cradles Eddie’s cheek again and looks at him so ducking tender; “it was not until humankind emerged that I strived to match their likeness, and reach to them,” and he wraps his whole hand the at the curve of Eddie’s neck, thumb stroking slow, rhythmic: the goddamn waves at rest under all the sky.

Jesus.

“I have been revered, through the many ages, as if I were a god,” Steve grimaces, confesses it like an embarrassment; “which I worked very hard to learn to see as ignorant flattery, rather than insult—“

“Insult?” Eddie tries very hard to comprehend how seeing Steve for all he is and feeling appropriately worshipful could be anything but just…natural. The proper way of all things.

“The gods are petty and discard their toys when they tire of them!” Steve’s tone is both imperious and indignant, and oh, oh, Eddie didn’t realize he was afraid to miss the catty, petty, adorable side of his beloved, considering he’s turned out to be not only not-human, but to top that, the whole-ass larger part of the world, not merely Eddie’s world alone anymore, but the warmth that rises through him is colored with relief and joy, now, especially as Steve adds, a little haughty:

“I am constant. Reliable. Eternal.”

Ah, yes. There’s his beloved, in as his adorably aggrieved petulance.

But, the choice of words—

“Eternal…” Eddie mouths, the implications swirling, dizzying, almost too vast to conceive let alone accept, but Steve seems to cling to something else, and Eddie doesn’t quite follow, not at first, save for the inexorable, undeniable wash of affection in it all:

“I did not wish to leave you in such distress, love, and I regretted wholly that I could not explain in the moment,” and Steve’s hands on his skin are the only thing holding him together because there’s no need to elaborate, Eddie knows exactly the moment he means, when Eddie's hands felt the lifeblood push out of Steve’s body, felt him fade, felt him—

But Steve is here, and his hands are warm and sure. It still devastates him, but it doesn’t wholly destroy anymore, like this.

“But when another form, a mortal form, sustains a mortal injury,” and Eddie cannot help but whimper a little, but to lean closer into Steve’s solid warmth; “I am bound to retreat to my First Form,” and he goes back to stroking Eddie’s hair, his voice pitch low and soothing like the subtle shift of low tide; “because it isn’t mortal, and such injuries mean nothing to it,” Steve explains in a hush, his voice and the motion of his hands matching the tide-beat in Eddie’s breast in perfect harmony and it doesn’t merely soothe something in him; it starts to truly heal something in him. “I let the waves restore me before I return, but,” and Eddie can hear the drone in Steve’s voice as he admits, so apologetic: “I have never gauged the timing for it all, never had reason to think on it, not until—“

And he cuts off, moans a little in sympathy, in remorse as he gives up on words and pulls Eddie tight to him, back into his chest and it’s odd, because the speed and strength with which he finds himself crushed to that broad chest is impressive, catches Eddie’s clinging hands against his own sternum where his head’s cradled to the center of Steve’s. And it’s not as if he hadn’t spent minutes, maybe hours nestled there as Steve’s body returned to its human appearance, as Steve’s presence proved real and tangible and not just a heartbroken hallucination. But now: now Eddie recognizes something in the heartbeat under him. Because if Steve had lent him some eternal magic from the making of the world, his heart should feel,should sound like the waves beating through his own veins but: no.

No: Steve’s heartbeat is human. And not just human: Eddie knows his own pulse. And that, that is—

“You meant it,” Eddie whispers, because he cannot manage more strength, is too overcome for the reality of it, the crashing impact of the rhythm against his hands versus the percussive drumming under his ear.

“You left me your Heart,” Eddie breathes, can scarcely comprehend, feels tears at his eyes he can’t even explain; “is it—“

“Your own felt in need of restoration, though I think it was simply shock, despair in a moment of high feeling,” and Eddie can feel it under his hand, the more-human flutter that’s pounding like Eddie had expected in his own chest: but there’s something dulled about it, like a shield maybe. Some…protection.

Eddie doesn’t know quite what to make of his heart, literally outside his own body—

“It’s still here, the physical form of it, though it is still troubling that I have to remind you that you very much need to keep that here,” Steve lays his hand on Eddie’s chest, like he could hear Eddie’s thoughts—wonders if he could hear their conclusion too: to live in Steve’s chest would be a gift.

“But there are perks to being of the Earth in this way,” Steve shrugs a little, and massages at Eddie’s chest, the pulse of his own Ocean heart above and stronger than Eddie’s own nestled safe below, Steve’s somehow feeding, sustaining, healing the damage wrought upon Eddie’s mortal heart with a chrysalis of the Ocean, the Heart of the Ocean at that, given to Eddie to help, to keep, to—

“But I would never try to, to drown the precious movements of your perfect self, your beloved heart,” and for the first time in a while Eddie consciously feels his own heartbeat in his own chest kick up toward the blanket of Steve’s Ocean heart and it’s the strangest thing to hear it under his ear the same inside Eddie’s chest, like he’s being tending to on both sides of a coin greater than any man could earn, but then, and more: his Ocean heart trills, like a playful breeze on the water, like it rejoices just for the proof of Eddie’s healing, or Eddie being able to reconstruct himself after breaking entirely: of Eddie’s heart remembering how to beat again when it’d resigned itself to slowly petering out, and in face of losing his everything Eddie’d had no intention to fight it, just to plead the inevitable to hurry itself long, but Steve: Steve had stepped in immediately, threw the core of his eternal fucking being into Eddie’s chest and…prioritized Eddie even as he remade the form holding Eddie now, from the water itself?

Eddie almost can’t breathe for the immensity of it; all for him. How—

“I am sorry that I took it in exchange without asking there and then,” Steve looks down, breaks eye contact for the first time in long enough for the loss to be jarring and Eddie: Eddie extracts one hand from between their chests to catch Steve’s chin and tilt it back up because how could he even begin to consider it something to forgive, not merely saving Eddie’s life but saving, restoring Eddie heart, and with his own—

“Did you think it was a lie,” Eddie breathes, desperate now in this new way this; this need for Steve to comprehend and know through the whole expanse of his elemental being: “did you think it some idle exaggeration, just a silly, mortal whim, every time I pledged that heart, my heart, to you? My everything—“

“I wanted to believe,” Steve demures, almost, while he simultaneously tries to infuse the words so fervently so that the doubt lands not upon Eddie, never upon Eddie, only his only bewilderment, the beautiful idiot, how can he not see his worth; “I wanted to hold it close from the start,” and there’s a heat that spreads through Eddie because he could have, he did, as much as Eddie could throw his everything into the waters far and near. More than he even suspected he was allowed: greedy. Needful.

“I came here seeking you for that very reason, you must know that.”

Eddie blinks; no. No he did not know that, but, now that it’s said, now that Steve’s eye on him are so dark and so deep, gaze unwavering, it, it could; he sees—

“You were,” Eddie grasps back to their meeting, to finding Steve at the first; “you said,” Eddie slides his, replays the first words they exchanged: “disoriented.”

Steve nods, looks pleased to have been remembered so clearly—as if another option existed at all.

“I followed a few schools of fish for company, some with poorer senses of direction than I’d banked on, more dizzying circles were involved than I’d have preferred,” Steve confirms wryly, but then? Then those words snap another puzzle piece into place because:

“Fish,” Eddie exhales, marveling again; “that’s how you—“

“You would not wish to eat the young, anyway,” Steve waves a hand but doesn’t hide a little grin. “Your taste is to those in the lifecycle that have mostly lived out their own purpose, and are then best suited to serve on last purpose,” then he flattens his hand to Eddie’s chest purposefully as he intones: “sustaining you.”

And somehow the magnitude of two things strike Eddie hard in just those words: this is an elemental force responsible for balance among so many things, the lifes and deaths of no just beings but of…so much of the world Eddie knows, and that elemental force is sat before him, cradling him close, valuing him in honest care—him, Eddie fucking Munson—and then second: Eddie loves him so fiercely, the love alone could kill him, and he’d be grateful for the privilege of a death at its hands.

“The gold?” Eddie presses, more pieces falling into place despite world-tilting revelations. “The jewels?”

And Steve just smirks, tilts his head slyly:

“Darling, imagine,” he almost drawls; “would the Ocean not know intimately, where every shipwreck sank?”

And it’s too much, the casual teasing, like the sharing of a secret, the little intimacy, the growing feeling in his chest where his human heart is finding footing, and the Ocean wreathed around it crests in jubilation through his veins: it’s too much.

“I’ve loved you since I was small,” Eddie breathes out, shakes his head slow because no words could say it truer, but they’re far too small nonetheless.

“I know,” Steve nuzzles the cook of his neck; “you piqued my interest from the start. Such conviction. Such feeling. I’ve known worship, but you,” and Steve’s lips graze his skin and Eddie’s pulse skips, and Steve kisses the line of his neck gentle, swift and soft.

“You loved, and you did not waver, or age beyond it,” Steve’s nose brushes Eddie’s hairline as he shakes his head then, and Eddie can feel his awe in it; “it was sustained, like a part of you that you did not outgrow but grew around,” and Steve’s hand curls over to Eddie’s chest again, presses with meaning: “intrinsic. Embedded in you as a rule.”

Eddie breathes in; Steve’s words are like flame to the kindling of his own abandoned, unfinished—he’s ready now to give them.

“I fell in love with you the moment I pulled you onto this ship.”

Because there’s nothing for it but the truth. The fact that Steve could have taken his whole heart; because Eddie meant it the whole time that the Sea had him but to know Steve—

Eddie would deem his life well lived, just to have loved Steve, with all that he is.

Steve stares at him, lips parted, eyes so wide and then he’s reaching, scrambling Eddie’s hands into his own and pressing them between their chests again, his grip so, so strong.

“Which,” Steve marvels, there’s no other word before he heaves a deep breath, seems to gather himself a little bit where he gathers is a solemn place, too far from euphoria, where living should be.

“Eddie,” Steve speaks gently, just firmly. “I am not human.”

And maybe it’s not the appropriate reaction, but Eddie cannot stop the chuckle that bursts out from his lips.

“Yeah,” Eddie huffs fondly; “yeah, I’m seeing that,” and something in Steve does ease at that, something that twinkles in his eyes and quirks at his lips.

“I am considerably less see-through, give me some credit,” he volleys back, and even if it’s a little strained, Eddie is grateful; squeezes Steve’s hands tight.

“You are stunning in every shape and form,” Eddie murmurs, and means it: “as a given,” and he tugs at the last bit of something closer to kelp than hair at the back of Steve’s head; “that is your natural form—“

“First Form.”

Eddie blinks to be interrupted so firmly, so sure, and frowns for the confusion of it.

“What do you mean?”

Steve is silent for a few breaths, and then he starts lacing their clasped fingers, one between them other, meticulous and intertwined.

“When I came to you? I was curious,” Steve says careful, just as meticulous; “but once I found you,” and his breath catches, and the Ocean-heart still blanketing Eddie’s mortal one does the closest thing he can imagining to skipping;

“You were more than I could have imagined.”

The flush that floods Eddie’s cheeks, then, is…a profound, unprecedented thing.

“I have felt, what it means when mortals use the word love,” Steve near-whispers, but alongside the pulsebeat of the Ocean and the fumbling of blood through arteries beside, it is the clearest, most powerful wash of sound? Of >i>feeling:

“I have known it before, though very few times in all of time, a kind of love but Eddie,” and Steve tips his head to kiss their joined hands before looking up, locking his eyes with Eddie’s and somehow its a brand new sensation to stage into them, like Eddie had never seen his whole soul before? Because he’d have known it: what he sees now shines bright enough to blind but much like his heart he feels shielded, protected. Then Steve tests that protection when his next words nearly stop his mending heart entirely:

“I know now what is meant when my kind speaks of love.”

And Eddie can’t quite conceptualize what that entails, which he thinks is the point; but he can feel the echo of it in the Ocean-heart under his breastbone, tendrils almost too much to reach out for but they are of Steve so of course Eddie’s reaches anyway, no question.

“For you,” Steve breathes against Eddie’s ear; “only you.”

And Eddie has to squeeze his eyes shut not this time to save himself from the blinding light of a soul more vast than Eddie can imagine; no. No, this time Eddie has to close his eyes to keep from sobbing. It’s so much.

It is so much, and it is love beyond love and it’s for him.

“And then, I didn’t just feel it,” Steve continues, his tone turning even more dumbstruck, overflowing entirely with awe: “I knew it, returned to me,” and Steve pulls back only enough to narrow his eyes just the slightest bit, like the next thing he’ll say is monumental in ways not touched just yet—almost inconceivable.

“Which is impossible, you understand?” his eyes rove Steve’s face, imploring him to grasp the magnitude, the certainty. “It is impossible for a human to feel love as an immortal feels, and yet,” Steve considers him like an unfashionable thing, like a myth made flesh as he hardly breathes, enamored and awestruck:

“I think you taught me from the very start,” Steve’s smiles grows with every breath, breathtaking and blinding; “you impossible wonder, miracle beyond the laws of being,” he murmurs, tracing eddies gestures so gentle, so reverent:

“You loved with the endlessness of my kind.”

And Eddie…feels the gravity of the statement of it, as one impossible thing. The weight of it as truth, and just for the natural inclination to love Steve in wholeness forever, and no less…

“I felt it from the start, and, here,” Steve touches their joined hands to his own chest, Eddie’s heartbeat there a bird chasing release within and then he turns their grasp to Eddie’s chest, presses their hands him to the center: “here, I can feel it just the same. Undeniable,” he shakes his head but stares at Steve with such wonder, such unending…love.

“Impossible, but unquestionable.”

Eddie feels the tears make their way down his cheeks but thinks nothing of him. He barely breathes, cannot risk shattering this moment of perfect splendor, the kind legends are written about.

“To be with you is the most natural thing I have ever known,” Steve bows his head to the line of Eddie’s shoulder, breathes and balances there as he speaks straight into Eddie skin; “to lie with you is a gift, and a joy,” and his smiles stretches wide where Eddie can feel it, and cannot help but let his own mouth curve to match; “to love and be loved by you is in the scope of the eternal, but the shape of humankind and the form I take to do, to give and receive that, to know that, to be that,” and he glances up then, not all the way but far enough he can look Eddie straight on their his lashes:

“Just because it came after does not mean it is less precious,” he tells Eddie with such feeling; “just because it was not First does not mean it is less,” and suddenly Eddie understands. It is not about the Form.

It’s about loving that much. That…that beyond the entirety of everything.

Eddie’s breath catches more than once and he almost laughs—would, if his breath weren’t already the issue at hand—when the Ocean-heart in him prods at his lungs helpfully, in soul-deep concern, with the protection afforded him as a rule now, it seems; he almost laughs, because how is this reality? How is this his life?

How did he find a love willing to match the way he’s given all of him?

“What does it all mean?” is the way his giddy, wobbly, breathless incredulity comes out. But then it cools, dampens a little as desperation seeps in because:

“Am I,” Eddie swallows hard, still doesn’t try to stop the tears even if they’re sharper, sour;

“Am I allowed to love you?”

Steve’s eyes go wide and he holds Eddie tighter but Eddie has to speak it, he needs to ask and say the words.

“Am I allowed to have you? To >i>keep you?” Eddie chokes on the fear in him, focuses in on the constancy of the wave-beat in his chest not smothering, or downplaying the growing strength of his own human heartbeat as it thunders; just holding it, cradling it almost like it’s treasured.

It makes he feel brave enough to try and be bold enough to act like he believes he deserves either of those things; to ask one more:

“What does it mean, to keep a,” wonder, a marvel, a heart and soul too generous and depthless and enticing and beautiful for this world or any other—

“An Elemental being?”

And something in that questions softens the tightness that had started to settle in Steve’s expression at the questions that had come before and Steve leans, kisses him so light on the surface but so deep that Eddie’s pulse somehow finds, alongside Steve’s heart, a way to pound with at least half the strength of the Ocean in response.

“It means as much of forever as you desire,” Steve mouths against Eddie’s lips then pulls back only to look him straight on when he adds; “and know with everything that less time does not mean lesser feeling.”

He means it. And Eddie believes him. But.

“I don’t want less time,” Eddie’s quick to make clear, to lay his leaping heart bare: “I want all of time, but…”

He trails off, but Steve only leans back in, seals their lips again like reassurance and whispers against him:

“But?”

“I’ll age, and die,” Eddie’s voice is small as he voices the truth of it, the heartbreak at the end of the tale, but further still:

“Is it worth it for you? When my time is,” Eddie shakes his head the slightest bit, unwilling to knock Steve away even an inch; “so small?”

He might fear that the most. Losing Steve at all has already proven unsurvivable. But knowing he’s only wasting Steve’s time—

“Understand me.”

Steve is a being of unfathomable power, Eddie knows this now. But the grandeur, the imperious striking might beneath his words is…undeniable.

“No time, spent with you, is small.”

And Eddie nods, and accepts Steve’s kiss and it’s wild endless depth without question and only with exhilaration, because what more can be done, not in the face of such power.

Not when he’s suggesting, hinting at everything Eddie would ever want.

“I have never given my Heart before,” Steve’s whole hand splays out to cover Eddie's chest, now, his voice lower and a rumble; vulnerable but unafraid; “not ever.”

And there again: the stability that Eddie’s human heart’s reclaiming gives way to trembling, and the beat gets knocked about but then right there is Steve’s heart: wholly given.

For the first time. And to Eddie.

Good fucking gods—

“It would keep you, it you wished it,” Steve tells him, simple and plain again about something Eddie can already tell is about to change his entire world yet again; “you would not wither. You would stay with me hale and whole and vibrant always, until the ending of all things.”

An Elemental being. Eternal in the…literal sense.

Eddie’s flesh heart trembles. His hand goes to cover the steadier one splayed atop it, next to Steve’s own hand.

“Don’t you need it?” Because, because it’s a part of Steve, and not something simple or extraneous, no, it’s his heart—

“Only mortals need a heart inside their breast, and,” Steve pauses, tilts his head; “if you,” and he lifts his eyes, grasps the hand eddie’s not holding to both their hearts inside his chest and lists it ever so tenderly to his lips:

“If you do me the honor of letting me pledge forever, and keeping mine in your sweet breast,” Steve mouths against Eddie’s knuckles, a little bit…shy; “perhaps you’ll be unthinkably generous and allow me to keep yours.”

And fucking hell, in all the history of idiotic questions, of obvious things—

“It is yours,” Eddie drags Steve’s hand from his mouth back to Eddie's chest, both hands there to be so fucking clear: “it is yours.”

And it always was.

And Eddie doesn’t have to think about eternity, or immortality, or forever on this sort of scale. He doesn’t. Because the answer was always and will always be Steve. But once Steve’s kissed him to breathlessness once, twice, their hands still pressed to Eddie’s chest to feel the effect of their fervor on the pounding met with the immediate embrace of Steve’s heart around the whole of it, like the Heart of the Ocean itself relishes the racing of Eddie’s pulse so long as it’s there to hold it safe, and properly adored, all the whole—but once Steve kissed him thoroughly, he leans back and looks Eddie square in the eyes:

“But know this too, my most beloved,” and Eddie’s pulse skips again, and Steve’s heart rejoices again, an addictive sensation is there ever was one:

“You gave yourself to the Sea,” Steve reminds him, as if it’s a thing to ever forget; “if you live and die as your perfect mortal self, in this perfect mortal body,” Steve keeps one hand on his chest but lets the other rove across his ribs, over his arm, up his neck to cup his face:

“If then you are consecrated to me in the end, as humans on the water tend to do,” and Eddie’s heart kicks—and Steve’s holds it dear—at the subtle suggestion of how Eddie thought he lost this, lose all of this—

“I protect and keep every soul that falls into me,” Steve murmurs with the cadence of the water he is, and all the more in him beyond only that; “and you,” he traces Eddie’s lips so gentle: “you would only come home to me in the end either way, if that was still what you wanted.”

Eddie is stunned still, a little, and Steve takes the space to speak further:

“If what you want is forever, the time it takes, whatever the route or its shape, it is,” Steve smiles so sweet, so encouraging; “that is of little consequence to me outside the happiness it brings for you,” and he plays with Eddie’s bottom lip, moves his hand against his chest through the curls there in time with the thump of his human heart.

“Time doesn’t, feel the same, for me,” Steve confesses, again apologetic all of a sudden for fuck knows what reason—he is here, alive, their hearts literally belong to each other, and he’s telling Eddie it can be forever, that he would want forever—

“I only knew you were hurting so badly when you spoke to me, and I was shaped enough in this form to know your distress,” Steve confesses, and it takes Eddie a moment to put it in context: before. Hours before and yet lifetimes before, it feels so far in so many ways from here: “I focused mostly on keeping your body safe,” he adds but quickly, like he sees it as an excuse he doesn’t deserve to lean on; “I am sorry you were in such pain for so long before I was strong enough to come to you,” and that part he says, far too close to something like a failing.

“Forgive me?” and his eyes are so big and Eddie wants to laugh but he can’t, he can’t, he just needs Steve to know— “You’re alive,” are the only words that come before Eddie kisses Steve with everything he has, and presses their hands again to his unbridled pulse, hoping he’s desperate enough, and that Steve’s own heart next to the pounding can feel enough, to know the rest with absolute certainty.

“Oh, sweet angel,” Steve mouths against him, and the tone is watery; Eddie knows he feels the breadth of what Eddie needs him to know; “my angel.”

“Yours,” Eddie nods; “entirely yours,” and he kisses Steve hard, just shy of rough before he pants between them, their foreheads bowed together.

“Entirely yours, and here to feel it, to be held in your arms,” Eddie shakes his head and beams at Steve; still holds his hand right to his heart:

“There is nothing to forgive.”

And Steve gapes at him a moment before he starts to speak:

“You are a,” but he doesn’t finish, just dives back in and kisses Eddie with an abandon that Eddie suspects only the elemental beings that shape the foundations of the world can reach, and love enough to drag mere mortals to the brink of alongside them.

When they part Eddie is weightless, buoyed on a novel ecstasy, but Steve is clasping their hands against his raving heartbeat somehow all the tighter.

“The love you’ve given to me wasn’t a thing I knew I could wish for,” Steve murmurs low; “but can you feel, here?”

And somehow Eddie knows Steve doesn’t mean the rabbiting of the flesh heart, he means the Ocean-heart, and how it flawlessly anticipates and shapes itself to Eddie’s human heartbeat, dances with it like an art form: immaculate.

“It never moved like that, before you.”

And somehow hearing those words are what breaks Eddie open, and leaves him to choke on a sob and cling to Steve because…

What else do you do in the face of the impossible? In the fulfillment of your every dream?

“You not only have the heart of the Ocean,” Steve breathes against Eddie's temple now, holding him close. “You are my heart. You reshaped and remade it indelibly. No matter what you choose, or how,” Steve flattens eddies palm against its rhythm: “it will never be as it was.”

Then he nudges his nose at Eddie’s jaw until their eyes meet and he says more like a bow:

“I will never be as I was.”

And part of Eddie wants, needs to sob some more; but more of Eddie needs Steve to understand one more thing, beyond any lingering doubt:

“I surrendered myself to the Sea,” and now it’s Eddie who can speak truth plain, and simple, when they are both even if they’re also life-altering and heart-shaping and soul-making, too: “and I know you are the Sea but,” and he reaches, then, and cradles Steve’s face in both hands:

“I give myself, heart and soul, to you,” because Eddie thinks the secrets the Sea whispered to him inside shells were his heart, sure, but that was the point. Because his heart is Steve’s now, and Steve’s is his, and maybe the secret was always that secret. Eddie gave his heart to the Sea before he knew there was more beyond to give to.

The secret was always Steve, wonder beyond and above all wonders.

And here they are.

“Forever,” Eddie tells him with no hesitation; gasping a little, heart tripping a little but always into the hold of Steve’s own, a home already, and better suited than Eddie’s chest alone had ever been. “I want forever. If you want—“

And with Steve’s lips on his immediately, rapturously, giving and taking, gifting and treasuring every offering that is Eddie, only Eddie, all of Eddie—

Hell, even without any of that: Eddie knows from the Heart around his heart and the way it moves—as it never has before, and Eddie knows—to curl around him with such absolute certainty, to almost nestle against him inside his chest like he’s making a home there for always, a life eternal protecting the heart he’s stretched around?

Steve wants forever, too.

✨permanent tag list: OPEN (lmk if you want to be added/removed): @pearynice @hbyrde36 @slashify @finntheehumaneater @wxrmland @dreamwatch @perseus-notjackson @estrellami-1 @bookworm0690 @imhereforthelolzdontyellatme @nerdyglassescheeseychick

divider credits here & here & here & here

🌊ao3 link here

[hitlikehammers]

The After the Sex and the Love and the Calm Storm (Steddie Pirate AU)

(I regret to inform you this is the end storm wherein bad things do in fact befall the boys)

🌊Under the Water (Our Hearts Will Dream Again)🌊

Chapter Six: Quite So Cruel

ONE // TWO // THREE // FOUR // FIVE // Chapter Six on 5 April 🌊

also on ao3

They are about as far from land as they ever venture—they’re risk-takers, and they’re foolish, the lot of them, you don’t become a pirate in the abundance of fucking self preservation and brains—but they’re not suicidal.

So: this is familiar, but further would be more than they venture toward.

That’s not to say others abide by the same limitations.

Steve stiffens in Eddie’s arms for no apparent reason; though the important observation is apparent, because Steve…does very little without reason.

He grabs Eddie’s hand, squeezes it and draws it to his lips for a kiss to the knuckles before untangling himself where they’d simply been resting, pressed body to body in comfort, where if Eddie concentrated very hard he could make Steve’s pulse out where he sprawled in Steve’s lap, pressed tight to his chest; but then Steve’s standing, letting go of Eddie’s hand with an apologetic grimace before he breathes low:

“Only a moment, angel,” and Eddie does melt easily at such ineffable endearments; “just need to test the currents.”

Which isn’t outside the norm, by any means: Eddie doesn’t comprehend how it’s done, or what it entails, or indeed the purpose it serves but Steve stands—sometimes with Eddie at his side—

Only…it’s not sometimes that Eddie’s stands at his side.

It’s most times. All times, Eddie would venture the wager blind.

Which sinks through the split of his heart right to his guts, when he lets the implications of this time, pursued alone, to sink in.

Eddie is barely on his feet to follow Steve unbidden, heart ricocheting, quaking from his ribcage and up his throat, when his arm is caught. All motion in his frame arrested for the hand on his sleeve, clenched around his limb: vise-tight and commanding, unforgiving, but desperate.

Eddie looks up, knows the touch is not its tenor simply for the shape of the hand, and Eddie needs to amend his assessment: his figure is frozen. His lungs are stuck.

His heart is shaking, for the wide frenzy in Steve’s eyes.

“They are almost upon us,” Steve pants, chest heaving, his hands on Eddie heavy, his hold so impossibly tight; “too swift and too much heft,” and his face drops, his breath catches and his eyes look bright almost stung to tears as he reaches a hand, cups Eddie’s face so soft, almost terrifying for how it juxtaposes to the death-grip he keeps on Eddie’s shirt, Eddie’s arm.

Eddie can near feel the break of his vessels to shape a bruise in the shape of Steve’s hand and he hates, he hates how his mind immediately whispers poison:

To keep for when he’s go—

No. No, Eddie doesn’t even know what’s happening, what’s the matter; he can’t afford to jump to conclusions—

His heart won’t withstand jumping to those conclusions—

The rest of the ship takes time to be roused, and if they did not trust in Steve’s uncanny intuitions they’d stay put but he’s not been wrong yet: a vessel is gaining on them, larger but somehow faster, pirates alike but no pirate crew is an ally to another, especially not in open waters, and Steve is certain they seek to do harm. They seek to plunder, certainly. But then: worse.

Eddie grabs for him, pulls him around a corner and asks how he knows it’s worse, where his fear is rooted and Steve stares at him, those sea-shift eyes flashing before he grabs Eddie’s face and draws him in, kisses him harder and needier than he’s ever done before and Eddie’s heart skips then surges for all the worst reasons when Steve pulls back, bows his head to Eddie’s brow and breathes:

“Blood,” and Eddie shivers for the closeness, for the word, for the promise of violence in the waves; “blood in the air, in the water,” and how Steve knows Eddie cannot guess, supposes it another talent learned where he hails from a world away, but Eddie never once thinks to question it. Because this is Steve, with whom he shares a bed. With whom he shares his heart.

If he’d had doubts, though, the way Steve looks at him—soft but unafraid, remorseful and yet so tender as he traces Eddie’s features, caresses his face; Eddie could never question this. No part of it. Not for an instant.

“I am sorry, my darling,” Steve breathes almost sorrowful, and the tides dip a little, the ship along their lead, as if Steve’s grief is deep enough to stir the fathoms below; “I’d have stopped them if I could.”

And Eddie cannot have that sorrow for nothing; reaches swift to catch Steve’s hands and brings them close first to his lips, then to his chest.

“You’re not to blame for pirates who seek to raid other pirates,” Eddie reasons, lifting one hand back now to cup Steve’s cheek just as dear, likely moreso, unable and unwilling to mask the depth of his feelings in a moment such as this. “It comes with the territory,” he tries to lighten the breaths between them, tries to reassure and steel them as one, together and united.

And Steve does not deny him, but outstrips him without seeming to intend it at all: he stares at Eddie as if he sees him in shades and frames beyond the perception of an ordinary man, watches him as if he can see the pump of his heart stripped bare and still he is steadfast: steadfast and unwavering, but then atop it all he is dangerous and somehow alight as he vows:

“I will not let you come to harm.”

And he draws Eddie in to kiss near violent for feeling, but this Eddie won’t be outstripped in, and meets him for every scrape of teeth and thrust of tongue.

And when Steve pulls away, the cries of the approaching enemy no longer approach, no: now they are here—but when Steve moves to meet them, Eddie stops him, traps their hands together against Eddie’s fitful heart and breathes:

“I pledge the same.”

And Steve’s eyes do impossible things, catch impossible light, before they settle on a soft regretful thing, an affection that fears but will not yield, and he holds tight to Eddie’s hand as he leads them to where the noise grows, swells: they’re being boarded.

“Stay close,” Steve breathes as he reaches for the pistol at his hip.

“Steve, I,” Eddie isn’t even sure what he means to say but Steve halts it quick enough he has no reason to learn; jerks him to a stop and hisses with the depth of an Ocean until himself:

“Stay close,” and Eddie nods, words beyond him, and draws a sword. Steve eyes him sharply.

“They will not all keep to the blade,” he warns, and Eddie nods, understands, then tips his head to Steve’s own firearm.

“I am quicker with this,” he assures, and Steve, bless him, doesn’t argue, doesn’t quest: trusts in kind.

Eddie’s heart still proves fool enough to swell, even as they cross into the fray.

They’re surprisingly not wildly outnumbered, and the invading parties expected to catch them wholly unawares: they press an advantage for it, and more than even the odds within mere minutes. But once they are evened, Steve is correct: they favor pistols.

And they are quicker than Eddie with them.

Eddie watches his crewmates fall, and slits throats without thought, quick and reliable, one after the next and they fall, and he doesn’t bother to think that he hasn’t found need to dodge a blade or a bullet yet, especially as his compatriots cry out or fall still and half-cold before they even can.

He doesn’t think, until he feels the impact: not of a bullet. Not of a blade.

But a body. One he knows so well, so intimately, pushing him with a purpose.

The way it slumps, a good five feet from where Eddie lands, and the groan that creaks from that direction, the way beloved hands clutch against the broad span of a chest: Eddie’s entire world shudders, goes dark at the edges when it becomes very fucking clear what the purpose was.

He sees the perpetrator, stalking close to finish the job and Eddie doesn’t think, sees the gleam of a gun held loose in dead hands and he grabs, aims, and pulls the trigger. And again. And again.

When he is certain the assailant is good and dead, he scrambles to Steve, still splayed on the deck, still clutching his chest.

His chest blooming red swift beneath his palms.

“How,” Eddie gasps, his vision still tunnelled, his tongue too thick; “why did you—“

“You were about to come to harm,” Steve croaks, simply, but as if the words cost him gravely; “what did I say, about that?”

He quirks a brow, even as the stain spreads beyond the cover of his hands, stretches rhythmically, as if, as if…

“Steve,” Eddie gasps, pleads, breaks because the stain spreads to a rhythm, and the would is in his chest—

Eddie reaches, moves Steve’s hands that are just resting, barely keeping pressure, and tries not to think of what it means that Steve maybe cannot hold with pressure as he leans his weight, his whole self onto Steve’s chest, the flutter of his heart that’s coloring his clothes, that’s draining his flesh to match the moonlight: far too pale already and no, no—

“But I gave you my heart,” Eddie insists, confounded, because the scene before him is impossible, it’s not possible even as that same heart trips frantic; even as he’s just barely keeping the words from spilling forth on a sob; “I gave you my heart, so you’ll be fine,” because he will, he must be, Steve must be; “you’ll be fine, because it’s still beating,” and Eddie’s hold is pressed tight to the hole ripped through Steve’s chest but he can feel the beating beneath it, because he can hear his own pulse in tumult but Steve’s heart is slower, the gush of blood between Eddie’s fingers gentler, the pulse driving it is sedate, even; is slowing, is fading, is leaving—

Eddie’s breath only manages to barely wheeze from his lips in a whine, because this cannot, he cannot—

“The heart of the whole Ocean, you said it,” Eddie gasps, whimpers, pleads because Steve told him, because Steve said so, and—

“The Seas would be dry, and I would be dust if you,” Eddie shakes his head, rakes denial over hot coals that will envelop him if he cannot blink and awake for: this nightmare, this hell, this—

Steve’s shirt is crimson, now; the blood pooling its own ocean beneath him, soaking the boards. Eddie cannot breathe.

“Beloved,” Steve barely manages to mouth the words, but Eddie feels them in the way his blood insists on continuing to move, and the same in the way Steve’s seems impossible to tempt into staying in motion, staying with Eddie—

“Take my heart, in this,” and somehow he mustered the strength to cover Eddie’s hand over the barest twitching left in it; “it’s been yours already, long enough,” and then Steve’s hand slips, and the less-than-a-beat under Eddie’s palm flees, and he presses harder, he tries to find it, how could he have lost it, where is it, where is—

“Steve?” Eddie is foolish enough to choke the name, when everything in him knows, and refuses to accept, that there will be no answer.

Ever again.

“No,” his voice shakes, though its steadier than any other part of him, and then, then—

There are no words for the sounds that escape him, animal and visceral, wrung to splatters and shattered beyond recognition, to less now than dust: more fitting, in honesty, than any words could have struck.

There are no curses, in any language or tongue, fit for gods quite so cruel.

✨permanent tag list: OPEN (lmk if you want to be added/removed): @pearynice @hbyrde36 @slashify @finntheehumaneater @wxrmland @dreamwatch @perseus-notjackson @estrellami-1 @bookworm0690 @imhereforthelolzdontyellatme

divider credits here & here & here & here

🌊ao3 link here

[hitlikehammers]

The Sex Really, It's Just Feelings and Sex Calm Before The Storm (Steddie Pirate AU)

(because nothing BAD could POSSIBLY HAPPEN to them in the REMAINING THREE CHAPTERS OR ANYTHING 👀)

🌊Under the Water (Our Hearts Will Dream Again)🌊

Chapter Five: The Heart of the Ocean

ONE // TWO // THREE // FOUR // Chapter Six on 3 April 🌊

also on ao3

It isn’t even a gradual shift, exactly. Not all of it, at least.

One wildly successful raid that funds the warming of the beds of the crew come next dock? That alone earns Steve and Eddie appreciation: Eddie’s called Munson without a single modifier on the name for the first time…ever on this ship. Steve gains a certain…deference. It’s probably the lack of any lingering suspicion toward him matched with respect but…it feels a little biblical-parting-of-the-Sea, if Eddie’s honest. Not that he’s complaining. It has its perks.

Not least among them an understood avoidance of the overhang near the bow after full-dark. Because there are no dunes to hide in on a ship and…well.

Once Eddie’s had Steve, like this? Like hell he intends to stop.

And if Eddie’s of such a mind? Steve is…intent near-beyond human reason. He is insatiable, but at the same time the most tender, most attentive, most intuitive partner—no. Most giving and generous and talented and staggeringly skillful lover, that Eddie’s ever had the privilege to touch, to feel, to take inside himself like he’s made to be there only and always.

And it takes only one near-brush with their nightly routine, the first sunset after that first raid—the boy Emerson being canny enough to take the hint of Eddie’s admittedly unrestrained moans, because restraining any reaction to Steve’s ministrations would be unfathomable as a universal rule, how he stretches Eddie like he’s delicate and still resilient, like he is known wholly in solidity, none of the weaknesses and faults he’s been highlighted for his entire life: Steve’s lips and Steve’s hands erase them entirely as his deft fingers quirk in angles more perfect, almost incomprehensible as they seem to swell, the rise of a tide almost within Eddie’s body to fill him better than he’s ever known, to nip at the most sensitive of his flesh like Scylla and suck at the tender rim of him like godsdamned Charybdis, and it’s impossible, Eddie is certain that it’s impossible to slip one’s tongue across the nub of pure abandon inside of him but sometimes Steve will place lips to the puckered center at the cleft between his cheeks and somehow slide the rush of pure sensation, the rightness Eddie’s chased his whole entire life—

Well. Eddie challenges anyone not to tremble, not to be dismantled, not to come wholly undone cry to the heavens and beg to the Sea below—and, in fairness.

Emerson was sharp enough to turn heel before he laid eyes on them, and ran his gob predictably to warn off the rest because the crew is depraved, but voyeurs among their own?

They’d prefer not.

Regardless: it’s a shift in esteem, really, that first time the ship’s laden with loot, after weeks of full bellies and pockets for trading the rest of their catch. And Eddie doesn’t mind it one bit—most significantly for how it allows him to…not merely indulge the glory of falling into Steve, of sinking wholly into his presence and power everywhere surrounding Eddie, pumping into him like he pumps Eddie’s blood, conducting his heartstrings like a song; more than.

It's rightness, and homecoming, pure belonging and release and above that, encompassing that: a beauty in it that thrums in Eddie’s veins so much like the tide, in and out, in and out: promising endlessness, somehow—more impossibilities.

But still without question.

So then, when it happens again—two ports, two hauls in a row: unprecedented luck, to be sure. But hell if Steve’s not offered a berth, which Eddie’s never seen a single member of the crew offered, ever—was not even aware they had those and Steve seems hesitant, aware he’s cutting corners somehow that the crew seems mostly too in awe of the gold on top of all the fish of late to wholly protest; Steve’s hesitant, until his eyes rake up and down Eddie’s frame, top to toe, and accepts the offer, graciously despite the catcalling of the men who noticed his not-at-all-discrete appraisal.

Eddie’d blushed, and dared to fear reprisals from the crew for the favoritism but there was…a shift, in Steve, as soon as he offered his hand to Eddie and didn’t lead him, walked at his side like an equal into modest but private quarters.

Eddie’s heart had leapt when Steve had fucked him in the open air, still, hands twined tight, before making love to him in their quarters—theirs, unquestioned—and perhaps they never use the word, and perhaps Steve only touches him with the feeling, and doesn’t feel it in his own chest, but Eddie feels it in every motion, every brush of skin, every breath and word and through the bones of his body, with certainty.

And that holds weight either way.

By the time their fortunes on land fill coffers and slake lists a full three times in a row, though? Eddie, Steve, or both together might have had a good case for mutiny, just for the lock on a door in the Captain’s Quarters—and would have had a strong shot to gain it in full, too; they’d grown close to revered.

Steve rationalized it all easily: middling ports attract many ships in distress, there are often coves with hidden bounty never retrieved, for every time the distress proved just too great—Eddie’s never heard of such a thing but perhaps there was sense in it. Certainly proof in his hands, all their hands for Steve’s cunning. Plus, as Steve argued: piracy upon the pirates, it actually seemed quite neutral from an ethical perspective, for Eddie’s benefit. And he leaned into Eddie when he said it, every time, and Eddie’s heart swelled so often as a result he feared for the integrity of his ribs, but also.

He welcomes the way this feeling will overcome his own skeleton one day. He relishes knowing his bones will be found some day hence by pirates of another age to ask why his, unlike his comrades, were blasted outward from within.

What a privilege that would be. Will be.

For Eddie’s part, though: he doesn’t question it. Any of it, really. He’d kept a firm stance on the question of looking gift-washed-up-on-his-metaphorical-shore in the mouth from the beginning. He had no desire or intention of looking this gift-born-miracle-lain-wonder-of-wonder-at-Eddie’s-own-feet as anything less than a boon, and a miracle, and the most precious thing Eddie’s ever beheld with his gaze, let alone held in his own hands.

And Eddie has spent his life beholding his beloved Sea.

So part of Eddie is uncomprehending, though it is a small inconsequential part. The other part, that knew his love would need to comprehend his heart was with the Sea—that other, larger part wonders if the Sea would share. He does not wish to take his heart back whole and yet—

Steve must have it just as much. Whether Steve wishes to give in kind is immaterial. Steve has as much right to his heart, now, as the water‘s lain claim to it, always.

Anyway.

It’s how they lie now, bare and entangled, salt of exertion matching salt on the wind; thoroughly sated and smiling to the stars, and truly: all the better that the crew’s mostly just taken to deferring to them in their odd little ways; that Steve finds it baffling, and Eddie finds it hilarious.

This way, they can hold these moments sacred. His thighs astride Steve’s hips until they burn. Steve’s body, and how it moves against Eddie’s and never ceases, never serves to be any less a revelation, even as it remains incomprehensible for it. The way he moves that’s not even againstEddie, really, no: it’s a glide, a give, a flow around and into every part of Eddie he didn’t know within himself had been waiting not merely to be touched, but to be found, awoken almost inhuman, beyond the moral coil and something transcendent. Steve’s hands idly cupping him long after he’s spent, cleaning him pristine like he cannot bear to leave a drop of Eddie to the cool night, greedy and adoring all at once, and it never mattered that the touch was never coaxing, never expectant, more a soft way to just hold onto more of Eddie—it taught Eddie’s heart to pound in a whole new way: contented beyond measure, but wildly overfull, only able to beat with all that it has.

It’s like that, here; now.

It’s magical.

And then Steve’s free hand twines with his, Steve’s lips come to Eddie’s as their fingers fold between each other’s: and Steve has this ineffable flavor, salt but not like food, or even just like waves but closer—it’s like what Eddie imagines salt strikes on an elemental level, pure and addictive, sweet underneath and savory everywhere, an indulgence that’s offered to Eddie without limits so that he can be greedy and adoring, too; and then now, he tastes himself under Steve’s tongue and that’s, that’s—

That tangles with the heady pulse of him and ramps it up a little bit extra. Just because; just as he kisses all the deeper.

They pull apart only when they’re gasping, smiling in the parting so wide, so overcome as Steve traces Eddie’s lips, his jaw, his cheekbones; as Eddie admires the splay of Steve’s lashes, diaphanous like sea foam—the freckling on his neck so like constellations guiding his eyes home, his hands true.

And Eddie thinks he might fall asleep despite the thrumming of his heartbeat, he is so impossibly…happy but then—

“Listen,” Steve’s mouth is at his ear, the word mostly breath. All Eddie hears are the waves—agitated. Or, no. No: just stirred to motion. They’re not angry. They’re…

“Now feel,” and Steve brings their still-laced hands together and presses them to Eddie’s chest where he can feel the heavy beat and it skips—the water sloshes below—and Eddie feels, and listens, and is breathless, and listens: the waves undulate too fierce, no reason, save that they match—

“Yours truly is the heart of the Ocean,” Steve kisses along his jaw, presses tighter to his chest until his mouth makes its way there, kisses Eddie’s pounding heart: “through and through.”

It’s an impossibility. It’s nonsensical. But…Eddie is in love; his heart is in that water as much as in Steve’s chest.

Maybe some impossibilities are a given.

✨permanent tag list: OPEN (lmk if you want to be added/removed): @pearynice @hbyrde36 @slashify @finntheehumaneater @wxrmland @dreamwatch @perseus-notjackson @estrellami-1 @bookworm0690 @imhereforthelolzdontyellatme

divider credits here & here & here & here

🌊ao3 link here

[hitlikehammers]

Fail Pirate!Eddie, Meet Your Competency Kink (Steddie Pirate AU)

🌊Under the Water (Our Hearts Will Dream Again)🌊

Chapter Three: A Three-Part Harmony

CHAPTER ONE // CHAPTER TWO // Chapter Four on 30 March 🌊

also on ao3

“I’m kind of wretched at this.”

Eddie sighs and honestly only keeps from tossing his fishing pole because Steve is nearby, and to risk harming Steve feels like a blasphemy he’d be committing against gods he’s never even heard of.

Because Steve is on a slightly-larger boat—not significantly, no one has any sudden burst of faith in Eddie’s abilities here, but it does hold two grown men and that’s an upgrade for certain—but Steve is with him, not quite a member of the crew proper but a member of something not-quite-nameable but oddly-universally-accepted (even the cat who pops up unexpectedly on board that no one can agree on whether it’s a demon or a ghost) as a member of the crew. His purpose is unspecified. His tenure undetermined. But his presence is taken as a given, now, and a quick turnaround with the decision for it, too. Eddie’d like to take the credit with his wordsmithery—Steve had escaped a painfully-forced marriage born of well-intended interference to stop a trampling, without knowing he was saving the governor’s daughter and securing her arranged betrothal in the heroics, and the only thing Eddie regrets about the tale is he truly maligned a nonexistent woman to make her unbearable, but it’s barely a regret at all, given how Steve had laughed like starlight when Eddie’d thrown theatrics into the planning, the man still half-dressed in a bed, and Eddie had never felt his heart thump quite like that sounds had managed before, but oh, it had only been a taste of what was to become commonplace—regardless. Steve had secreted the sympathies of the crew for the misfortunes endured for the wiles of women, and his presence was unquestioned, now.

To Eddie’s combined delight, with the constant risk to his sanity, not to mention—again—the safe and healthy cadence of his pulse in the man’s presence: the former holding most tenuous, while the latter being a wholly lost cause.

The delight, though, is worth both and more, at least tenfold.

He doesn’t even mind Steve’s smile, teasing but the sort as if they’re in on the honor together, and perhaps only together, something unique and secreted away for just they two: but regardless of Eddie’s whimsies, he doesn’t mind a bit when Steve grins at Eddie’s wholly accurate confession of being useless at fishing—obviously, though with Steve himself being the glorious and most wondrous kind of exception—and replies deadpan as anything:

“I’m aware.”

Which, oddly: one of Eddie’s favorite things about Steve is that he doesn’t try to placate Eddie with false comfort, but he also never mocks his ineptitude, in fact he frowns full-stop when the crew gets on a tear for it.

Eddie sighs in resignation, and moves to raise the line to try again, but Steve is quick, grabs it from midair and swings it in the blink of an eye to hold close in his palm.

Not-oddly, but very inconveniently, it turns bone dry in Eddie’s mouth merely for the show of skill.

“Your bait is poor,” Steve proclaims, thumbing around the worm that…looked fresh enough to Eddie’s wholly-untrained eyes; “and your hook,” Steve tuts, taking the metal between his fingers and bending it, squinting at his handiwork before humming and handing it back.

Eddie thinks perhaps he needs a break. A breather. A…moment to collect himself.

He hadn’t realized just how arousing competency was for him, before this moment. Certainly an indictment of the caliber of man he’s shared a ship with thus far.

But when he takes his seat, he nearly yelps when he doesn’t look, doesn’t think as to where he looks to take his rest, or better: what sits uponthe surface already.

Because Eddie, he…

He never steps aboard a vessel of any sort, without a shell to hand.

He huffs a little laugh, rubbing at the bit of flesh at the flank of him it bit into, and raising the conch he’d ferried aboard in the morning smile at, only catching Steve’s questioning gaze when Eddie lifts it by rote, pure muscle memory, to his ear.

“My mother,” Eddie breathes into the golden-hour, watches the waters sway like they just want to move, to live in the warm glow; “she told me that this was how the Sea shared its secrets,” then he drops the shell only to catch it near his hips with a flip, a little trick he’s mastered; a little desperation he’s never shaken: never let a shell fall.

Never once, since—

“My drunken father set me straight to tell me it’s just the echo of your blood pumping in your ears,” he taps his chest, then the lobe of his ear, sucks his cheeks inward as he tips his head knowingly; like it’s silly, but also like it hurts. Like it still hurts.

Eddie lets himself breathe in the golden air a little more, like a steadying hand in the more reflective calm along the surface of it: the waves themselves that shift around them, that seem to take cues and give hints back and forth with that air in a sparkling champagne dance: they’re not steady, save in their constancy.

But how are they anything but grounding, when their motion meets the motion beneath the surface of every man, the waves of his own beating blood: how is it anything but homecoming and soft stillness?

It is that and more for Eddie, always, and so he breathes, and he breathes, and he can speak again:

“I know he meant to ruin it for me,” Eddie nods to the horizon line, but it’s strange, or else just new: Eddie’s awareness of his surroundings is decent, had to be with his upbringing, but the way he’s aware of Steve’s presence isn’t even something he has to try for. It’s just…it’s just there, and was from the start.

So he knows when Steve steps closer.

He lets himself take the steadiness from the air, and the water held inside it; lets himself have one more deep breath, then.

“But from the day he said it, it felt even more magical, more perfect,” Eddie confesses, he thinks for the first time out loud and there’s no why he can pinpoint, just an urge natural, like the Ocean’s dance, to share this thing that sits in his chest and weighs his every move, left or right, forward of aft; “because why did it have to be one or the other? Why didn’t the fact that I heard my own heart mean the Ocean was moving in my veins, too,” and his eyes have slipped closed in that way that lets you trace lightning-lines behind the lid-backs, and he smiles as his palm rests against the center of his chest while he breathes, breathes:

“Secrets and life-sparks alike with every beat,” Eddie takes to drumming against his own ribs from the outside like a duet, save no, no it’s a three-part harmony, the sweetest in the cosmos: hand, heart, and the mighty whisper of all the Sea’s confidences.

“The waves,” Eddie exhales, just to breath in the sweet brine of the expansive waters, a balm to every part of him; “I always,” he shakes his head and massages his chest a little, hard enough to feel out the bones: “it’s not even that it just soothes me, or makes me feel,” he sighs, and opens his eyes, looks upon the majesty before him, and, and—

He thinks he feels a majesty not so different, not lesser and maybe not wholly separate in Eddie’s own chest, having taken yet another step closer while he’d left his eyes shut.

“It feels right,” Eddie looks behind him, over his shoulder; Steve is close, and the sun is catching his eyes fit truly to glow from within and Eddie will swear for all time that it’s the almost otherworldly shine that pulls the words further from his lips:

“I always imagined falling in love would feel,” Eddie starts, nearly whispers, drags his stare from Steve’s eyes but that just leaves his gaze to fall square on those lips, slick for no reason and so plump and dark that they do no less than the man’s eyes to steal Eddie’s breath, make the last of his words more motion than sound:

“That love would be the way I feel when I hear the waves.”

Eddie turns back to stare at the endless Sea for a time, then, and breathes, breathes, breathes—depends upon the familiar scent, and taste, and weight on the air to right him.

It works, a little. Because in the same moments: Steve doesn’t move. Remains; steady on his own.

“If the Ocean had a heartbeat,” Eddie finds himself murmuring almost without thinking, almost solely from his own heart, propelled by its own beats; “I imagine this,” and he breathes in deep for it, because it is whole truth, and no exaggeration, when he speaks of it the same as love: “enrapturing, this,” he gestures at the expanse of the water, the way peaks of foam, momentum rises a little higher, now, but somehow do not shake their boat one bit.

“Power beyond power,” Eddie shakes his head, in wonder now; “encompassing,” and he takes in the scene of it, never once less than the first time, always also newly profound, and then he pauses, feels Steve closer beside him, if only just, and chuckles. Does not blame the sun for the way his cheeks flush as he huffs:

“I sound fairly heartsick, don’t I?”

Because he does. Maybe he is. Steve, in his goodness, does not mock him. Is steady, and yet, his presence seems to give around Eddie’s somehow. Like some imperceptible dance.

“Though I do think, should I be lucky enough to stumble across another love?” Eddie adds, and knows full well it makes him sound no less pathetic with it all; “I hope their heartbeat makes me feel like the Ocean’s,” and he does hope that, he hopes that with all that he has, but then alongside:

“And also that they’d forgive, even if they couldn’t understand,” Eddie breathes a little quieter, now; “how I gave my heart to the water years ago.”

Because any lover would always need to understand: he was meant to be with the Sea.

He doesn’t actually know how long he stares at the waters before he laughs at himself and turns fully back to his companion.

“Apologies,” he bows his head, but Steve merely stills, his confusion painted on his features.

“Whatever for?”

“I have to sound mad,” Eddie points out, no question in it whatsoever; “and that leaves you stuck on a boat with a madman,” he laughs again, but Steve?

Steve doesn’t.

“I’ll tell you once more, as I told you the first time,” Steve considers him carefully, oh-so-serious; “I would never say that I am stuck with you.”

And if that doesn’t light something stunning and warm in Eddie’s breast, he’s not sure whatever could hope to. He feels himself flush, blames the feeling and the dying sun—their time waning—as he moves to busy himself with the pole to try one last time to secure a single fucking fishto take back to the ship.

“Is that how you cast a line?” Steve comments playfully as Eddie reels back to toss, but stops with theatrical offense before handing the pole to Steve pointedly.

“You do better, then.”

“Alas,” Steve shakes his head, palms out to decline as he wanders to the edge of the boat; “I don’t fish.”

“But you know,” Eddie doesn’t ask, because Steve’s critiques have not been idle. The man has knowledge—

Then Eddie’s crying out, because Steve’s bending dangerously unbalanced over the boat toward the water both hands beneath the surface, feet barely set aboard and Eddie does not wish to lose him to the waves again, it was frightening enough when he had no sense of the man; he cannot imagine losing him now—

And then the wet plop of a dozen…fish. They’re fish, wriggling but not like they would at the end of a line, just…there, out of their element, and then:

“Like that,” Steve breathlessly nods, dropping four more fish from his hands as he springs back full-footed into the boat and nods at Eddie’s abandoned fishing pole; “I don’t fish like that.”

Eddie thinks he’s allowed the moments he spends simply staring; gaping.

“How—“

“Just a skill,“ Steve merely shrugs; “we learn it where I’m from.”

Eddie would love to know where in the whole of the entire world summoning fish into one’s bare hands is a common skillset.

“They are not of sickly stock,” Steve insists, as if he needs to, as if there’s some modicum of distrust where none has existed from the very start; “not touched by what ailed me upon arriving here, I swear it.”

And Eddie wants to ask, wants to know what harmed this man, what brought such perfection in his low—still perfect, still blinding but pained, harmed, to the point where even when Eddie knew nothing of him he was pained in kind but know, Eddie aches to think of Steve come to any harm.

And yet he is curious.

“They seem almost,” Eddie takes a fish in hand—the perfect size and weight, impossible; “almost docile.”

Then Steve is close at his shoulder, and when he speaks Eddie feels it on his skin; Eddie’s heart leaps and takes to racing:

“Fish don’t have intelligence such as you and me,” Steve explains simply, voice a low heady rumble so near; “but they’re not stupid, and they’re not ignorant of the way the cycle of life turns, and their part within it.”

And in every way it sounds fanciful, child’s-play: but from Steve’s lips, with the conviction of plain truth in each word, Eddie believes beyond sense at all.

“They’ll taste sweeter this way,” Steve bends to help gather the catch together; “so long as they’re cooked well,” Steve adds the caveat with a playful raise of his brow; “a burnt fish is a burnt fish, no matter how gently they’re caught.”

And skill, charm, taste: Eddie is almost too busy falling just that little bit harder for the man as he nets the fish for transport.

Almost.

But then Steve’s back at his shoulder, and his voice is still low but the rumble is pressed where his chest grazes the line of Eddie’s spine:

“Do you know, that the human body is mostly water?”

Eddie didn’t. Doesn’t. Can’t barely breathe; only half-gasps shakily with all the air that remains to him.

“Is it?”

“Mmm,” Steve hums, and Eddie doesn’t move, cannot move, but he thinks if he did Steve’s lips would brush his neck just for the nearness of the sound.

“So you were always in the right, then,” Steve whispers to him, but it feels like it echoes through his entire frame nonetheless:

“Your heartbeat does have some of the Ocean inside of it.”

And Steve pulls back, finishes gathering up their catch, but Eddie.

Eddie’s heartbeat’s pounding hard enough that it’s a damn good thing his heart’s not in the Ocean, in kind, because he’d fucking capsize them both in a second, and he worse: he doesn’t have the breath in him like this to even hope to survive the depths.

✨permanent tag list: OPEN (lmk if you want to be added/removed): @pearynice @hbyrde36 @slashify @finntheehumaneater @wxrmland @dreamwatch @perseus-notjackson @estrellami-1 @bookworm0690 @imhereforthelolzdontyellatme

divider credits here & here & here

🌊ao3 link here

[hitlikehammers]

After The Storm (Steddie Pirate AU)

(you guys totally made it through the storm fine, right? no issues, all good?)

🌊Under the Water (Our Hearts Will Dream Again)🌊

Chapter Seven: As Offering or Mercy

ONE // TWO // THREE // FOUR // FIVE // SIX // FINAL CHAPTER on 7 April 🌊

also on ao3

In the days that follow, only two things remain constant.

The first is perhaps most obvious, most inescapable: Eddie Munson is, in the aftermath, no more than the shell of a man, hollow and barren, though the prices of him meant to be hollow, to fill with air and blood and bring life to the whole of him—those hollow parts are leaden, now. The chambers of his heart struggle endless, the expanse of his lungs shriveled; calcified.

He wishes both would just…give up the ghost already. The rest of him’s managed it well enough.

The crew somehow pried him from Steve’s body the night of the attack; Eddie doesn’t remember. The next thing he does recall is stumbling onto the deck again to see the last of the bloodstains being scrubbed away, no bodies in sight and panicking, where was Steve, where had he gone—

A burial at sea, of course. But Eddie…Eddie had come undone.

He’d screamed and lashed and…and he doesn’t recall what all he’d said or done but he knows they don’t bother thinking, his crewmates. They leave him to his hollowness within the quarters that were Steve’s. That were theirs, together. They either respect his space, or expect him to rot.

Either is…sufficient.

The second constant, though, are the questions. Because he is silent, winnowed to only bones he can’t comprehend as still possessing the capacity to stand, to hold weight and move, until he does both and leans dependent at the edge of the shop in the dark and asks whatever listens, in the water or beyond:

“Was I,” he croaks; the first time in particular; they’re the first words he didn’t speak over Steve’s body, and then scream for the faceless loss of even that; “did I disrespect you?”

He addresses the Sea; thinks he’s doing the closest thing to offering prayer, or maybe the opposite of prayer—more that he thinks he’s speaking to the closest thing he’s ever felt to a deity; divinity as understood in Eddie’s frame of comprehension.

At least: how he understood it, before he knew Steve’s touch.

There is no reply.

“Was I,” he clears his throat the next time; it grates like glass, to no avail; “was I selfish?” And he shakes his head and feels faint for it, for so much more than it too—feels like he may fall, his body finally processing the message that he is finished, and he may simply tumble into the Waves: where he gave his heart first.

Where they threw his heart last.

“What did I do,” he asks but in truth he begs, and the barest spark in him left sees fit to flare, and almost try to demand; “was wanting him like,” he licks his lips, cracked and bloody, iron against the salt on the breeze that’s not comfort here, now, where always it was: it mocks him.

It tastes like Steve.

“Was wanting him an offense to the universe, to the gods themselves, if there are any?” He barely huffs the question, cannot laugh, no capacity for it left in him; “or whatever’s out there instead of them, if they’re a lie?”

He suspects they’re a lie. He hopes they are. He doesn’t want to believe in a cosmos as callous as this by design. With intent.

And of course there are no answers. It makes him fear a little, for the inherent heartlessness of the universe.

“Was loving him a sin, like,” he gasps the next time, In the very depths of the night; “can I sin if I don’t believe in what I’m sinning against but if I can and if I did,” he babbles, rough and breathless, manic as he pants;

“Was being with him, someone like me just, presuming I could,” he shakes his head, and then can’t seem to stop as he rails hoarse and shaky against the ship’s wake;

“Was simply holding him a desecration, did I defile him by default?” Eddie feels sick for the thought, for the seed of the idea planted in his head. “Was it an insult on, on some level deeper than,” and he looks out into the endless shift of waves and asks it, this thing that was once unthinkable:

“Deeper maybe even than You,” he addresses the Ocean, this thing that he’s loved, he asks one love to explain the loss of another:

“Was it a violation, somehow of something I couldn’t know, merely to think that I deserved to love him?”

He doesn’t wait for any answer before he tries to defend himself because:

“Not even to be returned, not,” Eddie’s voice catches, and his tears sting on the wind; “I never expected it back, not from someone,” he shakes his head, and almost doesn’t mind the way the words choke; he wouldn’t mind these being the last truths he speaks; “he was beautiful but not just his face, his,” and he shakes his head; swallows; swallows—his pulse is mallet in his throat and by every hid and devil he wishes it would burst forth and finally drain him dry—there is not pain in it that could outstrip what consumes him as a rule.

“I’d never seen the shade of his eyes. I’ve never felt magic like it could be real, until he looked at me and then,” Eddie’s chest flutters, a vivacious reminder of what he had and lost and then clenches, back to the present truth:

“Then he touched me, just the once, just the first time and—”

Eddie falls, that night, to his knees. It’s been weeks, by now. He doesn’t know how long he sobs.

He doesn’t know how he gets back to the bed that was theirs, where he wakes only to sob harder.

It takes him more days than it should to return to the edge of the ship, but then; he’s mostly lost track of time. It has no real meaning.

“Was it a test?” he whispers, tone flat and eyes dim, any color in the stars washed out entire; “If so it was foolish, and not on my part,” he accuses, maybe for the first time, the whole of the Sea he trusted for so long, with so much, because—

“I was never strong enough not to fall for that,” he doesn’t even argue, just states the fact for what it is: unquestionable. “No one could be, but,” and Eddie’s throat closes, his pulse feels faint and he wonders if he’s staring it down, finally, finally: an end. A release from this kind of hurting.

But no. Not yet.

“His heart was,” Eddie’s words find him without thinking; his blood trips and he lifts a hand to rub his chest, the stutter like a reminder alongside the roil in his stomach as he amends: “is,” because that was the last he had of Steve. To be given his heart.

And Eddie, for punishment or restitution or something else entire: Eddie gave his heart to Steve, but possesses a beat in his breast here, still.

So Steve’s heart is, not was.

“It is goodness,” Eddie declares to the night sky, to the Sea almost in defiance; “it is all-consuming, it is the thing people treat like revelation, that once you know it you can’t breathe the same again,” and even in his devastation, Eddie cannot help but marvel because—

“It moves mountains and, and,” he shakes his head, seeks the right words; “it’s power, isn’t it, it’s the like life itself, but wielded to, to,” and Eddie’s breath escapes him, and he brings his other hand to his chest, too, presses there and the beat should be heavy and frantic and flooded with all of Eddie’s heartbreak but maybe the broken part of the concept itself is what wins out: it’s unsteady, but it’s constant. It’s wispy, somehow; like the slow push of low tide.

“It’s almost cruel that even like this,” Eddie cups the beats between his hands against his chest; “even when it isn’t mighty enough, powerful enough to, to,” even when it’s a fledgling thing, like a baby bird, it is strong enough Eddie wants to praise the impossible, inexplicable strength of this heart, of all that Steve still is, that he left behind in Eddie, deserving or otherwise—but there’s so much of him that wants to break more for it, because why must it be enough to keep him in his world, when, when—

“Was I not allowed to love him?” Eddie murmurs, tears streaming without relent; “Was I not allowed to love him alongside you?” he demands of the Sea, almost hysterical before he dares speak it, dares mouth it to the breeze:

“Above you?”

He clutches to the wood of the gunwale until it splinters his skin, lets the weak push of his own blood pool against his flesh.

“I would give everything to have him back,” he barely breathes, watches the blood on his pale palms as they tremble; he is weak, he knows this. He barely eats. He does not brave the day.

“But if even you can’t give me that,” he doesn’t know what prompts him this night, after so many nights, too many nights without: he doesn’t know but he presses the blood-stained hand to his heart, Steve’s heart, the fluttering bird in his chest and heaves a sob as he begs, bargains:

“Take it from me as an offering,” he speaks it clearer, plainer, truer than his voice has managed in ages; “either as an exchange for him, or a,” his voice cracks but he clenches his teeth, his jaw;

“Or else as a mercy,” Eddie whispers, but it’s fierce; “take it from me so it can no longer torment me, and let me lie with him in the depths.”

He’s clutching his chest, he cannot look down to his bloodstained shirt because he knows he will only see Steve, see him at the end and he can’t, he simply can’t—

A pressure curls around his hand, upon his chest—if a hand were cool and wet as a rule, before being solid underneath, it would be a hand, too. Maybe it is.

He looks down, braves the memory: it’s a hand. It’s not flesh colored, or else not entirely, like it’s only shaded in three-fourths the way it’s meant to be.

It is stronger, though, than any three-fourths grip has the right to be.

“Please stop trying to give me your heart,” a voice murmurs, close to his ear and Eddie’s hollowness is taking hold, it seems, emptying his mind of reason because: that voice.

That voice—

“You mortals rather need those,” the hand presses harder than a whole hand should be capable, at least that Eddie’s ever known, but it feels as if the beat below rises to the pressure somehow, some way; “and I happen to be singularly fond of you, so,” the hand taps his chest, something almost playful but far more instructive, chiding even:

“Keep that in here, please.”

And Eddie’s pulse should be a torrent, now, or else a scared bird’s wings fluttering, terrified to fall but: no.

No; everything in Eddie’s body is running circles, frantic and confused, heartsick and panicked and beyond reason: but his heartbeat when he listens, for the first time since his heart was lost—

When he listens, his heart is a mirror of the waves: the same tempo.

The same quiet might.

He slips one hand away from his chest and dares to cover the watery touch, test its solidity: it holds. Eddie gasps.

It turns; laces their fingers: Eddie knows the fit of that hand.

Eddie knows that touch.

He turns, and braves to be undone by the final fracturing of his sanity for wanting too hard.

But there stands…something not quite human. Eddie heard the words in the voice he loves just moments before—you mortals—and if the hair is part kelp and coral, the shape and sweep is the same. If the eyes are nearly translucent, they are no less drawn from the wellsprings of the flame where sunset meets the surf. If the frame of him seems malleable, it is not lesser for the give and flow: it is greater.

Eddie gapes, marvels: it cannot be.

But this, this: this otherworldly being, wreathed in power and beauty and wonder and a tangible regality, a palpable sense of a thing that exceeds Eddie’s comprehension, save to feel reverent, worshipful, grateful beyond expression in its presence—

This being inspires those feelings for something like divinity among legends, but at the same time, the same feelings for a desperate love in a heart Eddie’s starting to feel the beat of in his chest as something other than an albatross, or a noose.

More like a miracle.

“Keep this safe here, please,” Steve—because no matter the changes Eddie knows beyond doubt or question this is his Steve—Steve’s hand flattens full against Eddie’s chest and holds there like he needs to impress his desire as more accurately a need, then he glances up through lashes just as long and languid but more intangible, like a sunburst caught on the water.

Eddie swallows, not daring to blink, and Steve’s growing more flesh colored, more solid with every breath Eddie gasps in awe before he cups Eddie’s cheek and Eddie nearly comes undone; he’d lost that, he’d believed with the whole of him that he’d lost this forever and how, then, how is it here now—

He nearly comes undone for it; only nearly though.

Because the words Steve speaks to him next do the job entire.

“Keep this here,” Steve says once more with his hand to Eddie’s heart but…if a voice can hold the tides then his does, bears their strength and endlessness, before they disperse and it’s just the gentle hum of Steve when he adds, somehow stronger, somehow more:

“Unless, of course, you truly mean to give it.”

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divider credits here & here & here & here

🌊ao3 link here