"The Hand of a Friend" (Sherlock Holmes Pirate AU), July 29 Prompt
Title: The Hand of a Friend
Author: gardnerhill
Rating: PG (somewhat gross surgical stuff)
Characters: AU (ACD-style) Sherlock Holmes et al.
Summary: Story # 3 in the "A Study in Crimson" pirate AU I began here and continued here.
Warnings: Explicit mutilation and amputation descriptions enclosed. Not for tender tummies.
Word Count: 1700
Author's Notes: For the July 29 prompt (Illness, in a location where little to no help is forthcoming).
***
Pain. Swimming in a sea of pain. Arm on fire. Dark, dank smells of bilge; sullen yellow of an oil-lamp. My surgery belowdecks. Now it was I laid on the table like a wounded shipmate.
Something cool on my head; a soaked cloth. "Doctor Jack?" Wiggins' anxious voice. "Your hand - what's left of it - it's all puffed like a dough-nut."
Through the fog of pain in that windowless room I thought I'd had a little finger left; two fingers, possibly, both dripping where their nails had been. Then that lovely dream of the Cap'n barreling in blade-first, shouting curses at the Admiral, the Bakers streaming behind him to put paid to the Spiders. Noise, blood - and a cry of pain from my tormentor for once, stumbling out the door with Shear-Lock howling after him. Freed of that damned chair at last. Bodies on the floor - the other Spiders in the room who'd helped the Admiral. Poor little Billy had vomited, seeing what Moriarty had done to my hand. "Nothing," I whispered through my chewed-bloody tongue and lips when the Cap'n loomed over me in the boat white with rage, the first words I hadn't screamed in hours, "told him nothing, said nothing." He told me he knew, he knew, he knew.
Yesterday. Two days ago. How many days, hours, in that room? Hard to think, my head was stuffed with gun-cotton and everything hurt.
"Ship, Mr. Wiggins?" To rescue me, the Bakers would have had to go right among the fleet, pigeons among the hawks, to Moriarty's flagship itself. This foolish expedition could have ended with the Cap'n and half the ship hanged and my stubbornness for naught.
"Oh, we've everything up to the wind but our pocket-handkerchiefs, Cap'n's putting all speed between us and the Spider." Wiggins grinned, showing his tobacco-stained front teeth. "Shear-Lock made damn' sure every man in the rescue party was a fast rower - we were out and away from the fleet with you before Admiral Moriarty could weigh anchor. And that's if he could see well enough, with that pretty cut the Cap'n gave him. There's a few behind us, but we'll be among friends and in Safety Bay on Sholto in two days."
"Safety Bay on Sholto." I tried not to think of how that little phrase, so glibly spoken by our bo'sun, would have stopped the pain and let a ship's surgeon keep his hand - words I'd bitten my tongue nearly in half not to say. Even now, I could not bear the thought of speaking them aloud.
Pursuit. We would soon be safe, but for now it was a race among the islets of the South Seas.
In the meantime there remained to finish the job with what was left of my hand. I'd lose the whole arm if I waited another brace of hours.
"Can't do it myself, Mr Wiggins," I moaned. "Can't hold the saw." My other hand was weak, shaking; it too had been awaiting its inevitable fate when its undominant twin had finally been all pared away. Strength and resolve would be needed to whip off the rest of that mutilated hand and make a clean cut that would heal. I'd done it for others and seen them go back to their duties. If I had to I'd hold the goddamned saw in my teeth afterward, but I'd keep saving Shear-Lock's men. But first the rest of the hand had to come off.
"I'll get someone to do it." Wiggins looked a little sick - he was stalwart enough in the red heat of battle, laughing at wounds and slipping in blood, but the cold deliberate infliction of these cuts was more than he was ready to face. "Who'll I fetch, Dr. Jack?"
I knew what I wanted, the last chimaera that had moaned through my brain, the one thing that had comforted me during the pain and the cool repeats of "Where is he?" "Where does the Baker berth?" "Tell me where the criminal hides, Dr Watson, and you retire a rich man. Stay silent and go to the sharks, a bite at a time." But the Cap'n had to shake off the ships that followed, one of whom was surely the Spider; he had to think of the ship, not of one man. He'd already endangered everyone to save me, and now he needed to put all speed into our escape. I couldn't ask him for this.
"Angel. Send Angel in here."
"Yessir." Wiggins was away in that second - like all good seamen, he obeyed his orders at a dead run.
We called our gunner's mate Angel because it was the English word closest to his African name. He was good with every kind of bladed weapon and downright frightening with his machete (the one he'd used on his slave-master during his escape to sea); he bore strange dark tattoos round his wrists and ankles to hide the marks of his irons, and one long scar down his arm that I'd stitched shut. He would show me no misguided kindness in the form of timidity; his strength was such that he could easily lop off my hand in one clean machete blow.
Pain and fever rocked me, rocked the creaking ship with me, the low overhead roof like the lid of my coffin. Everything listed and moved forward smoothly once again. Ah, another dream. I must not sleep, nor let the pain close my eyes. Another would hold the saw but I would do the deed nevertheless.
My dream continued, bringing a familiar rustle and stride in through the hatch. But this was not Angel's deep and resonant "Dr. Jack, how keep you?" filling the room, nor his broad dark body that bent over me. My kind dreaming mind had answered my prayer.
He was as white-faced as he'd been in the open boat, bent over me. But his voice had his usual careless tones. "Angel has the wheel and will keep us steady as an island, Jack me boy. I'll give your hand a proper sendoff." Behind him, Hopkins and Tonga waited.
So I had not dreamed the little list that meant the Cap'n had given over the wheel.
"We're being pursued, Shear-Lock," I whispered. "You should - "
"It was easy enough to deduce Angel's purpose when I saw him heading for the surgery. He's our surest hand with a knife, excepting yourself. I knew why you'd summoned him." Even as he spoke, the Cap'n had laid out my surgical blades on the canvas-covered table, carefully dousing them in the bottle of rum I kept for that purpose. That simple expedient, learned by accident, has made an uncanny difference in the survival rate of my patients. Shear-Lock, fascinated with all modern things and who'd assisted me during several surgeries, was writing up a paper about advances in naval medicine. "It's high time I performed an amputation by myself, eh?"
"We're under chase," I murmured. "Quick-time it is. Start with that knife."
"No. With this." He held a flask to my lips. Grog, but an unusual taste. "Two good swallows, me lad."
The sailing master and our best rigger moved forward, and under the Cap'n's direction bound me tightly to the table with canvas straps, leaving my damaged arm free. Tonga stuffed a rolled canvas belt between my teeth and Shear-Lock tied off my forearm with another strap. The men held me down, shoulders and knees.
"Show me with your eyes," Shear-Lock said, taking up the blade and tracing his finger along my forearm. "Cut here? No. No. Here. Here, then."
This was…effortless. I'd undergone twenty times this much pain under torture, mingled as it was with loneliness, terror that I'd give away my captain, my ship, and my friends, and horror that I would die alone in this terrible way. There was a sharp cutting pain, true, but much of it was muffled by the pleasant sleepy fog in my brain that had replaced the fevered pain. If I must be bluntly honest, my own fascination with watching my own arm become parted from me occupied my mind as well.
Skin laid open in swift, delicate moves; blood vessels tied off with rum-soaked thread as if they were goatskins full of wine. Flesh parted from flesh, down to the double bones; my beloved old saw, turned against its master. Hopkins made a face at the sawing sounds. Shear-Lock's hands were as deft and precise as they were on his violin. The knife again for its final jaunt through flesh and skin, and there I was as one-handed as many an old salt. In the same deft manner the Cap'n sewed the skin-flap over the stump and wrapped my stump in spirit-soaked dressings as the men untied me. The whole thing had taken less than fifteen minutes.
"You've the makings of a surgeon, Cap'n," I said softly.
His blood-spattered hand holding the flask trembled, as it never had whilst taking off my hand. "But then you'd have to command the Baker, Jack, and you've no stomach for that work," he said jocularly. "Now take your medicine. I've to get us back to safety."
I swallowed another dose of poppy-laced rum. "Thank you, Shear-Lock. I'd hoped you could do this."
He was still and silent. The men pretended to be deaf and dumb, as they often had to do when the Cap'n and I spoke to each other. "I'd hoped I could present that bastard's liver to you. My truest man, my surest heart - Jack me bonny boy, I swear by every saint in Heaven that he will learn what your lost hand meant to me."
In the meantime all I had to do was rest in my hammock in the captain's quarters, watching the curling foam of the sea under blue skies through the picture windows, reassuring me that I was safely out of that windowless room of horror and pain, dying by inches under Moriarty's quiet questions. Carried out of Hell by the scurviest angels who ever flew, led by the strangest and gawkiest angel God ever created…
I closed my eyes.
***
Author: gardnerhill
Rating: PG (somewhat gross surgical stuff)
Characters: AU (ACD-style) Sherlock Holmes et al.
Summary: Story # 3 in the "A Study in Crimson" pirate AU I began here and continued here.
Warnings: Explicit mutilation and amputation descriptions enclosed. Not for tender tummies.
Word Count: 1700
Author's Notes: For the July 29 prompt (Illness, in a location where little to no help is forthcoming).
***
Pain. Swimming in a sea of pain. Arm on fire. Dark, dank smells of bilge; sullen yellow of an oil-lamp. My surgery belowdecks. Now it was I laid on the table like a wounded shipmate.
Something cool on my head; a soaked cloth. "Doctor Jack?" Wiggins' anxious voice. "Your hand - what's left of it - it's all puffed like a dough-nut."
Through the fog of pain in that windowless room I thought I'd had a little finger left; two fingers, possibly, both dripping where their nails had been. Then that lovely dream of the Cap'n barreling in blade-first, shouting curses at the Admiral, the Bakers streaming behind him to put paid to the Spiders. Noise, blood - and a cry of pain from my tormentor for once, stumbling out the door with Shear-Lock howling after him. Freed of that damned chair at last. Bodies on the floor - the other Spiders in the room who'd helped the Admiral. Poor little Billy had vomited, seeing what Moriarty had done to my hand. "Nothing," I whispered through my chewed-bloody tongue and lips when the Cap'n loomed over me in the boat white with rage, the first words I hadn't screamed in hours, "told him nothing, said nothing." He told me he knew, he knew, he knew.
Yesterday. Two days ago. How many days, hours, in that room? Hard to think, my head was stuffed with gun-cotton and everything hurt.
"Ship, Mr. Wiggins?" To rescue me, the Bakers would have had to go right among the fleet, pigeons among the hawks, to Moriarty's flagship itself. This foolish expedition could have ended with the Cap'n and half the ship hanged and my stubbornness for naught.
"Oh, we've everything up to the wind but our pocket-handkerchiefs, Cap'n's putting all speed between us and the Spider." Wiggins grinned, showing his tobacco-stained front teeth. "Shear-Lock made damn' sure every man in the rescue party was a fast rower - we were out and away from the fleet with you before Admiral Moriarty could weigh anchor. And that's if he could see well enough, with that pretty cut the Cap'n gave him. There's a few behind us, but we'll be among friends and in Safety Bay on Sholto in two days."
"Safety Bay on Sholto." I tried not to think of how that little phrase, so glibly spoken by our bo'sun, would have stopped the pain and let a ship's surgeon keep his hand - words I'd bitten my tongue nearly in half not to say. Even now, I could not bear the thought of speaking them aloud.
Pursuit. We would soon be safe, but for now it was a race among the islets of the South Seas.
In the meantime there remained to finish the job with what was left of my hand. I'd lose the whole arm if I waited another brace of hours.
"Can't do it myself, Mr Wiggins," I moaned. "Can't hold the saw." My other hand was weak, shaking; it too had been awaiting its inevitable fate when its undominant twin had finally been all pared away. Strength and resolve would be needed to whip off the rest of that mutilated hand and make a clean cut that would heal. I'd done it for others and seen them go back to their duties. If I had to I'd hold the goddamned saw in my teeth afterward, but I'd keep saving Shear-Lock's men. But first the rest of the hand had to come off.
"I'll get someone to do it." Wiggins looked a little sick - he was stalwart enough in the red heat of battle, laughing at wounds and slipping in blood, but the cold deliberate infliction of these cuts was more than he was ready to face. "Who'll I fetch, Dr. Jack?"
I knew what I wanted, the last chimaera that had moaned through my brain, the one thing that had comforted me during the pain and the cool repeats of "Where is he?" "Where does the Baker berth?" "Tell me where the criminal hides, Dr Watson, and you retire a rich man. Stay silent and go to the sharks, a bite at a time." But the Cap'n had to shake off the ships that followed, one of whom was surely the Spider; he had to think of the ship, not of one man. He'd already endangered everyone to save me, and now he needed to put all speed into our escape. I couldn't ask him for this.
"Angel. Send Angel in here."
"Yessir." Wiggins was away in that second - like all good seamen, he obeyed his orders at a dead run.
We called our gunner's mate Angel because it was the English word closest to his African name. He was good with every kind of bladed weapon and downright frightening with his machete (the one he'd used on his slave-master during his escape to sea); he bore strange dark tattoos round his wrists and ankles to hide the marks of his irons, and one long scar down his arm that I'd stitched shut. He would show me no misguided kindness in the form of timidity; his strength was such that he could easily lop off my hand in one clean machete blow.
Pain and fever rocked me, rocked the creaking ship with me, the low overhead roof like the lid of my coffin. Everything listed and moved forward smoothly once again. Ah, another dream. I must not sleep, nor let the pain close my eyes. Another would hold the saw but I would do the deed nevertheless.
My dream continued, bringing a familiar rustle and stride in through the hatch. But this was not Angel's deep and resonant "Dr. Jack, how keep you?" filling the room, nor his broad dark body that bent over me. My kind dreaming mind had answered my prayer.
He was as white-faced as he'd been in the open boat, bent over me. But his voice had his usual careless tones. "Angel has the wheel and will keep us steady as an island, Jack me boy. I'll give your hand a proper sendoff." Behind him, Hopkins and Tonga waited.
So I had not dreamed the little list that meant the Cap'n had given over the wheel.
"We're being pursued, Shear-Lock," I whispered. "You should - "
"It was easy enough to deduce Angel's purpose when I saw him heading for the surgery. He's our surest hand with a knife, excepting yourself. I knew why you'd summoned him." Even as he spoke, the Cap'n had laid out my surgical blades on the canvas-covered table, carefully dousing them in the bottle of rum I kept for that purpose. That simple expedient, learned by accident, has made an uncanny difference in the survival rate of my patients. Shear-Lock, fascinated with all modern things and who'd assisted me during several surgeries, was writing up a paper about advances in naval medicine. "It's high time I performed an amputation by myself, eh?"
"We're under chase," I murmured. "Quick-time it is. Start with that knife."
"No. With this." He held a flask to my lips. Grog, but an unusual taste. "Two good swallows, me lad."
The sailing master and our best rigger moved forward, and under the Cap'n's direction bound me tightly to the table with canvas straps, leaving my damaged arm free. Tonga stuffed a rolled canvas belt between my teeth and Shear-Lock tied off my forearm with another strap. The men held me down, shoulders and knees.
"Show me with your eyes," Shear-Lock said, taking up the blade and tracing his finger along my forearm. "Cut here? No. No. Here. Here, then."
This was…effortless. I'd undergone twenty times this much pain under torture, mingled as it was with loneliness, terror that I'd give away my captain, my ship, and my friends, and horror that I would die alone in this terrible way. There was a sharp cutting pain, true, but much of it was muffled by the pleasant sleepy fog in my brain that had replaced the fevered pain. If I must be bluntly honest, my own fascination with watching my own arm become parted from me occupied my mind as well.
Skin laid open in swift, delicate moves; blood vessels tied off with rum-soaked thread as if they were goatskins full of wine. Flesh parted from flesh, down to the double bones; my beloved old saw, turned against its master. Hopkins made a face at the sawing sounds. Shear-Lock's hands were as deft and precise as they were on his violin. The knife again for its final jaunt through flesh and skin, and there I was as one-handed as many an old salt. In the same deft manner the Cap'n sewed the skin-flap over the stump and wrapped my stump in spirit-soaked dressings as the men untied me. The whole thing had taken less than fifteen minutes.
"You've the makings of a surgeon, Cap'n," I said softly.
His blood-spattered hand holding the flask trembled, as it never had whilst taking off my hand. "But then you'd have to command the Baker, Jack, and you've no stomach for that work," he said jocularly. "Now take your medicine. I've to get us back to safety."
I swallowed another dose of poppy-laced rum. "Thank you, Shear-Lock. I'd hoped you could do this."
He was still and silent. The men pretended to be deaf and dumb, as they often had to do when the Cap'n and I spoke to each other. "I'd hoped I could present that bastard's liver to you. My truest man, my surest heart - Jack me bonny boy, I swear by every saint in Heaven that he will learn what your lost hand meant to me."
In the meantime all I had to do was rest in my hammock in the captain's quarters, watching the curling foam of the sea under blue skies through the picture windows, reassuring me that I was safely out of that windowless room of horror and pain, dying by inches under Moriarty's quiet questions. Carried out of Hell by the scurviest angels who ever flew, led by the strangest and gawkiest angel God ever created…
I closed my eyes.
***