#iz in the next part xo

[pukner]

Baz | part one

a steddyhands twt thread turned oneshot

|| Rated Gen || Stede and Ed take a brief vacation to visit Stede's family, and find a surprise.

part one / part two

They decide to visit Mary. Well, Stede decides to visit Mary.

Or, Stede gets a letter by extremely confusing means (why is fucking Jackie playing messenger) and receives word that in his absence (read: death), his wife's gone and married some bloke named Doug.

Ed doesn't feel anything about it either way, really. Stede's gone and worked himself into a tizzy (heh, like Izzy. Wait no, don't think about Izzy) and he's all guilty for ignoring his kids or whatever.

Ed doesn't get it. In his experience, the best dad is one you don't have to see.

He's a bit antsy about leaving the crew behind, to be honest. Not the most functional lot, this. Not without-- Well. Not without Iz.

Stede doesn't get it. "Honestly," he says, mouth pursed in that unhappy way of his, "Izzy was hardly the only competent member of our crew."

"Besides Oluwande and Jim," Ed says, flatly, "Yeah, he was."

"Lucius can write--" Stede offers.

"So can that molly we ran into last week. So can--"

"...molly?"

"The-- he tried to sleep with you? Asked you for a drink and then I stabbed him?"

"Oh, goodness--he was a courtesan?"

"Mate, don't say--"

Alright, so the conversation gets a bit derailed. He imagines Iz standing between them and snapping at them to Fucking Stay On Track or something, but they wouldn't be having this conversation if he was here, would they? If he hadn't slipped away unnoticed the second Stede returned--

if Ed had just paid attention, if Ed hadn't gone so profoundly off the rails in those last days before Stede showed back up, if he hadn't--

Ed tastes blood when he wakes up some nights. He wonders if Izzy does. He wonders if he's dead. He talks to Stede about it, some nights.

And he understands, is the bizarre thing. Stede looks at his worst moments, the tar leaking out his mouth, the I Maimed My Dearest Friend And Also Tried To Kill Lucius of it all, and says, "Alright, that's fine. You're terrible but so am I. We can be less terrible together."

They end up going to Barbados, in the end. He talks about Iz again, as they walk. It's a nice island. Very breezy. Sunny. It's like he's hemorrhaging all his feelings.

Stede listens, and murmurs, "I don't miss him like you do, dear, but I miss him all the same."

Then, because Stede's fundamentally a bitch, he adds, "Even though he was an irritating little man."

Ed doesn't like that. Not the thing about Iz, he absolutely is irritating and little, but the fact that he's talking in the past tense. Then Ed realizes that he did the same.

They meet Mary and her Doug. They're great. She's kind of a bitch, and Ed thinks immediately that he can never let her meet Jackie, or Anne, or Mary (the other one, Read). He also meets some broad in an eye patch that he immediately clocks as a threat.

The kids aren't home.

"You just let them run around with some stranger?" Stede says, appalled.

Stede gets appalled a lot. It's his whole thing. Ed's sort of wandering around and picking at stuff they have lying around. Paintbrushes, cushions. A doll lying on some fancy sofa.

Place looks nice. Dying was a good parenting move on Stede's part.

"He isn't a stranger," Mary's saying, in that patient tone that all women have when they're thinking of murder, "He's our neighbor--"

"Well," says Doug, coughing into his hand.

"Alright, so he lives in the woods, but he's a perfectly nice--"

"He watches the children when I'm having showings--"

"What on earth are you showing?" asks Stede, sounding unreasonably baffled.

"...my art, Stede."

"Ah. Well, what about Doug?"

"I work," says Doug, brightly.

"Some people do that, Stede," says Mary, pointedly.

"I work!"

"I doubt that," says Mary, which is fair. Ed doesn't think what they do qualifies as work.

They bitch at each other about this guy. Apparently he watches the kids. He's teaching Alma how to swordfight. And teaching Louis how to sew? What the fuck.

"--sword fight!" Stede says, shrilly, "Mary, that's hardly appropriate--"

"You literally ran away to become a pirate," says Mary, flatly.

"...fair," says Stede.

They hear a lot about this guy over tea.

He helped get rid of a nasty pirate situation, apparently. He's good with a sword, despite his limp, the cane he needs. He grows excellent beets? Has a nice flower garden. Knits up a storm. Kind of a wanker, very crabby, but soft on kids. The kids love him, apparently.

"--Alma's developing quite an interest in sailing, thanks to Baz," Mary is saying, and Ed drops his fork.

Oh.

He looks at Stede, panicked, and then when Stede doesn't give him the panic eyes back he realizes Ah He Doesn't Know. Stede isn't Jack, or old Sam. He doesn't know.

He looks at Mary, just then, and spies out a sly little smile on her face. It's a schemer's smile, this one. He's seen it on Jack often enough. Oh, he can never let her meet Annie. He's already afraid of the implications of her knowing Jackie.

Stede decides, before Ed can say his thing, that he's got to meet this Baz bloke.

Ed can't speak, on account of the phantom taste of blood in his mouth. He looks down at his plate, at all the meat he's pushed to a side.

part two