Perfect Duet's paid account and the Oakum Meme (II)

[esteven]

Some lovely person was so kind to gift perfect_duet with two months of paid time. Whoever it was, please pm me, so I can thank you properly. :D The gift makes the Oakum Meme so much easier because it brought the subject headers back.

So, once more onto the breach:

Here at this post you will find all prompts/requests we have so far received on LJ and on DW

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Nip and Tuck (part 2)

[anonymous]

“How very irritable Grainger has become of late, beneath the genteel veneer,” he thought. “Or is it I who am become irritable with weariness, snapping at Jack for doing no more than his duty and doing it cheerfully at that? He refused his dose, it is true, but then he almost certainly supposed it a purgative that would have confined him to the quarter-gallery tomorrow, the creature. His notions of medicaments are as incurably narrow as any mariner’s, and as incurably expansive too: self-medicating with Billingsworth’s Patent Embrocation, for all love, the merest empirical quackery, and all the time he believes me unaware. It will do him no more good than his quacksalves have done his corneal abrasion. It is the greatest fool that he is; he can barely see out of that eye now, when such a superficial lesion should have been resolved weeks back.”

Stephen was indeed weary, as weary as a man rightly could be who had spent all morning in the careful sorting of his Peruvian collection and the packing of it, wrapped in oiled silk and sailcloth parcels, into watertight casks in the hold, and then all afternoon in the sickbay, treating two men injured by falls from ice-coated rigging and another three struck by lightning, the same lightning that had annihilated the rudder.

One of the latter patients had been so damaged by the electrical fluid that had coursed through him that Stephen, having tracked the fellow’s heartbeat as it fluttered crazily under his fingertips, had every expectation of a prodigiously curious dissection by the following day. He wondered whether his friend Mr Crilly of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh would want the disordered organ and the scorched disc of skin overlying it for his new museum, along with the set of comminuted tarsal fractures that Stephen had just put up for the purpose in spirits of wine, an excellent specimen of that typical nautical injury so frequently produced by recoiling cannons. Perhaps Stephen might even donate the blackened gangrenous toes he kept tucked away in an old snuff-box, the chisel-marks still clear on their severed ends.

“Effects of frostbite on Naval Surgeon, Peru 1813,” he thought. “The visible effects, at least, since the mental effects, alas, cannot be so easily bottled and labelled... Oh how very hazy my faculties are become this evening, and without a drop of poppy to excuse them.” The laudanum decanter, emptied of its contents and never refilled since Padeen’s departure, would be in the bottle-rack, and the coca pouch would be on the lid of his sea chest. He would turn over to check that it was so; any moment now he would turn over, just to check...

He fell into an uneasy sleep, dreaming of chisels and his cure-all leaf.

***

Stephen awoke at the end of the middle watch-that time when the life-spirit, regardless of the tide, is at its lowest ebb-with the notion that something was wrong, a notion that gripped him with such immediate force that no logic could dismiss it. Jack, he remembered, had looked pale with exhaustion beneath the hectic flush brought on by his immersion in the ice-strewn seawater, had made no mention of music or their usual supper of toasted cheese, seldom neglected even when neither soft-tack nor cheese was to be had within hundreds of sea-miles, and had made no protest when Stephen departed for the gunroom.

“I shall but put my head in the door of his sleeping-cabin. The Devil take that great ninny if he has caught a chill, but if he has, it might be as well if treatment should commence immediately,” Stephen muttered, fishing for his list slippers in the detritus of his cabin-floor. “Or perhaps I shall merely send the sentry in to check that all is well.”

He shuffled as far as the ladder, where he peered up at the dim light from the hatchway. Very dim, it seemed, and very far away, and suddenly he felt that it might be best after all if he laid his head down on the deck for a moment, just to cool his cheek against the chill damp of the planking, just until his breath came back, and until his mind stopped spinning, and until the blackness let him go.