Advent Calendar, Day 18 - Fic
Title: Not Crossing the Bar
Author: takadainmate
Rating: Mature
Words: 2,525
Summary: Without any indication as to why, without disagreement, Jack and Stephen are not speaking.
.Not Crossing the Bar.
Stephen awoke to the familiar sounds of a ship; creaking, feet running, shouting, voices familiar. He swayed with the familiar rhythm of being far out to sea, that deep slow roll that was familiar after so many years, if not quite Stephen’s most favoured of sensations. The smell too was well known to him; coffee and salt and, unmistakably, Jack. He was in Jack’s cabin. In Jack’s cot. How he’d come to be there he couldn’t remember. But Stephen was warm and could not gather the strength to be concerned at that. He was tired.
From the corner of the room Stephen heard the legs of a chair scrape against the deck floor, heavy bootfalls, then Jack’s face above him.
He said, “There you are, Stephen,” and he was smiling, as he often did, but there was some tightness around his eyes, some fixed aspect of his joviality that made Stephen frown.
“The hospital surgeon told me the best cure for you is rest.” Jack patted his arm with incredible care. “So rest you shall have.”
Stephen thought he should ask what was wrong, but he found he couldn’t convince his voice to form words. His eyes were too heavy and he couldn’t keep them open.
So rest he would have.
**
The crew were infuriating and would not be told. It had been like this with Jack after Menorca and so now it seemed this trait of overbearing care - of attempting to doctor him - had been passed on to every seaman who had the capacity for speech.
“Here, sir,” said a foremast hand called Samuel Darnell who had been under Stephen’s knife more than once and whose thick Norfolk accent made his invitation sound more like a threat. “I’ve made a comfy seat for you to take the air.”
There was a cushion and three blankets.
“I don’t need to take the air, I thank you.” Stephen gritted his teeth as he smiled and it must have looked painful and strange because the seaman took his arm carefully and ushered him to the bench, bending his arm to force him to sit. Stephen was defenseless against the fanatical care of his shipmates.
“You look right tired there, Doctor,” Samuel said, pulling a blanket over Stephen’s legs fussily. “Nice sit down’ll see you better.”
“I’m fine,” Stephen insisted, even if his chest still felt weighted, constricted, and his shoulders and back ached, itched like fine needles scraping across his skin. His eyes felt heavy even though he’d slept for most of four days. It was a relief to be out in the open air though; to see the sky and the cool wind on his face, away from the confines of Jack’s cabin, buried under a hundred blankets and stifling, suffocating.
Still now, since those first half-remembered words in the Captain’s cabin Jack had not said a word to him beyond what was polite; a “Good morning, Doctor,” here and a “How is your health today,” there and it was amazing to Stephen that two men could live in such close, shared quarters for days on end and say absolutely nothing to each other.
This too was suffocating.
Jack was angry with him, Stephen was sure, but this wasn’t like other times when Jack would show his irritation through cold impersonality; there was a hot fury to Jack’s behaviour, a pain to it that Stephen did not like to see and did not understand.
He watched the Captain at the helm, speaking lowly with the Master. Stephen had tried to thank him, but Jack would hear none of it. He’d tried to ask if he’d had any news of home when he’d been ashore and he had received only brief, punctilious reports of Sophie’s well being and the possibility of new stockings in their next packet.
Stephen hadn’t explained. He knew Jack didn’t want to hear it.
“He was all mad with it,” Samuel said, tipping his head towards the Captain. “When he thought you'd been done for. There was some that thought he’d get us all killed he was so distempered. Doesn’t have both oars in the water, someone said.”
Stephen raised an eyebrow. “Not you, though.”
Samuel grinned wide enough that Stephen could see the gaps in his teeth.
“Not me.”
**
The weather turned the next day and Stephen was once again confined to his bed - Jack’s bed - not steady enough on his legs to risk the sharp rise and fall and turning and bucking of the deck beneath his feet.
Jack had posted Killick at the door, as though he were a prisoner to be closely watched. And yet, Stephen hadn’t even argued at the imposition; Jack’s mood was foul enough. But his obsequiousness had only seemed to aggravate Jack, who stormed out of his own cabin, face flushed, barking orders as he went.
“It’s the storm,” Killick lied, and forced an entire bowl of watery, tepid broth down Stephen’s throat.
**
There was no one to ask; of every man and boy on board Stephen knew their Captain the best. There was no man or boy aboard who would, nor should, speak with Stephen of the Captain’s mind when it came to their friendship. It was improper. And yet, for the first time, despite Jack’s presence, Stephen felt terribly alone -all at sea, he thought, shaking his head. He was cut off from his usual source of cheerfulness, of gossip, of music and humour, no matter how poor the humour.
Stephen could not fathom it, no matter which way he looked at it, nor how many times he tried to speak with Jack.
In the familiar confines of his own cabin Stephen had tried to write something down, to try and work it out, but his hand still shook when he tried to hold a pen, his shoulder not yet healed enough. It smelled stale, as though he’d been away for a year rather than a week. Perhaps he’d left a dissection half finished and it had begun to rot. Stephen began looking through the drawers of his cabinet.
The hands just said, “He couldn’t bear it,” and it was a strange sensation in his stomach to know how deeply his abbreviated death had affected Jack. Stephen tried to imagine it the other way around; if it was Jack who had passed and Stephen had been left behind. He found he could not imagine it, that world without Jack.
In the very bottom drawer he found his decaying culprit, the stench of it entirely unpleasant. He closed the drawer and leaned back upright, hissing at the aching of his muscles. It always irritated him, how his body was so slow to heal when his mind was already cataloguing the hundred things he could be doing; should be doing.
There was a bottle in the top drawer that Stephen knew was there and that Stephen knew would make this pain stop and for a long time he sat with his fingers wrapped around the drawer handle. He sat until the thought had passed.
He should inspect the wound, Stephen decided instead. For all the time that he had been aboard since Jack had retrieved him Stephen had not yet looked at the damage that had been inflicted upon him.
Carefully, he balanced a mirror on the cabinet, pulled off his shirt with his good arm and slowly unwound the bandages from his shoulder, his arm, his chest. Purple and yellow and green bruises were slowly revealed, red raw flesh where a bullet had ripped through his skin, but no sign of infection.
Stephen stared at the mess of his shoulder and back, at the scars there still visible from other times too, and wondered at the fact that Jack had seen them all.
Then, a knock at the door and Jack was standing there, suddenly filling the doorframe and saying, “Doctor, I-”
He stopped, eyes fixed on Stephen’s injuries, and his face turned a strange pale colour that make Jack look ghoulish in the lamplight.
Jack’s mouth opened and closed, then opened again. “I’m disturbing you,” he said, and coughed into his hand but still his eyes did not leave Stephen’s shoulder. “I shall come back at a more convenient time.”
And then he was gone, the door shut behind him, and Stephen left quite cold.
**
At Jack’s table Stephen picked at his food, eating only as much as was polite, and drank sparingly, a queasy dizziness overtaking him every time he took a sip of wine.
Jack spoke at length about Nelson and the officers around the table hung on his every word, fascinated and in awe. For his part Stephen had heard this tale a hundred times or more. But still he found he’d never yet grown tired of hearing it. Or perhaps it was just that Jack was flushed with laughter and it had been some weeks, uncharacteristically, since Stephen had seen Jack smile.
And then a young midshipmen by the name of William Coles, who Stephen thought haughty and arrogant and loud, stood up unsteadily and raised his glass, wine sloshing over the side and onto the white tablecloth such that Killick tutted and mumbled curses under his breath.
“To the Doctor’s health, Sir,” he announced, grinning down at Stephen. Stephen tipped his head in acknowledgement, but it was Jack’s emphatic nodding that caught his attention.
Jack said, “Hear, hear,” and, for a moment, grinned at Stephen.
It was enough to convince Stephen that they would be well; that Jack had forgiven him.
But then the midshipman went on, “I would be most grateful to hear the tale of your rescue of the good Doctor, Captain. I heard it was a glorious coup,” and Jack’s demeanour changed immediately.
“It was nothing so remarkable, Coles.” Jack shook his head, shifted in his seat and did not smile. “The Doctor could have saved himself in time, I’m certain of it.”
In time Stephen would have bled to death, but he held his tongue. There was none but Jack that knew the whole of it.
“But Sir, I heard you killed a French admiral,” William Cole persevered.
With his bare hands Jack had tried, thinking the admiral had killed Stephen. It had been revenge, pure and simple, and Stephen could not help but be both affected and disturbed by it. Disturbed not because he knew Jack would kill for him, but because he knew he would easily -without thought of consequence or morality- do the same thing.
“It was a small thing,” Jack said, “He was a coward. Now, Killick,” he turned away, ending the conversation. “Where is that dessert?”
Perhaps Stephen was not as forgiven as he’d hoped.
**
They hadn’t played together in weeks; between storms and being dead and Jack’s anger it was not unexpected but Stephen still missed it terribly. Jack had not asked and Stephen did not dare to.
Yet still they shared Jack’s cabin; something unspoken that even when Stephen was mostly healed and could have returned to his own cot he stayed. It wasn’t just a matter of politeness -that Jack wasn’t willing to ask Stephen to leave for fear of appearing ill-mannered- Stephen knew Jack better than that. Despite everything Jack still seemed to value Stephen’s companionship, even as stilted and awkward as it was.
Stephen sat silently reading, Jack writing a letter, his pen scratching furiously over the paper. He was frowning, mouth pursed. The atmosphere was as strange as it had ever been these past weeks. The night was warm and still, the hands creeping about the ship in deference, perhaps, to their Captain’s mood.
With a particularly vicious stab upon his letter that Stephen presumed was the making of a full stop, Jack put down his pen and turned to face him.
“I’ll tell you what it is, Stephen,” he began, “How am I to answer Sophie when she asks after your health? I have to write, ‘Stephen is well, Sophie, and had not at all been shot thrice by a mad Frenchman, beaten half to death to the extent I thought he had been beaten all the way to death, and then it turned out he wasn’t dead at all, but just pretending so I wouldn’t interfere’.”
“It wasn’t-“
Jack interrupted, “But all is well, my dear, because our Stephen is safely back aboard ship now, where he belongs, and not a trace of this unhappy incident remains.”
He looked sternly at Stephen, very obviously waiting for a reply.
“You cannot write that,” Stephen said finally, cautiously.
“No,” Jack agreed. “I cannot.”
“Perhaps I should not have acted as I did,” Stephen offered. He understood that he had acted rashly, unthinkingly, inconsiderate of Jack’s reaction. At the time it had seemed the only thing to do; to keep Jack safe; to complete his assignment.
“Perhaps not,” Jack agreed and Stephen nodded, stood up, bowing formally.
“I can only offer my apologies, Jack.”
It was a relief, after all these weeks of formality to call Jack by his name again, to hear Jack call him by his name.
And then the legs of Jack’s chair were scraping against the wooden deck, Jack was standing, standing there in front of him casting a long shadow and grasping Stephen by the shoulders.
“Dammit, Stephen,” he said, “I don’t want your apology. I want you to not do that again.”
It was difficult to stand up straight and look Jack in the eye, imagining what he might see there. It was unbearable that he could make no such promise; not to die, not even to keep Jack so far in the dark that he didn’t know if Stephen lived. He could not make that promise because there was every possibility -every likelihood- that he would never be able to keep it. To make Jack an oath and break it; that would be worse than anything.
Concern, uncertainty, apprehension was what he found. And in their proximity Stephen felt Jack’s warmth, Jack’s hand moving to his neck.
“You know,” Jack said, and took a breath, then said again, “You know, I thought you were dead and I could not fathom it.”
“I know,” Stephen tried. “I know, Jack.” Because it was the same for him. Stephen wouldn’t make excuses. Jack didn’t deserve that, not when his fingers were rubbing at the base of Stephen’s skull and Stephen could feel the warmth of Jack’s breath against his face.
Jack kissed him then, and Stephen could not decide if he had expected it or not, but rather that he did not care.
This was different but the same; the same as before in their trust and their contentment with each other. And yet all new in the taste of Jack’s mouth and the entwining of their hands together, finding new places to touch each other.
It should not have taken them so long to get to this, Stephen thought when they finally broke apart. It should not have taken this. But he couldn’t regret it. He wouldn’t change it.
Stephen kissed Jack again and did not think at all.
.End.
Hope you enjoyed and a Happy Christmas and a fantastic new year to you all!
Author: takadainmate
Rating: Mature
Words: 2,525
Summary: Without any indication as to why, without disagreement, Jack and Stephen are not speaking.
.Not Crossing the Bar.
Stephen awoke to the familiar sounds of a ship; creaking, feet running, shouting, voices familiar. He swayed with the familiar rhythm of being far out to sea, that deep slow roll that was familiar after so many years, if not quite Stephen’s most favoured of sensations. The smell too was well known to him; coffee and salt and, unmistakably, Jack. He was in Jack’s cabin. In Jack’s cot. How he’d come to be there he couldn’t remember. But Stephen was warm and could not gather the strength to be concerned at that. He was tired.
From the corner of the room Stephen heard the legs of a chair scrape against the deck floor, heavy bootfalls, then Jack’s face above him.
He said, “There you are, Stephen,” and he was smiling, as he often did, but there was some tightness around his eyes, some fixed aspect of his joviality that made Stephen frown.
“The hospital surgeon told me the best cure for you is rest.” Jack patted his arm with incredible care. “So rest you shall have.”
Stephen thought he should ask what was wrong, but he found he couldn’t convince his voice to form words. His eyes were too heavy and he couldn’t keep them open.
So rest he would have.
**
The crew were infuriating and would not be told. It had been like this with Jack after Menorca and so now it seemed this trait of overbearing care - of attempting to doctor him - had been passed on to every seaman who had the capacity for speech.
“Here, sir,” said a foremast hand called Samuel Darnell who had been under Stephen’s knife more than once and whose thick Norfolk accent made his invitation sound more like a threat. “I’ve made a comfy seat for you to take the air.”
There was a cushion and three blankets.
“I don’t need to take the air, I thank you.” Stephen gritted his teeth as he smiled and it must have looked painful and strange because the seaman took his arm carefully and ushered him to the bench, bending his arm to force him to sit. Stephen was defenseless against the fanatical care of his shipmates.
“You look right tired there, Doctor,” Samuel said, pulling a blanket over Stephen’s legs fussily. “Nice sit down’ll see you better.”
“I’m fine,” Stephen insisted, even if his chest still felt weighted, constricted, and his shoulders and back ached, itched like fine needles scraping across his skin. His eyes felt heavy even though he’d slept for most of four days. It was a relief to be out in the open air though; to see the sky and the cool wind on his face, away from the confines of Jack’s cabin, buried under a hundred blankets and stifling, suffocating.
Still now, since those first half-remembered words in the Captain’s cabin Jack had not said a word to him beyond what was polite; a “Good morning, Doctor,” here and a “How is your health today,” there and it was amazing to Stephen that two men could live in such close, shared quarters for days on end and say absolutely nothing to each other.
This too was suffocating.
Jack was angry with him, Stephen was sure, but this wasn’t like other times when Jack would show his irritation through cold impersonality; there was a hot fury to Jack’s behaviour, a pain to it that Stephen did not like to see and did not understand.
He watched the Captain at the helm, speaking lowly with the Master. Stephen had tried to thank him, but Jack would hear none of it. He’d tried to ask if he’d had any news of home when he’d been ashore and he had received only brief, punctilious reports of Sophie’s well being and the possibility of new stockings in their next packet.
Stephen hadn’t explained. He knew Jack didn’t want to hear it.
“He was all mad with it,” Samuel said, tipping his head towards the Captain. “When he thought you'd been done for. There was some that thought he’d get us all killed he was so distempered. Doesn’t have both oars in the water, someone said.”
Stephen raised an eyebrow. “Not you, though.”
Samuel grinned wide enough that Stephen could see the gaps in his teeth.
“Not me.”
**
The weather turned the next day and Stephen was once again confined to his bed - Jack’s bed - not steady enough on his legs to risk the sharp rise and fall and turning and bucking of the deck beneath his feet.
Jack had posted Killick at the door, as though he were a prisoner to be closely watched. And yet, Stephen hadn’t even argued at the imposition; Jack’s mood was foul enough. But his obsequiousness had only seemed to aggravate Jack, who stormed out of his own cabin, face flushed, barking orders as he went.
“It’s the storm,” Killick lied, and forced an entire bowl of watery, tepid broth down Stephen’s throat.
**
There was no one to ask; of every man and boy on board Stephen knew their Captain the best. There was no man or boy aboard who would, nor should, speak with Stephen of the Captain’s mind when it came to their friendship. It was improper. And yet, for the first time, despite Jack’s presence, Stephen felt terribly alone -all at sea, he thought, shaking his head. He was cut off from his usual source of cheerfulness, of gossip, of music and humour, no matter how poor the humour.
Stephen could not fathom it, no matter which way he looked at it, nor how many times he tried to speak with Jack.
In the familiar confines of his own cabin Stephen had tried to write something down, to try and work it out, but his hand still shook when he tried to hold a pen, his shoulder not yet healed enough. It smelled stale, as though he’d been away for a year rather than a week. Perhaps he’d left a dissection half finished and it had begun to rot. Stephen began looking through the drawers of his cabinet.
The hands just said, “He couldn’t bear it,” and it was a strange sensation in his stomach to know how deeply his abbreviated death had affected Jack. Stephen tried to imagine it the other way around; if it was Jack who had passed and Stephen had been left behind. He found he could not imagine it, that world without Jack.
In the very bottom drawer he found his decaying culprit, the stench of it entirely unpleasant. He closed the drawer and leaned back upright, hissing at the aching of his muscles. It always irritated him, how his body was so slow to heal when his mind was already cataloguing the hundred things he could be doing; should be doing.
There was a bottle in the top drawer that Stephen knew was there and that Stephen knew would make this pain stop and for a long time he sat with his fingers wrapped around the drawer handle. He sat until the thought had passed.
He should inspect the wound, Stephen decided instead. For all the time that he had been aboard since Jack had retrieved him Stephen had not yet looked at the damage that had been inflicted upon him.
Carefully, he balanced a mirror on the cabinet, pulled off his shirt with his good arm and slowly unwound the bandages from his shoulder, his arm, his chest. Purple and yellow and green bruises were slowly revealed, red raw flesh where a bullet had ripped through his skin, but no sign of infection.
Stephen stared at the mess of his shoulder and back, at the scars there still visible from other times too, and wondered at the fact that Jack had seen them all.
Then, a knock at the door and Jack was standing there, suddenly filling the doorframe and saying, “Doctor, I-”
He stopped, eyes fixed on Stephen’s injuries, and his face turned a strange pale colour that make Jack look ghoulish in the lamplight.
Jack’s mouth opened and closed, then opened again. “I’m disturbing you,” he said, and coughed into his hand but still his eyes did not leave Stephen’s shoulder. “I shall come back at a more convenient time.”
And then he was gone, the door shut behind him, and Stephen left quite cold.
**
At Jack’s table Stephen picked at his food, eating only as much as was polite, and drank sparingly, a queasy dizziness overtaking him every time he took a sip of wine.
Jack spoke at length about Nelson and the officers around the table hung on his every word, fascinated and in awe. For his part Stephen had heard this tale a hundred times or more. But still he found he’d never yet grown tired of hearing it. Or perhaps it was just that Jack was flushed with laughter and it had been some weeks, uncharacteristically, since Stephen had seen Jack smile.
And then a young midshipmen by the name of William Coles, who Stephen thought haughty and arrogant and loud, stood up unsteadily and raised his glass, wine sloshing over the side and onto the white tablecloth such that Killick tutted and mumbled curses under his breath.
“To the Doctor’s health, Sir,” he announced, grinning down at Stephen. Stephen tipped his head in acknowledgement, but it was Jack’s emphatic nodding that caught his attention.
Jack said, “Hear, hear,” and, for a moment, grinned at Stephen.
It was enough to convince Stephen that they would be well; that Jack had forgiven him.
But then the midshipman went on, “I would be most grateful to hear the tale of your rescue of the good Doctor, Captain. I heard it was a glorious coup,” and Jack’s demeanour changed immediately.
“It was nothing so remarkable, Coles.” Jack shook his head, shifted in his seat and did not smile. “The Doctor could have saved himself in time, I’m certain of it.”
In time Stephen would have bled to death, but he held his tongue. There was none but Jack that knew the whole of it.
“But Sir, I heard you killed a French admiral,” William Cole persevered.
With his bare hands Jack had tried, thinking the admiral had killed Stephen. It had been revenge, pure and simple, and Stephen could not help but be both affected and disturbed by it. Disturbed not because he knew Jack would kill for him, but because he knew he would easily -without thought of consequence or morality- do the same thing.
“It was a small thing,” Jack said, “He was a coward. Now, Killick,” he turned away, ending the conversation. “Where is that dessert?”
Perhaps Stephen was not as forgiven as he’d hoped.
**
They hadn’t played together in weeks; between storms and being dead and Jack’s anger it was not unexpected but Stephen still missed it terribly. Jack had not asked and Stephen did not dare to.
Yet still they shared Jack’s cabin; something unspoken that even when Stephen was mostly healed and could have returned to his own cot he stayed. It wasn’t just a matter of politeness -that Jack wasn’t willing to ask Stephen to leave for fear of appearing ill-mannered- Stephen knew Jack better than that. Despite everything Jack still seemed to value Stephen’s companionship, even as stilted and awkward as it was.
Stephen sat silently reading, Jack writing a letter, his pen scratching furiously over the paper. He was frowning, mouth pursed. The atmosphere was as strange as it had ever been these past weeks. The night was warm and still, the hands creeping about the ship in deference, perhaps, to their Captain’s mood.
With a particularly vicious stab upon his letter that Stephen presumed was the making of a full stop, Jack put down his pen and turned to face him.
“I’ll tell you what it is, Stephen,” he began, “How am I to answer Sophie when she asks after your health? I have to write, ‘Stephen is well, Sophie, and had not at all been shot thrice by a mad Frenchman, beaten half to death to the extent I thought he had been beaten all the way to death, and then it turned out he wasn’t dead at all, but just pretending so I wouldn’t interfere’.”
“It wasn’t-“
Jack interrupted, “But all is well, my dear, because our Stephen is safely back aboard ship now, where he belongs, and not a trace of this unhappy incident remains.”
He looked sternly at Stephen, very obviously waiting for a reply.
“You cannot write that,” Stephen said finally, cautiously.
“No,” Jack agreed. “I cannot.”
“Perhaps I should not have acted as I did,” Stephen offered. He understood that he had acted rashly, unthinkingly, inconsiderate of Jack’s reaction. At the time it had seemed the only thing to do; to keep Jack safe; to complete his assignment.
“Perhaps not,” Jack agreed and Stephen nodded, stood up, bowing formally.
“I can only offer my apologies, Jack.”
It was a relief, after all these weeks of formality to call Jack by his name again, to hear Jack call him by his name.
And then the legs of Jack’s chair were scraping against the wooden deck, Jack was standing, standing there in front of him casting a long shadow and grasping Stephen by the shoulders.
“Dammit, Stephen,” he said, “I don’t want your apology. I want you to not do that again.”
It was difficult to stand up straight and look Jack in the eye, imagining what he might see there. It was unbearable that he could make no such promise; not to die, not even to keep Jack so far in the dark that he didn’t know if Stephen lived. He could not make that promise because there was every possibility -every likelihood- that he would never be able to keep it. To make Jack an oath and break it; that would be worse than anything.
Concern, uncertainty, apprehension was what he found. And in their proximity Stephen felt Jack’s warmth, Jack’s hand moving to his neck.
“You know,” Jack said, and took a breath, then said again, “You know, I thought you were dead and I could not fathom it.”
“I know,” Stephen tried. “I know, Jack.” Because it was the same for him. Stephen wouldn’t make excuses. Jack didn’t deserve that, not when his fingers were rubbing at the base of Stephen’s skull and Stephen could feel the warmth of Jack’s breath against his face.
Jack kissed him then, and Stephen could not decide if he had expected it or not, but rather that he did not care.
This was different but the same; the same as before in their trust and their contentment with each other. And yet all new in the taste of Jack’s mouth and the entwining of their hands together, finding new places to touch each other.
It should not have taken them so long to get to this, Stephen thought when they finally broke apart. It should not have taken this. But he couldn’t regret it. He wouldn’t change it.
Stephen kissed Jack again and did not think at all.
.End.
Hope you enjoyed and a Happy Christmas and a fantastic new year to you all!