Fic for lysimache - The End of All Our Exploring
Recipient: lysimache
Author: hedda62
Title: The End of All Our Exploring
Pairing: James Hathaway/Robert Lewis
Characters: James Hathaway, Robert Lewis, Zoe Suskin
Rating: Hard R/MA
Wordcount: 8018
Warnings: None
Summary: James Hathaway often thought that at his christening he must have been cursed, by an underhanded and satirical fairy, with the twin blessings of an excellent memory and an inability to run away from his past.
The End of All Our Exploring @ AO3
James Hathaway often thought that at his christening he must have been cursed, by an underhanded and satirical fairy, with the twin blessings of an excellent memory and an inability to run away from his past.
In retrospect, the fairy was probably imagination (although the vision of a hatchet-faced crone lingered, likely from some later event) but the gifts were real. The talent for remembering was the more obvious of the two; he'd always been good at connecting faces and names, winning any game that required a mind-picture of previous moves, allowing the precisely-recalled humiliations of his daily existence to haunt him, and memorizing meaningful sequences of words. He'd been born too late for rote recitation alone to win him prizes in school, but he had an analytical mind as well, and used it to advantage, to Cambridge and beyond. Along the way he accumulated a great deal of poetry (in several languages, some of them dead), a heavy burden of biblical verses and religious liturgy (also in several languages as well as translations and creeds), and a lot of odd bits and bobs of fairly useless general knowledge, rowing jargon and statistics, lyrics, chords, fingerings, dates of battles, meanings of words, and, more recently, a detailed map of Oxford and environs lending itself to finding shortcuts, parking, and decent pub lunches.
In his early years he'd been encouraged by how much his mnemonic abilities impressed other people; then he'd learned that to impress was not always an unmixed benefit, and discovered how to remember in silence. He still couldn't help answering direct questions, nor could he always resist the opportunity to show off with a clever riposte. It wasn't that he consistently had just the right quote for an occasion, but he could frequently fill in a specific prompt - the number of times Oxford police work called on him to do this probably shouldn't have surprised him - and now and then word association or emotional relevance provided a line or two of apposite verbiage, not that he always spoke it aloud.
Though sometimes, when he felt comfortable enough, in certain company, he'd find the words coming out of his mouth. To be met, if he was lucky, by a twisted smile and a grunt or a Geordie put-down of, he liked to think, increasing tolerance or perhaps even affection.
But some situations did not call for a smartarse quote (or even a deeply felt and eloquent one), and remembering in silence was still a useful skill. Particularly when the words that came to mind were apparently incongruous with the situation. Looking down at Dorian Crane's pierced body, Alice still mute and trembling among the bicycles, he should have been struck by a bolt out of the Carroll/Tolkien/Lewis cloud hovering over his head, or at least out of Boxlands, but what came to mind was a Latin tag: omnis et una dilapsis calor, atque in ventos vita recessit. It was an hour later, back in the Eagle and Child, staring at the empty scabbard between fruitless interviews, that he identified it - the death of Dido, in the Aeneid - and decided that it wasn't so inappropriate after all: warmth and life, dissipating on the air, the living shivering in their wake and sailing onward.
*
Neither was it completely absurd, despite Portia's "quality of mercy" speech saturating the atmosphere, to draw in a breath watching a tortured Robbie Lewis confront Simon Monkford, and exhale it non-Shakespeareanly, breathing the easy profundity of T.S. Eliot: So I find words I never thought to speak/In streets I never thought I should revisit/When I left my body on a distant shore.
Which was really the problem with both of them, he had a chance to think later. Neither of them should be in Oxford, with pain and memories thick on the cobblestones, and neither of them should be doing this job. We are born with the dead: see, they return, and bring us with them. Though it was foolish and arrogant to think that any copper, from the crass Hooper to the sublime Innocent, was free from loss and regret; and someone had to catch murderers. And he and Lewis were very good at it.
*
And so they went on (the conscious impotence of rage, the rending pain of re-enactment, the shame of motives late revealed) and they caught Paul Hopkiss, and standing at rosy-fingered dawn in glad banishment from Crevecoeur with the brainier half of a not-bad detective, knowing that he ought to be murmuring of the land of lost content or the long road white in the moon, or perhaps of Sirens weaving a haunting song over the sea, he looked at Lewis and the only words that came into his head were "Whither thou goest, I will go."
Which nearly made him laugh out loud, because of all the things Robbie Lewis was to him, all the things that by that time he wanted him to be, his mother-in-law was not one of them.
"What are you smiling at?" Lewis said.
Hathaway controlled his treacherous mouth. Almost. "The alien corn," he said.
This earned him a suspicious look, but all Lewis said was, "Mainly oats and barley, oop north. And I'd say 'speaking of the latter', but at this hour I think coffee's recommended. My treat."
"Sabean odors from the spicy shore of Araby the Blest, sir."
"Oh, go on, you." And Hathaway did.
*
By the time, much later, that he said Ruth's words aloud, or a version of them, he'd become more honest with himself about wanting Lewis; he was still shocked at the speaking - if you go, I go - and hastened to undercut the blunt declaration. It didn't help, of course; Lewis was too canny for that.
"And what did Thomas Aquinas say?" he asked when Hathaway got back with the pints.
"Hm." There had been something to do with the sun in his mind, but it had vanished... if the divine action should cease, all things would drop into nothingness... Well, that was rather depressing. "He has a lot to say about faith and its relation to hope, and about how faith is the foundation of the spiritual life in much the same way that matter" - he plunked the substance of good brown ale down in front of Lewis - "is the foundation for real objects. Both faith and hope, by slightly different paths, have to do with things that aren't there in front of us, but that are wished for. I suppose the end point of hope is things we could actually have and touch, even if we never get them. And the end point of faith is less tangible; he says we think of it as truth, but really it's desire. To find the truth, I suppose," he added hastily. "Anyway, I like to think that, one way or another, we keep searching."
"And where's all your searching leading you? St. Gerard's, or back to the nick? Or are you telling me I've got to decide for you?"
The colors of the sunset were fading; he suspected they were showing on his face instead. He kept silence, and let Lewis answer his own question. "If both of us stay in our jobs," he said, "nothing much changes. Still here in bloody Oxford; same old routine. Not much of a spiritual or intellectual journey."
"Actually I'd say that things not in front of us but wished for are the foundation of police work, wouldn't you, sir?"
"Or finding the truth. If we're going to play theological word games."
"Sorry. I'd be doing a good deal more of that if I took the fellowship, of course."
"And I," said Lewis, "would be playing a lot more peekaboo." His mouth twitched. "Not that we don't sometimes do that in the line of work."
"Your grandchild isn't likely to pull a gun on you when you're not looking. I suppose the question is, does that sound like the next stage in the adventure of life, or does it sound like stagnation?"
Lewis laughed. "Anyone can tell you've not had kids. More like... what was it you told me Lewis Carroll said? About running."
"The Red Queen's race. 'Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in one place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.' No one has been quite sure what he meant by it - it doesn't make sense in the context of the chess game - but it's been used to explicate theories of relativity and evolutionary biology." He took a glance at Lewis's expression, in the fading light, and shut up.
"All I know is it felt like I was running twice as fast after Lyn and Mark as after any criminal you could name. Not that it'd be my job, mostly, this round." He shot Hathaway a keen look. "Didn't even say I'd be moving to Manchester, did I?"
"Well... traveling there more often, if not."
"Course the trains make you feel like you're running in place. And the motorways aren't much better."
"I think..." Hathaway began, gazing down into his pint, and then gathered his courage and said, "Sometimes I think life is just like that. At least I feel like I've been running in place, not... gathering escape velocity. The scenery," he added, gesturing at the sunset-that-was, "has been oddly lovely. Working with you has been... it's been wonderful, sir. I mean, I do have to buy all the pints, but..."
"Cheeky bugger. I've bought you a coffee now and then. So you want to escape... what, Oxford's gravity? Your metaphor," he added dryly when Hathaway made a dissenting noise.
"The thing is... I don't. I should want to be a thousand miles from Crevecoeur, from St. Mark's, from..." From you, he managed not to say. "All the running, and I keep tripping over things that..."
"That hurt. Oh, I know; d'you think I don't know that, lad? Different for me, though; I'm an old sod stuck in me ways."
"That's not true. Not a word of it. When..." Hathaway gulped, and then went ahead, "When the pain was too much to bear, you gathered enough momentum to fling yourself damn far out to sea."
Lewis put his glass down abruptly. "Are you saying I was running away when I took the exchange in the BVI?"
"No. Well... yes, but there's nothing wrong with running away. Not when the option is going quietly mad." Lewis made a hmph noise and picked up his pint. Hathaway went on: "I was wondering why you didn't stay there, actually. They wanted you to."
He could read that suspicious look even in the gathering dusk. "They made polite noises," Lewis said, "which Innocent's got a record of. I was a bit tempted to take them up on it, mind. Lovely place. Different from anywhere I'd lived, but easy to get used to."
"Sing unto the Lord a new song," Hathaway recited, his voice surprisingly clear and strong, "and his praise from the end of the earth, ye that go down to the sea, and all that is therein; the isles, and the inhabitants thereof."
"Mm," Lewis said, and then, "You would have been good at that."
"That part I would have been good at," he responded, smiling. "Though it's the wrong Bible. They generally wanted me to quote something more modern and Catholic."
"Stuck in the past. We are alike, then." Lewis was silent a moment, and then added, "That's why I came home."
A mental image of orchids placed reverently on a grave: Hathaway didn't need any words to understand what Lewis meant. However, it was rather a dead end to the conversation, literally, which prompted him to pick up the wrong half of the musing and turn it to another joke. "To follow your destiny in meeting me, sir?"
Lewis didn't laugh. "Not sure I believe in destiny. But I'm glad I did; more glad than you know that we ended up working together. Even if it's been a bit like the blind leading the blind, at times, and not always sure which of us is which."
And I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; I will lead them in paths that they have not known. "Hard to tell with your eyes shut," Hathaway said. "But I suppose if we're running in place we can't get lost."
"Yeah," said Lewis. "But I want you to take that fellowship if you really-"
"No. I stay if you stay. I go if you go. That's the deal." It was back to Ruth again: Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. And if you die first, dig a hole for me beside you.
"Well, that's that, then. I'll stay on, and you with me, and..." - Lewis lifted his glass - "I'm flattered, James. And grateful." He held out his right hand, to solemnize the deal; Hathaway took it, thinking of boat-ropes tossed ashore at the end of a long voyage, thinking about hope, wanting to hang on much longer than the length of a handshake.
*
Hathaway reached out to the chessboard to move a knight and, he realized a second too late, to consign himself to another defeat at the ruthless hands of Zoe Suskin. Suskin, from the German for "sweet child." Ha. Though the other part of her name...
He'd seen it right away, or nearly so; it was part of why he'd clung so hard to the girl and her innocence, why he'd identified with her so strongly. Zoe to Zoe: life born of fire and life born of sweetness, if an island amid a sea of calamity could be sweet. Not that his personal journey from the one to the other denied either her individuality, or demonstrated any connection between them (other than a cunning ability to outplay him), but it threw into stark relief his struggle with self-acceptance. He really hadn't come very far.
"James, you're not concentrating," Zoe said reprovingly. "Checkmate in five moves."
He could see the whole game laid out behind him, and where he'd gone wrong. "Yes," he said. "Might as well give up now."
She nodded, though she played out the finish anyway, swiftly shifting pieces for both sides. Then she sat back and regarded him. It was a lovely summery morning out in the garden, birds singing. "And what is it that is so very dreadful and distracting today?" she said in an Austrian accent thick as sugared coffee; she liked mocking her therapist.
He hesitated, and then said, "Do you know about the Red Queen's race?"
"Of course. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass. It's very, very good; I was too young to appreciate it when I read it before, but I've gone back, with other people's notes to help. There's so much there; I spent forty-five minutes thinking about the Red King and his dream." She smiled with the glee of an adventurer brave enough to venture into jungles dripping with snakes and paradoxes. "Though I don't like that Alice just wakes up at the end. And the chess game isn't very well thought out."
"Neither is life," Hathaway said dryly. "Never forget that Charles Dodgson wasn't just a disembodied brain."
"Well, I wouldn't have let him take photographs of me. And I know that there's more to people than their scholarship," she said, giving him a meaningful glance. "So are you running in place in more of a spiritual sense, or an emotional? Or just training for a race."
He shouldn't burden her with his troubles; he was teetering on the edge of being Dodgy Uncle James with Zoe's mother as it was. "Just... getting out of breath a bit."
"Did you ever wonder what happens if you stop? I mean, the Red Queen provides just the two options, running as hard as you can and running even harder. If you don't run at all... is it like stopping on a treadmill, so you shoot off the back? Or does the world sort of... go still around you? When my father died..."
She was still very young, he had to remind himself, even in her intellectual life: not yet used to reconciling theory with reality. "That's psychological self-preservation," he said gently. "Neurological, even. The brain stops processing irrelevant stimuli so it can deal with what's really important. Or sometimes what helps us most is doing the opposite, fiddling with trivial matters so we don't have to think about..." Bone-deep pain, he continued silently. Guilt and remorse and a soul that wants to kick itself unconscious, if it could figure out which part was the foot. "Things," he finished.
Zoe gave him a look that said she knew, in general if not in specific detail, what he was glossing over. She certainly realized that pain and longing could be hidden away in secret. "Or there's another option," she said. "If we're going to assume that 'running in place' does mean something in the chess game... maybe it's the way your brain works over moves, all that mental activity that then results in a piece going one space, or not moving at all if that's not the right thing to do?"
Hathaway nodded. "I like that; it makes sense."
"So I suppose it takes just as much energy for the bishop to move on a diagonal, for example... but what about the knight and its funny sideways-any-direction hop? Maybe that's somehow different for not being straightforward? It's 'thinking outside the box,' though that's a silly phrase. If you go outside, you leave the box just the same. I'd rather bend it into interesting shapes from the inside."
"Me too," he said, although he realized that he seldom did. "But no, your theory doesn't hold up. Doesn't the knight's hop require even more effort, metaphorically? Or even mentally, because it's not a movement the brain processes naturally." Like zigzagging while running away from an assailant with a gun, his policeman's mind threw in.
Zoe frowned. "Then we must assume it's natural for the knight. And at least it provides a perspective the other pieces don't have. And it's entertaining to watch. Did you know he always ends up on a square of a different color than the one he started from? Well, of course you did."
"I did, but why do you say that? Because you know I've played so much bad chess in my life?"
"Because you are a knight, James."
She'd shown an occasional tendency to idolize him since they'd caught her father's killer; he wished he could say that losing to her at chess was a purposeful attempt to nip this in the bud. "The White Knight, maybe," he said self-deprecatingly. "With all sorts of baggage slung around my saddle, and falling off a lot."
"No, not him. More like... Percival or Galahad."
"Oh, God, no," he said in alarmed denial. "I mean... I don't have a Holy Grail to chase after."
"Don't you? Well, you're not nearly such a prig as Galahad, that's true."
"Or as virtuous. For example, right now I am filled with an unworthy desire to get my revenge by trouncing you as soon as we set up the board again."
"I don't feel like playing anymore. And your Inspector Lewis will call you any minute, to go on another quest."
"Setting up as a Sibyl, are you?" Hathaway said, trying not to glance at his mobile. He longed for and dreaded being with Lewis, neither urge ever less than fervent now. And he didn't want to see another dead body again ever, yet the puzzles still seduced him each time. "Or, don't tell me, you've been committing murders so you can predict them to me. And investigations aren't much like quests; there's far too much paperwork."
"Well, quests must have had boring bits, all that riding and riding and bad weather."
"Night after night you sit/Holding the bridle like a man of stone,/Dismal, unfriended: what thing comes of it?" he quoted to her. She gave him her impatient for data glare, and he added, "William Morris. Poem about Galahad. He's beginning to wonder if he's made the right choice, particularly about chastity. But he has God on his side, so it's all right if he doesn't get the girl." He hadn't been so cynical about the poem when he'd first read it, at Zoe's age.
"Hm. I suppose I understand why it's better not to be distracted by sex while you're focused on a goal," she said, just a bit pink. "But we learn from mistakes, don't we? It doesn't seem fair he isn't allowed to make any. Anyway, I don't think I'd like being a Sibyl or a serial killer; I'd rather be a detective. Don't frown at me; it's what you do, and you wouldn't do it if you didn't like it."
It was an accident, Zoe, he wanted to say. But something in him hated to disillusion her, and besides, accident was entirely the wrong word. He still wasn't sure what the right one was. Like Lewis, he didn't really believe in destiny.
"But you are a knight," she went on. "You protect people, and you do best working for someone, and you're not very direct in your thinking, because that would be boring, but you ride at threats very hard and you're not afraid to face them when you have right on your side. And I think you have a Grail, but you don't ride so hard or so directly at that, maybe because that's what you're afraid of? And you jump both ways."
He nearly blushed; though if it had been a knowing insinuation, she was hiding it under a veil of innocence. "Well," he said, "I'd advise you to shoot for being an Oxford don or a billionaire financial analyst, but if you must join me on the chessboard of crime I'd rather you were on my side, because I'd have a hell of a time checkmating you. And speaking of which-"
His mobile rang. He glanced at the display - it was Lewis - and then back up at his very own Sibyl, grinning at him.
Dies irae, dies illa. He smiled back affectionately, and took the call. There'd been a body dug up in a wood.
*
Underground in Falconer's Lab H, gazing at Thea's face as she recognized the pit her husband had buried himself in for her sake, Hathaway indulged himself in another flight of Latin: Volui posse pati: nec negobo me tentâsse. Amor vicit. Orpheus had probably had his own Helena to help him bear the loss of his wife, can't deny I tried, though at least he must have waited till Eurydice was actually dead. But love conquered, didn't it bloody always, sucking you down into hell, Lab Hades as it were. And every single time you lost it all, by not being able to help looking back. Or you found your Snark and vanished away; it was all pretty much the same thing.
When the day's work was done, he went home and started drinking, self-indulgence keeping pace with blood alcohol level. Eurydice the woods, Eurydice the floods, Eurydice the rocks and hollow mountains rung. It was his luck to fall in love with someone named Robbie. He really should run off to Scotland to shout a bit and then die. He laughed at himself, and poured another whisky.
*
No worst, there is none, but nothing seemed good from that point forward either. He slept poorly, in snatches, every cell in him yearning for caffeine all day, but he functioned; he drank too much, but never enough to impair his work; he managed, sometimes, to find his snark and say something clever, so that Lewis's over that existential flu yet, lad? glances were few and far between. All would have been well, really, if Lewis had been happy, if anyone had seemed happy, but Oxford remained sunk into a slough of despond; even Zoe had frustrations in her work and an unrequited crush on a boy in a tutorial, and beating him at chess now bored her. Eventually they moved on to snooker (she still won) and Tolkien.
A long afternoon over tea, deep into elven lore and sociopolitical criticism, and then with one of those abrupt turns into the simple that characterized Zoe's insight, she said, "I really like there and back again more than there and back again and off to the Grey Havens. It seems so pointless. I mean, I know it's analogous to self-sacrifice and salvation, you explained that very well, but that means Frodo's going into death; isn't it always better to hang on, even if the pain seems unbearable? And to go all that way and get no benefit from your own good works. It's stupid. Wasteful."
"It would hardly be self-sacrifice if you got something out of it."
"Only if you get benefits in kind. Frodo doesn't want power or wealth, but he could at least have some home comforts like Bilbo did. Neither of them's much interested in finding a wife - or a husband, though it seems a homophobic society, and anyway Sam's taken - but there are lots of other pleasures in life. And Frodo should go on a healing quest, to fix his wound. Or someone should do it for him. He shouldn't just give up."
"So speaks the voice of youth," Hathaway said, from nearly twenty years further down the road.
"Oh, James. You said you'd stop doing that." He scrubbed out the condescension with a gesture, and she went on, "I like the idea of a healing quest. Much better than being too pure and wounded to live. I'm sorry I said you were Galahad or Percival; I think they're both wankers. Oh, Galahad, the days go by; so sorely you have wrought and painfully. Eurgh."
Hathaway laughed, wondering if she burrowed out every source he lightly tossed her way and memorized it. "It would make a good essay: the Wanker in Medieval Romance. Glimpsed Through a Lacy Victorian Curtain, if you like. But I still think Tolkien had a point. It's not merely that you can't go back but have to keep moving forward; that's just time theory. It's that... sometimes there's only one place you belong, and you can't be there. 'No longer at ease here, in the old dispensation.' T.S. Eliot," he noted before she asked. "Look it up."
"Well, then you go somewhere else. Ask my mother."
"And if there's nowhere you can be healed?" Hathaway asked, feeling he'd got beyond his depth.
Zoe regarded him with eyes that cut too keenly. "You're not Frodo either," she said.
*
He wasn't; he had no ensnaring ring to drop into a fiery mountain, no sacred vessel to retrieve, not even a dragon to kill. No country to found or to return to; nowhere to go at all outside Oxfordshire, except occasionally to play a gig with the band. Or, more rarely, in the line of work.
One day in the dead of winter (the ways deep and the weather sharp) they set out to Glastonbury to question a potential witness. The interview wasn't expected to be pivotal, but was important enough to conduct in person, and Lewis apparently thought it required the presence of both investigators. It wasn't so much a pear-shape as some sort of pear upside-down cake that things soon began to resemble, and they ended up in a dramatic full-out foot-race up the Tor, chasing the man who was now a murder suspect and had pretty much confirmed his guilt by bolting.
Putting on a final burst of speed, Hathaway hit the ground and his quarry hard in a desperate tackle, wrestled the suspect's hands behind his back, and looked up to see Lewis limping over, handcuffs at ready, sturdy figure echoed by the tower and set off by the fantastically enormous dark cloud on the horizon, shoving its dragonish mass in fury through the frigid air as if just too late to claim Hathaway's struggling prize. He grinned, struck with the lightning bolt of his first spontaneous happy moment in months. Lewis jerked back, grazed by the electric joy, met Hathaway's eyes for a long instant, and then bent to secure the suspect; two local constables came racing up to assist with the arrest, and it was only after the correct procedures had been attended to that Hathaway's brain caught up. Lewis, limping.
"Are you all right, sir?"
He made a face. "Twisted my bloody knee. Would be on top of a great hill." The constables were leading their suspect away. "If you give me an arm..."
"All of me, if you want it."
The world paused; waited, refusing to breathe. Oh hell; he hadn't gone and said it, not now... If not now, when? And if not here... oh, batter me up and fry me, you flipping God. Who finishes quests on Glastonbury Tor? He who must be forced to admit he's engaged on them, I suppose. "All of me," he repeated. "You know that." He kept his gaze on Lewis's face.
"Yeah. Yeah, I do." They couldn't seem to look away from each other. "Just the arm will do, for the moment. Shoulder, maybe."
Body supporting body, they made their way slowly down; it didn't feel like a descent. Lewis refused a hospital; the police pathologist was just as acerbic as Laura Hobson about being asked to treat the living, but advised rest, elevation, ice and anti-inflammatories, and agreed that anything else would wait until they reached Oxford. "Though I wouldn't be surprised if it's a torn meniscus. Make sure he does get it seen to, Sergeant. Oh, and speaking of which..." The doctor made gestures toward his own face and hands; Hathaway looked down and noticed abrasions for the first time, and a rip in his trousers.
Gazing into the mirror in the Gents, he felt the first familiar, comforting caress of insecurity touch his brow. You can't go through with this; really you can't. He'll never mention it again, if you don't. Better that way.
He nodded firmly to himself, and went back to find Lewis, a DC at his side, on the phone arranging for transport for the suspect to Oxford. They got the paperwork started, then they made their way into the car park. Lewis tossed Hathaway the keys. "Suppose you're driving, then."
The ice-pack didn't last long, and even with the passenger seat cranked back Lewis clearly couldn't get his leg into a comfortable position. Over and over, Hathaway's mouth formed the words maybe we should stop, sir, but he couldn't say them. Not that it would be less awkward when they got home; he'd have to help Lewis into his flat, and then... they approached Frome; there had to be a decent hotel, with two rooms available. Hathaway opened his mouth and glanced over. Lewis was asleep.
Nothing for it but to keep driving. To add insult to irony, it was raining now, the black cloud disgorging its burden. The radio announced a pileup ahead on the A361; without really thinking about it, he swung the wheel over into the back roads of Wiltshire, darkening fast now with twilight and the storm. Short cuts make for long delays, some hobbit in his head teased. I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight path had been lost.
The little inn appeared on the left side of an unknown lane in an unknown village so quickly it might have been by magic; making the turn was instinct, instantly regretted but impossible to reverse. It was a charming Georgian stone building, not the sort of place one needed to abandon all hope, entering. He parked; Lewis started awake. "Sir," said Hathaway, and then: "Robbie. I'm knackered, it's raining, I can't go any further, and I don't know where we are. We're going to stop the night."
"Yeah," was all Lewis said, not a word about GPS or coffee, and grunted as he slid his bad leg out of the car and rocked to his feet.
"Maybe I should see first if they have a room-"
"They will."
Yes, they did; it was inevitable. And only one room, naturally. It was Lewis who said, "That'll be fine, then," to the crone behind the counter. She was of a piece with the magical apparition of the inn, one of those witches with a hovel to shelter in on a long journey after a vanished prince, who hands out walnuts with golden birds inside and turns out to be the mother of the North Wind. Hathaway was sure he recognized her from long ago, muttering to herself about a late invitation to his christening. All she handed him was a key and a credit card receipt, however.
Lewis hobbled up the stairs; Hathaway followed, carrying the two overnight bags they'd thrown into the car because you never knew when interviews might turn into quests. It was a pleasantly-appointed room, dark wood and white curtains, its own bath: it was probably the honeymoon suite or something. There was only one bed.
Lewis took this in, glanced sideways at Hathaway, began to say, "D'you ever think that-" and then was quiet.
Yes, I do. I think that all the time.
"Let me get you settled, sir," was what he said aloud, "and I'll see about some ice for the knee. Would you rather the chair or the bed, to sit in?"
"I'd rather a piss first and wash me face," Lewis said in his don't you dare fuss, Sergeant voice. "And I'll get myself settled. I'd appreciate a bag of ice, thanks. Bugger off and fetch it."
Hathaway buggered off, the minor quest absorbing his attention for as long as he could decently stretch it out, which was five minutes. "Well, I'm back," he said as he reentered the room. Lewis was in the bed, sitting up against pillows with a hump under the duvet indicating another pillow placed under his injured knee. His suit, shirt and tie were draped tidily over a chair; he was wearing a faded jumper for warmth in the chilly room, and reading a Bath tourist brochure. Hathaway handed him the bag of ice, and could see as he slipped it onto his knee that he hadn't replaced the suit trousers with anything; he made a little "ah!" sound at the cold, and covered himself up again.
"How bad is it?" Hathaway asked.
"It'll do fine," Lewis said, and then, to Hathaway's reproving look, "Really. Should be walking instead of hobbling tomorrow. Sorry I took most of the pillows; I left you one."
He patted it; it was not a take this and use it in the armchair gesture; and in fact the armchair looked supremely uncomfortable for sleeping in. Hathaway stared at him for a moment, and then said, "Just to confirm, you want me to-"
"And just so you know, it's been a while since I shared a bed. But I reckon we can both manage."
He couldn't possibly have missed Hathaway's confession on the Tor, which meant this was purposeful ambiguity, which meant... Hathaway couldn't decode what it meant, except that Lewis was reading the brochure again, with apparent avid interest, and Hathaway was pretty sure he'd already been to Bath. He felt his face flush; in fact he felt himself burning all over, so he retreated to the toilet, then emerged a few minutes later wearing vest and pants, having decided that even the casual sort of striptease was not a good plan under the circumstances.
"There doesn't appear to be a lot of reading matter about," he commented as he climbed into bed; it was, at least, a fairly broad piece of furniture. He still felt like his skin was on fire, like he was about to set the sheets alight. "Or good lighting for reading."
"Mm," said Lewis. "That the way you usually rank hotel rooms?"
"It's a major criterion, yes."
Lewis gave him an explains a lot sort of smirk, then added, wiggling the brochure, "I was remembering. They'd just started that 'hop on, hop off' bus. Mark was in a rebellious phase. So he hopped off at the Royal Crescent, and we didn't notice till a few stops further on. I flipped my lid, which Val knew perfectly well meant I was in a bit of a panic; she was the one who said he'd be fine, and of course he was. Just having his own little adventure." His voice went thin. "It was Val I didn't worry about, going off to London by herself."
Hathaway had long ago become a connoisseur of talking-about-Val nuances; some of the tones meant stop; retreat; go away now and some seemed to invite a neutral but potentially encouraging noise that Lewis seldom took the mm-er up on. Once, a little floaty at the end of a very long day and over the dregs of a second pint, Hathaway had had a confusing chat with Laura Hobson on this topic, while Lewis was at the bar, which in retrospect implied that he'd opened up a bit more to Laura; or at least she seemed to have got as far as actual words of inquiry. Hathaway hadn't tried that in a very long time, whether because he didn't want to open wounds or because, shamefully, he didn't want to fill Lewis's mind with memories of someone else who'd loved him, considering such reminders to be bad tactics even from a hopelessly unrequited lover. Or perhaps he was just afraid of being snapped at. It seemed, suddenly, a colossal error in human decency.
All of me. "Tell me about Val," he said, still attuned enough to nuance to realize that the open-ended query was best.
Lewis glanced up; he hadn't actually looked directly at Hathaway for several minutes, and the surprised expression also contained a glimmer of appraisal, the eyes flicking to the chest, the arms. Hathaway wanted to read that as gently ironic commentary: interesting notion of pillow talk, Sergeant. But he didn't dare to.
"I still miss her," Lewis said, looking back at the brochure for a moment and then laying it on the bedside table. "It's not... a wound reopened daily, is that how you'd put it?" You literary types, you readers of legends in hotel bedrooms with adequate lighting. "It doesn't hurt every day now. I don't talk to her every day; I don't expect her to talk back. But I'm never going to stop missing her. I suppose, if it was a wound, it would be one that never completely healed, inside, but not one that leaves a nasty scar that makes people look away, that makes me incapable of living." He sat a moment, apparently looking inward, and Hathaway let him. "When Lyn was pregnant with Dylan, I just kept thinking how terrible it was that Val wasn't around to meet her grandchild. Now that he's here, I feel like... well, he's her grandson, but it's more important that he's himself, and has people to love him. And get shirty with him when he hops off buses unsupervised, someday."
Hathaway nodded. "I don't think I have sufficient family ties to understand, really, but I'm glad you do. Have a family, I mean. And that you had a wife. I hope you don't think I ever..." He took a deep breath. "Resented your grief. Or her existence. Or anything. I would have been there, if you'd wanted to talk." Trying to smile a little, he added, "Rather belated declaration." Like the other one.
Lewis's mouth twisted in a mirror-image smile. "And I didn't tell you about Val, there, did I? I told you about me." He shifted to face Hathaway in the bed. "But probably the only relevant bit of data in the Val-file just now is sex: female."
"I'm aware of your preferences," Hathaway said, wishing he'd made himself uncomfortable in the armchair. "If that's what you're saying."
"Are you then? I thought I was aware of yours, not that I'm inquiring into your sexual history, because look how well that usually turns out."
Hathaway stared at the framed country-cottage prints on the wall, at the flowered wallpaper, at anything but Lewis. "The two women you know I've been with. And a few men, including one of my bandmates when we got tipsy one evening three years ago. That was a truly bad plan; don't sleep with people you work with, right? And that's all. Don't have to take the other glove off yet, let alone my socks."
"Val used to hate it when I left my socks on. Unromantic, she said. Not that I would have needed my toes for counting either." A foot wriggled, far down under the duvet; Hathaway couldn't tell, of course, whether it was socked or unsocked, but for a moment he was absurdly unable to breathe. "I hope," Lewis went on, "that this... relative lack of partners isn't anything to do with..."
"Deciding that I was saving myself for the Holy Grail of Robbie Lewis? Not that you're not, but... no. Just general ineptitude. And disinclination for casual encounters." He turned back to face Lewis, suddenly determined to find out the truth whatever the consequences. "You said you knew."
"Hm?"
"I said 'All of me. You know that,' and you agreed. Had you... seen it?"
"That you fancied me? Sometimes I thought so. Couldn't credit it, really." He held up a hand against Hathaway's protest: pale, surprisingly slim fingers; no wedding ring. He'd dreamed about those hands. "But it's more than fancying, right? You don't do things by halves, James." Lewis swallowed, and he was looking at Hathaway's hands, now. "It's just as well you never said anything till now. I would've… well, not sure what I would have done. And I've tried not to think about it, lately; things have been so…" He made an abrupt gesture of dismissal. "Today, for some reason… it was like everything I thought I knew got lit from the other side, and I had to stare at it straight on. And I liked what I saw."
Finally, he looked up, met Hathaway's eyes, set his heart to pounding, sending fast-warming blood through him at speed, like a messenger lighting beacons of desire, calling out the news that he was wanted in return. It was everywhere in him, this unsought certainty: in all the expected parts, and in ankles, elbows, eyebrows, the back of his neck. He was momentarily very distracted by the notion that Lewis wanted the back of his neck, and had to concentrate to realize that his desirer was still speaking.
"I've never had someone say… never had an offer like that before. Not that Val and I didn't belong to each other, but... the words. All right, I was already weak-kneed, but..."
Words. You want words? I can do those. Too many came to mind: the star to every wandering bark; my kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann'd; we shall not cease from exploration; I am glad you are here with me at the end of all things. He couldn't say any of them. He couldn't move, either; he was useless, really.
Lewis reached over, took Hathaway's hand, brought it to his own cheek: a sort of tutorial gesture. "And when your fingers find me," he said, "I'll drown you in my body, carving deep blue ripples in the tissues of your mind," and the touch and the image shook Hathaway out of his stupor enough that he could lean over and discover Lewis's mouth, as it pressed in answer against his.
It was all exploration for a while after that, so intensely physical - lips dancing against skin; hands venturing under clothing, tracing the contour of muscle and bone; tongues in ears at one point; fingers mussing and then smoothing hair, gentling, learning; quick now, here, now, always; before, behind, between, above, below - that he had no time to consider words, but his brain must have been working on the problem, because he suddenly pulled back, noting and glorying in Lewis's small bereft noise, and murmured, "Tiny purple fishes. You're quoting Eric bloody Clapton to me in bed?"
"Martin Sharp, I think you'll find," Lewis said, sounding short-winded. "Clapton did the..." Fingering, against James's skin.
"More like this, actually," and he played the phrases where his hands were, under Lewis's jumper and against his chest, brushing a nipple; rewarded by an intake of breath, he did it again, and again. The open-mouthed pleasure on Lewis's face undid him completely; he tore the jumper and vest off with a decisive tug and haul, followed them with his own remaining garments - as souls unbodied, bodies uncloth'd must be - and straddled his new owner, his new possession, his new-found land, pressing him against the pillows, expressing with unmerciful hands and mouth every instant of lust and devotion he'd saved up over the years. The substance of things hoped for, he thought, wildly, with uncaring blasphemy. I should have had more faith, I should have... and then theology flew out of his head along with everything else, because, oh bless you God, there was Robbie, Robbie, the rocks and the hollow mountains ringing; clutching him with equal desire, hard against his hardness, trying to push and rock; James sliding flat down against his body, to make it easier, and his foot hitting... cold. Robbie jerked, just enough to bring it all back, the figure against the dragon cloud, limping...
"Shit, sorry, I hurt you," he gasped out. "Your knee-"
"Don't be daft," Robbie breathed back, "you could cut my fucking legs off right now and it wouldn't stop me-"
"Fucking?"
A fierce kiss, and then, "It's just a flesh wound. Come on, you pansy!"
James grinned at him with utter unconstraint, and Robbie groaned. "That mouth of yours... when you smiled, on the hill today-"
"Holding a man down, clearly what does it for me. I can find something else to do with my mouth besides grin at you like an idiot...?"
"No. I mean, yes, I want that... oh, fuck, James... but no. Hands. Eyes."
Interpreting this, he slid sideways enough that after he carefully tugged down Robbie's boxer shorts they could get a purchase on each other - like sailors, he thought muzzily, except ropes not cocks, though probably cocks on occasion too, those long long voyages - and thumb and stroke and cosset and caress, each to each, eyes locked, rhythm and need building, breath fast and ragged, until Robbie's eyes closed and warmth spilled over James's hand. And he followed. As he always did.
The miracle, the sort of wonder you chase a star or push yourself into looking-glass land to find, was that it wasn't awkward after that; no too-late qualms or self-reproach or urge toward penitence, no throat-clearing or mention of need for sleep, though James was pretty sure they'd both sleep well. There was kissing, of both the postcoital-passionate and the affectionate sort, and a bit of amazed gazing, and the kicking of the ice out of bed before it leaked, whereupon James got himself out of bed to put it in the sink where it belonged, before it leaked onto the good witch's floorboards, or through them. And then Robbie said, "C'mere, you," and he slid back into bed a bit chilled, and was taken into welcoming arms again.
"Journeys end in lovers' meeting," he murmured, face compressed against Robbie's chest.
"What a long strange trip it's been," Robbie countered dryly. There was a response to that, a riposte, a clever thing to say, somewhere in James's head; he lay searching for it until the sunlight and a lover's kiss woke him, and the journey back home to Oxford awaited them.
Author's Note:
Sources of quotes and allusions, more or less in order:
Fairytale, "Sleeping Beauty"-type; Virgil, Aeneid; T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, "Little Gidding" (also source of title); A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad; Homer, Odyssey; King James Bible, Ruth 1; John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale"; John Milton, Paradise Lost; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica and Quaestiones disputatae de veritate; Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass; King James Bible, Isaiah 42; Grail legends, various (Percival, Galahad, later Fisher King); William Morris, "Sir Galahad, A Christmas Mystery"; Thomas of Celano/Requiem Mass; Ovid, Metamorphoses; Lewis Carroll, Hunting of the Snark (brief allusion); Alexander Pope, "Ode on St. Cecilia's Day"; Gerard Manley Hopkins, "No worst, there is none": John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress (brief allusion); J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings; T.S. Eliot, "Journey of the Magi"; um, Rabbi Hillel I suppose; John Donne, "Batter my heart"; Dante, Inferno; fairytale, "East of the Sun, West of the Moon"-type; Shakespeare, Sonnet 116; John Donne, "To His Mistress Going to Bed"; Cream, "Tales of Brave Ulysses"; Monty Python and the Holy Grail; Shakespeare, Twelfth Night; Grateful Dead, "Truckin'." Whew.
Author: hedda62
Title: The End of All Our Exploring
Pairing: James Hathaway/Robert Lewis
Characters: James Hathaway, Robert Lewis, Zoe Suskin
Rating: Hard R/MA
Wordcount: 8018
Warnings: None
Summary: James Hathaway often thought that at his christening he must have been cursed, by an underhanded and satirical fairy, with the twin blessings of an excellent memory and an inability to run away from his past.
The End of All Our Exploring @ AO3
James Hathaway often thought that at his christening he must have been cursed, by an underhanded and satirical fairy, with the twin blessings of an excellent memory and an inability to run away from his past.
In retrospect, the fairy was probably imagination (although the vision of a hatchet-faced crone lingered, likely from some later event) but the gifts were real. The talent for remembering was the more obvious of the two; he'd always been good at connecting faces and names, winning any game that required a mind-picture of previous moves, allowing the precisely-recalled humiliations of his daily existence to haunt him, and memorizing meaningful sequences of words. He'd been born too late for rote recitation alone to win him prizes in school, but he had an analytical mind as well, and used it to advantage, to Cambridge and beyond. Along the way he accumulated a great deal of poetry (in several languages, some of them dead), a heavy burden of biblical verses and religious liturgy (also in several languages as well as translations and creeds), and a lot of odd bits and bobs of fairly useless general knowledge, rowing jargon and statistics, lyrics, chords, fingerings, dates of battles, meanings of words, and, more recently, a detailed map of Oxford and environs lending itself to finding shortcuts, parking, and decent pub lunches.
In his early years he'd been encouraged by how much his mnemonic abilities impressed other people; then he'd learned that to impress was not always an unmixed benefit, and discovered how to remember in silence. He still couldn't help answering direct questions, nor could he always resist the opportunity to show off with a clever riposte. It wasn't that he consistently had just the right quote for an occasion, but he could frequently fill in a specific prompt - the number of times Oxford police work called on him to do this probably shouldn't have surprised him - and now and then word association or emotional relevance provided a line or two of apposite verbiage, not that he always spoke it aloud.
Though sometimes, when he felt comfortable enough, in certain company, he'd find the words coming out of his mouth. To be met, if he was lucky, by a twisted smile and a grunt or a Geordie put-down of, he liked to think, increasing tolerance or perhaps even affection.
But some situations did not call for a smartarse quote (or even a deeply felt and eloquent one), and remembering in silence was still a useful skill. Particularly when the words that came to mind were apparently incongruous with the situation. Looking down at Dorian Crane's pierced body, Alice still mute and trembling among the bicycles, he should have been struck by a bolt out of the Carroll/Tolkien/Lewis cloud hovering over his head, or at least out of Boxlands, but what came to mind was a Latin tag: omnis et una dilapsis calor, atque in ventos vita recessit. It was an hour later, back in the Eagle and Child, staring at the empty scabbard between fruitless interviews, that he identified it - the death of Dido, in the Aeneid - and decided that it wasn't so inappropriate after all: warmth and life, dissipating on the air, the living shivering in their wake and sailing onward.
*
Neither was it completely absurd, despite Portia's "quality of mercy" speech saturating the atmosphere, to draw in a breath watching a tortured Robbie Lewis confront Simon Monkford, and exhale it non-Shakespeareanly, breathing the easy profundity of T.S. Eliot: So I find words I never thought to speak/In streets I never thought I should revisit/When I left my body on a distant shore.
Which was really the problem with both of them, he had a chance to think later. Neither of them should be in Oxford, with pain and memories thick on the cobblestones, and neither of them should be doing this job. We are born with the dead: see, they return, and bring us with them. Though it was foolish and arrogant to think that any copper, from the crass Hooper to the sublime Innocent, was free from loss and regret; and someone had to catch murderers. And he and Lewis were very good at it.
*
And so they went on (the conscious impotence of rage, the rending pain of re-enactment, the shame of motives late revealed) and they caught Paul Hopkiss, and standing at rosy-fingered dawn in glad banishment from Crevecoeur with the brainier half of a not-bad detective, knowing that he ought to be murmuring of the land of lost content or the long road white in the moon, or perhaps of Sirens weaving a haunting song over the sea, he looked at Lewis and the only words that came into his head were "Whither thou goest, I will go."
Which nearly made him laugh out loud, because of all the things Robbie Lewis was to him, all the things that by that time he wanted him to be, his mother-in-law was not one of them.
"What are you smiling at?" Lewis said.
Hathaway controlled his treacherous mouth. Almost. "The alien corn," he said.
This earned him a suspicious look, but all Lewis said was, "Mainly oats and barley, oop north. And I'd say 'speaking of the latter', but at this hour I think coffee's recommended. My treat."
"Sabean odors from the spicy shore of Araby the Blest, sir."
"Oh, go on, you." And Hathaway did.
*
By the time, much later, that he said Ruth's words aloud, or a version of them, he'd become more honest with himself about wanting Lewis; he was still shocked at the speaking - if you go, I go - and hastened to undercut the blunt declaration. It didn't help, of course; Lewis was too canny for that.
"And what did Thomas Aquinas say?" he asked when Hathaway got back with the pints.
"Hm." There had been something to do with the sun in his mind, but it had vanished... if the divine action should cease, all things would drop into nothingness... Well, that was rather depressing. "He has a lot to say about faith and its relation to hope, and about how faith is the foundation of the spiritual life in much the same way that matter" - he plunked the substance of good brown ale down in front of Lewis - "is the foundation for real objects. Both faith and hope, by slightly different paths, have to do with things that aren't there in front of us, but that are wished for. I suppose the end point of hope is things we could actually have and touch, even if we never get them. And the end point of faith is less tangible; he says we think of it as truth, but really it's desire. To find the truth, I suppose," he added hastily. "Anyway, I like to think that, one way or another, we keep searching."
"And where's all your searching leading you? St. Gerard's, or back to the nick? Or are you telling me I've got to decide for you?"
The colors of the sunset were fading; he suspected they were showing on his face instead. He kept silence, and let Lewis answer his own question. "If both of us stay in our jobs," he said, "nothing much changes. Still here in bloody Oxford; same old routine. Not much of a spiritual or intellectual journey."
"Actually I'd say that things not in front of us but wished for are the foundation of police work, wouldn't you, sir?"
"Or finding the truth. If we're going to play theological word games."
"Sorry. I'd be doing a good deal more of that if I took the fellowship, of course."
"And I," said Lewis, "would be playing a lot more peekaboo." His mouth twitched. "Not that we don't sometimes do that in the line of work."
"Your grandchild isn't likely to pull a gun on you when you're not looking. I suppose the question is, does that sound like the next stage in the adventure of life, or does it sound like stagnation?"
Lewis laughed. "Anyone can tell you've not had kids. More like... what was it you told me Lewis Carroll said? About running."
"The Red Queen's race. 'Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in one place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.' No one has been quite sure what he meant by it - it doesn't make sense in the context of the chess game - but it's been used to explicate theories of relativity and evolutionary biology." He took a glance at Lewis's expression, in the fading light, and shut up.
"All I know is it felt like I was running twice as fast after Lyn and Mark as after any criminal you could name. Not that it'd be my job, mostly, this round." He shot Hathaway a keen look. "Didn't even say I'd be moving to Manchester, did I?"
"Well... traveling there more often, if not."
"Course the trains make you feel like you're running in place. And the motorways aren't much better."
"I think..." Hathaway began, gazing down into his pint, and then gathered his courage and said, "Sometimes I think life is just like that. At least I feel like I've been running in place, not... gathering escape velocity. The scenery," he added, gesturing at the sunset-that-was, "has been oddly lovely. Working with you has been... it's been wonderful, sir. I mean, I do have to buy all the pints, but..."
"Cheeky bugger. I've bought you a coffee now and then. So you want to escape... what, Oxford's gravity? Your metaphor," he added dryly when Hathaway made a dissenting noise.
"The thing is... I don't. I should want to be a thousand miles from Crevecoeur, from St. Mark's, from..." From you, he managed not to say. "All the running, and I keep tripping over things that..."
"That hurt. Oh, I know; d'you think I don't know that, lad? Different for me, though; I'm an old sod stuck in me ways."
"That's not true. Not a word of it. When..." Hathaway gulped, and then went ahead, "When the pain was too much to bear, you gathered enough momentum to fling yourself damn far out to sea."
Lewis put his glass down abruptly. "Are you saying I was running away when I took the exchange in the BVI?"
"No. Well... yes, but there's nothing wrong with running away. Not when the option is going quietly mad." Lewis made a hmph noise and picked up his pint. Hathaway went on: "I was wondering why you didn't stay there, actually. They wanted you to."
He could read that suspicious look even in the gathering dusk. "They made polite noises," Lewis said, "which Innocent's got a record of. I was a bit tempted to take them up on it, mind. Lovely place. Different from anywhere I'd lived, but easy to get used to."
"Sing unto the Lord a new song," Hathaway recited, his voice surprisingly clear and strong, "and his praise from the end of the earth, ye that go down to the sea, and all that is therein; the isles, and the inhabitants thereof."
"Mm," Lewis said, and then, "You would have been good at that."
"That part I would have been good at," he responded, smiling. "Though it's the wrong Bible. They generally wanted me to quote something more modern and Catholic."
"Stuck in the past. We are alike, then." Lewis was silent a moment, and then added, "That's why I came home."
A mental image of orchids placed reverently on a grave: Hathaway didn't need any words to understand what Lewis meant. However, it was rather a dead end to the conversation, literally, which prompted him to pick up the wrong half of the musing and turn it to another joke. "To follow your destiny in meeting me, sir?"
Lewis didn't laugh. "Not sure I believe in destiny. But I'm glad I did; more glad than you know that we ended up working together. Even if it's been a bit like the blind leading the blind, at times, and not always sure which of us is which."
And I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; I will lead them in paths that they have not known. "Hard to tell with your eyes shut," Hathaway said. "But I suppose if we're running in place we can't get lost."
"Yeah," said Lewis. "But I want you to take that fellowship if you really-"
"No. I stay if you stay. I go if you go. That's the deal." It was back to Ruth again: Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. And if you die first, dig a hole for me beside you.
"Well, that's that, then. I'll stay on, and you with me, and..." - Lewis lifted his glass - "I'm flattered, James. And grateful." He held out his right hand, to solemnize the deal; Hathaway took it, thinking of boat-ropes tossed ashore at the end of a long voyage, thinking about hope, wanting to hang on much longer than the length of a handshake.
*
Hathaway reached out to the chessboard to move a knight and, he realized a second too late, to consign himself to another defeat at the ruthless hands of Zoe Suskin. Suskin, from the German for "sweet child." Ha. Though the other part of her name...
He'd seen it right away, or nearly so; it was part of why he'd clung so hard to the girl and her innocence, why he'd identified with her so strongly. Zoe to Zoe: life born of fire and life born of sweetness, if an island amid a sea of calamity could be sweet. Not that his personal journey from the one to the other denied either her individuality, or demonstrated any connection between them (other than a cunning ability to outplay him), but it threw into stark relief his struggle with self-acceptance. He really hadn't come very far.
"James, you're not concentrating," Zoe said reprovingly. "Checkmate in five moves."
He could see the whole game laid out behind him, and where he'd gone wrong. "Yes," he said. "Might as well give up now."
She nodded, though she played out the finish anyway, swiftly shifting pieces for both sides. Then she sat back and regarded him. It was a lovely summery morning out in the garden, birds singing. "And what is it that is so very dreadful and distracting today?" she said in an Austrian accent thick as sugared coffee; she liked mocking her therapist.
He hesitated, and then said, "Do you know about the Red Queen's race?"
"Of course. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass. It's very, very good; I was too young to appreciate it when I read it before, but I've gone back, with other people's notes to help. There's so much there; I spent forty-five minutes thinking about the Red King and his dream." She smiled with the glee of an adventurer brave enough to venture into jungles dripping with snakes and paradoxes. "Though I don't like that Alice just wakes up at the end. And the chess game isn't very well thought out."
"Neither is life," Hathaway said dryly. "Never forget that Charles Dodgson wasn't just a disembodied brain."
"Well, I wouldn't have let him take photographs of me. And I know that there's more to people than their scholarship," she said, giving him a meaningful glance. "So are you running in place in more of a spiritual sense, or an emotional? Or just training for a race."
He shouldn't burden her with his troubles; he was teetering on the edge of being Dodgy Uncle James with Zoe's mother as it was. "Just... getting out of breath a bit."
"Did you ever wonder what happens if you stop? I mean, the Red Queen provides just the two options, running as hard as you can and running even harder. If you don't run at all... is it like stopping on a treadmill, so you shoot off the back? Or does the world sort of... go still around you? When my father died..."
She was still very young, he had to remind himself, even in her intellectual life: not yet used to reconciling theory with reality. "That's psychological self-preservation," he said gently. "Neurological, even. The brain stops processing irrelevant stimuli so it can deal with what's really important. Or sometimes what helps us most is doing the opposite, fiddling with trivial matters so we don't have to think about..." Bone-deep pain, he continued silently. Guilt and remorse and a soul that wants to kick itself unconscious, if it could figure out which part was the foot. "Things," he finished.
Zoe gave him a look that said she knew, in general if not in specific detail, what he was glossing over. She certainly realized that pain and longing could be hidden away in secret. "Or there's another option," she said. "If we're going to assume that 'running in place' does mean something in the chess game... maybe it's the way your brain works over moves, all that mental activity that then results in a piece going one space, or not moving at all if that's not the right thing to do?"
Hathaway nodded. "I like that; it makes sense."
"So I suppose it takes just as much energy for the bishop to move on a diagonal, for example... but what about the knight and its funny sideways-any-direction hop? Maybe that's somehow different for not being straightforward? It's 'thinking outside the box,' though that's a silly phrase. If you go outside, you leave the box just the same. I'd rather bend it into interesting shapes from the inside."
"Me too," he said, although he realized that he seldom did. "But no, your theory doesn't hold up. Doesn't the knight's hop require even more effort, metaphorically? Or even mentally, because it's not a movement the brain processes naturally." Like zigzagging while running away from an assailant with a gun, his policeman's mind threw in.
Zoe frowned. "Then we must assume it's natural for the knight. And at least it provides a perspective the other pieces don't have. And it's entertaining to watch. Did you know he always ends up on a square of a different color than the one he started from? Well, of course you did."
"I did, but why do you say that? Because you know I've played so much bad chess in my life?"
"Because you are a knight, James."
She'd shown an occasional tendency to idolize him since they'd caught her father's killer; he wished he could say that losing to her at chess was a purposeful attempt to nip this in the bud. "The White Knight, maybe," he said self-deprecatingly. "With all sorts of baggage slung around my saddle, and falling off a lot."
"No, not him. More like... Percival or Galahad."
"Oh, God, no," he said in alarmed denial. "I mean... I don't have a Holy Grail to chase after."
"Don't you? Well, you're not nearly such a prig as Galahad, that's true."
"Or as virtuous. For example, right now I am filled with an unworthy desire to get my revenge by trouncing you as soon as we set up the board again."
"I don't feel like playing anymore. And your Inspector Lewis will call you any minute, to go on another quest."
"Setting up as a Sibyl, are you?" Hathaway said, trying not to glance at his mobile. He longed for and dreaded being with Lewis, neither urge ever less than fervent now. And he didn't want to see another dead body again ever, yet the puzzles still seduced him each time. "Or, don't tell me, you've been committing murders so you can predict them to me. And investigations aren't much like quests; there's far too much paperwork."
"Well, quests must have had boring bits, all that riding and riding and bad weather."
"Night after night you sit/Holding the bridle like a man of stone,/Dismal, unfriended: what thing comes of it?" he quoted to her. She gave him her impatient for data glare, and he added, "William Morris. Poem about Galahad. He's beginning to wonder if he's made the right choice, particularly about chastity. But he has God on his side, so it's all right if he doesn't get the girl." He hadn't been so cynical about the poem when he'd first read it, at Zoe's age.
"Hm. I suppose I understand why it's better not to be distracted by sex while you're focused on a goal," she said, just a bit pink. "But we learn from mistakes, don't we? It doesn't seem fair he isn't allowed to make any. Anyway, I don't think I'd like being a Sibyl or a serial killer; I'd rather be a detective. Don't frown at me; it's what you do, and you wouldn't do it if you didn't like it."
It was an accident, Zoe, he wanted to say. But something in him hated to disillusion her, and besides, accident was entirely the wrong word. He still wasn't sure what the right one was. Like Lewis, he didn't really believe in destiny.
"But you are a knight," she went on. "You protect people, and you do best working for someone, and you're not very direct in your thinking, because that would be boring, but you ride at threats very hard and you're not afraid to face them when you have right on your side. And I think you have a Grail, but you don't ride so hard or so directly at that, maybe because that's what you're afraid of? And you jump both ways."
He nearly blushed; though if it had been a knowing insinuation, she was hiding it under a veil of innocence. "Well," he said, "I'd advise you to shoot for being an Oxford don or a billionaire financial analyst, but if you must join me on the chessboard of crime I'd rather you were on my side, because I'd have a hell of a time checkmating you. And speaking of which-"
His mobile rang. He glanced at the display - it was Lewis - and then back up at his very own Sibyl, grinning at him.
Dies irae, dies illa. He smiled back affectionately, and took the call. There'd been a body dug up in a wood.
*
Underground in Falconer's Lab H, gazing at Thea's face as she recognized the pit her husband had buried himself in for her sake, Hathaway indulged himself in another flight of Latin: Volui posse pati: nec negobo me tentâsse. Amor vicit. Orpheus had probably had his own Helena to help him bear the loss of his wife, can't deny I tried, though at least he must have waited till Eurydice was actually dead. But love conquered, didn't it bloody always, sucking you down into hell, Lab Hades as it were. And every single time you lost it all, by not being able to help looking back. Or you found your Snark and vanished away; it was all pretty much the same thing.
When the day's work was done, he went home and started drinking, self-indulgence keeping pace with blood alcohol level. Eurydice the woods, Eurydice the floods, Eurydice the rocks and hollow mountains rung. It was his luck to fall in love with someone named Robbie. He really should run off to Scotland to shout a bit and then die. He laughed at himself, and poured another whisky.
*
No worst, there is none, but nothing seemed good from that point forward either. He slept poorly, in snatches, every cell in him yearning for caffeine all day, but he functioned; he drank too much, but never enough to impair his work; he managed, sometimes, to find his snark and say something clever, so that Lewis's over that existential flu yet, lad? glances were few and far between. All would have been well, really, if Lewis had been happy, if anyone had seemed happy, but Oxford remained sunk into a slough of despond; even Zoe had frustrations in her work and an unrequited crush on a boy in a tutorial, and beating him at chess now bored her. Eventually they moved on to snooker (she still won) and Tolkien.
A long afternoon over tea, deep into elven lore and sociopolitical criticism, and then with one of those abrupt turns into the simple that characterized Zoe's insight, she said, "I really like there and back again more than there and back again and off to the Grey Havens. It seems so pointless. I mean, I know it's analogous to self-sacrifice and salvation, you explained that very well, but that means Frodo's going into death; isn't it always better to hang on, even if the pain seems unbearable? And to go all that way and get no benefit from your own good works. It's stupid. Wasteful."
"It would hardly be self-sacrifice if you got something out of it."
"Only if you get benefits in kind. Frodo doesn't want power or wealth, but he could at least have some home comforts like Bilbo did. Neither of them's much interested in finding a wife - or a husband, though it seems a homophobic society, and anyway Sam's taken - but there are lots of other pleasures in life. And Frodo should go on a healing quest, to fix his wound. Or someone should do it for him. He shouldn't just give up."
"So speaks the voice of youth," Hathaway said, from nearly twenty years further down the road.
"Oh, James. You said you'd stop doing that." He scrubbed out the condescension with a gesture, and she went on, "I like the idea of a healing quest. Much better than being too pure and wounded to live. I'm sorry I said you were Galahad or Percival; I think they're both wankers. Oh, Galahad, the days go by; so sorely you have wrought and painfully. Eurgh."
Hathaway laughed, wondering if she burrowed out every source he lightly tossed her way and memorized it. "It would make a good essay: the Wanker in Medieval Romance. Glimpsed Through a Lacy Victorian Curtain, if you like. But I still think Tolkien had a point. It's not merely that you can't go back but have to keep moving forward; that's just time theory. It's that... sometimes there's only one place you belong, and you can't be there. 'No longer at ease here, in the old dispensation.' T.S. Eliot," he noted before she asked. "Look it up."
"Well, then you go somewhere else. Ask my mother."
"And if there's nowhere you can be healed?" Hathaway asked, feeling he'd got beyond his depth.
Zoe regarded him with eyes that cut too keenly. "You're not Frodo either," she said.
*
He wasn't; he had no ensnaring ring to drop into a fiery mountain, no sacred vessel to retrieve, not even a dragon to kill. No country to found or to return to; nowhere to go at all outside Oxfordshire, except occasionally to play a gig with the band. Or, more rarely, in the line of work.
One day in the dead of winter (the ways deep and the weather sharp) they set out to Glastonbury to question a potential witness. The interview wasn't expected to be pivotal, but was important enough to conduct in person, and Lewis apparently thought it required the presence of both investigators. It wasn't so much a pear-shape as some sort of pear upside-down cake that things soon began to resemble, and they ended up in a dramatic full-out foot-race up the Tor, chasing the man who was now a murder suspect and had pretty much confirmed his guilt by bolting.
Putting on a final burst of speed, Hathaway hit the ground and his quarry hard in a desperate tackle, wrestled the suspect's hands behind his back, and looked up to see Lewis limping over, handcuffs at ready, sturdy figure echoed by the tower and set off by the fantastically enormous dark cloud on the horizon, shoving its dragonish mass in fury through the frigid air as if just too late to claim Hathaway's struggling prize. He grinned, struck with the lightning bolt of his first spontaneous happy moment in months. Lewis jerked back, grazed by the electric joy, met Hathaway's eyes for a long instant, and then bent to secure the suspect; two local constables came racing up to assist with the arrest, and it was only after the correct procedures had been attended to that Hathaway's brain caught up. Lewis, limping.
"Are you all right, sir?"
He made a face. "Twisted my bloody knee. Would be on top of a great hill." The constables were leading their suspect away. "If you give me an arm..."
"All of me, if you want it."
The world paused; waited, refusing to breathe. Oh hell; he hadn't gone and said it, not now... If not now, when? And if not here... oh, batter me up and fry me, you flipping God. Who finishes quests on Glastonbury Tor? He who must be forced to admit he's engaged on them, I suppose. "All of me," he repeated. "You know that." He kept his gaze on Lewis's face.
"Yeah. Yeah, I do." They couldn't seem to look away from each other. "Just the arm will do, for the moment. Shoulder, maybe."
Body supporting body, they made their way slowly down; it didn't feel like a descent. Lewis refused a hospital; the police pathologist was just as acerbic as Laura Hobson about being asked to treat the living, but advised rest, elevation, ice and anti-inflammatories, and agreed that anything else would wait until they reached Oxford. "Though I wouldn't be surprised if it's a torn meniscus. Make sure he does get it seen to, Sergeant. Oh, and speaking of which..." The doctor made gestures toward his own face and hands; Hathaway looked down and noticed abrasions for the first time, and a rip in his trousers.
Gazing into the mirror in the Gents, he felt the first familiar, comforting caress of insecurity touch his brow. You can't go through with this; really you can't. He'll never mention it again, if you don't. Better that way.
He nodded firmly to himself, and went back to find Lewis, a DC at his side, on the phone arranging for transport for the suspect to Oxford. They got the paperwork started, then they made their way into the car park. Lewis tossed Hathaway the keys. "Suppose you're driving, then."
The ice-pack didn't last long, and even with the passenger seat cranked back Lewis clearly couldn't get his leg into a comfortable position. Over and over, Hathaway's mouth formed the words maybe we should stop, sir, but he couldn't say them. Not that it would be less awkward when they got home; he'd have to help Lewis into his flat, and then... they approached Frome; there had to be a decent hotel, with two rooms available. Hathaway opened his mouth and glanced over. Lewis was asleep.
Nothing for it but to keep driving. To add insult to irony, it was raining now, the black cloud disgorging its burden. The radio announced a pileup ahead on the A361; without really thinking about it, he swung the wheel over into the back roads of Wiltshire, darkening fast now with twilight and the storm. Short cuts make for long delays, some hobbit in his head teased. I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight path had been lost.
The little inn appeared on the left side of an unknown lane in an unknown village so quickly it might have been by magic; making the turn was instinct, instantly regretted but impossible to reverse. It was a charming Georgian stone building, not the sort of place one needed to abandon all hope, entering. He parked; Lewis started awake. "Sir," said Hathaway, and then: "Robbie. I'm knackered, it's raining, I can't go any further, and I don't know where we are. We're going to stop the night."
"Yeah," was all Lewis said, not a word about GPS or coffee, and grunted as he slid his bad leg out of the car and rocked to his feet.
"Maybe I should see first if they have a room-"
"They will."
Yes, they did; it was inevitable. And only one room, naturally. It was Lewis who said, "That'll be fine, then," to the crone behind the counter. She was of a piece with the magical apparition of the inn, one of those witches with a hovel to shelter in on a long journey after a vanished prince, who hands out walnuts with golden birds inside and turns out to be the mother of the North Wind. Hathaway was sure he recognized her from long ago, muttering to herself about a late invitation to his christening. All she handed him was a key and a credit card receipt, however.
Lewis hobbled up the stairs; Hathaway followed, carrying the two overnight bags they'd thrown into the car because you never knew when interviews might turn into quests. It was a pleasantly-appointed room, dark wood and white curtains, its own bath: it was probably the honeymoon suite or something. There was only one bed.
Lewis took this in, glanced sideways at Hathaway, began to say, "D'you ever think that-" and then was quiet.
Yes, I do. I think that all the time.
"Let me get you settled, sir," was what he said aloud, "and I'll see about some ice for the knee. Would you rather the chair or the bed, to sit in?"
"I'd rather a piss first and wash me face," Lewis said in his don't you dare fuss, Sergeant voice. "And I'll get myself settled. I'd appreciate a bag of ice, thanks. Bugger off and fetch it."
Hathaway buggered off, the minor quest absorbing his attention for as long as he could decently stretch it out, which was five minutes. "Well, I'm back," he said as he reentered the room. Lewis was in the bed, sitting up against pillows with a hump under the duvet indicating another pillow placed under his injured knee. His suit, shirt and tie were draped tidily over a chair; he was wearing a faded jumper for warmth in the chilly room, and reading a Bath tourist brochure. Hathaway handed him the bag of ice, and could see as he slipped it onto his knee that he hadn't replaced the suit trousers with anything; he made a little "ah!" sound at the cold, and covered himself up again.
"How bad is it?" Hathaway asked.
"It'll do fine," Lewis said, and then, to Hathaway's reproving look, "Really. Should be walking instead of hobbling tomorrow. Sorry I took most of the pillows; I left you one."
He patted it; it was not a take this and use it in the armchair gesture; and in fact the armchair looked supremely uncomfortable for sleeping in. Hathaway stared at him for a moment, and then said, "Just to confirm, you want me to-"
"And just so you know, it's been a while since I shared a bed. But I reckon we can both manage."
He couldn't possibly have missed Hathaway's confession on the Tor, which meant this was purposeful ambiguity, which meant... Hathaway couldn't decode what it meant, except that Lewis was reading the brochure again, with apparent avid interest, and Hathaway was pretty sure he'd already been to Bath. He felt his face flush; in fact he felt himself burning all over, so he retreated to the toilet, then emerged a few minutes later wearing vest and pants, having decided that even the casual sort of striptease was not a good plan under the circumstances.
"There doesn't appear to be a lot of reading matter about," he commented as he climbed into bed; it was, at least, a fairly broad piece of furniture. He still felt like his skin was on fire, like he was about to set the sheets alight. "Or good lighting for reading."
"Mm," said Lewis. "That the way you usually rank hotel rooms?"
"It's a major criterion, yes."
Lewis gave him an explains a lot sort of smirk, then added, wiggling the brochure, "I was remembering. They'd just started that 'hop on, hop off' bus. Mark was in a rebellious phase. So he hopped off at the Royal Crescent, and we didn't notice till a few stops further on. I flipped my lid, which Val knew perfectly well meant I was in a bit of a panic; she was the one who said he'd be fine, and of course he was. Just having his own little adventure." His voice went thin. "It was Val I didn't worry about, going off to London by herself."
Hathaway had long ago become a connoisseur of talking-about-Val nuances; some of the tones meant stop; retreat; go away now and some seemed to invite a neutral but potentially encouraging noise that Lewis seldom took the mm-er up on. Once, a little floaty at the end of a very long day and over the dregs of a second pint, Hathaway had had a confusing chat with Laura Hobson on this topic, while Lewis was at the bar, which in retrospect implied that he'd opened up a bit more to Laura; or at least she seemed to have got as far as actual words of inquiry. Hathaway hadn't tried that in a very long time, whether because he didn't want to open wounds or because, shamefully, he didn't want to fill Lewis's mind with memories of someone else who'd loved him, considering such reminders to be bad tactics even from a hopelessly unrequited lover. Or perhaps he was just afraid of being snapped at. It seemed, suddenly, a colossal error in human decency.
All of me. "Tell me about Val," he said, still attuned enough to nuance to realize that the open-ended query was best.
Lewis glanced up; he hadn't actually looked directly at Hathaway for several minutes, and the surprised expression also contained a glimmer of appraisal, the eyes flicking to the chest, the arms. Hathaway wanted to read that as gently ironic commentary: interesting notion of pillow talk, Sergeant. But he didn't dare to.
"I still miss her," Lewis said, looking back at the brochure for a moment and then laying it on the bedside table. "It's not... a wound reopened daily, is that how you'd put it?" You literary types, you readers of legends in hotel bedrooms with adequate lighting. "It doesn't hurt every day now. I don't talk to her every day; I don't expect her to talk back. But I'm never going to stop missing her. I suppose, if it was a wound, it would be one that never completely healed, inside, but not one that leaves a nasty scar that makes people look away, that makes me incapable of living." He sat a moment, apparently looking inward, and Hathaway let him. "When Lyn was pregnant with Dylan, I just kept thinking how terrible it was that Val wasn't around to meet her grandchild. Now that he's here, I feel like... well, he's her grandson, but it's more important that he's himself, and has people to love him. And get shirty with him when he hops off buses unsupervised, someday."
Hathaway nodded. "I don't think I have sufficient family ties to understand, really, but I'm glad you do. Have a family, I mean. And that you had a wife. I hope you don't think I ever..." He took a deep breath. "Resented your grief. Or her existence. Or anything. I would have been there, if you'd wanted to talk." Trying to smile a little, he added, "Rather belated declaration." Like the other one.
Lewis's mouth twisted in a mirror-image smile. "And I didn't tell you about Val, there, did I? I told you about me." He shifted to face Hathaway in the bed. "But probably the only relevant bit of data in the Val-file just now is sex: female."
"I'm aware of your preferences," Hathaway said, wishing he'd made himself uncomfortable in the armchair. "If that's what you're saying."
"Are you then? I thought I was aware of yours, not that I'm inquiring into your sexual history, because look how well that usually turns out."
Hathaway stared at the framed country-cottage prints on the wall, at the flowered wallpaper, at anything but Lewis. "The two women you know I've been with. And a few men, including one of my bandmates when we got tipsy one evening three years ago. That was a truly bad plan; don't sleep with people you work with, right? And that's all. Don't have to take the other glove off yet, let alone my socks."
"Val used to hate it when I left my socks on. Unromantic, she said. Not that I would have needed my toes for counting either." A foot wriggled, far down under the duvet; Hathaway couldn't tell, of course, whether it was socked or unsocked, but for a moment he was absurdly unable to breathe. "I hope," Lewis went on, "that this... relative lack of partners isn't anything to do with..."
"Deciding that I was saving myself for the Holy Grail of Robbie Lewis? Not that you're not, but... no. Just general ineptitude. And disinclination for casual encounters." He turned back to face Lewis, suddenly determined to find out the truth whatever the consequences. "You said you knew."
"Hm?"
"I said 'All of me. You know that,' and you agreed. Had you... seen it?"
"That you fancied me? Sometimes I thought so. Couldn't credit it, really." He held up a hand against Hathaway's protest: pale, surprisingly slim fingers; no wedding ring. He'd dreamed about those hands. "But it's more than fancying, right? You don't do things by halves, James." Lewis swallowed, and he was looking at Hathaway's hands, now. "It's just as well you never said anything till now. I would've… well, not sure what I would have done. And I've tried not to think about it, lately; things have been so…" He made an abrupt gesture of dismissal. "Today, for some reason… it was like everything I thought I knew got lit from the other side, and I had to stare at it straight on. And I liked what I saw."
Finally, he looked up, met Hathaway's eyes, set his heart to pounding, sending fast-warming blood through him at speed, like a messenger lighting beacons of desire, calling out the news that he was wanted in return. It was everywhere in him, this unsought certainty: in all the expected parts, and in ankles, elbows, eyebrows, the back of his neck. He was momentarily very distracted by the notion that Lewis wanted the back of his neck, and had to concentrate to realize that his desirer was still speaking.
"I've never had someone say… never had an offer like that before. Not that Val and I didn't belong to each other, but... the words. All right, I was already weak-kneed, but..."
Words. You want words? I can do those. Too many came to mind: the star to every wandering bark; my kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann'd; we shall not cease from exploration; I am glad you are here with me at the end of all things. He couldn't say any of them. He couldn't move, either; he was useless, really.
Lewis reached over, took Hathaway's hand, brought it to his own cheek: a sort of tutorial gesture. "And when your fingers find me," he said, "I'll drown you in my body, carving deep blue ripples in the tissues of your mind," and the touch and the image shook Hathaway out of his stupor enough that he could lean over and discover Lewis's mouth, as it pressed in answer against his.
It was all exploration for a while after that, so intensely physical - lips dancing against skin; hands venturing under clothing, tracing the contour of muscle and bone; tongues in ears at one point; fingers mussing and then smoothing hair, gentling, learning; quick now, here, now, always; before, behind, between, above, below - that he had no time to consider words, but his brain must have been working on the problem, because he suddenly pulled back, noting and glorying in Lewis's small bereft noise, and murmured, "Tiny purple fishes. You're quoting Eric bloody Clapton to me in bed?"
"Martin Sharp, I think you'll find," Lewis said, sounding short-winded. "Clapton did the..." Fingering, against James's skin.
"More like this, actually," and he played the phrases where his hands were, under Lewis's jumper and against his chest, brushing a nipple; rewarded by an intake of breath, he did it again, and again. The open-mouthed pleasure on Lewis's face undid him completely; he tore the jumper and vest off with a decisive tug and haul, followed them with his own remaining garments - as souls unbodied, bodies uncloth'd must be - and straddled his new owner, his new possession, his new-found land, pressing him against the pillows, expressing with unmerciful hands and mouth every instant of lust and devotion he'd saved up over the years. The substance of things hoped for, he thought, wildly, with uncaring blasphemy. I should have had more faith, I should have... and then theology flew out of his head along with everything else, because, oh bless you God, there was Robbie, Robbie, the rocks and the hollow mountains ringing; clutching him with equal desire, hard against his hardness, trying to push and rock; James sliding flat down against his body, to make it easier, and his foot hitting... cold. Robbie jerked, just enough to bring it all back, the figure against the dragon cloud, limping...
"Shit, sorry, I hurt you," he gasped out. "Your knee-"
"Don't be daft," Robbie breathed back, "you could cut my fucking legs off right now and it wouldn't stop me-"
"Fucking?"
A fierce kiss, and then, "It's just a flesh wound. Come on, you pansy!"
James grinned at him with utter unconstraint, and Robbie groaned. "That mouth of yours... when you smiled, on the hill today-"
"Holding a man down, clearly what does it for me. I can find something else to do with my mouth besides grin at you like an idiot...?"
"No. I mean, yes, I want that... oh, fuck, James... but no. Hands. Eyes."
Interpreting this, he slid sideways enough that after he carefully tugged down Robbie's boxer shorts they could get a purchase on each other - like sailors, he thought muzzily, except ropes not cocks, though probably cocks on occasion too, those long long voyages - and thumb and stroke and cosset and caress, each to each, eyes locked, rhythm and need building, breath fast and ragged, until Robbie's eyes closed and warmth spilled over James's hand. And he followed. As he always did.
The miracle, the sort of wonder you chase a star or push yourself into looking-glass land to find, was that it wasn't awkward after that; no too-late qualms or self-reproach or urge toward penitence, no throat-clearing or mention of need for sleep, though James was pretty sure they'd both sleep well. There was kissing, of both the postcoital-passionate and the affectionate sort, and a bit of amazed gazing, and the kicking of the ice out of bed before it leaked, whereupon James got himself out of bed to put it in the sink where it belonged, before it leaked onto the good witch's floorboards, or through them. And then Robbie said, "C'mere, you," and he slid back into bed a bit chilled, and was taken into welcoming arms again.
"Journeys end in lovers' meeting," he murmured, face compressed against Robbie's chest.
"What a long strange trip it's been," Robbie countered dryly. There was a response to that, a riposte, a clever thing to say, somewhere in James's head; he lay searching for it until the sunlight and a lover's kiss woke him, and the journey back home to Oxford awaited them.
Author's Note:
Sources of quotes and allusions, more or less in order:
Fairytale, "Sleeping Beauty"-type; Virgil, Aeneid; T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, "Little Gidding" (also source of title); A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad; Homer, Odyssey; King James Bible, Ruth 1; John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale"; John Milton, Paradise Lost; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica and Quaestiones disputatae de veritate; Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass; King James Bible, Isaiah 42; Grail legends, various (Percival, Galahad, later Fisher King); William Morris, "Sir Galahad, A Christmas Mystery"; Thomas of Celano/Requiem Mass; Ovid, Metamorphoses; Lewis Carroll, Hunting of the Snark (brief allusion); Alexander Pope, "Ode on St. Cecilia's Day"; Gerard Manley Hopkins, "No worst, there is none": John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress (brief allusion); J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings; T.S. Eliot, "Journey of the Magi"; um, Rabbi Hillel I suppose; John Donne, "Batter my heart"; Dante, Inferno; fairytale, "East of the Sun, West of the Moon"-type; Shakespeare, Sonnet 116; John Donne, "To His Mistress Going to Bed"; Cream, "Tales of Brave Ulysses"; Monty Python and the Holy Grail; Shakespeare, Twelfth Night; Grateful Dead, "Truckin'." Whew.