The Left Hand of Franklin (F/K, G)
Title:The Left Hand of Franklin
Pairing: F/K (sorta)
Rating: G
Author's Notes: Written after skimming Ken McGoogan's 2006 book Lady Franklin's Revenge. Which is such a due South book. McGoogan uses that "Revenge is a wild kind of justice" quote from Bacon as his opening epitaph! So...it's required reading, okay? And it got me thinking about the way history is shaped and formed. Which I assume might interest Fraser and Ray. And this is unbeta'd because it's damn short, so all mistakes and problems with tense are my own.
It's really a love story.
That's what Ray discovers when he starts reading about Sir John Franklin and his reaching-out hand. He gets stacks of books out of the library in Chicago - Christ, thirty-eight years old and he's never needed a library card before - and starts going through them. And the facts line up just like Fraser said they would. It's like listening to that song echo through the ice crevasse, the one about the one warm line through a wild and savage land except...except it turns out that the line wasn't drawn by Franklin at all.
That's what Ray learns when he starts reading the very last book on the very last shelf in the Chicago Public Library's section on the history of arctic exploration. That the story wasn't Franklin's. He was just some guy who got some boats together and didn't quite find the Northwest Passage and ended up on some ice floe and maybe got eaten by his shipmates. His story isn't a very interesting one.
The interesting story, the one that the books don't talk about, is the part when Franklin's wife starts looking for her husband. The guy sailed away and disappeared and then Mrs. Franklin, who sounds like a pretty feisty lady if half of what Ray has read is true, got in on the act. She organized expeditions to the arctic. She wrote editorials in the newspapers and gave lectures about her husband and hounded pretty much everybody in the British government to find out what happened out there by the Beaufort Sea. And the lady got her answers.
She got them when some other explorer brought back the news that her husband died on that ice floe. And Mrs. Franklin mourned him, and then she put up a statue in his honor, and then she made the misadventures of the Erebus and the Terror into something worth writing songs about. The whole thing was engineered by this great explorer's wife, and she was hardly even mentioned in any of the stories Ray read before he found that last slim volume shoved in the back of the shelf at the Chicago Public Library.
He showed the book to Fraser later that night when Fraser came home, looking a little tired and worn-out from putting up with the noise and the rush of the big city.
"It's not what we thought it was," Ray said, holding the book out.
Fraser scanned the back cover and read a couple of paragraphs and looked at Ray. "History rarely is."
"What does it mean?"
Fraser took a deep breath and Ray prepared himself for a lecture, but like always Fraser managed to surprise him.
"It means that the world is more interested in the story than the thing that holds it and carries it forward."
"Is that like, 'All women are our sisters'?" Ray asked after a long moment of silence.
In the darkness of their bedroom Fraser nodded. "Yes. Yes, that's it exactly."
.the end.
Pairing: F/K (sorta)
Rating: G
Author's Notes: Written after skimming Ken McGoogan's 2006 book Lady Franklin's Revenge. Which is such a due South book. McGoogan uses that "Revenge is a wild kind of justice" quote from Bacon as his opening epitaph! So...it's required reading, okay? And it got me thinking about the way history is shaped and formed. Which I assume might interest Fraser and Ray. And this is unbeta'd because it's damn short, so all mistakes and problems with tense are my own.
It's really a love story.
That's what Ray discovers when he starts reading about Sir John Franklin and his reaching-out hand. He gets stacks of books out of the library in Chicago - Christ, thirty-eight years old and he's never needed a library card before - and starts going through them. And the facts line up just like Fraser said they would. It's like listening to that song echo through the ice crevasse, the one about the one warm line through a wild and savage land except...except it turns out that the line wasn't drawn by Franklin at all.
That's what Ray learns when he starts reading the very last book on the very last shelf in the Chicago Public Library's section on the history of arctic exploration. That the story wasn't Franklin's. He was just some guy who got some boats together and didn't quite find the Northwest Passage and ended up on some ice floe and maybe got eaten by his shipmates. His story isn't a very interesting one.
The interesting story, the one that the books don't talk about, is the part when Franklin's wife starts looking for her husband. The guy sailed away and disappeared and then Mrs. Franklin, who sounds like a pretty feisty lady if half of what Ray has read is true, got in on the act. She organized expeditions to the arctic. She wrote editorials in the newspapers and gave lectures about her husband and hounded pretty much everybody in the British government to find out what happened out there by the Beaufort Sea. And the lady got her answers.
She got them when some other explorer brought back the news that her husband died on that ice floe. And Mrs. Franklin mourned him, and then she put up a statue in his honor, and then she made the misadventures of the Erebus and the Terror into something worth writing songs about. The whole thing was engineered by this great explorer's wife, and she was hardly even mentioned in any of the stories Ray read before he found that last slim volume shoved in the back of the shelf at the Chicago Public Library.
He showed the book to Fraser later that night when Fraser came home, looking a little tired and worn-out from putting up with the noise and the rush of the big city.
"It's not what we thought it was," Ray said, holding the book out.
Fraser scanned the back cover and read a couple of paragraphs and looked at Ray. "History rarely is."
"What does it mean?"
Fraser took a deep breath and Ray prepared himself for a lecture, but like always Fraser managed to surprise him.
"It means that the world is more interested in the story than the thing that holds it and carries it forward."
"Is that like, 'All women are our sisters'?" Ray asked after a long moment of silence.
In the darkness of their bedroom Fraser nodded. "Yes. Yes, that's it exactly."
.the end.