(no subject)

[quigonejinn]

Running draft post for 1character claim of William Bush. Spoilers for Ship of the Line, Flying Colours, and Lord Hornblower. Non-explicit HH/WB. Because, you know. I'm a sap.



#01 - Snow

Snow muffled even Bush's footsteps.

#02 - Child

Bush had not, as a child, particularly dreamed of either the sea or His Britannic Majesty's Navy; after he became old enough and had his first taste, though, they became all that he loved and desired to know.

#03 - Brick

The cottage at Chichester had originally been built with wood; the first William Bush expanded it, had parts of it put into stone during bursts of prosperity, and after news of Caudebec reached England, prize money rebuilt it entirely with brick from one of the local yards.

#04 - Judgement

The court martial had given Meadows only a reprimand, had not even found the conduct of the first lieutenant or master worth inquiring into, but Bush felt the shame of having lost his ship anyways.

#05 - Powder

Bush had been so long at sea that he thought rotten eggs smelled like gundeck smoke.

#06 - Grim

There was bad weather, Bush thought, looking over at his captain's face -- and then there was strange, queer, miserable weather that it was a trial to endure.

#07 - Trap

They built the boat in an empty loft in one of the outer barns; broken furniture, old farm equipment, bits and pieces of variou carriages covered the first floor, and on nights when it was raining or he was too tired to make the long walk back to the house with his leg, Bush went down and slept on the seats of the two-wheeler with which Marcel had first brought Marie home.

#08 - Star

Gerard claimed to have once fucked a Drury Lane actress so hard that she started to deliver her lines from a play where she'd been one of Napoleon's artillery officers at the Siege of Toulon.

#09 - Possession

Outside of his share in the wardroom animals -- on this voyage, parts of three lambs, the produce of one hen and eating rights in two more -- everything that Bush owned in the world fit into his sea chest with room to spare.

#10 - Bandage

There was his knee, there was his shin, there was the scar he'd picked up from the time that his grip on the tongs had slipped while making nails and wearing an apron too short for him, there was bandage, more bandage, and after the bandage -- nothing, nothing at all.

#11 - Pearl

At the ceremony, Hornblower wore his hundred-guinea sword with a new coat of pearls, Lady Barbara had matching pearls in her hair, and rather than sit, as would have been quite understandable, Bush stood in the pews in the best dress uniform that could be found for a one-legged man whose stump had not entirely healed.

#12 - Glass

"Midshipman Bush volunteered to go aloft with a glass and report, sir."

#13 - Classified

"No, sir, I don't think he's taken leave of his desire to live."

#14 - Buttons

Bush never trusted his sisters to mend any part of his uniform.

#15 - Closet

Bush helped Hornblower dress the morning that he maried Maria; he was with Hornblower, again, in the morning before he married Lady Barbara, but he watched from a distance as Brown did the honors.

#16 - Ash

For Hornblower, at least, those nights at Smallbridge were some of the most pleasant he ever spent -- a good dinner, excellent cigars, safety, security, a hot fire in the grate with Barbara, smiling at him from across the way before she took her leave for the evening, and Bush, probably quiet becaue he was drowsing from the dinner he had eaten and the comfort of it all, in the armchair closest to him.

#17 - Definition

"The parallax of an object is measured by an arc of a vertical circle intercepted between a line extended from the centre of the earth and a line extended from the eye of the observer, through the centre of the object; the parallax of an object is measured by an arc of a vertical circle intercepted between a line extended from the centre of the earth and a line extended from the eye of the observer, through the centre of the object; the parallax of an object is measured by an arc of a vertical circle intercepted between a line extended from the center of the earth -- and -- and -- oh damn."

#18 - Staircase

His office at Sheerness was at the top of grand-looking, well-polished granite staircase, and in the first weeks, it took Bush a good ten minutes to make his way up it and another fifteen to go down because he refused to cling to the banister.

#19 - Nail

Even as an officer, Bush did enough rough work -- a bit of carpentering, fiddling with the tiller with his own hands, the occaisoinal run up the rigging with a glass if it was sneeded -- that it kept his hands hand and his nails short.

#20 - Prey

During the ninth week of the blockade, a snow bank settled off the coast, and they had to catch the French sloops and cutters in a world of white.

#21 - Backwards

Poverty had been such a part of Bush's life that it was a surprise for him to learn, on his return from France, that between the Witch and the prize money from the Sutherland, he was now a man of reasonable means.

#22 - Trouble

Bush killed his first man when he was a sixteen year old midshipman and spent the next three months trying to scrub the bloodstains out of his white lapels with cheap soap in useless seawater.

#23 - Little

Dinner was all right because there was food and talking and the bustle of uncovering dishes and fresh plates, but afterwards, when they retired, as a group, almost a family, to the fireplace, Bush found himself staring at the little feet on the dog-haped andirons and wishing that someone, anyone would talk.

#24 - Collar

After so any months of wearing only shirt and trousers, it was odd enough to put a full coat and neckcloth and stock on; it was even stranger that they were all Dutch things.

#25 - Circle

The ingrained powder stain on Hornblower's left hand was roughly in the shape of a circle and the size of a half-crown -- he had received it, Bush remembered, from the boarding of the Castilla.

#26 - Hands

Bush had only been half-conscious during that carriage ride, and it would have mortified him to know that he had not only reached out for his captain's hand but caressed it once he had received it, so Hornblower never mentioned it to him.

#27 - Freedom

Bush was a man who preferred, even when given the choice, duty to freedom.

#28 - Last

Bush was emotionally incapable of spending any great period of time deeply unhappy or in mourning, but he had served longer with Gerard than with any other man in the Navy outside of Hornblower, and in that terrible, mad business of those last days on the French coast, with his station on the quarterdeck by Hornblower and Gerard's work on the gundeck -- Bush never came back to England after getting the Nonsuch, never met Gerard or the handsome, rich widow he married, and thus, Bush never had a proper last memory of the man with whom he had shared the burdens and small details of sailing to the other side of the world and back again.

#29 - Scab

The scabs each itched, indvidually, like the Earl of Hell's crabs at night, and there were nine of the fuckers.

#30 - Crown

It was a pity, Bush thought, that the meeting had broken up so soon after Freeman started to tell fortunes.

#31 - Time

The business of living left its marks on Bush's body, not his heart.

#32 - Rice

Bush had rice for the first time while they were in Kingston; it was not part of the usual provision of one of his Majesty's ships owing to both the expense and the volume of fresh water required to cook it, and while Hornblower talked about his first prize command and how he had lost it, Bush picked out all the bits of lemon and asked for a pot of mustard.

#33 - Worn

Bush went to sea with a secondhand seachest and a thirdhand set of navigational guides, and his shirts were inherited from a cousin, as his were his shoes -- but the coat, the hat, everything else he wore and had were new,so he felt rich as the son of an earl.

#34 - Paint

When Hornblower saw her again, the Nonsuch was quite a different-looking ship -- with a captain who knew his buiness, she ran in much better order, and since Bush had been lucky in the matter of prize money during the ten months that he'd been with Pellew, his girl now had gilded bows and stern.

#35 - Ache

After he had seen it a time or two, Bush learned the look that his captain took on when he wanted to inquire whether Bush felt any more pain from his missing foot.

#36 - Cherry

As a seaman, Bush had little taste for fruit outside of lime juice in his rum toddy, but he had liked the basket of manogoes and pawpaws that Hornblower brought -- he had liked it very much.

#37 - Library

Hornblower had always brought enough books to line the bottom of his sea chest, and when Bush was getting his personal provisions for the Nonsuch together, he decided that the captainly thing to do would be to bring a few extra ones himself.

#38 - Win

He would have dearly liked to have been in the party himself, but when he saw that French sloop coming out of the sound with her new British colors on the mast, sails white as the clouds and Hurst on the clean deck bawling orders -- it was the moment when he realized that he had now taken his first prize as a captain, and Bush would not have exchanged it for anything.

#39 - Loss

Seeing Bush weed was like seeing a 74-gun ship of the line set herself to pilchard fishery.

#40 - Fold

Hornblower was sitting at the end of the bed with a basket, keeping him company; the door was open, and in the hallway, they could hear the voices of the servants chattering at each other in French, and it was strange, so utterly strange, to see his captain determinedly folding clothes like a laundry maid.

#41 - Music

It was completely untrained, but Bush's voice was nevertheless warm, pleasant, and lay, depending on the time of day and the degree to which he had become drunk, somewhere in pitch between his captain's cabin murmur and his gunnery deck bellow.

#42 - Bell

The boarding house bell rang once a day, and it rang for supper.

#43 - Sleep

Conscientious, duty-doing officers of His Majesty's ships of the line wanted sleep the way that the average pressed seaman wanted rum -- whenever, where-ever, and as much of it as possible.

#44 - Contact

Gerard's nephew was one of the better ones out of the lot; he was occaisionally faulty with his book learning, but he had his namesake's quick mind and steady ways ways, and one of the letters that he received from home brought news to Bush that the uncle, the original, through a prisoner exchange, had come home to England, safe, sound, and with a working knowledge of dirty French,

#45 - Electricity

He was born poor on a damp island; he came to being an adult as an officer in the fighting Navy; the only electricity Bush knew lay up in the sky during a storm and under his skin, like pins and needles, but strangely pleasurable, before a piece of ship-to-ship action.

#46 - Milk

Bush was not a religious man, but he had learned enough Scripture by bawling out the lesson during Sunday service that he was sure what Hornblower quoted to him, then, laughing, with the Sheerness morning light making his skin look very pale -- milk, honey, washed doves and the sweet things that lay under the tongue -- could not possibly in the Bible.

#47 - Wild

Bush had read it many times at Sunday service, but he could not remember what book it was, let alone the meaning or context; this ignorance was, perhaps, why it flashed to mind as he stood on the deck of the Nonsuch and the squadron left Koenigsburg and her commodore behind in the waves of the Baltic -- Let my people go, the verse went, that they may serve me in the wilderness.

#48 - Expectation

He was born to class that could afford few expectations of the world; a hard childhood and harder apprenticeship as midshipman taught him to have none at all.

#49 - Mechanism

Hornblower was the calculating, educated man who would live to see the start of the Industrial Revolution, but Bush was, in a way, the more machinelike -- despite his mathematics, Hornblower was unpredictable, cross-grained, wherease duty and honor and love drove Bush as steadily as steam ever drove an engine.

#50 - Finale

The ceremony of dedication was quiet and sparsely attended; the weather was damp and inclement, and once it was over and the parties had returned to their carriages, there was, on the outcropping over Caudebec, quarried as close to Chichester as Hornblower couldarrange, only the column of English south-shore granite standing, alone, in the rain, but still steady and unafraid.

His work at Sheerness was a desk position requiring no diplomacy or tactical planning; there would be no writing of orders weighted with grapeshot and sent out by midnight courier and few classified documents beyond the occaisional memorandum concerning the schedule at which ships were being completed -- it was, in short, the sort of position believed by both Horatio and the Admiralty admirably suited to Bush's abilities