Sometimes you go into a fic intending to make Stede face his complicated feelings and relationship with his mother, and you come to the end of it having made poor Ed handle it instead (via visiting his dementia-ridden mother-in-law bc Stede can’t handle seeing his mum like that yet, and no one else will visit, leaving him feeling obligated to go and give her at least one person who visits), making him reflect on his life, how he wound up where he did (not a bad thing, just a Realisation of the Changes), and how much he misses his own mum (modern AU where they’ve all unfortunately wound up in the States, so his mum is back in Aotearoa and visiting her doesn’t happen as often as he’d like)

I am genuinely sorry for every time I put poor Ed through shit, but I do think this wound up being best from his POV. I considered Izzy too, but it didn’t quite hit the same when I started a draft with his POV, and Stede’s POV just…idk. Didn’t go anywhere that I wanted it to.

Based a lot of it on how things went with my great-grandma on my mum’s side, especially once her memory really went, which was a particular set of my own memories to go over while writing this lol