Chapter Text
Ed became obsessed with the Gentleman Apothecary's scents long before he learned the man's actual name, which sounded weird and fucking creepy. In this case, scents referred to soap, which Ed admitted was still weird and fucking creepy. But Ed was a corporate raider. CEO of Kraken Inc. So whatever.
Kraken Inc. specialized in hostile takeovers of companies, selling off their IP, and raking in the profits for the Kraken's board of directors and whatever assholes who'd invested in the takeover. Mostly a bunch of rich white assholes getting richer.
When he'd gotten into this business, it had been to stick it to the man. Now, he was the man. Kraken got richer with each deal.
But Kraken's board would just as soon give this brown boy the boot if he didn't keep coming up with the plans that kept them swimming in more capital. Enough was never enough. Every kill meant there needed to be a new kill on the horizon.
Current kill being Blorbo Media, which was a fancy way to refer to a company that was six people, a dog, and a website.
The moment they walked in the door, Izzy was gnashing his teeth over all the ways those foofy twats were wasting money on things like free meals, a nap room, and very, very nice soap.
The gnashery was the background noise of Ed's life. Like the sound of cars honking in Hyderabad or strangers shouting, "Fuck you," in New York. Like flying halfway around the world to gobble up a new company.
Half the time, he swooped in only to find out that vulture capitalists had set the whole thing up so he would buy them out. No drama. No adventure. It was just a grind.
The other half of the time, it was some little unicorn of a startup funded by Stardust, Dreams, and Employee Pocket Lint.
Ed was a unicorn murdering Kraken.
Blorbo Media was a dewy-eyed unicorn in the corporate woods.
When Izzy found out that layoffs were not Ed's plan for Blorbo, he went ballistic. "When you told me to pull together a team to take down these twats, I didn't question it."
Ed's eyes crossed because Izzy always questioned every takeover. It was always, "I have an MBA this," and "That's not professional that." He tried to remember if there'd been a time when Izzy had been all on board, but those days were rearview smoke from a farting engine.
Ed said what he always said these days, "You can be a real bummer sometimes. You know that?"
Izzy didn't care about being a bummer. "When I found out that L'Espagna Consortium was about to make a move, I made sure we got here first. Losing several of our team by the way. Meaning the rest of us had to work twice as hard."
"They knew what they signed up for. Burnout and PTSD," said Ed flatly. A lead balloon that Izzy buzz sawed through.
"For years I've followed your every whim. I've managed your increasingly erratic moods. I've massaged the team when they were worried about your judgment. Kept the board off your back."
Izzy was as likely to massage the team as he was to sing musical theatre. So Ed said, "Sounds stressful, Izzy," in the most condescending, annoying, twat tone he could manage.
Not that Izzy bought the hint. "It is. But I did all that because I was honored to work for the legendary Blackbeard, the most brilliant financial mind I've ever met. But now, you're just an...insane, unpleasant shell of a man who's merely posing as Blackbeard."
With that, he stormed off to unleash some wrath downstream. This meant that Ed got to call each of the Blobo staff members for the Talk.
The one where he offered them golden handcuffs to join on with Kraken. A life of endless adventure: crushing boredom. A life seeing exotic places: where they fucked people over. A life with no room for relationships: casual sex was just fine. A life that could pay off debts if they lasted long enough for the payout.
Fang stared at the paper the whole time Ed was talking. Signed on without a word.
Ivan wanted to know if Ed still rode a motorcycle, which wasn't a question Ed had been asked before.
Everyone else told Ed to go fuck himself. The former CEO got really creative and broke some things in a corporate sort of way. Not the first time that had happened. But the former CEO had never been in a knife fight, and it showed.
But it was a fucking shame it had to go that way.
Ed hadn't only targeted Blorbo Media because Blorbo had valuable IP, though they did.
When he asked Izzy what pattern he saw in a series of LinkedIn connections, it was because he saw something there. He was also giving Izzy a chance to meet Ed halfway, which went as well as it ever did. Izzy had snitted that he saw LinkedIn but hadn't asked why Ed was asking that question.
He never asked why.
What Ed had seen in the pattern was a group of superstars who'd been propping up failing startups for years. Talent who had pooled their resources, taken out loans, and run up their credit cards to make a go of it. The reason they'd crashed and burned wasn't a lack of talent. In Ed's experience, most "genius disrupters" had cash in the bank and a fuckton of connections when they started. Not everyone could be Blackbeard.
Izzy forgot that he'd been part of a similar acquisition back in the day. He acted like he'd made Blackbeard. Like he'd built Kraken from the ground up.
Ed had made Blackbeard, crafted the legend of Kraken, figured out how to build on Hornigold's "greed is good" boiler room, added burn-down the ship tactics, and worked his way up from there.
But back to Blorbo's CEO.
There was a brief period when it looked like he'd stuck them with a poison pill of a fuckton of debt. For a moment, they were crashed on the rocks. It looked like Kraken's board, always a twitchy bunch, would vote a lack of confidence in their CEO and find someone new.
Izzy was going on about how he wasn't "losing everything I've worked to achieve, not for this lot of ponces and not for you. So I'm going to devise a plan that will turn this turd into something worth selling, and when we've once again barely eked by to fight another day, I will very willingly offer you this," Izzy extended both middle fingers under Ed's nose. "My fuckin' resignation, you absolute twat."
It was only the hundredth time that particular threat had played out in the last few years. More and more often.
Fucking exhausting.
Izzy stormed off, but he didn't come up with the plan—he never did. He just said he would, but plans weren't his deal.
Ed came up with selling the debt to an oil company, which could be used to save fat stacks in taxes. Oh, Izzy worked out the final details because he was the one with the MBA.
Ed had left school at fifteen.
Then there was the familiar dance. Izzy boxed up his corner office. Ed told him not to. Ed needed Izzy to run a tight ship. To get shit done. They both went their separate ways to try to feel something. Anything.
But all of this was well off the topic of magical soap.
Ed took the lavender honey soap from Blorbo's bathroom because it smelled yummy, and Ed wanted it.
Or maybe it was the kill after that.
Or maybe it was the kill before it.
They all blended together.
What was important was the soap.
Everything about that soap was handcrafted, unique, over the top, and utterly absurd. Also, girly as all fuck. The sort of stuff that would have gotten Ed gutted in his earliest days.
Kicked out of Hornigold's boiler room. Cali Jack would have whipped Ed in the nads, at the very least.
It made Ed want to bliss out.
It was this sort of golden liquid that came in sturdy—and thankfully very portable, given Ed's lifestyle—bamboo cups with handwritten labelling, "The Best Revenge."
On the side of each cup was a loop of hemp rope with a tiny wooden spoon, intricately carved with sailing ships, castles, and knights. That was how the soap was dished out, not by a quick-action pump but with a little wooden spoon.
Under the lid of each cup was an answer. The best revenge was dressing well, living your best life, or simply existing when the world thinks you shouldn't. That one came with a rainbow flag.
Eventually, Ed discovered -- because he fiddled with shit -- that there was a secret compartment in the bottom of each container. He'd sat there for all of five seconds with a grin on his face and exclamations of "Fuck me!" floating in the air.
In that compartment was a note. Handwritten in flowing script.
"I like to think about a little medieval hill town in Provence perched above wide rows of lavender buzzing with bees. Not just because bees are fascinating creatures, which they are. I mean just think about it. They have three genders. Though I'd rather not be a drone. Their dicks fall off after sex with the queen, which wouldn't be great in several ways."
Ed burst out laughing because he had no idea what he was reading or what the fuck the note writer was talking about, but he loved it. Also, he had to look up the bit about bee dicks. He did it on his work laptop because why not give Ivan in InfoSec something fun to read?
"But maybe I'd be a worker bee, so it'd be fine. Wouldn't want to be the queen. Stuck in the hive making eggs. Though the honey must be nice. The honey used in the product you've just used came from the honey of bees who buzzed in the lavender rows beneath just such a hill town. But have no fear, I'm assured the honey was removed in a cruelty free way. Also, it's nice to think that while the reason the town is on a hill instead of on the easily accessible beach is because barbarians were murdering everyone. Well, except the people who lived in that one amphitheater. They did fine too. Well, until Napoleon kicked them out. But even though the reason for the beautiful towns on defensible hilltops where it's hard to get water was horrible and involved the fall of a fairly dickish empire, they're pretty and have a lovely view. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed doing whatever got you dirty enough to need to wash your hands with The Best Revenge soap, and it wasn't all trips to the bog. Maybe a trip into the lavender fields to get your hands on some dirt that got under your fingers and now here you are. With clean hands and this note. Surviving the hordes trying to take you down and living in lavender is the best revenge. All the best, the Gentleman Apothecary."
Ed kept the note. He kept all the notes. They were all unique. Windows into the mind of someone who was doing something different, and that was so fucking rare. Everyone else was trying to make a fortune. Get ahead.
The Gentleman Apothecary was just buzzing. He had it all figured out. He knew how to live his best life. He had something to teach.
Ed wanted to know what the Gentleman's Apothecary knew.
Ed made a sock puppet email account to contact the Best Revenge, let them know he liked their soap, and ask a few questions. Not a comment because the Best Revenge's website looked like it had been constructed by someone whose ideas about web design had been formed in the early 00s.
He bought some Hydra rehydration cream because air travel did a number on skin, and Ed did a fuckton of flying.
The smell of the thick lotion made Ed think of a time back in the hungry days. He'd gone into the desert to do a thing. Bury something that needed burying. A thunderstorm had swept in. Sheets of rain that made seeing three feet in front of him impossible. His father's body was still in the car boot he'd parked under a lonely cement overpass, watching the sky turn purple and green with cracks of lightning. Water pouring down like there would be no tomorrow. Just a final deluge from an angry God to wash them all away. The sort of thing that his mother had always liked to go on about.
Until it stopped, and God wasn't an angry man with a beard in the sky. She was the smell of the earth after a hard rain. God was a wide welcoming space with room to bury his dick of a dad and bloom flowers from crevices in rocks.
He sent another email. Like shoving thoughts into cracks in a wall to keep out the cold. Not the bit about murder, because that would be mental, but the part about the rain.
Several weeks later, he got a very long reply from [email protected] to both comments.
Epically long. Ed didn't know what a bestiary was, anything about the chemicals released by creosote plants after a rain, or that French resistance fighters in WWII named themselves after maquis, a hearty, if fragrant, shrub. It was the sort of email that doubled back on itself, like an autumn leaf gusting over the shallow pool that had drowned its fellows.
He especially liked this one bit, "After you're dead, the worms won't care about what you acquired. Though I suppose, technically, you won't be eaten by worms as most people are heavily embalmed and hermetically sealed in a coffin and of course there is the whole idea of cremation, which is terrible for the environment and don't do it. I hear there's a company that will bury your body in a forest and plant a tree. That sounds nice."
Ed loved cemeteries. Always had. Fucking awesome buildings and statues. Big green spaces where folks left a brown man with a bundle of fucking flowers the fuck alone.
The Gentleman Apothecary, or GA for short, didn't think that was morbid or weird.
Several more emails were sent, and Ed suggested that GA should consider making some French resistance lotion.
For that sort of consultation, Kraken would normally charge a fee of several million dollars, a stake in the product, and require an NDA.
If Izzy had any idea, he would lose his fucking mind, but Ed no longer had fucks to give. They'd all burned out. He held his hands to his face and just breathed in.
Something GA said got Ed thinking, though.
After the next board meeting, Ed told Izzy to plan and execute the next takeover. Because Ed needed a fucking break. A week or two off would see him right, he was sure.
It wasn't that Ed had never heard of a holiday. He just hadn't ever taken one.
Ed went back to the apartment he was hardly ever in and sniffed lavender honey soap. Looked at the view. Tried to get some chill.
Then his phone started barfing at all the texts he was getting from Izzy. There was a fucking situation.
Ed came in to find that while Izzy had been in charge of the ship, so to speak, there'd been what could best be described as a shit storm.
Ed didn't ask Izzy if this was a case of managing Ed's moods or a whim. If this was an example of massaging the team. He looked at Fang and Ivan, headphones on and heads down, doing the work that needed to be done. Came up with a plan. It was a burn the corporation they were targeting down and salt the earth sort of plan. The kind of plan that had Ivan hacking into Blitzen Biotech's systems -- a little spear phishing campaign -- with Fang digging through the dirt that they found. The CEO was into some shady shit. The sort of shit that went with a prison sentence.
People. The weak link in every company was always people.
That night, in a hotel room with the best fucking view of Paris to be had, Ed pulled a little box of soap out of his luggage and idly thought about taking a quick flight to Provence to visit the bees.