[cross-posted to tumblr]

Edward is crying, again. Sullen, resentful tears fill his eyes to brimming as he opens them wide as he can and holds them very still to keep the tears from spilling.

It’s because can’t figure out how to fix some little nothing, and he keeps working the problem harder and it’s apparent that it just keeps getting harder. At Stede’s gentle offer of lending a third hand, he grips it tighter while sliding down to the floor and letting his head knock into the wall. He cranes to looks at the ceiling, which just serves to give them a better view of his throat working as he swallows, still trying not to make noise.

Or: He’s in the right about whatever little disagreement they’d had, but he isn’t doing anything besides telling Stede over and over that Stede doesn’t understand, couldn’t possibly, and he seems to be stuck there, clenching harder and harder as his knuckles get white and his voice gets thicker before he finally says he has to find something in the hold.

He has a quiet hole somewhere down there, they know it—damp and rotten, far enough down that whatever sounds he might be making wouldn’t be heard against the waves—but they let him have it and don’t look for him. Izzy makes the whole crew practice complicated line-working “in case of storms” for about an hour, because they never want them to know outright what’s going on and start pitying Ed when he needs to come on deck now and again. They tell them he gets bad headaches, sometimes, and the sun hurts his eyes. If the crew want to talk about how Ed was truly, violently insane for those six months without Stede, with Izzy calling him only “Blackbeard,” they at least only talk about it among themselves.

Stede can’t offer him tea without the real sobbing starting, the shoulder-heaving kind he can’t bring himself out of. They can’t decide whether that’s better or worse than when Izzy quietly brings him a cup so the slow tears can roll while he holds the tea in both hands, hunched over it, letting the steam bathe his face while he sort of rocks himself on the window seat. It’s all very different than what Izzy knew before this, the dead silence and the endless monotonous puffing on the pipe. But the steady months that had finally come on the new ship and the thing with the three of them had brought a lot of changes, so it followed that this would change, too.

When they eat, they make sure it’s with him, and they make sure they get more than he does and finish it all so he can manage maybe half of his little serving of the same plain food. They can’t do anything for his sleep, and they don’t try, besides making sure Roach is the only one with the key to the laudanum. Edward can drink until he’s ready to curl up sideways on the sofa, wearing his day clothes but with fingers tangled in the dressing gown they carefully drape on the back of the sofa whenever the drinking starts.

Whenever he’s awake, he works, and tells them wonderful things he wants to do, dreaming of things beautiful and calm. But when he works on them he doesn’t know where to start, or what steps come when, and he gets very upset very quickly and the tears start again. But they can see that he wants: oh, god, he wants.