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Part 1 of orange grove
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2018-05-26
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and the waves tell the firm coast: everything will be fulfilled.

Summary:

“Do you actually know anything about tending to trees?”
“How hard could it be?” Francis had replied. “They grow all over the place.”

[or, the one where Francis Crozier and James Fitzjames flee England to an orange grove in Spain, and learn how to forget the cold.]

Notes:


Now with phenomenal cover art by zehstern!
 

 

This concept was 100% inspired by st augustine is that way, which set the standard for two broken sailors finding domestic post-canon happiness.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

“I could just cut the top third clean off,” James says.

He’s slumped in the chair by his desk, one finger trailing over the small painted globe he keeps there; a gift, no doubt, from some well-meaning friend. He’s been spinning it for minutes on end now, the motion almost idle—but for the fact that he cannot seem to stop.

Francis watches from his place by the hearth, saying nothing. Though the weather outside is fair, James keeps the fire high. Francis leans on the mantle with three fingers of water in his glass, wishing, as he often does with a drink in his hand, that it were whiskey. It’s a vague and formless urge he quashes with practice by now. James, on the other hand, has no such need for temperance.

The decanter is on his desk, half-empty beside his wholly empty glass. Francis had not commented as he worked his way through the bottle, though it started nearly full. Now James’s face is slack and his eyes dull, and he keeps the globe spinning round and round, sending it on another turn the moment it seems ready to stop.

“What I can’t believe,” James says in the heavy silence, “is that Ross came to me first.”

“I wouldn’t read too much into it, James.”

“It should have been you,” he argues. “You were his second, you outrank me. And you’re his friend.”

“He did ask me,” Francis reminds him.

“And what answer did you give?”

Francis stares down into his glass. “I didn’t.”

James says nothing. Francis knows his answer was the same. Ross said as much when he came to Francis earlier that day, to convince him to take a position on the next expedition north. The possibility that James might accompany them had been part of Ross’s argument to convince Francis to agree. He suspected that fact, more than the social slight James imagined, was the real reason Ross had gone to James first; as much for his expertise as his influence with Francis himself.

“I know the importance of bringing men you can rely on,” Ross had said, looking glossy and comfortable in the leather chair where he sat. “You, me, and Fitzjames—I can hardly imagine a more capable assortment of officers.”

“Has James said yes, then?” Francis had kept his tone carefully neutral.

“Well, not as of yet.” Ross shifted slightly. “But he will, when he hears you’ve agreed to the position.”

Francis hadn’t bothered to ask if he’d told James the same thing. He doesn’t bother to ask, now, whether Ross's assumption was true.

“I suppose this is all we’re good for now,” James says, his voice tight with false mirth. “It’s made our mark on us, that place; and they can’t abide us here any longer, any more than we can abide them.” His finger trails north on the globe, the nail scraping at the paint as it completes another circuit. “They’ll just keep sending us back, until it claims us for good.”

“James,” Francis says, softly but with an edge. “Don’t speak that way.”

Still the globe spins round. Tipping back the rest of his water, Francis departs the hearth and makes to settle in the chair across from James’s desk—but then grabs it by its back, and pulls it to the other side so he and James might sit closer, in a silence he waits for James to break.

“I cannot stay here,” James says at last. “This place… is worse than a prison to me. But I cannot go back. Francis, I cannot.”

Francis reaches for him on impulse, his hand gripping James’s arm—the same, he realizes belatedly, with the bullet wound nearly a decade old by now, which still pains him on the colder days. James watches him with a desolate expression. For all the months they have been in this place that once was home, it has been like living in a box made of paper; and the real world is waiting outside, cold and white and sunless, and one wrong move will tear straight through.

“There are other places that we might go,” Francis says at last, and it is not even strange, to say we so easily, and know himself understood. The fact that he is here, now, is proof enough that wherever they go it will be as one.

James laughs, a silent sound that manifests as a shudder moving through his chest. He shakes his head as if disbelieving that there is any other place which will open itself to them now. “Where?” he says, as if in jest, but his eyes beg for an answer.

Francis holds his gaze a long time. He can smell the whiskey on him, and that is as good an excuse as he can make for himself as to why he wants to lean forward and breathe in. Instead, he reaches for the globe. It spins, ponderously, as Francis lets his finger hover just around the equator.

“Somewhere warm,” Francis says.

He doesn’t look where his finger stops, arresting the world’s motion. The light from the fire throws shadows across James’s face, darkening his eyes until the pupil swallows the iris. From his position slumped in his chair, his face responds to Francis’s smile like frozen ground taking the thaw. Only then does Francis look down, and see where they have landed.

 

 

Francis awakens swinging in an icy darkness.

His hammock grips him like a net, but in an instant he’s struggling free, blinking against the strange, cold white that washes over Hamadryad’s hold, no sign of his fellow midshipmen swaying with the motion of the ship, and hadn’t they heard whatever it was that awakened him—and how had he gotten out here on the ice—

Somewhere nearby, a bird thrills in the treetops, and Francis remembers.

He swings his legs out of the hammock and plants them on the wood—not of a ship’s deck, but of a sagging and weathered porch. The hammock he’s strung to the eaves shifts with his weight as he leans forward to rub his face down with his hands, as if the residue of that waking dream is still lingering on his skin like sweat. It’s the hammock that’s done it, of course, and this isn’t even the first time. After so many years sleeping in a similar contraption before he was an officer, his body remembers what his mind has reason enough to forget. The white void around him he took for Nunavat is in fact only the grove, made strange and cold by moonlight. No, he amends, not the grove. Home.

Behind the trees to the east, the sky is just beginning to grey. Silently, Francis rises. The smell on the air is of orange blossoms, warm earth, the wood of the porch around him. Francis lets it ground him, as he does every morning. The past is a heavy thing, but it cannot drag him under here.

The door to the house stands ajar, and when Francis pushes it open the hinges creak in greeting. Every available latch and window to the house has been thrown open, an invitation to let the cooler night air creep in. Still, the temperature is notably warmer as he steps inside, which is precisely what drove him to his hammock in the first place. His dreams might be uneasy in it, but at least he can sleep.

The house is little more than a central room which serves as parlor, kitchen, and dining room; and a single hallway leading from it to the three small rooms beyond. Those doors are flung open too; but it’s by one door in particular that Francis pauses at out of habit.

James sleeps, his face slack and his hand gripping the blankets to his chest. He has the heavy quilt on his bed, and accordingly there is a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead. He must have grown cold in the night, and neglected to shrug the extra layer off.

Francis lingers there a moment longer, one shoulder leaning on the door frame and his hands in his pockets. Then, shaking his head, he continues down the hall to his own room, to dress for the day yet dark, and collect the pen and paper he will need to draft the latest batch of letters to the place that was once home.

He’s long since doused the candle and switched to working by daylight when movement stirs from the rear of the house. The creak of slow footsteps on the boards in the hall brings a faint smile to Francis’s face—one he banishes by the time James shuffles into their kitchen. He’s pulled on a pair of loose trousers and scraped at his hair with his fingers, but the collar of his night shirt is still skewed to one side, and his eyes are only half-lidded. When he sees Francis at the table a smile too tired to be anything but authentic crosses his face.

“You’re up early,” he says in a voice rough with sleep.

“You’re up late,” Francis counters, whisking the latest completed page aside to dry. He glances up at James from beneath one raised brow, allowing that smile to creep back onto his lips. “And only for a very loose definition of up. You’ve got birds nesting in your hair.”

James raises a bleary hand to the mane around his head, hovers over it absentmindedly before letting the hand fall away in defeat. Instead, he shuffles to the other side of the room, and stoops to the hearth.

“Oh, James, you must be joking,” Francis groans. “It’s going to be hot as a coal stove in here by noon without you actually lighting one.”

James glances at him with mild reproach. “What about tea?”

“Damn the tea.”

James turns away, but not before Francis catches a glimpse of the smile that creeps over the edge of his mouth. “That’s not very English of you, Francis.”

“Well I’m not bloody English, so I suppose that makes sense.”

“Stop your complaining and pass me the tinder box.”

Francis does. James bows over his task, muttering under his breath as he gets out the matches, pushing his hair back away from his face but not taking the time to tie it. The light from the windows is dim yet—it softens the lines on James’s face, erases the years and agonies of the ice. But then the match flares to light, and the firelight throws those lines into relief, and turns his eyes dark as unlit coal. 

Francis forces his eyes back to the page before him, trying to recall what the devil he had been in the midst of writing to Thomas about. It would have to wait. He rises, capping the ink well and going to the cabinets.

“I thought we would focus on the Eastern section today,” he says, packing a light meal of bread and cheese into his day sack. The care and upkeep of the grove has always seemed a task for a small army rather than two ex-sailors whose knowledge of trees extended only as far as after they’d been cut into timber.

“I’ll meet you there later,” James replies. “I’ve half a mind to go back to bed for a few hours more.”

“Back to bed? The morning’s half over.”

“Then it’s a good thing we’re long past the need for strict naval discipline,” James replies with a gleam of amusement in his eyes.

Francis  huffs a laugh under his breath. “Get to that shutter, then, while you’re around the house. It’s been hanging loose since that gale last January.”

“And you’ve been harassing me about fixing for at least that long.”

“Because you haven’t done it, James.”

James grins at him from across the room as he sets the kettle atop the stove. The warm light puts some color back into his cheeks—he looks perfectly hale, now.

“I’ll see you at lunch then,” Francis says, hoisting his rucksack. “The usual tree.”

“Mm.” James is unfocused again, only partly present as he sets out a cup for tea and sits to wait for the kettle. He looks very tired. Francis allows himself to examine that tableau for two additional heartbeats before forcing himself to turn away and step out onto the porch. The air outside is sweet and still.

 

 

“Oranges?” James had said, when Francis first proposed the idea. They were sitting on the shaded terrace of the villa in Cádiz where they had been renting rooms for the past week. The cool, spiced horchatas in their hands are steadily growing warm, but James seems to have forgotten his entirely. He stares at Francis across the table, his shirt collar open and his vest partially unbuttoned.  

He’s beautiful. It’s a fact so objective that Francis feels no apprehension in admitting it to himself. He, on the other hand, suspects his own state of undress resembles more of a half-debauched East End doxie, despite the way James’s eyes linger on him in a contemplative way.

“It’s not the trees, James. It’s the land. We’re not likely to find a better offer than this, and we can do with it whatever we see fit.”

James brushed his hair from his eyes for the tenth time during that conversation. It was long enough now to get in the way, but James showed no interest in cutting it. “Do you actually know anything about tending to trees?”

“How hard could it be?” Francis had replied. “They grow all over the place.”

James looked as if he wanted to contest the logic of that point, but then he just smiled and shook his head. “Suppose we’ll never have to worry about scurvy again,” he said, but Francis hadn’t smiled at that.

 

 

There’s no sign of James as Francis works the grove that day, nor under the tree where they customarily take their lunch. Francis has grown accustomed to catching glimpses of James through the trees, reaching with a pair of shears to prune wayward branches, his long hair bound at the nape of his neck to keep it out of his eyes. Most afternoons they would eat under the largest orange tree in the center of the grove, their shoulders brushing with every movement; to say that Francis had grown accustomed to that would not be wholly accurate.

They’d shared such physical closeness on the ice, of course—any sailor could attest that a ship allowed little in the way of personal space. They had clung to each other for footing on icy precipices, had embraced in the depths of despair, had damn near every form of closeness two people were capable of sharing—damn near. The memory of that should have been enough to sustain him for a lifetime. But he finds himself scanning the trees long past the point when James is likely to appear, like a tongue which cannot keep from worrying at a sore tooth.

It’s dark by the time Francis returns from the groves, a dusting of pollen on his loose white shirt, the sack of oranges bouncing against the small of his back. It feels strange to walk home in his shirtsleeves at night, and not feel the slightest hint of a chill; nights in the Andalusian spring are still warmer than days in a Banbridge summer. A month from now he will complete this walk with a sheen of sweat in the hollow of his throat.

Still, even in the warm air, he walks quickly. Before long the house resolves itself out of the branches of the trees ahead, black against the purpling dusk. The windows are dark, and the kitchen shutter still hangs askew.

Francis covers the rest of the distance at a pace he convinces himself is no more hasty than usual, up to the porch and through the door, depositing his bag on the table with little thought for bruising the fruit. The cup he watched James set out that morning is still on the table, bone-dry; the pot sits on the stove right where it was when Francis left, only now the stove is cold and dead. The hallway is a lightless gullet, no sign of life within.

He nearly stumbles as he reaches James’s door. It’s dark inside, but for the open window—but at the sound of Francis’s loud and fast footsteps stopping in the doorway, there’s a rustle of bedding from the shadows, and a dry, croaking voice. “Francis?”

“James.” He steps into the room quickly, fumbling at the bedside table where he knows the lantern remains. The time it takes him to strike a match and light the oil is interminable, but when the dim flame flickers to life and illuminates James’s wan face, something in Francis’s chest eases.

James blinks against the light, licking dry lips. “What time is it?”

“It’s after dark,” Francis says, settling the lamp back on the table so he can give the man his full attention. The bedding is twisted, as if James has been tossing and turning like a ship in a squall. There’s a dull cloudiness to his eyes that Francis likes not at all.

James frowns.  “I slept all day?”

Francis releases his shoulder to press a palm to James’s forehead. It’s like pressing his hand to the side of Terror’s coal stove. “Christ, James, you’re burning.”  

When he lowers his hand James is staring up at him, his smile faint. “It must have started this morning. I felt a bit of a chill coming on.”

“James,” he says, fighting down the frustration with difficulty. It’s all he can do not to gently probe his fingers at James’s hairline, to pull back his lips and check his gums—to ruck up the man’s shirt and inspect the wound, over a decade old now, to make sure it does not seep blood. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“Figured I had just caught a draft.” James manages a weak smile.

“We should be so lucky to catch a draft in this house.” And indeed the air is very close in the room, but James still pulls the blankets close around himself as if fighting off the chill of a damp London morning. “Do you need anything?”

With a rather shaky breath, James forcibly loosens his grip on the covers. “I’m fine, Francis. Really. You know I’ve had much worse.”

“I do know, and that fact hardly does much to comfort me.” Francis stands, crossing the room to pull up a chair at the head of James’s bed. James watches him with an expression of growing exasperation, reaching out to grasp Francis’s forearm as he settles by the bed.

“Francis,” he says, his voice low. “You really don’t need to worry.”

“I don’t need to,” Francis agrees, settling down and reaching for the book on the side table with the hand which James has not arrested. “But you ought to know better than to try to stop me from doing something I want to do.”

“I suppose I really ought to,” James allows, and lets his fingers slide free from Francis’s sleeve. He settles back against the pillows, a spot of color in his cheeks even from the exertion of speaking, but Francis does not speak his concern. Rather he flips the book over to read the cover. “Gulliver’s Travels again?”

“It’s an old favorite,” James says, with something that could be either defensiveness or chagrin.

“Well, alright,” Francis says with a meaningful eyebrow, leafing through the pages to find where James left off. “But I really ought to go and get you something better, like perhaps Hardy, or Dickens—”

“I think if you try to inflict Charles Dickens on me while I’m too weak to defend myself I might just have to expire out of spite,” James says, a faint smile tugging at the corners of his lips. 

“You’d better not,” Francis says, “Not after I worked so hard getting you off King William Land in one piece.”

James stares at him, slumped against his pillow, his eyes soft and sad. The guard James keeps about him at almost all times has fallen away, sagging in the heat of the fever. Francis finds himself locking eyes with a part of James he is not certain he is meant to see. “I suppose it would be ungracious of me to put your hard work to waste,” James says.

“Damn right, it would be,” Francis says, and means so much more. But he cannot hold James’s unguarded gaze much longer. He looks down to the book instead, nothing but the dry rustle of paper in the room between them. He finds the proper page, and begins to read.

 

 

“Are you certain,” Francis had said, “that this is what you want?”

It would be the only time they ever discussed it. The travel papers, which Francis had only succeeded in obtaining that day, lay on the table between them. They would grant the two of them passage on a merchant vessel to Spain, leaving two weeks from the day. Francis keeps a hand over their corners, as if they might take off like errant birds if he lets them go.

James stares at him without comprehension. “Why are you asking me that?”

Francis pushes the papers around the tabletop slightly, tapping them twice with his fist. He reads the first line of text over again to avoid meeting James’s eye. “There is a life for you here, James,” he says at last. “More of a life than I could hope for. You forfeit that, if you leave on these terms.”

James’s hand enters his vision. For a moment, Francis thinks he is reaching for him. But the fingers hesitate just before they brush his—and then gently pull one of the two papers out from under Francis’s knuckles.  When Francis finally meets his eye, James is smiling.

 

 

“Francis. Francis.”

He jolts awake, a hand flailing into empty space where once the wall of his berth had been. But this is no arctic darkness, hemmed in by the hold of the ship—the lamp burned down, moonlight pours in through the unshuttered window, bringing with it the warm night breeze and the smell of orange blossoms. Gulliver’s Travels lies where it slipped from his fingers to the floor.

Oblivious to the peaceful tableau around him, James thrashes against the bedsheets like a man possessed.

“Francis,” he groans again. Desperate. His eyes rove wildly across the ceiling, where the light of the moon does not reach the roof, nothing but darkness hemmed in by the rafter beams. “Francis, the masts—what’s happened to the sails—“

Francis almost reaches for the lantern by the bed, to illuminate the way back from the memory James is lost in—but on impulse he reaches for James instead, leaning over the bed to grip the man’s shoulders and try to capture his gaze. The thin fabric of his nightshirt is soaked with sweat, and beneath it the flesh is on fire. “James, the ships are gone. You’re safe.”

James goes rigid in his grip, his eyes locked on Francis’s as if seeing him for the first time. “Francis,” he says again, his voice low and ragged. He’s shaking so hard Francis can hardly hold him. “It’s so cold.” 

“It’s just the fever,” Francis says, as gently as he can with his own heart pounding in his ears. He shifts his hand up the curve of James’s shoulder. His thumb passes the hem of his nightshirt, open and askew, to press the feverish skin just above his collarbone. Francis can feel his heart fluttering, the rhythm tucked against the bone. “Just hold on, James. You’ll be feeling better by morning.”

It’s difficult to make out James’s face in the darkness. Like a photographic plate, grey and indistinct. He can see the shine against James’s eyes, the mussed waves of his hair against the pillow. If anything, the shaking seems to get worse.

“I can feel it,” James hisses through chattering teeth. “The ice. The wind. It’s here, Francis, in the room with us—can’t you feel it too?”

“That’s all over now,” Francis lies, the chill creeping up his spine as familiar as James’s words.

The gleam of James’s eyes disappears. Francis can just make out the furrowed shadows of his brow as he squeezes them shut. “I don’t think it will ever really be over for us, Francis.”

Without realizing it, Francis’s thumb begins to brush up and down James’s collar, following the hard line of bone. “Maybe not.” His voice is hoarser than he intended. But there is no one here to comment but James. “But we made it out once. We can find our way back together, as many times as we need to.”

James says nothing to that. Entirely possible he has not heard at all. He’s far away now—and yet not so far at all. For there is a door inside them both, a hatch and a narrow stair. Beyond it, the ships. Still and silent. In his mind, when he goes there, the only thing that moves are the green fingers of the aurora stroking through the frozen rigging. The ships are gone, he knows, pulled beneath the ice, broken apart; but beyond that door they will always wait for him, and for James, it seems, as well. There are nights when he goes through that hatch in his sleep, stands a watch on the Terror’s empty deck, and when he wakes it takes him some time to find his way back again.

“Francis,” he says, his voice thick and far-away again. “A blanket—anything—please—”

They have no extra blankets here, in this place where the temperature never grows close to cold. Not even a hearth to light. One look at James’s face and Francis sees him slumped in the bow of the boat sled, one eye bleeding out along the retina, the flesh hanging slack on his bones. Two days from rescue, but they hadn’t known it at the time. The expression James had fixed him with was that of a man who could see death circling in the corner of his eyes, and Francis had been helpless to chase that specter away.

Francis acts without thinking. He stands and settles on the bed. Barely remembers to kick his boots off as he maneuvers beneath the twisted covers, pressing against James’s back, solid and damp with sweat.

The heat of their combined bodies is smothering, but he pulls James’s back against his chest until the tremors that wrack his body seem to travel straight into Francis’s. He can feel the shallow gasps of James’s breathing, the frantic beat of his heart. Francis presses his forehead to the nape of James’s neck, the sweat-damp curls of hair there. He wraps his arms around James’s chest and holds him through the shivers, until at long last when the moonlight has crawled further up the wall James finally begins to still.

“It’s alright,” Francis says, his mouth moving against the knobs of James’s spine, the long strands of his hair loose from their tie. James’s hand raises to grip his wrist, the bare skin just beneath the cuff—as if to pull himself free from Francis’s grasp, or to ensure he’ll never let go. The hand simply remains, its grip growing steadily looser, and so Francis does not move.

“It’s always worse in the darker months,” James mumbles, but his voice is thick with sleep now. The hand on Francis’s wrist squeezes once, gently, and then goes slack.

Francis believes that sleep is impossible, so aware of every breath and movement of James’s body as he is. But it seems no time at all, after the last of James’s tremors cease, that sleep opens up beneath him like a flat, black sea, and when it envelopes him, it is warm.

 

 

He wakes to a rare cool breath of air from the window—one of the last of the season. Wakefulness comes as slow as treacle, inching its way through his veins. He is aware of sensations before he can make sense of them—his left arm is asleep, his chest is damp with sweat, his limbs are heavy and there is something solid and warm pressed against the front of his body.

It takes time for the events of the previous night to straggle back to him, piece by reluctant piece; as if his mind is trying to protect him from the realization which will cut this total contentment short. Something shifts against him, a faint sigh in the morning air. And he opens his eyes to James’s face.

The man has shifted in the night, turning to lie facing him. Francis’s arm still drapes across his waist, the other trapped beneath his head. He’s awake. His hair is a fright, dark circles beneath his eyes, but the sweat has dried from his brow and he looks at Francis with clear—if tired—eyes. Impossible to say how long he has lain awake, studying Francis with that unreadable expression. It’s Francis’s first instinct to pull back immediately, but something holds him in place. Perhaps the fact that James himself has not drawn away while he slept; perhaps the fact that he is simply too comfortable to move.

“How long’ve you been awake?” Francis murmurs thickly. It seems a safe question, one which requires no acknowledgement of their current circumstances.

“A while,” James replies. His voice is a hoarse whisper, but it does not threaten to break apart as it did last night. Francis can detect no shivers in his body at all, which is probably a sign he should disentangle himself. There are, in fact, many reasons to support that course of action. He stares into James’s dark eyes, which study him distantly—but it’s the remoteness of sleep, not fever, that softens his gaze now.

“And how do you feel?” Francis asks after far too much time has passed.

“I think the worst has passed,” James says, careful, ever so careful. He is still, everything motionless but for his breathing and his heart. He makes no move to raise his head from Francis’s arm, nor to pull back the hand whose knuckles just barely brush Francis’s sternum beneath the fabric of his shirt. 

The words Francis could say to unravel this moment are easily within reach. He could undo this like a loose thread, pulling away and away until there’s nothing left but what they had before. He doesn’t. His lips are too dry too speak, and when he wets them with a tongue James’s eyes travel to the movement. “James—”

James shifts forward, and Francis can feel every motion of his body as he closes the distance between them, the way the bed creaks so softly with the shifting of weight as he leans into Francis’s space so slowly and yet without hesitation, his lips pressing to the corner of Francis’s jaw. The hand which had scarcely brushed his chest turns to slide upward into the V of the neckline and settle over Francis’s heart. The moment is longer and slower than dying, and Francis’s eyes slide shut and he just feels, James so close and warm and solid and wanting him to stay.

When he pulls back it’s only a fraction, his eyes lowered—looking at the hand which still lays against Francis’s bare skin. His breaths come soft, but ragged, and Francis is frozen in the moment, staring at James with open amazement.  “I, ah, hope I haven’t presumed—”

Francis presses forward and then his mouth is on James’s, kissing him properly, as slow as he can stand to make himself when James is making those noises in the back of his throat. At last Francis raises his hand to tangle his fingers in that damnable mane of hair, and finds it still damp at the scalp from the sweat of the fever. James’s hand cups his lower back, and then presses it hard. It’s only when they’re both breathless that Francis forces himself to pull back, his hand sliding free of James’s hair so his thumb can stroke the line of James’s jaw. His flesh is still warm, but it’s no fever-heat that colors his cheeks now.

“Ah,” James says after a moment. His expression is dazed, as if still half-asleep, but Francis can feel the quick, strong beats of his heart in every corner of his body. “Well. That is a relief.”

Francis snorts quietly. Now that they are given free reign, his fingers travel up the crease in James’s cheek to brush the hair behind his ear. “A relief?”

“Well,” James says, his voice still thick and quiet. “For a moment there I was afraid I’d read you wrong, and I’d held out this long only to ruin things now—”

“You damn fool,” Francis says in fond exasperation. “How long have you been thinking of this?”

James’s mouth twists. “How long have you?”

The silence between them speaks volumes. Francis quirks an eyebrow. “Fair enough.”

But when James leans forward again, he slides his hand to cover the man’s mouth before it can reach his own. “You need your rest, James.”

He makes a noise of protest from behind Francis’s palm, but makes no move to resist. Crozier shifts his hand to the side of James’s face, and James’s eyes slide closed. “I suppose you’re right,” he says after a moment, his eyes still shut. He tilts his face more firmly against the pressure of Francis’s hand, as if drinking in the touch. His skin is still warm.

“Sleep,” Francis says, shifting forward until their foreheads are pressed together. James’s face becomes indistinct, so close it is nothing but an impression of color, closeness, warmth. Already his breaths are growing slower.

Like a man in the water dragged down in the wake of a sinking ship, Francis feels sleep tugging at him as well. James is close. He is well. The door to the hatch remains sealed tight. For the first time in a long time, Francis forgets the cold.  

Notes:

Title taken from the Pablo Neruda poem.

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