N is for Nuits Blanches
Finally after weeks of angst and clear writerly evenings spent producing nothing, I finally shed my fic block and scrawled this all at once, stuck in a Cairo traffic jam in a slum at dusk, breathing in pollution, writing in a notebook lit by my mobile phone in the back of a taxi. I love my city.
I've also forbidden myself from reading fic until this thing is done. Hence the comment-spam you're about to get from me, and hence the silence beforehand.
(My notebook, by the way, is not dissimilar to black_hound 's, but that it has my name on the side and then 'the happy return' translated into Arabic and imprinted on the side also. I love dorky personal mythologies, in case you hadn't guessed).
Title: N is for Nuits Blanches
Characters: Horatio Hornblower, William Bush
Rating: UST, bookverse (The Commodore)
Word count: 478
Notes: ever since atropos_too wrote the astounding Bush, Meditative, I've wanted to write a companion piece. So, poor as it is, this one's dedicated to her. It also is my letter-N entry (finally) to lokei 's Horatio Alphabet Soup, if it's still acceptable to submit.
N is for Nuits Blanches
The sun was small and tight and pale, and they had been standing there pleasantly in its shy warmth on the lee deck of the Nonsuch, and Bush had incautiously ventured an opinion of what Napoleon might do in the Baltic.
Hornblower, strung with roughly the same questions, had been so astringently moved by the thought of Bush attempting to think strategically that he gave a tart reply: 'Remind me to speak to the Admiralty, Captain Bush: Talleyrand could not hold a candle to your insight.'
The fact that it was a poor joke gave Bush no more right of reply than ever, and he flushed and made no further unsolicited comments that day. Despite the fact that Hornblower had achieved his aim - to silence any ridiculous speculation - Bush's carefully hidden, philosophically accepted misery stayed with Hornblower for the rest of the day and for much of the night.
*
Towards the men off watch, who were at this moment swaddled in sleep, Hornblower felt the genuine enmity of the insomniac.
It was different when he looked in on Bush, whose mouth was slightly open and whose face was, despite its lines, childlike in its unconcern. Bush who was open and vulnerable to Hornblower at all times, his feelings uniquely available for him to toy with in any number of the miniscule ways that only the two of them really understood. And whose absolute essence only Hornblower and his perpetually overwrought analysis truly grasped in these darkest watches: that ultimately, it hurt him far, far more than Bush.
After all, he was the one awake and fretting just now, who couldn't forget, who could erase nothing from that traumatic catalogue that was the reality and the unreality of their war. And there with the lantern casting one warm gleam of candlelight silently over Bush's brow, Hornblower had an uncharacteristic flash of insight. One not prompted by the exaggerated, fractured phantoms of his pysche, but a rare accession onto clear reality.
He is clearing his mind. Here, where I cannot reach him, no matter how vulnerable he is. He is forgetting the day. Tomorrow he will be refreshed, untouched, despite me and despite this war. Sleep removes every trace of me. This is how he bears it.
Hornblower spent only a little more time standing there in his white nightshirt, staring at Bush performing that simple yet infathomable task of sleeping. Then he turned away, disturbed and comforted in the same moment, and he moved silently back to his cot, and slept.
*
'Good morning, Commodore,' said Bush with a salute, his eyes precisely the same shade as the clear Baltic morning. He looked as though all the cares of his ship, and those of every single man on it, could as ever be borne upon on his broad, sturdy shoulders.
I've also forbidden myself from reading fic until this thing is done. Hence the comment-spam you're about to get from me, and hence the silence beforehand.
(My notebook, by the way, is not dissimilar to black_hound 's, but that it has my name on the side and then 'the happy return' translated into Arabic and imprinted on the side also. I love dorky personal mythologies, in case you hadn't guessed).
Title: N is for Nuits Blanches
Characters: Horatio Hornblower, William Bush
Rating: UST, bookverse (The Commodore)
Word count: 478
Notes: ever since atropos_too wrote the astounding Bush, Meditative, I've wanted to write a companion piece. So, poor as it is, this one's dedicated to her. It also is my letter-N entry (finally) to lokei 's Horatio Alphabet Soup, if it's still acceptable to submit.
N is for Nuits Blanches
The sun was small and tight and pale, and they had been standing there pleasantly in its shy warmth on the lee deck of the Nonsuch, and Bush had incautiously ventured an opinion of what Napoleon might do in the Baltic.
Hornblower, strung with roughly the same questions, had been so astringently moved by the thought of Bush attempting to think strategically that he gave a tart reply: 'Remind me to speak to the Admiralty, Captain Bush: Talleyrand could not hold a candle to your insight.'
The fact that it was a poor joke gave Bush no more right of reply than ever, and he flushed and made no further unsolicited comments that day. Despite the fact that Hornblower had achieved his aim - to silence any ridiculous speculation - Bush's carefully hidden, philosophically accepted misery stayed with Hornblower for the rest of the day and for much of the night.
*
Towards the men off watch, who were at this moment swaddled in sleep, Hornblower felt the genuine enmity of the insomniac.
It was different when he looked in on Bush, whose mouth was slightly open and whose face was, despite its lines, childlike in its unconcern. Bush who was open and vulnerable to Hornblower at all times, his feelings uniquely available for him to toy with in any number of the miniscule ways that only the two of them really understood. And whose absolute essence only Hornblower and his perpetually overwrought analysis truly grasped in these darkest watches: that ultimately, it hurt him far, far more than Bush.
After all, he was the one awake and fretting just now, who couldn't forget, who could erase nothing from that traumatic catalogue that was the reality and the unreality of their war. And there with the lantern casting one warm gleam of candlelight silently over Bush's brow, Hornblower had an uncharacteristic flash of insight. One not prompted by the exaggerated, fractured phantoms of his pysche, but a rare accession onto clear reality.
He is clearing his mind. Here, where I cannot reach him, no matter how vulnerable he is. He is forgetting the day. Tomorrow he will be refreshed, untouched, despite me and despite this war. Sleep removes every trace of me. This is how he bears it.
Hornblower spent only a little more time standing there in his white nightshirt, staring at Bush performing that simple yet infathomable task of sleeping. Then he turned away, disturbed and comforted in the same moment, and he moved silently back to his cot, and slept.
*
'Good morning, Commodore,' said Bush with a salute, his eyes precisely the same shade as the clear Baltic morning. He looked as though all the cares of his ship, and those of every single man on it, could as ever be borne upon on his broad, sturdy shoulders.