Fic: Fixing Epees
Title:Fixing Épées
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Harry Percy (Hotspur), Douglas, pre-slash.
Rating: My usual dull PG-13 :-)
Notes/Warnings, etc. WWI AU, set pre main events.
The first record of the epée match at Oxford is in 1903. It was held in the summer, in The Queen's College quad, and was fenced between teams of five fencers, each bout to only one hit, in true duelling style. Although it was usually former blues who took part, occasionally students were included on the team as well. I assumed Hotspur would be good enough to get in to the OFC rather than just the OUFC, and thus be on the team…
Yes, I own a copy of E.M. Morton's The Martini A-Z of Fencing. Sad, isn't it?
(N.B. This is a completely self-indulgent fic. I know, you hadn't guessed…)Hangovers, college life at Oxford when you're them, and unashamedly AU. Set pre-anything yet written in this AU *G* but heralds some of the events of 'No Man Than Yourself'. Love to the usual suspects, who preserve my sanity, such as it is...
If there was one thing Douglas hated more than waking up in the morning, it was waking up in the morning to find that it was already boiling hot, that the sun was already coming straight through his open window into his eyes (and he refused to take the blame for that, since it certainly hadn't been his idea to finish the (very good) port the night before and get himself so utterly plastered that he'd fallen asleep without closing the curtains, thank you very much), and that it was, in fact, only five o'clock and no-one should be awake.
Unless they were mad as hatters or Harry Percy, obviously, and why, why, why was he sharing rooms with the horrible non-sleep-needing live finger-fret of a man, anyway?
"Mzszz," he managed, fervently if incoherently, as the sounds of Harry being incredibly restless outside his door, which meant prowling the study and picking something up and putting it down - over and over and over, what the hell? -penetrated his unhappy ears and throbbing head. "Wha'?"
"Are you up?"
"Nnnn," Douglas said in futile protest, dragging his pillow over his face. "G'way."
His door creaked open.
"Said go away," he repeated, knowing it wouldn't do any good but needing to try anyway. "Please?"
The pillow was tugged off his face, and Douglas, unwisely, let his eyes open a slit. The glaring sun had been replaced by Harry's upside-down, broken-nosed face, which really was not an improvement in any way, but was at least a bit dimmer.
"Are you hungover?" Harry demanded incredulously.
Douglas, suffering from the increasing onset of what was shaping up to be one of the worst port-induced headaches of his life, sleep deprivation, and the growing realisation that he had gone to sleep still in white tie - though fortunately without the tie itself, which had at least prevented imminent strangulation - opened his eyes enough to meet Harry's incredulity with his own disbelieving glare.
"Yes, Harry," he said, with a patience he was a long way from feeling. "It happens to most people who get given most of a bottle of port right at the end of an evening by their oh-so-helpful so-called friend. Which would be you, just in case you were going to ask. Now give me back m'pillow, and fuck off."
Harry scowled. "You wouldn't rather I made you a cure?"
"It'd be a sodding tonic if you just left me alone," Douglas said wearily, but Harry was already gone. The sound of things clinking disturbingly in the next room boded no good for either his nervous system or the rest of the morning, and did nothing for the increasing feeling that someone had taken up playing a steel comb in his skull.
"I don't think it's supposed to look like this," Harry said at last, coming back in, "but I put the right things in…" He trailed off, looking at the glass in his hand, and Douglas focused on its contents for long enough to decide that nothing should ever look like that, and that he certainly wasn't letting it anywhere near him.
"Bloody hell," he said. "No."
Harry screwed his face up, seemingly equally dubious about the whole thing, and Douglas felt a wild moment of hope that he was going to abandon the project. "That's what I thought," he said, "but it's supposed to work, so -"
Douglas discovered, a few unpleasant seconds later, that when someone was sitting on top of you and pinching your nose shut, it was impossible not to open your mouth, and once something was in your mouth, no matter how incredibly, astoundingly foul it tasted or how much it resembled paintstripper - or perhaps just pure methylated spirits, he wasn't quite sure - it was impossible not to swallow.
There were a few silent moments while he decided whether or not he was going to be sick, his head was going to explode, or whether he was actually going to kill Harry and have the rooms to himself to do both or either of those things in and with some modicum of peace, and then, however nastily, his head and stomach settled enough to bring a little clarity back to him - including just why Harry was behaving more like a denizen of the Hanwell than usual.
The blasted fencing match. The invitation, rare and prized, from the OFC, to join their team and put on a show in Queens' front quad. Douglas tried not to curse himself out loud for an idiot, because if anything could finally make Harry doubt himself in something that was purely physical, it was being part of a display, being part of an expectation greater than he was.
Harry at fencing, be it play or practice, was a marvel to watch, the ripostes and counterattacks that would not come to his tongue at any time a natural extension of his arm's movements. He could think and strategise and adjust in a way that defied all his attempts at putting such things down on paper, lit up with a fierce clarity of eye and intelligence that most people denied existed in him at all, let alone in a sport where it was so very necessary. He was clean and brilliant and all the things his words so very rarely allowed him to be, and he found joy in it, which was something Douglas had come to learn was even rarer for this surprisingly hidden, complicated man.
But the joy, slowly, was draining away, simply through his skill having been recognised.
That Harry had earned his place, that he was a duellist of a skill approaching expert standard and probably the best the University had when it came to the art of épée fencing, that he could claim precedence in the painful sport with justification and proof, was all beside the point. He was now in a position where he had to prove his own worth, and in front of the world's curious eyes, that was no small difficulty for Harry, whose pride so often got in the way of allowing him to show anything of his skills, innate or learnt, that might be valued more highly than he himself counted them.
It was an honour for him to be asked, and an agony to have to participate, and Harry was deeply and thoroughly at war with his own nature as a result. He knew that people would be coming to watch him, he knew how good he was, and still he hated knowing that he would be observed. Douglas didn't know whether to pity him or strangle him, caught on his own part between envy of Harry's skills and a desire to save him from the inevitable result of them.
He batted, feebly, at the fingers still closing off half his air supply, and when Harry finally released him, he drew in a very deep breath, swallowed a few times, and finally said rather croakily, the concoction having removed most of the soft tissue at the back of his throat -
"Fencing match."
"No, that's me," Harry said, not getting off him, and Douglas sighed.
"I know it's you. Observation. Statement - can you move your great carcass, please, I'd like to breathe again sometime this godawful morning - of the bleeding obvious."
"Er. Yes?" Harry looked completely confused, but at least he moved to the edge of the bed and off Douglas's stomach, which was an enormous relief.
"You're nervous," Douglas said with a slow grin, which had the predictable result of making Harry flush with what could have been embarrassment or annoyance, and the inevitable howl of denial.
"Why would I be -" Harry started at the top of his voice, before visibly stopping himself. He subsided, blew out a frustrated breath, and grumbled - "You are a complete piss-artist, and it's not appreciated."
"And you were prowling the study at five in the morning, and since you don't actually know how to read, it wasn't to get any extra work in…"
"I can read."
"Uh-huh."
"You know I can read."
Douglas nodded, at his wide-eyed, encouraging, and thoroughly irritating best.
"I am not nervous!"
"And you can read, too," Douglas agreed kindly. Harry glared at him, before falling over sideways in overdone defeat and thumping his head down hard on the maligned pillow. There wasn't really room, and his elbow ended up in Douglas's ribs, which killed any burgeoning smugness almost instantly.
"I just….can't sleep."
"Right," Douglas said, wheezing, and pulled the pillow back so that it was between him and Harry's elbows. With a vague grunt of complaint, Harry let his head fall onto the hard mattress. "Why did you feel the need to invite me to share this little difficulty?"
"I was bored?" And just how he managed to look that pathetic was a miracle in and of itself, Douglas thought exasperatedly. It was a general combination of the shadows under his eyes and still being too thin to suit the heaviness of his bones, but Christ, it was effective, especially when seen sideways and lacking any sort of humour. Harry amused could beat the devil for his own peculiar kind of charm - and when he was worried, or thoughtful, or straight-out knackered, he just looked like a badly-treated wolfhound.
"Bored, or wanted me to read you a story?" he settled for in place of sympathy, smacking the pillow onto Harry's face.
"I do not -" came the indignant splutter from beneath the battered and flattened package of feathers, and Douglas sighed. No sense of humour at all, then. Wonderful. He glanced at the clock, which wasn't even showing quarter to six yet, and groaned inwardly. Hours and hours of Harry worrying himself sick over a standard of perfection that only he expected of himself did not go even remotely well with a hangover, even a diluted one.
"Harry?"
"I said, I'm not -" began a clearer voice, and Douglas replaced the pillow with his hand.
"Shut up. Get some sleep. Lie here and worry. Lie here and think of sheep - I don't particularly care, but shut up while you do it so I can go back to sleep, would you?"
"Can't," Harry muttered into his palm. Douglas sighed, and lowered his hand, since it was obviously not doing any good either as a deterrent to speech or a noise muffler.
"You can't shut up? Well that's a first…"
"I just keep -"
"You. Will. Be . Fine." Douglas punctuated his words by poking his finger hard into Harry's chest. "You're one of the best -"
"But 'one of' isn't enough. It's not, Doug, you know it's -"
"It's enough," Douglas said firmly. "You're enough. You're enough, and you're good enough, and you are going to win, and then we will fucking celebrate, all right? Now stop tormenting me and pretend you're a nice comatose ordinary person, and then I'll buy you lunch."
There was silence, for long enough for Douglas to begin to drift off again, thinking that Harry had actually listened to him, and then a whisper, so close to his ear that Harry's mouth was actually brushing against it -
"You see, almost magic - it's n-nothing."
Douglas turned his head, and opened his eyes, his face so close to Harry's that he could barely distinguish features, all of it a rather white blur and dark hair, and said clearly -
"You're not almost."
He couldn't quite get the next words out, but he knew Harry had heard them.
You are. You're the closest thing I know to magic. And I wish you could see that.
Harry leant in that last fraction, resting their foreheads together, and just breathed for a moment, quiet and shallow and very warm. At last, he whispered -
"All right."
He stayed there for a moment, and then moved his head away, back to the pillow. His bruised-looking eyelids, very slowly, closed.
Douglas didn't dare move, even to close his own tired eyes, afraid to break whatever peace Harry had managed to bring out of the fraught morning for himself.
It wasn't until Harry reached out, and awkwardly, fumblingly, took his hand, tangling their fingers together in a decidedly uncomfortable way, that he dared relax, and drift back into his own miserable attempts at a doze.
Almost magic. It's nothing.
For some reason, the words haunted him, and echoed, uncomfortably, in his dreams, imbuing them with a restless unhappiness that was not his, and somehow hurt the worse for that.
He wondered, when he woke, whether winning would ever be enough for Harry.
He wondered even more what would happen when it started to be the only thing that mattered.
*
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Harry Percy (Hotspur), Douglas, pre-slash.
Rating: My usual dull PG-13 :-)
Notes/Warnings, etc. WWI AU, set pre main events.
The first record of the epée match at Oxford is in 1903. It was held in the summer, in The Queen's College quad, and was fenced between teams of five fencers, each bout to only one hit, in true duelling style. Although it was usually former blues who took part, occasionally students were included on the team as well. I assumed Hotspur would be good enough to get in to the OFC rather than just the OUFC, and thus be on the team…
Yes, I own a copy of E.M. Morton's The Martini A-Z of Fencing. Sad, isn't it?
(N.B. This is a completely self-indulgent fic. I know, you hadn't guessed…)Hangovers, college life at Oxford when you're them, and unashamedly AU. Set pre-anything yet written in this AU *G* but heralds some of the events of 'No Man Than Yourself'. Love to the usual suspects, who preserve my sanity, such as it is...
If there was one thing Douglas hated more than waking up in the morning, it was waking up in the morning to find that it was already boiling hot, that the sun was already coming straight through his open window into his eyes (and he refused to take the blame for that, since it certainly hadn't been his idea to finish the (very good) port the night before and get himself so utterly plastered that he'd fallen asleep without closing the curtains, thank you very much), and that it was, in fact, only five o'clock and no-one should be awake.
Unless they were mad as hatters or Harry Percy, obviously, and why, why, why was he sharing rooms with the horrible non-sleep-needing live finger-fret of a man, anyway?
"Mzszz," he managed, fervently if incoherently, as the sounds of Harry being incredibly restless outside his door, which meant prowling the study and picking something up and putting it down - over and over and over, what the hell? -penetrated his unhappy ears and throbbing head. "Wha'?"
"Are you up?"
"Nnnn," Douglas said in futile protest, dragging his pillow over his face. "G'way."
His door creaked open.
"Said go away," he repeated, knowing it wouldn't do any good but needing to try anyway. "Please?"
The pillow was tugged off his face, and Douglas, unwisely, let his eyes open a slit. The glaring sun had been replaced by Harry's upside-down, broken-nosed face, which really was not an improvement in any way, but was at least a bit dimmer.
"Are you hungover?" Harry demanded incredulously.
Douglas, suffering from the increasing onset of what was shaping up to be one of the worst port-induced headaches of his life, sleep deprivation, and the growing realisation that he had gone to sleep still in white tie - though fortunately without the tie itself, which had at least prevented imminent strangulation - opened his eyes enough to meet Harry's incredulity with his own disbelieving glare.
"Yes, Harry," he said, with a patience he was a long way from feeling. "It happens to most people who get given most of a bottle of port right at the end of an evening by their oh-so-helpful so-called friend. Which would be you, just in case you were going to ask. Now give me back m'pillow, and fuck off."
Harry scowled. "You wouldn't rather I made you a cure?"
"It'd be a sodding tonic if you just left me alone," Douglas said wearily, but Harry was already gone. The sound of things clinking disturbingly in the next room boded no good for either his nervous system or the rest of the morning, and did nothing for the increasing feeling that someone had taken up playing a steel comb in his skull.
"I don't think it's supposed to look like this," Harry said at last, coming back in, "but I put the right things in…" He trailed off, looking at the glass in his hand, and Douglas focused on its contents for long enough to decide that nothing should ever look like that, and that he certainly wasn't letting it anywhere near him.
"Bloody hell," he said. "No."
Harry screwed his face up, seemingly equally dubious about the whole thing, and Douglas felt a wild moment of hope that he was going to abandon the project. "That's what I thought," he said, "but it's supposed to work, so -"
Douglas discovered, a few unpleasant seconds later, that when someone was sitting on top of you and pinching your nose shut, it was impossible not to open your mouth, and once something was in your mouth, no matter how incredibly, astoundingly foul it tasted or how much it resembled paintstripper - or perhaps just pure methylated spirits, he wasn't quite sure - it was impossible not to swallow.
There were a few silent moments while he decided whether or not he was going to be sick, his head was going to explode, or whether he was actually going to kill Harry and have the rooms to himself to do both or either of those things in and with some modicum of peace, and then, however nastily, his head and stomach settled enough to bring a little clarity back to him - including just why Harry was behaving more like a denizen of the Hanwell than usual.
The blasted fencing match. The invitation, rare and prized, from the OFC, to join their team and put on a show in Queens' front quad. Douglas tried not to curse himself out loud for an idiot, because if anything could finally make Harry doubt himself in something that was purely physical, it was being part of a display, being part of an expectation greater than he was.
Harry at fencing, be it play or practice, was a marvel to watch, the ripostes and counterattacks that would not come to his tongue at any time a natural extension of his arm's movements. He could think and strategise and adjust in a way that defied all his attempts at putting such things down on paper, lit up with a fierce clarity of eye and intelligence that most people denied existed in him at all, let alone in a sport where it was so very necessary. He was clean and brilliant and all the things his words so very rarely allowed him to be, and he found joy in it, which was something Douglas had come to learn was even rarer for this surprisingly hidden, complicated man.
But the joy, slowly, was draining away, simply through his skill having been recognised.
That Harry had earned his place, that he was a duellist of a skill approaching expert standard and probably the best the University had when it came to the art of épée fencing, that he could claim precedence in the painful sport with justification and proof, was all beside the point. He was now in a position where he had to prove his own worth, and in front of the world's curious eyes, that was no small difficulty for Harry, whose pride so often got in the way of allowing him to show anything of his skills, innate or learnt, that might be valued more highly than he himself counted them.
It was an honour for him to be asked, and an agony to have to participate, and Harry was deeply and thoroughly at war with his own nature as a result. He knew that people would be coming to watch him, he knew how good he was, and still he hated knowing that he would be observed. Douglas didn't know whether to pity him or strangle him, caught on his own part between envy of Harry's skills and a desire to save him from the inevitable result of them.
He batted, feebly, at the fingers still closing off half his air supply, and when Harry finally released him, he drew in a very deep breath, swallowed a few times, and finally said rather croakily, the concoction having removed most of the soft tissue at the back of his throat -
"Fencing match."
"No, that's me," Harry said, not getting off him, and Douglas sighed.
"I know it's you. Observation. Statement - can you move your great carcass, please, I'd like to breathe again sometime this godawful morning - of the bleeding obvious."
"Er. Yes?" Harry looked completely confused, but at least he moved to the edge of the bed and off Douglas's stomach, which was an enormous relief.
"You're nervous," Douglas said with a slow grin, which had the predictable result of making Harry flush with what could have been embarrassment or annoyance, and the inevitable howl of denial.
"Why would I be -" Harry started at the top of his voice, before visibly stopping himself. He subsided, blew out a frustrated breath, and grumbled - "You are a complete piss-artist, and it's not appreciated."
"And you were prowling the study at five in the morning, and since you don't actually know how to read, it wasn't to get any extra work in…"
"I can read."
"Uh-huh."
"You know I can read."
Douglas nodded, at his wide-eyed, encouraging, and thoroughly irritating best.
"I am not nervous!"
"And you can read, too," Douglas agreed kindly. Harry glared at him, before falling over sideways in overdone defeat and thumping his head down hard on the maligned pillow. There wasn't really room, and his elbow ended up in Douglas's ribs, which killed any burgeoning smugness almost instantly.
"I just….can't sleep."
"Right," Douglas said, wheezing, and pulled the pillow back so that it was between him and Harry's elbows. With a vague grunt of complaint, Harry let his head fall onto the hard mattress. "Why did you feel the need to invite me to share this little difficulty?"
"I was bored?" And just how he managed to look that pathetic was a miracle in and of itself, Douglas thought exasperatedly. It was a general combination of the shadows under his eyes and still being too thin to suit the heaviness of his bones, but Christ, it was effective, especially when seen sideways and lacking any sort of humour. Harry amused could beat the devil for his own peculiar kind of charm - and when he was worried, or thoughtful, or straight-out knackered, he just looked like a badly-treated wolfhound.
"Bored, or wanted me to read you a story?" he settled for in place of sympathy, smacking the pillow onto Harry's face.
"I do not -" came the indignant splutter from beneath the battered and flattened package of feathers, and Douglas sighed. No sense of humour at all, then. Wonderful. He glanced at the clock, which wasn't even showing quarter to six yet, and groaned inwardly. Hours and hours of Harry worrying himself sick over a standard of perfection that only he expected of himself did not go even remotely well with a hangover, even a diluted one.
"Harry?"
"I said, I'm not -" began a clearer voice, and Douglas replaced the pillow with his hand.
"Shut up. Get some sleep. Lie here and worry. Lie here and think of sheep - I don't particularly care, but shut up while you do it so I can go back to sleep, would you?"
"Can't," Harry muttered into his palm. Douglas sighed, and lowered his hand, since it was obviously not doing any good either as a deterrent to speech or a noise muffler.
"You can't shut up? Well that's a first…"
"I just keep -"
"You. Will. Be . Fine." Douglas punctuated his words by poking his finger hard into Harry's chest. "You're one of the best -"
"But 'one of' isn't enough. It's not, Doug, you know it's -"
"It's enough," Douglas said firmly. "You're enough. You're enough, and you're good enough, and you are going to win, and then we will fucking celebrate, all right? Now stop tormenting me and pretend you're a nice comatose ordinary person, and then I'll buy you lunch."
There was silence, for long enough for Douglas to begin to drift off again, thinking that Harry had actually listened to him, and then a whisper, so close to his ear that Harry's mouth was actually brushing against it -
"You see, almost magic - it's n-nothing."
Douglas turned his head, and opened his eyes, his face so close to Harry's that he could barely distinguish features, all of it a rather white blur and dark hair, and said clearly -
"You're not almost."
He couldn't quite get the next words out, but he knew Harry had heard them.
You are. You're the closest thing I know to magic. And I wish you could see that.
Harry leant in that last fraction, resting their foreheads together, and just breathed for a moment, quiet and shallow and very warm. At last, he whispered -
"All right."
He stayed there for a moment, and then moved his head away, back to the pillow. His bruised-looking eyelids, very slowly, closed.
Douglas didn't dare move, even to close his own tired eyes, afraid to break whatever peace Harry had managed to bring out of the fraught morning for himself.
It wasn't until Harry reached out, and awkwardly, fumblingly, took his hand, tangling their fingers together in a decidedly uncomfortable way, that he dared relax, and drift back into his own miserable attempts at a doze.
Almost magic. It's nothing.
For some reason, the words haunted him, and echoed, uncomfortably, in his dreams, imbuing them with a restless unhappiness that was not his, and somehow hurt the worse for that.
He wondered, when he woke, whether winning would ever be enough for Harry.
He wondered even more what would happen when it started to be the only thing that mattered.
*