(no subject)

[quigonejinn]

Here is a dream of yours: you have been ill for a long time, in a foreign land, and after you return home, Barbara watches over you all summer to make sure the last traces of the illness are gone. She is diligent and loving. Under her care, you grow slowly, steadily, healthier. One afternoon, you and Richard lie side by side on your bellies beside the fish-pond, trying to catch carp with your hands.

You return to the house with the sunset all around you, muddy and wet and gloriously happy. Barbara is standing on the steps, smiling, her hands stretched out, one for each of you.

That is the dream: you and your son and your wife, as close as three human beings can be, living in a beautiful house.

And here's the reference forward to the post-Flying Colours books. The idea in my head is that there probably isn't going to be a Lord Hornblower for HH in these books. Or a Commodore Hornblower. In the modern world, the US military has enough in the way of resources that they don't need a captain with PTSD and mondo political connections risking his life in Iraq, so Hornblower sits in DC for the rest of his life. Maybe dabbles in politics. Maybe writes an autobiography. Sure, this means that Hornblower never catches typhus, that Bush probably doesn't die in a muddy river, but it also means that Hornblower never has this golden moment described in Lord Hornblower:

There bad been that golden afternoon when he and Richard had lain side by side on their bellies beside the fish-pond, trying to catch golden carp with their hands; returning to the house with the sunset glowing all about them, muddy and wet and gloriously happy, he and his little child, as close together as he had been with Barbara that morning. A happy life; too happy

It's exactly too happy. Book Hornblower might have had it; this Hornblower will never have it.

...

It is five days later before anything else happens with Bush -- two of the days are because of the weekend, and Bush does not get therapy on the weekends. Three of the days, you drive him to his therapy, drive him back. During that period, once, you even take him to get groceries and walk with him through the aisles of the stores, him on his crutches, you pushing the cart. The checkout girl smiles at Bush; he drops his head and blushes like a teenager instead of looking her in the eye.

You say nothing, but feel as though you are coloring yourself.

On the sixth day, you drive him back from his therapy, and you go with him to the door. He hands you his keys, stands there while you open the door for him, then makes the awkward step up from the porch into the hallway of his house. You have one foot on that step, as if to follow him. You stop because you are suddenly unsure, and then, while you are standing in the door like that, the door actually lying against your shoulderblades because it is mostly closed, Bush kisses you.

You are fairly sure that Bush has never kissed someone taller than him, but he does it right. He turns his head to do it; he must go up on the toes of the one foot that he still has and raise himself up, off his crutches, by upper body strength. Nevertheless, it is a kiss and a good one. Sparks go down your back when his tongue touches yours. While he's kissing you, working at you with only his mouth because he must keep both hands on his crutches, you can feel his breath across your cheek.

The keys drop out of your hand and land on the floor. You put your hand in the small of his back and press him against you -- in a few moments, both you and him are on the floor. It started with his hand down your pants and him trying to give you a handjob, but it ends with him rubbing his clothed crotch against the bare inside of your thigh, you coming against his shirt, and him coming from watching you gasp and writhe and almost beg for him to put his hand around you again.

...

There is one dream that you know to be based on reality very closely:

This is my least favorite section in the entire piece. It was a lst-minuted add-on because I was worried there wasn't enough explanation of why a career Marine like Hornblower would jump Bush and why Bush would be like ".... what" in return. So I couldn't think of anything that would make it OK except for years of built-up UST, and this is what I came up with.

And plus, I was in a porny mood.

Lack of creativity + lack of discipline = annoying section that I will make me wince each and every time I start to re-read this fic even though I haven't actually gotten to this section. IT LIVES ON IN INFAMY.

In the dream, you are on a ship, in a foreign port, about to take her around the Cape. You have not told anyone aboard the ship that is what you intend to do, but Bush has guessed, and so have many of the men. It is dangerous enough to take a ship around the Cape at this time of year, but the Lydia has taken on so much in the way of stores that it will take a miracle of seamanship. Consequently, you have told Bush and the other lieutenants to be a little more lax about bumboats and women coming alongside. The crew is hardened enough, experienced enough, that an afternoon of liberty will not be too damaging.

You are in your cabin. Some of the midshipmen have gone ashore. Sunlight plays on the beams over your head, and there is a knock -- Bush, with a woman behind him. She comes in; Bush closes the door behind him, and the woman begins to undress. Her shoes, her shawl, her dress, her shift. It's all wordless, as the details seem to have been taken care of already. When she is naked, she kneels in front of you, works your trousers off. She would take your shirt off, too, but you put your hand into her hair. You are hard already, and soon after, you've got your fingers wrapped in her hair and are moving her mouth hard and fast to make her whimper a little and put her hands on your thighs and press so that you will slow and she can breathe.

Bush watches from the across, hat held over his chest, and his face unreadable.

When you are done, he puts the girl on her back on your map table, and it is your turn to watch.

It happened in your actual life. The occaision was that you were in Germany after finishing Officer Candidate School; you certainly weren't a stranger to the grand Corps tradition of paying for sex, but this was a present from Bush for giving you a present for finishing OCS and receiving a commission.

The only real difference was that it happened in your hotel room, not your office.

Also, that you and Bush had drunkeness available as an excuse. You put your hand around yourself, after all, while Bush went at her. You held his hand, again, in the moning before you filed your full, formal report to Gambier in Kaiserslautern.

....


One afternoon, Barbara takes the afternoon off work, and she and you and the baby have a picnic in the park. The sky is overcast, but you and Barbara take turns holding Richard while the other eats. He smells like powder and clean laundry. Barbara's eyes, blue in most lights, are beautifully gray.

One of the things that I'm the most OCD about in writing is pacing. I like big dramatic revelations and lots and lots of angst, but in a short story format, particularly with the style I write where it's scene to scene to scene, pacing gets to be a real problem. How do you keep the reader from being overwhelmed? How do you make sure these individual sections are memorable? Splicing a scene with a big revelation into an innocuous part and an insane part is another one of my stupid dog tricks to get that. I think it kinda manages to work here because it ties back to the stuff about looking for golden carp with RA.

...

In Iraq, you had command of an undersized company; together, with Bolton, you were to maintain peace and security in the seventy five miles around the crossing of the Ammon-Baghdad road and the north-south oil pipeline. Bolton had more combat experience than you did, was technically the one in command at Rutbah while the new lieutenant colonel took his sweet time arriving, You had been a second lieutenant in Bolton's battalion while he was a first, though. He knew the quality of your work, and he was scrupulously fair -- his platoons alternated checkpoint and patrol duty with yours. When news came in of the munitions dump and abandoned base, it was clear that one of you would have to go out and at least look at it.

"You'd give three fingers to go," Bolton said, looking hard at you. The two of you were in what passed for his office; the air conditioning was humming at full strength, but both of you were sweating hard. "I know it, and you know it. You're the same restless fucker that you were the first time in Mogadishu."

He studied you for another moment, and then, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a quarter. You called tails; he called heads. After a moment where you had to grip your hands into fists to keep yourself from doing anything rash, the quarter came up with the silver eagle, a little scratched from having being in a desert, but its wings nevertheless stretched over the arrows of war and the laurels of glory.

...

The laurels, as they actually played out: to come home. To have a staff job in Arlington. Gentle treatment for having lost half of Sutherland company in the single bloodiest day in any United States face-to-face engagement in almost twenty years. A house in Georgetown, Barbara, the first new car you have ever owned, and a Navy Cross, the highest award available to a man in your branch of service without Congressional approval. Ostensibly, it was for personally throwing back a grenade that had gotten over the ramparts, but you know the political motivations behind it.

The Cross is bronze on a blue and white ribbon. At the center is a small ship, called a caravel, moving across rough water. It has occurred to you that this medal is the source of these dreams you have been having, but those thoughts are creditable only when you are not being honest with yourself.

Once in a while, I write a line that makes me happy at the time I write it and later. This fic gets redeemed from the over-long Barbara-backstory and the stupid HEY LOOK THEY HAD UST! sections by the paragraph above about the Iraqi kids being little Horatio and Maria and by the second paragraph of this section I don't like the first paragraph because it's cheating to use a series of events and ideas because it's so easy to make those memorable, but damn, I love how clean that last part of the last sentence reads.

...

Barbara takes that afternoon off, in part, because there is something that must be done: there is a benefit of some sort that both of you must attend. The nanny stays late to watch Richard Arthur to bed, and you put on one of the two tuxedos that you own. You are still technically active duty, as you are formally listed on the staff of a major general in Arlington and write the occaisional memorandum for him or talk to him about Iraq, but it is a marginal call as to whether you ought to wear dress uniform B to most of these things. Most of them are charities; the majority of the remainder are professional, journalism association celebrations or functions.

You have made a judgment call, though -- there are speeches, and sometimes, there are opinions, expressed in the speeches. It is better not to wear blue-and-red to some of these functions. Barbara likes you better in true black tie, too.

During the pre-banquet cocktails, while Barbara is talking to some of her publishing friends, you meet a woman named Marie. She wears a gold dress and beautiful shoulders. No jewelry, just the fine, perfect color of her skin. When you meet her, you are struck wordless for a few moments because she has the warmest eyes you have ever seen. She is shy, young and profoundly uncomfortable in the fancy surroundings, but her smile makes you feel as if you have just sat down by a blazing fireplace on a cold, damp night -- at first, it makes you feel hot, almost uncomfortably so, and then it turns into a pleasant warmth down to the bones.

This is another one of my little retarded attempts to show that what looks like post-Flying Colours happy ending is still the thick of captivity among the enemy. There wasn't room to develop it further between them in this, and I kind of liked the abruptness -- the reader is kind of looking for some kind of short affair between them, but nope, this Hornblower doesn't get that, not in this universe. A passing glimpse of what could hae been.

In the novel-sized version of this, though, Marie takes Hornblower up on his offer to show her the sites. Hornblower has no job because Barbara is the breadwinner and Richard Arthur has a nanny, and they walk along the Tidal Basin around the Jefferson Monument arm and arm in the cold October wind, but Marie won't sleep with him because she's still married (IE: the Comte's son is still alive.)

Second verse, same as the first: this Hornblower got the happy ending. This Hornblower don't get nothing.

She is French; she has thickly accented English, and you have high school French. You have managed to get her name, that she is new to Washington DC and has never been to America before. You are about to ask her if she has seen all the monuments, and then her husband calls for her. She is the wife of the son of the French ambassador, you realize, after glancing up at the little group that waves to her. Why did you assume, when looking at her, that her husband was dead, that she was living with her father-in-law? Why does looking at her make you feel so happy, and why are you so sure that she is a good woman who could love you?

She apologizes, looks at you once more, kindly, though without a smile, and hurries to be with her husband.

Barbara is still holding court underneath the potted palms. There is a glass of champagne in her hand the same color as Marie's dress.

...

After the first speech, you slip away, tell Barbara to catch a taxi, step away before she can say anything to you quietly, and then you drive to Bush's. It is quick, trafficless, at this hour. It is fairly late, and Bush is a little surprised to see you in the black tie.

Nevertheless, he is pleased. He offers to heat up another frozen dinner; you tell him that you have already eaten, and then, he makes small talk and maneuvers around the place easily enough now that he is only on one crutch. You think a little bit about Marie while watching him get a beer from the fridge, but mostly, you watch him. Most of the lights in his house are turned off, but he turns them on after you arrive. Eventually, you convince him to go back to watching television, and you watch him.

Eventually, he falls asleep, and you think about taking the remote control out of his hand and putting it back on top of the cable box, but you do not want to wake him. It is so peaceful, in fact, in the room: he has the screen door open. The sounds of the summer night mix with the television. You can hear the trees, the wind, the insects, and you look at Bush. You study the shape of his mouth, the strength of his jaw. The steadiness of his breathing. You remember the time that you dug him out of a firefight in an abandoned warehouse in Mogadishu; you remember the time he offered to give you his pay while the issue of your commission was clarified.

His heartbeat lies at the base of his throat, and his sleep is peaceful. You can see that much by light of the television.

Bush is close to being happy.

...

Another thing that I regret the hell out of in this fic is how inauthentic it sounds. Do enlisted men really deal with their command officers like this? Is this scenario even vaguely accurate? Who the hell knows because apparently, reading a handful of books and trying to remember the time you read Jarhead in 45 minutes in a NY public library isn't enough to make you enough of a USMC expert to write 10,000 words about it.

There were nights in Iraq, too. Bad nights, terrible nights. Nights after Barbara, night where you couldn't sleep, and nights, too, when you fought against the fact that everything was as slow and heavy as a dream.

There were nights that were almost good, though: the streets were always quiet after dark because out of fear, but sometimes, the silence was not that menacing. You could hear the trees on the side of the compound rustling; you could hear Barrack D talking, the occaisional sound of the perimeter watching passing and going by their way. Bush would be outside with the other officers until they began to play poker, and at that point, he would wander inside on a pretext of paperwork, as he was playing both the role of a mastery gunner and a first. It was not fraternization, after all, if there was work to be done.

You would have an exchange of formalties. He had paperwork. You had more paperwork. He had come in to make his report. Casualties. Supplies. Minor disciplinary issues. You listened, then watched while he pretended to do paperwork. You would sit in your chair, the only chair in the whole town that had four working wheels, and put your feet up on your desk. The window was open; the trees were rustling, and Bush's face was half in shadow because there was only one lamp in the quarters that were also your office. Your laptop had a half-written letter to Maria; together with the lamp and the air conditioner, that was all of the generator's output that you could justify taking for your personal use.

The computer was also playing one of your Arabic language lessons. Bush shifted in his metal chair every once in a while.

It was impossible to think of Barbara in a context like this, impossible to worry about anything more than vague professional concerns, and you and Bush might go through the rest of the evening that way, barely saying seven words. Sometimes, he would reach over and hand you something across the desk; you would glance at it, then sign. Drink some water. Watch Bush. Wonder what it would be like to be a father. Listen to his breathing.

Those nights felt like dreams, too. Slow dreams, wonderful dreams. Dreams full of peace.

...

In August, Bush is given a government job in San Diego. There is a good sized military population there, and you are not entirely clear what his duties would be with the title that he would have, but the job is real enough. You call around to make sure, and it is through the Department of Defense. Bush tells you about it when you see him, shows you the letter. Mentions that he had gotten a phone call about it a few weeks before, talked to them about it, but that he hadn't even been aware that he was under serious consideration. It has something to do with the Marine training base at Twentynine Palms, but it is a Department job, and it is situated in the city by the ocean, not the desert.

Bush thanks you over and over for it. He says that he never would have gotten the job if it had not been for you; he thinks, in fact, that it has something to do with you. He assumes, crudely, that you had something to do with it, and the gratitude in his eyes is pathetic to see.

So this is Sheerness for our modern version. Bush gets to sail off to semi-retirement to something that he probably will hate, which is like the original canon, but I wanted to make it suck for HH even more -- this time, because it's the modern day and Barbara is the one with the earning power, he doesn't get to decide to settle near Bush. Barbara has put down roots in Washington, DC, and visits are all that HH is going to get.

It is a desk job, and you honestly had nothing to do with it. He will never be a Marine again; his hair is still short in the Marine way because he had it cut short in his last trip to the physical therapy in the VA, but it will grow out soon enough, and he has his head turned in that way and is smiling up at you in his kitchen.

...

Guilt about Maria, guilt about Barbara, guilt for what you did in Iraq, guilt for what you failed to do. Guilt for what you could not do for Bush, for taking him to a fate that you distinctly considered worse than death. Guilt, too, for loving him so much that the only way it can find expression now that you are back home is to play the woman for him or have him play the woman for you. You are tired and afraid; this was intended to be the greatest, best time of your life. You had the woman you loved; you had the friend who loved you. You had a son, a family.

Gulit, fear, worry. The inability to enjoy what you have, an overwhelming yearning for escape from what you experience -- these are the things that control your dreams. They are the origin fo the alternate life that you live at night.

Little by little, you are starting realize that these things control your waking life, too. Love, you are learning, is not enough for happiness.

Indeed, I am flailing along to the ending. Normally, when I'm writing a fic and firing on all cylinders, the ending comes to me 1/3rd of the way through a fic, and I can skip all the way down to the end, bang it out, then work backwards. Alas, this was not one of this fics, and it's why I felt so conflicted about it at the time I posted. WHERE IS THE ENDING? WHAT IS THE UNIFYING THEME? WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF THIS ENTIRE STORY?

...

One night, you are dressing next to Barbara for another event, and asks you to come over and zip the back of her gown. You are mostly done yourself, so you go, and you put one hand on her hip, another in the small of her back. Strangely enough, she takes the hand that you have at her hip, and she moves it over so that it is lying low on her belly. Between the hips now, and you stop moving. You stop breathing. If you were breathing, you could smell her perfume.

She turns her face up to look at you.

"The doctor thinks that -- "

When you manage to smile back at her, she looks so happy that she might start weeping.

So yes, a bunch of us have been bantering ideas as to why Barbara never conceived despite regular doses of the Supersperm. She was close enough to childbearing age by the time of FC so that she ought've spawned in in the normal course of things, and yeah, it's eminently possible that CSF just didn't care to think about it that way, but it's more fun to speculate. XD

And what with the way she gets so angry at people thinking RA is her kid, it really struck me that a modern Barbara would definitely try for fertility treatments.

...

At some point during that night when you went to see Bush, it rained. In the darkness, Bush got up to close the screen door, and you must have lain down on the floor for some reason. You woke the next morning, still on the floor, an ache in your neck, but suddenly and absurdly happy because Bush's arm was over your chest and his snoring was so close by.

Outside the door, it was still raining.

And finally, a tiny little bit of the happy from Flying Colours. Sure, Barbara may be complicated. Sure, life may be complicated, and Marie may not have worked out, but Bush is still Bush despite everything. Not even gay sex can mess that up.

But. You know.

...

You see Bush to the airport. You stand with him in the ticket line, and you go with him as far as the security line. There was time before that for a stop at a news stand, where he buys himself a soda, and you buy a bottle of water and a newspaper. He salutes you one last time for old time's sake; you know that you have a standing invitation to visit him, and he has shown you pictures of the shore. He is looking for a condo near the sea, and then he goes to a special line because of his prosthetic leg. The nanny is with you. She brought Richard Arthur and holds him.

Barbara is in New York; the nanny gives Richard a bottle, and even after Bush is gone out of the airport, even after his plane is left and gone, you stand there, and you wait.

You stand, and you wait. People pass on either side of you; you barely see them. The intercom system mentions flights that are boarding, flights that have left, but you are not sure what you are waiting for. You wait, and you wait.

It is not Bush you are waiting for, or Barbara, or even Marie, the woman in gold that you cannot forget. You waited for a commission; you waited to fall in love. You waited for a friend and for family, and then, you waited for your wife to die. You waited to come home; you waited for the good life, and now that you have everything you ever imagined, you are not sure what you are still waiting for: it has been so long since you have been happy, completely happy, that you can have forgotten what it feels like to the point where you cannot even wish for it anymore.

You are waiting now. You wait, and you wait, and you are waiting for happiness.

True fact: in quigonejinn land, when in doubt and in DESPERATE, TERRIBLE NEED of an ending, pull out some bullshit about happiness.

...

And since that section was really lame, I needed to hide it with something else to make the reader feel like they got something for the time investment. Consequently, the ending cribbed word for word from Admiral Hornblower but with a wanky change at the end to drive home the point that HH's life sucks more:

At last, the realization came upon him. Now he could shake off the astonishment, the bewilderment, that had held him helpless up to that moment. Nothing counted in the world except Barbara. Now he could move. Two steps forward and she was in his arms. Her tears wetted his lips; they were complete in a world of their own, and his heart beat faster.

"My love! My darling!" he said, for, unbelieving and blind, she had not responded.

And then she knew, in the darkness that surrounded her, and her arms went about him. There was no such joy in all the world. Indeed, there could not be, and for Hornblower, there never was.

Comments

[iansmomesq.livejournal.com]

Thank you SO MUCH!!! I loved reading this like you wouldn't believe because for one reason I love you dearly, and for another reason I covet your writing ability like woah... and I love nothing more than to see how a writer's brain works... and it's writ large all over here.

Moreover... I had a fantastic time writing this in tandem with you and we so need to glom onto something else... but not revisit the lawyer thing. :)

<333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333

[quigonejinn.livejournal.com]

Guilt, etc, is for lesser beings. Or something like that. XD

And yeah. I'd love to get back in the creative groove with you someday. I just wish that all of my fandom creativity hadn't gone down the drain with the end of July or something. COME ON, BRAIN. COOPERATE AND SHIT.

[randomalia.livejournal.com]

This commentary is made of awesome. It really is interesting to see what goes into a fic, and you put so much thought into it, you know the canon so well. <33333

True fact: in quigonejinn land, when in doubt and in DESPERATE, TERRIBLE NEED of an ending, pull out some bullshit about happiness.

But it fits perfectly with the rest of the fic and with Hornblower. I would have thought you were heading there all along. And it's still a gut-punch, just looking at it now.

[quigonejinn.livejournal.com]

AHAHAH. I'm glad the ending works for you. When I about 3/4 of the way through the fic (IE: I'd said about everything I could possibly think of to say), I went into a cold sweat because I had no idea what to do.

Thank God that Hornblower is as obsessive about happiness as I am.