Fic! 20,000 Leagues fic.
Title: Dressed in Your Pyjamas in the Grand Salon
Author: Tiamat’s Child
Rating: G
Fandom: 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas
Pairing: Well. Sort of Aronnax/Nemo. Implied. Er.
Disclaimers: The insane timeline and all the rest belong to Verne.
Notes: Over nine months is TOO LONG for something this short, which is why the ending remains kind of weak. I really like the first part, though.
Dressed in Your Pyjamas in the Grand Salon
When Aronnax was a child he would quietly slip from his bed and quietly sneak down the hall to his father’s study. The light from the lamp his father had put in outside, so there would never be a murder outside his house, slanted in, and in the middle of the floor it was bright enough to see properly. There he would sneak the huge, illustrated dictionary out from its place on the shelves and hide with it, reading it sprawled across the floor - lingering longest over the beautiful color plates of the orders of life. Then that dictionary had seemed the wisest thing in the world, and the most wonderful.
He knows now how inaccurate those illustrations were. Most of them had been drawn from descriptions, not experience, and as a result they were distorted and strange. He recalls the proportions that had been merely guessed at, the patterns of markings assumed from an inadequate explanation - it had been such a shock when he first saw a scientific illustration of a Equus grevyi, and realized that its stripes ran both horizontally and vertically, not merely vertically, as the dictionary had it. Sometimes the new things he knows - how the world really is - colors his remembrance of the dictionary, making it seem better informed than it was, but the memory of the disconnect remains.
As does the dictionary. He keeps it plopped on his desk at the museum, generally hidden by piles of cascading work. It’s not a bad dictionary, as such, and every time someone asks him why the zoological gardens are important, or why he spends so much time looking for creatures, he pulls it out from its protective avalanche, and opens it to the illustrations, and quietly explains all the inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and his boyhood fascination.
Some nights he still gets up after he has gone to bed and sneaks out to some corner somewhere. There remains a thrill to it, the small, delightful shock of doing something forbidden, even though Aronnax is grown now, and there is no one on the Nautilus who would particularly mind if they found him up. Conseil might smile at him, that almost non-existent expression of fondness that Aronnax spent months thinking he was imagining, but now knows to be real, and Ned would laugh, but it is always good to see Conseil smile, and it would be wonderful to hear Ned laugh again, so he does not know why that delicious nervousness continues.
He doesn’t bother to think about it much, because it’s so much fun, and his sneaking little fear of being caught only makes it more amusing.
He’s spent his whole life doing what he wanted to do as a child, or what he did do as a child. Sneaking out of bed, searching for interesting animals and plants, reading everything he can… It’s not so very different from his childhood. He’s never had to grow up, be reasonable, be sensible, be steady, be practical, take a steady job in some bank office. He gets to be fanciful, absurd, and absorbed in study. Aronnax knows he’s lucky. Not everyone revels in their work the way he does.
He knows he’s lucky, and is properly delighted when he slips into the salon and finds that, indeed, the portals are still open, though the room itself is dark. He curls up on the floor, next to the divan, half leaning against it, and silently watches the window. He has a blanket flung over his shoulders, as it has reached that hour where the body’s temperature drops dramatically in the old, inherent rhythms of sleep. Even here, far from the light of the sun, that solar body’s hold is not quite escapable. He can feel his body responding to the movements of the planet he seems so disconnected from, clamoring for sleep at this, the safest time of the night. But he does not heed it, because he can ignore it, for a little while, and because it pleases him to do so, to be a rational being who can set aside the demands of his lower nature.
So he sits, and lets his mind wander, now carefully and thoughtfully observing this or that creature, now simply drifting, not thinking of much of anything. It is wondrously pleasant, and all through he tries to blend into the shadows, to make it seem as if there is no one in the salon at all. If he is still, and forgets that he is there, setting aside the burden of his presence for a mere watchfulness, it is as if he is a part of the silence of the sea, just one more soft, unreaching whisper in its depths.
He remembers the woman who taught him this, the young wife of the landlord who kept up the cottage his family visited in the summer. She had been fond of him, and willing to allow him to tag along as she walked up the beach and down the lanes on her errands. So he trailed after her, racing off and bringing her shells and plants and rocks that caught his fancy. She had named them for him, with both the common and the scientific terms, and her accent (so exotic to a Parisian boy who had not learned to consider Parisian French the only true French) had made the names sound to him almost like spells, strange incantations to bind the knowledge to him.
He wonders, sometimes, just what her accent was. Grown up now he cannot place it, nor quite place her. Here, sitting in the midst of marvels of reason, he can still almost believe what he sometimes pretended to believe as a child: that she was a selkie out of the stories she told him, and somewhere in the attic was her seal pelt, soft and slippery and warm, always nagging at her to leave her dry human life and return to the wild dark wet of her people’s gardens in the sea. He thought, sometimes, of asking her to take him with her when she went, because the stories said that selkies could do that, for a time.
Aronnax remembers how she taught him to be still, to be silent, to become a part of a rock or the beach until all the creatures nearby would move over and around him as if he was not there. He remembers how she always knew where he was, how she could always find him, and how it was this, along with her sadness as they looked together at her beautiful book that explained all the life along the coast, that had him half convinced his fancy was the truth. Or possibly only one quarter convinced. The possibility niggled at him, and he would confuse it with the truth for an instant or two, sometimes, when he saw her stand at the edge of the sea, her hair falling down and the water wrapping about her ankles. She did so look as if she wanted to go back, back to where the light would fall so differently on her and oh, he did so want her to go and be happy.
But she was not a selkie, she belonged to the land, and he knows that now as he knew it then.
Nemo, though, Nemo…
He barely has time to think of him before the man is in the salon, striding as confidently as if the light were good. Aronnax freezes, and pretends harder than ever that he is not here. He’s fairly certain Nemo wouldn’t care at all if he found him up, but this is Nemo, and Aronnax cannot figure him. Besides, he would feel foolish, and he doesn’t like feeling foolish.
But being still and unobtrusive doesn’t work, since the reason Nemo is so confident is that he knows every inch and miniscule dip of this ship as if it were his own body, and Aronnax’s presence in the room is therefore not unobtrusive to him. To him it is a major disruption, something unplanned for, so he pauses and looks about, finding Aronnax almost at once.
Aronnax smiles sheepishly in answer to his cold, penetrating stare and tugs his blanket a bit more firmly over one shoulder. “I couldn’t sleep,” he says, “So, as the window was open…”
Nemo raises his eyebrows and looks out into the waters himself. “Somehow, Professor, I doubt this is going to help you sleep.”
“I wasn’t intending it to. I just thought that that if I have to be stuck awake it might as well be with something interesting to look at.”
He’s amazed at himself, and his blatant lie. But he can’t imagine telling Nemo about the dictionary, and the gas lamp, and sneaking out at night, and how sometimes he needs to be fanciful. Because though he is rarely practical he usually manages to be his own particular definition of logical and sensible, and sometimes he gets so tired of being grown up and brave. All he wanted was to remember when he didn’t have anyone else’s lives on his hands, and was only a boy in the glow of a lamp.
He's not going to tell Nemo that. Any more than he’ll ever tell him about anything he thinks on nights like this, when the light from the lamps outside falls back on Nemo, and sets him to almost glowing, straight and tall and staring at the sea as if it is a refuge and a dream.
Aronnax knows that for Nemo the sea is a refuge, is a home, though there his knowledge largely stops. Nemo is shut, is closed, is a shuttered house with one window that sometimes lights enough to see in to. He is hard to know. But Aronnax studied the sea without the advantage of the Nautilus, and if Nemo is as inaccessible as his home it does not matter.
Nemo turns away from the window, and looks down at Aronnax, who looks up, smiling a little in a way that feels almost like a defense, like a shield, as if he can keep Nemo from looking straight through him with a smile. It's a flimsy thing, but he almost thinks he could hide behind it, even as he reveals himself with it. Because he is glad to see Nemo, even if he's embarrassed. It’s always good to see Nemo, always good to be with him, even if it is strange to find himself being watched by him while he’s sitting on the floor in his nightshirt.
Nemo raises an eyebrow and crosses to sit next to him on the divan. Aronnax follows him with his eyes, smiling with his chin tilted up. He tries to ask what Nemo is thinking of with the warmth in his eyes and the set of his face and the twist of his smile. Nemo doesn’t say a thing, but he smiles, just a little, just a wry, half-seen quirk of his mouth.
For Nemo, it’s an excellent display of emotion, and Aronnax cannot stop his smile from growing broader and brighter and far more revealing. He loves to see Nemo smile. It’s as if the shutters are opened up for just a moment, and Aronnax is almost allowed to look in one of those dusty, disused windows.
Or it’s like glimpsing someone at a window, just for a instant, and standing transfixed, wondering what you saw and if you will be invited in.
Then it’s gone, and they’re simply sitting together, watching the window and the creatures outside. Nemo whispers names to him for the unfamiliar ones, a nomeculture that is at once as odd and haphazard as any developed by people to cope with the strange beings they live with daily, and are the first to know, and as learned and witty as anything Aronnax has ever heard. Nemo has to translate them, of course, and he seems to take great joy in doing so, shifting subtle meanings across the language divide, drawing out new aspects of each joke or strikingly apt reference, and Aronnax cannot help his soft laughter, and how much he is aware of where and who and when he is. Still he almost forgets his self conciousness, sitting there, because that is precisely the name for the ribbon-like serpent who dashed by in a quick, unthinking blaze just now, and he knows that Nemo enjoys this - he loves knowing things that Aronnax doesn’t, and he loves his little jokes - and he is glad that he has been found. He does not feel foolish anymore. He feels utterly and completely at home within his own skin, which is a rarity when he has company.
But, then, Nemo himself is a rarity. A rarity far more precious than any of the fantastically beautiful things in the museum or lining the shelves of the salon, because he is, well, he is Nemo. Which is to say he is distinctly human, though writ larger and stranger and more beautiful than most. Aronnax genuinely likes him, under his tendency to wax philosophical and poetic in ways that he knows perfectly well Nemo would probably not particularly appreciate. He likes Nemo for times like this, as much as he admires him for the moments when he can see the resolve and compassion that make him more than simply a very angry, hurt man.
Aronnax is surprised at himself when he chuckles softly and turns his face downward for just an instant to hide his blush at Nemo’s soft-voiced explanation of one of the rather more risqué references, and wishes, so intently he can feel the longing on the surface of his skin, that Nemo would put his hand on his exposed neck. Just at the place where it flows into his shoulders. His loose collar falls away from his skin there, just a little, leaving the rounded bump of the first of his large vertebra open to the air. He wants the weight of Nemo’s hand there, warm and comforting and friendly. He wants the tug and scratch of Nemo’s calluses on his skin (Aronnax knows he has them, sturdy and solid and useful, the marks of steam burns and hot metal, healed over rough to protect against the next time), a connection, a charm against any possible loss. He wants the assurance of touch, of tactile reality.
It’s one of those irrational impulses, the response of some part of him that ignores the cultivated humanity that is so important to him. The library might be a selkie’s home, the way he feels now, dizzy and light and strange. Nemo might be a rational selkie, a hidden, proud sea king building his garden out of metal bound and reshaped by an elegant mind. But of course that simply isn’t true, and Aronnax is glad it isn’t, because he likes Nemo best as he is.
Aronnax sits, and ignores the irrational demands of his fleshly self, because he is a rational being and it pleases him to do so, listening instead to Nemo’s endless, quiet wash of definitions.
He never wants to go to bed.
Author: Tiamat’s Child
Rating: G
Fandom: 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas
Pairing: Well. Sort of Aronnax/Nemo. Implied. Er.
Disclaimers: The insane timeline and all the rest belong to Verne.
Notes: Over nine months is TOO LONG for something this short, which is why the ending remains kind of weak. I really like the first part, though.
Dressed in Your Pyjamas in the Grand Salon
When Aronnax was a child he would quietly slip from his bed and quietly sneak down the hall to his father’s study. The light from the lamp his father had put in outside, so there would never be a murder outside his house, slanted in, and in the middle of the floor it was bright enough to see properly. There he would sneak the huge, illustrated dictionary out from its place on the shelves and hide with it, reading it sprawled across the floor - lingering longest over the beautiful color plates of the orders of life. Then that dictionary had seemed the wisest thing in the world, and the most wonderful.
He knows now how inaccurate those illustrations were. Most of them had been drawn from descriptions, not experience, and as a result they were distorted and strange. He recalls the proportions that had been merely guessed at, the patterns of markings assumed from an inadequate explanation - it had been such a shock when he first saw a scientific illustration of a Equus grevyi, and realized that its stripes ran both horizontally and vertically, not merely vertically, as the dictionary had it. Sometimes the new things he knows - how the world really is - colors his remembrance of the dictionary, making it seem better informed than it was, but the memory of the disconnect remains.
As does the dictionary. He keeps it plopped on his desk at the museum, generally hidden by piles of cascading work. It’s not a bad dictionary, as such, and every time someone asks him why the zoological gardens are important, or why he spends so much time looking for creatures, he pulls it out from its protective avalanche, and opens it to the illustrations, and quietly explains all the inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and his boyhood fascination.
Some nights he still gets up after he has gone to bed and sneaks out to some corner somewhere. There remains a thrill to it, the small, delightful shock of doing something forbidden, even though Aronnax is grown now, and there is no one on the Nautilus who would particularly mind if they found him up. Conseil might smile at him, that almost non-existent expression of fondness that Aronnax spent months thinking he was imagining, but now knows to be real, and Ned would laugh, but it is always good to see Conseil smile, and it would be wonderful to hear Ned laugh again, so he does not know why that delicious nervousness continues.
He doesn’t bother to think about it much, because it’s so much fun, and his sneaking little fear of being caught only makes it more amusing.
He’s spent his whole life doing what he wanted to do as a child, or what he did do as a child. Sneaking out of bed, searching for interesting animals and plants, reading everything he can… It’s not so very different from his childhood. He’s never had to grow up, be reasonable, be sensible, be steady, be practical, take a steady job in some bank office. He gets to be fanciful, absurd, and absorbed in study. Aronnax knows he’s lucky. Not everyone revels in their work the way he does.
He knows he’s lucky, and is properly delighted when he slips into the salon and finds that, indeed, the portals are still open, though the room itself is dark. He curls up on the floor, next to the divan, half leaning against it, and silently watches the window. He has a blanket flung over his shoulders, as it has reached that hour where the body’s temperature drops dramatically in the old, inherent rhythms of sleep. Even here, far from the light of the sun, that solar body’s hold is not quite escapable. He can feel his body responding to the movements of the planet he seems so disconnected from, clamoring for sleep at this, the safest time of the night. But he does not heed it, because he can ignore it, for a little while, and because it pleases him to do so, to be a rational being who can set aside the demands of his lower nature.
So he sits, and lets his mind wander, now carefully and thoughtfully observing this or that creature, now simply drifting, not thinking of much of anything. It is wondrously pleasant, and all through he tries to blend into the shadows, to make it seem as if there is no one in the salon at all. If he is still, and forgets that he is there, setting aside the burden of his presence for a mere watchfulness, it is as if he is a part of the silence of the sea, just one more soft, unreaching whisper in its depths.
He remembers the woman who taught him this, the young wife of the landlord who kept up the cottage his family visited in the summer. She had been fond of him, and willing to allow him to tag along as she walked up the beach and down the lanes on her errands. So he trailed after her, racing off and bringing her shells and plants and rocks that caught his fancy. She had named them for him, with both the common and the scientific terms, and her accent (so exotic to a Parisian boy who had not learned to consider Parisian French the only true French) had made the names sound to him almost like spells, strange incantations to bind the knowledge to him.
He wonders, sometimes, just what her accent was. Grown up now he cannot place it, nor quite place her. Here, sitting in the midst of marvels of reason, he can still almost believe what he sometimes pretended to believe as a child: that she was a selkie out of the stories she told him, and somewhere in the attic was her seal pelt, soft and slippery and warm, always nagging at her to leave her dry human life and return to the wild dark wet of her people’s gardens in the sea. He thought, sometimes, of asking her to take him with her when she went, because the stories said that selkies could do that, for a time.
Aronnax remembers how she taught him to be still, to be silent, to become a part of a rock or the beach until all the creatures nearby would move over and around him as if he was not there. He remembers how she always knew where he was, how she could always find him, and how it was this, along with her sadness as they looked together at her beautiful book that explained all the life along the coast, that had him half convinced his fancy was the truth. Or possibly only one quarter convinced. The possibility niggled at him, and he would confuse it with the truth for an instant or two, sometimes, when he saw her stand at the edge of the sea, her hair falling down and the water wrapping about her ankles. She did so look as if she wanted to go back, back to where the light would fall so differently on her and oh, he did so want her to go and be happy.
But she was not a selkie, she belonged to the land, and he knows that now as he knew it then.
Nemo, though, Nemo…
He barely has time to think of him before the man is in the salon, striding as confidently as if the light were good. Aronnax freezes, and pretends harder than ever that he is not here. He’s fairly certain Nemo wouldn’t care at all if he found him up, but this is Nemo, and Aronnax cannot figure him. Besides, he would feel foolish, and he doesn’t like feeling foolish.
But being still and unobtrusive doesn’t work, since the reason Nemo is so confident is that he knows every inch and miniscule dip of this ship as if it were his own body, and Aronnax’s presence in the room is therefore not unobtrusive to him. To him it is a major disruption, something unplanned for, so he pauses and looks about, finding Aronnax almost at once.
Aronnax smiles sheepishly in answer to his cold, penetrating stare and tugs his blanket a bit more firmly over one shoulder. “I couldn’t sleep,” he says, “So, as the window was open…”
Nemo raises his eyebrows and looks out into the waters himself. “Somehow, Professor, I doubt this is going to help you sleep.”
“I wasn’t intending it to. I just thought that that if I have to be stuck awake it might as well be with something interesting to look at.”
He’s amazed at himself, and his blatant lie. But he can’t imagine telling Nemo about the dictionary, and the gas lamp, and sneaking out at night, and how sometimes he needs to be fanciful. Because though he is rarely practical he usually manages to be his own particular definition of logical and sensible, and sometimes he gets so tired of being grown up and brave. All he wanted was to remember when he didn’t have anyone else’s lives on his hands, and was only a boy in the glow of a lamp.
He's not going to tell Nemo that. Any more than he’ll ever tell him about anything he thinks on nights like this, when the light from the lamps outside falls back on Nemo, and sets him to almost glowing, straight and tall and staring at the sea as if it is a refuge and a dream.
Aronnax knows that for Nemo the sea is a refuge, is a home, though there his knowledge largely stops. Nemo is shut, is closed, is a shuttered house with one window that sometimes lights enough to see in to. He is hard to know. But Aronnax studied the sea without the advantage of the Nautilus, and if Nemo is as inaccessible as his home it does not matter.
Nemo turns away from the window, and looks down at Aronnax, who looks up, smiling a little in a way that feels almost like a defense, like a shield, as if he can keep Nemo from looking straight through him with a smile. It's a flimsy thing, but he almost thinks he could hide behind it, even as he reveals himself with it. Because he is glad to see Nemo, even if he's embarrassed. It’s always good to see Nemo, always good to be with him, even if it is strange to find himself being watched by him while he’s sitting on the floor in his nightshirt.
Nemo raises an eyebrow and crosses to sit next to him on the divan. Aronnax follows him with his eyes, smiling with his chin tilted up. He tries to ask what Nemo is thinking of with the warmth in his eyes and the set of his face and the twist of his smile. Nemo doesn’t say a thing, but he smiles, just a little, just a wry, half-seen quirk of his mouth.
For Nemo, it’s an excellent display of emotion, and Aronnax cannot stop his smile from growing broader and brighter and far more revealing. He loves to see Nemo smile. It’s as if the shutters are opened up for just a moment, and Aronnax is almost allowed to look in one of those dusty, disused windows.
Or it’s like glimpsing someone at a window, just for a instant, and standing transfixed, wondering what you saw and if you will be invited in.
Then it’s gone, and they’re simply sitting together, watching the window and the creatures outside. Nemo whispers names to him for the unfamiliar ones, a nomeculture that is at once as odd and haphazard as any developed by people to cope with the strange beings they live with daily, and are the first to know, and as learned and witty as anything Aronnax has ever heard. Nemo has to translate them, of course, and he seems to take great joy in doing so, shifting subtle meanings across the language divide, drawing out new aspects of each joke or strikingly apt reference, and Aronnax cannot help his soft laughter, and how much he is aware of where and who and when he is. Still he almost forgets his self conciousness, sitting there, because that is precisely the name for the ribbon-like serpent who dashed by in a quick, unthinking blaze just now, and he knows that Nemo enjoys this - he loves knowing things that Aronnax doesn’t, and he loves his little jokes - and he is glad that he has been found. He does not feel foolish anymore. He feels utterly and completely at home within his own skin, which is a rarity when he has company.
But, then, Nemo himself is a rarity. A rarity far more precious than any of the fantastically beautiful things in the museum or lining the shelves of the salon, because he is, well, he is Nemo. Which is to say he is distinctly human, though writ larger and stranger and more beautiful than most. Aronnax genuinely likes him, under his tendency to wax philosophical and poetic in ways that he knows perfectly well Nemo would probably not particularly appreciate. He likes Nemo for times like this, as much as he admires him for the moments when he can see the resolve and compassion that make him more than simply a very angry, hurt man.
Aronnax is surprised at himself when he chuckles softly and turns his face downward for just an instant to hide his blush at Nemo’s soft-voiced explanation of one of the rather more risqué references, and wishes, so intently he can feel the longing on the surface of his skin, that Nemo would put his hand on his exposed neck. Just at the place where it flows into his shoulders. His loose collar falls away from his skin there, just a little, leaving the rounded bump of the first of his large vertebra open to the air. He wants the weight of Nemo’s hand there, warm and comforting and friendly. He wants the tug and scratch of Nemo’s calluses on his skin (Aronnax knows he has them, sturdy and solid and useful, the marks of steam burns and hot metal, healed over rough to protect against the next time), a connection, a charm against any possible loss. He wants the assurance of touch, of tactile reality.
It’s one of those irrational impulses, the response of some part of him that ignores the cultivated humanity that is so important to him. The library might be a selkie’s home, the way he feels now, dizzy and light and strange. Nemo might be a rational selkie, a hidden, proud sea king building his garden out of metal bound and reshaped by an elegant mind. But of course that simply isn’t true, and Aronnax is glad it isn’t, because he likes Nemo best as he is.
Aronnax sits, and ignores the irrational demands of his fleshly self, because he is a rational being and it pleases him to do so, listening instead to Nemo’s endless, quiet wash of definitions.
He never wants to go to bed.