Chapter Text
It’s stupid. It’s a stupid, pitiful, devastating little thing.
The rest of the Revenge is barren, a scorched wasteland of—whatever the fuck he and Stede had built during their time together. Love, or something weaker, something more easily shattered and abandoned on a dock.
And it’s stupid, how Ed had stashed the plant before having the crew rid the ship of everything else reminiscent of Stede. Stupid, how Ed had only lasted a day before unearthing it from the wardrobe and carefully placing it on a window ledge where it can drink in the sunlight it needs to survive.
It’s stupid that Ed waters it carefully each night, that he studies its leaves and checks for new ones each morning. Stupid how many hours Ed has lost to simply watching it, as if waiting to catch the tiny, delicate tendrils curling towards the light of day or the leaves emerging in real time. Stupid how he periodically uses his knife to carefully prune away dead bits of the thing to let the living parts flourish, thinking of the glow radiating off of Stede when the plant was produced as evidence of his successful tenure on the high seas.
It grows; it breathes; it sprawls with life, and Ed wonders how it learned to do it so easily.
He wonders what it did to deserve Stede’s love and affection. How it captured his heart and kept it, how the mere sight of it earned a beaming grin from the most blinding force of a man he’s ever met. In his more pathetic moments, he wonders if there’s something there he could have learned from, if he’d thought to do it.
Maybe he could have held Stede’s attention just a little longer. Maybe, if Ed had known better—been better—then he, too, could have caught him and kept him and eventually deserved him.
Maybe Stede would have stayed.
He stares at the plant now, tears running down his cheeks as soft rays of sunlight spill across its leaves. He’s careful not to edge too far into the golden light, well aware now of how quickly men get burned when they fly too close to the sun, when they try to claim something that isn’t theirs to have.
But he gazes at it, watches it welcome the light like it deserves it, the way not everyone does.
Something deserves to be alive in this cabin, since everything else is dead.