Fic dump, part I.
Feb. 8th, 2006 04:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quigonejinnThings are getting ludicrously busy in non-fandom life, and I need the processing power that writing fic is eating up, so I'm kind of kicking fic-writing out of bed for the next few weeks aside from what I'm doing with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cupiscent. [ETA: ... that was a really embarrasing typo. *_*]
And really, the only way that I really stop thinking about a fic is if I post it public, so. Fic dump, part I of III. Stuff that I've had floating around for a month or more.
Nothingthat I ever post following is finished, polished, or beta read. This stuff is worse because most of the time, the reason why this stuff flounders, is becaue it fails to pass my "Rhod, you sound like a moron" filter and thus, I can never get a proper grip on it. There are also some gross characterization problems since most of this stuff is you know. LIETUENANT MOTHERFUCKING ARCHIE KENNEDY WHO I CAN'T WRITE TO SAVE MY LIFE BUT KEEP ON TYRING TO.
Qui-Gon was waiting for his padawan to get ugly.
Every other one of them went through it, after all. Even Xanatos had a stage where he was elbows and knees and where the features of his face failed to line up entirely properly because of bone and cartilige growth, and Qui-Gon knew that he had never been a charmer, but there was a period where he had been particularly ungainly and awkward and with a nose that ate most of his cheekbones and half of the length of his face. Qui-Gon had also seen a picture of Dooku at seventeen where he looked positively bug-eyed and stood stoop-shouldered because he'd jut spent eight months on a planet where the average height was at least two-and-a-half heads shorter than he'd been even then.
Even Adi Gallia. Even Plo Koon. Calamari, Alderaan. Even Hutts probably had a stage where they were particularly ugly by the standard of gastropods, and really.
It was typical of the boy that he completely failed to bother with it.
...
Perhaps the issue was that Qui-Gon had taken Obi-Wan on too late. [insert stuff about their early days, insert section breaks about Obi-Wan growing up, insert sections where they go to weird planets and Qui-Gon realize how dear Obi-Wan is to him, and how they eventually have sex when Obi-Wan is twenty-something XD]
You were fifty-five in Corsucant years when you died.
It takes a while to recall that exact number these days -- it is much easier to think that you only really existed after you died -- but if you concentrate, you can, indeed, pick it out from all the other facts that are also drifting through your mind.
You are Qui-Gon Jinn. When you were alive, you were tall. You had brown hair, blue eyes, large hands, a nose that was flattish in the middle, and while you were on a mission, a shaman of the Wisps came to you in a Force meditation and told you a few hints about Jedi of the ancient past had become ghosts in the Force.
The things that he said to you had been fragmentary, strange-sounding, but he gave you enough so that you could piece together the elements after a little research. Your Padawan saw you looking through old files, and he was puzzled because you had never been much for digging through old theoretical research and doctrine, but because he was your Padawan, because he was the sort of person that he was, he did not demand to see the research or press you about it.
You choose to keep the physical charactistics of what you had been at the very end of your life now, even though you are dead and have been dead for almost two decades. It disconcerts your Padawan, as he now is, entirely too much to see you otherwise.
...
Obi-Wan lives on the edge of a mountain range. His house is close enough to remain somewhat cool at the height of the afternoon, but built so that Obi-Wan can watch the Lars homstead, and thus, far enough from the base of the mountain so that sandstorms are not entirely blocked. Sand drifts into the hut, coming in through the chimney, the seams between the blocks, sometimes even the pores of the blocks themselves if the sand is particularly fine and the wind especially strong.
It is a dry, lonely existence. Obi-Wan wakes at dawn to make the most of daylight before the heat becomes oppressive -- water must be brought in from the collector. The rock wall that keeps the creatures of the high ravines from coming down must be repaired. He must examine the walls of the hut to see if cracks have developed in the intense cold of the night; otherwise, the next sandstorm will blow in and bury everything in sand up to the knee.
There are patrols to be walked, things to be repaired, supply runs to be made. At night, deeper into the mountains, Tusken raiders let off their rifles; cold will strip the unprotected flesh from bone in the course of the hours. Anything that falters in the darkness dies.
It is a lonely, hard life full of reminders, by contrast, to what the Temple had been, and the first time that Obi-Wan managed to see you, he would have jumped up and tried to embrace your ghost, but he was in shock.
He was also holding the week's supply of water in an open container in his lap.
This is the first Hornblower fic I actually wrote, in fact. It kind of makes me WRITHE WITH EMBARRASSMENT when I look at it again, but *HEAVES OVERBOARD*
There is a moment in your mind: your eyes are closed in it, and yet it is there, very vividly. You are on a boat; you are rowing. The sea is in front of you, and the man that you trust most in the world is standing behind. The ship that has, just recently, become the center of your world again looms behind you both, and when Horatio bends his knee to drive the rudder against the current, his knee almost brushes your back.
It is probably his knee, not a spray of water because you feel that brush more than once, but you cannot tell because, for some reason, during this moment that you remember so vividly, your eyes are closed.
Perhaps it was only a spray of salt water. Perhaps your eyes were only closed because you were blinking. Perhaps it was only a Spanish prison that you were rowing back towards.
...
On the fourth night back at there, it is some kind of Don holiday, so there is, with dinner, for each of you, a cup of very acidic, very bad wine.
Horatio comes and sits down on your bed next to you, and you pass each other the cup -- the wine is too foul-tasting to be enjoyed, and it is not strong enough to actually get either of you drunk, but it tastes better when taken in small sips while talking or singing or telling lies. You joke with Horatio, asking him whether he wants to make a toast to his duchess, and he smiles in that way of his, and soon, both of you are drinking out of the same tin cup.
The moon coming in through the bars, and the torches have long been taken away from the hallway outside. You are surprised at how slow your heart is beating when you watch Haratio drink out of the side of the cup opposite to where you put your mouth.
Horatio grips the same handle, though, and your heart is still slow, slow as a wave, slower than the slowest thing you have ever imagined in your entire life when you reach over and touch him at the waist.
In fact, he makes these noises when your hands are on him, your hand on his bare hip, your hand on the inside of his knee. The leggings do not get pulled down very far, but Horatio cannot figure out where to put his hands, how to move, and what he should be doing when you go down on him. You have to position him on the edge of the bed so that you can kneel down by the side, and he says Oh, Archie. Neither of you is all that drunk, but Horatio gasps like he has forgotten to take in some bit of weather-rigging or has entirely lost the position that he was plotting. It is somehow the most flattering sound you have ever heard, and you push your mouth down a little more quickly.
The moon is on your back now, and not just over the grates on the window. It is as cool and steady as the head that Horatio puts in your hair is not.
Horatio gasps again. He acts like this has never happened to him. It quite possibly has not.
You, on the other hand, remember that moment on the rowboat where your eyes were closed. You remember that feeling.
The sea was on both sides of you, the Indy was firing in salute behind you, and you were going back to the Spanish prison.
You close your eyes.
...
Simpson was the one who taught you how to do it, of course.
When you came aboard, you got a speech much like what Horatio got, except you failed to have a locket that Simpson could steal from you because you'd already long lost whatever money your sister had pressed into your hand as you were climbing into the rowboat that would take you out to sea. You also failed to have any reaction when he insulted your mother, as you had no memory of the woman and had moved somewhat beyond caring if she had made her living on her back. You hadn't really even had much of a facial expression when he asked you if you liked boys.
You had, however, gone still for just a moment.
A tensing of the stomach that he only felt because he was laying on top of you. A hitch of breath for a tiny portion of fraction of a second.
There was, after all, nothing serious in your past. You had paid for boys a few times in port, on previous ships. You got excited, sometimes, when you were lying in bed at night and heard someone nearby working away at it. Maybe there had been a friend that you had been close to, that you might have done something with if only you didn't like him so much, if only you hadn't been transferred, if things hadn't been so complicated, and Simpson felt you freezing for just that moment. He knew he had you, and he taught you how to play the role of a boy for him.
On a ship with that many men, there was very little privacy.
That was, quite possibly, the worst of it.
...
There was far more privacy here. With Hunter gone, it was just you and Horatio in the cell. The wall were thick; the grated window was high, and the watch too far away to look in. Nevertheless, the next morning, you woke in your bed, and Horatio woke in his. You didn't speak to him at all the whole morning as far as you could manage; you ate your food in silence, and he had to come and find you when everyone was in the yard.
There were great spaces of silence. One of the men had thought to grab a pair of dice with him before he left the Indy, so they played against a wall, gambling away shares of their evening beer, and Horatio kept trying to catch your eye. He kept trying to interest you in a bit of phrasing in the Cervantes or some meaning that he didn't quite grasp in the lexicon, and when all of that still failed, he started to ask you, jokingly, about your escape attempts.
You liked to talk, to make jokes and play at being witty, and he almost had you going with his jokes about Spanish donkeys and mountains, but when he started started to talk about escapes, you looked at him sharply. He had given his word, after all, not to try.
...
Horatio came to you a few nights later, and he was hesitant. He was not quite sure how to go about it, but when you saw him standing at your bed, your heart and slow suddenly went slow again while everything went fast. You had the notion that you were speaking without actually intending any of the words, and then Horatio drew close to you, and you couldn't even hear what he was saying because of the rushing noise in your ears.
It may have been something to do with fairness, though. His lips moved as though that was word that he was saying, and then he bent close, as if to try and kiss you, but at the last second, he stopped, uncertain again. You had looked away, but he wanted to do for you what you had done for him, and he got down on the floor of the cell and looked up at you.
There was a feeling in your throat, and he said again, "Fair is fair, Archie."
So you let him.
Horatio did not have much experience with undressing another man. Your pants were much the same as his, but he did not know how to handle weight, how to lean someone over on one hip while working the waist down over the other. He knocked his elbow against the frame of the bed, apologized rather loudly, and both of you froze for because it sounded as though there were footsteps in the hallway.
No footsteps. Just wind, stirring up dust and making light gravel move against stone walls.
Horatio was, in the end, very bad at it.
His teeth scraped; he had no idea what to do with them to keep them out of the way, and he could not keep his mouth on it for very long at all, but you could not, would not say a word to him about any of it. You refused. In fact, there were moments when it was almost painful, and then you would look him -- Horatio would close his eyes and then open them again and look at you, and you wanted nothing in the world so much as to reach out and touch his cheek, to touch the bridge of his nose and see if he would close his eyes when you did.
You wanted to ask him what you had done to deserve the friendship of someone like him. The question burned in your mouth and behind your eyes; the last time you had held a feeling like this in, it ended up giving you fits in your sleep and at the most inopportune times, but all you did now was hold on to the edge of the bed and try not to look too much at his face.
...
What can a man in the Navy give a woman that he loves? He marries her properly, if he can. He sees her whenever his ship brings him back to port, and he tries to get her a good living. Money. Food. A new dress once a year, more frequently if she is either a great beauty or vain. A trip to the theatre when you could and if she liked that sort of thing. You, Archie, used to think about all this when you went down to the clerks' room -- your sister's husband would beat her, but she would turn and start hitting you herself if you intervened, so the only thing to do was to go downstairs to sit with the empty desks.
You would dream of the sea; you would dream of freedom. Carriage lights passing over cobblestone streets looked like water. Sitting in the dark, you would pretend that you were at sea, and every once in a while, when you thought of it or when your sister's weeping grew loud enough to filter down through the floorboards, you would ask yourself: what could a man give to the woman he loves? What could he possibly do? Before he died, your father gave his girls -- the gillies, one after the other -- his heart, not to mention everything that he happened to have in his purse.
You could have run away to the merchant navy, but you stayed until you were fifteen, waiting for your chance at the Royal Navy as a midshipman.
The lantern in the hand of the night guard on the wall makes an effect like water. Horatio is asleep, lying in his bunk, and it's hard to see him because he has the upper bunk, but you tilt your head up, and you sit. You watch.
...
Horatio told you about Simpson's death, of course. It was while he was nursing you. He thought it would help you recover more quickly, so he told you twice, once when you were pretending to be more delirious than you were, again when you had calmed down, were recovering, and he was feeding you.
You were perfectly capable of feeding yourself, but you did not want to. If he set the bowl in your lap, it would sit there, so he began to feed you, spoon by spoon, with his face bent close to yours. You let him, though you would also unfocus your eyes so that the room and Horatio's face was nothing but a blur of moving shadow and paleness that meant nothing to you. It was a trickthat you'd learned as a small boy when ignoring your father and whatever he had brought home, and when Horatio set the bowl down to add a little hot water to the mash, while his face was hidden in shadows from the fireplace and his back was half-turned to you, he said the words. "Simpson is dead."
You thought about telling him that you heard him the first time or, alternatively, asking him how it had happened. Instead, for once, you said nothing. The fire popped, a Spanish speaker passed the guard set in the hallway outside, and after a while, Horatio began to work the hot water properly into the mash.
...
[The prison is only a mile or so from the sea, the don talking to Archie about it, asking Archie had thought. How Archie had tried to run away all thoe times as much of boredom as anything ele, and at the end of the conversation, realizing, with a sudden flash of inisght, that the Don would run away, too, if there were anywhere that he could go.]
...
[Scene flashbackgoing up and seeing Horatio on the rigging. Wondering, when Hornblower came aboard what his flaw would be. How Simpson would get to him, and how Archie now realizes that there was nothing that Simpson could get on Hornblower]
...
There is a moment in your mind: your eyes are closed in it, and yet it is there, very vividly. You are on a boat; you are rowing. The sea is in front of you. The man that you trust most in the world is standing behind, steering, and when Horatio bends his knee to drive the rudder against the current, his knee almost brushes your back.
Your eyes are closed. Perhaps you are holding them shut against the spray from a wave. Perhaps your eyes are only closed because you were blinking away tears.
Perhaps it is only the rest of your life, a world full of possibility, that you are rowing towards.
Years ago. Cheap lodgings, their first shore leave after getting to the wretched Renown. An inn with the door locked and the only chair in the room shoved up against the door. They were kneeling on the floor, and Archie had his lips on Hornblower's shoulder, his hand across Hornblower's mouth. Loosely at first, mostly for the feel of Horatio's lips, but also to make sure that Horatio couldn't get away with taking more than he could handle.
So Archie lay his fingers across Hornblower's mouth, and Archie stopped. He was not quite sure if this was what they should be doing or that Horatio was ready yet, but then, Horatio reached a hand behind him, gripped Archie's waist and pulled him just a fraction of an inch deeper and held him like that.
It went like that for a while.
They were kneeling on the floor next to the bed, and Hornblower had his fingers at Archie's waist. Archie had his hand loosely over Horatio's mouth. Horatio pulled him a little deeper whenever he thought he might be able to take more, and Archie would hold there, waiting with his heart pounding and his eyes closed because if he looked too much at the sight of Horatio with his head bowed, naked, shoulders bare except for the tumble of hair, he was not sure what he would do.
And then, that moment when Archie sank all the way in, and Archie's eyes flew open just in time to see as well as feel Hornblower press himself all the way back. The arch of the spine, the movement as Hornblower he threw his head back, and the sight of Horatio spreading his legs for his best friend.
The sound of Horatio saying Archie, over and over, with his heart in every syllable, and the feeling of the rest of the world -- Sawyer, ship, memories of the Spanish prison, lingering ghosts of Simpson everything, absolutely everything -- dropping away.
He had refused to take laudanum the morning before he testified to make sure that he would be absolutely cogent, but the pain almost made him blind and unable to speak anyways. He had not sure, in fact, that he had even said the right thing until he heard the rush of sudden talk and saw Horatio's stricken expression.
NC-17, grim, quite possibly OOC, rather out of the usual HH/AK line and references to Archie/Simpson, terribly overwrought, and eventually abandoned because I was so horrified at the shitty characterization in here.
Things We Do in Our Sleep
By the time that he was forty, Hornblower had buried his mother and two of his children. A wife and a father had died while he was at sea and been put in the ground before he returned, and by the time that he was fifty, Horatio added to the list a mistress who he had loved more than any woman he had ever married at the moment he married her and a friend who was dearer to him than his own body.
He could, at that point, grieve in his sleep.
cupiscent. [ETA: ... that was a really embarrasing typo. *_*]And really, the only way that I really stop thinking about a fic is if I post it public, so. Fic dump, part I of III. Stuff that I've had floating around for a month or more.
Nothing
Qui-Gon was waiting for his padawan to get ugly.
Every other one of them went through it, after all. Even Xanatos had a stage where he was elbows and knees and where the features of his face failed to line up entirely properly because of bone and cartilige growth, and Qui-Gon knew that he had never been a charmer, but there was a period where he had been particularly ungainly and awkward and with a nose that ate most of his cheekbones and half of the length of his face. Qui-Gon had also seen a picture of Dooku at seventeen where he looked positively bug-eyed and stood stoop-shouldered because he'd jut spent eight months on a planet where the average height was at least two-and-a-half heads shorter than he'd been even then.
Even Adi Gallia. Even Plo Koon. Calamari, Alderaan. Even Hutts probably had a stage where they were particularly ugly by the standard of gastropods, and really.
It was typical of the boy that he completely failed to bother with it.
...
Perhaps the issue was that Qui-Gon had taken Obi-Wan on too late. [insert stuff about their early days, insert section breaks about Obi-Wan growing up, insert sections where they go to weird planets and Qui-Gon realize how dear Obi-Wan is to him, and how they eventually have sex when Obi-Wan is twenty-something XD]
You were fifty-five in Corsucant years when you died.
It takes a while to recall that exact number these days -- it is much easier to think that you only really existed after you died -- but if you concentrate, you can, indeed, pick it out from all the other facts that are also drifting through your mind.
You are Qui-Gon Jinn. When you were alive, you were tall. You had brown hair, blue eyes, large hands, a nose that was flattish in the middle, and while you were on a mission, a shaman of the Wisps came to you in a Force meditation and told you a few hints about Jedi of the ancient past had become ghosts in the Force.
The things that he said to you had been fragmentary, strange-sounding, but he gave you enough so that you could piece together the elements after a little research. Your Padawan saw you looking through old files, and he was puzzled because you had never been much for digging through old theoretical research and doctrine, but because he was your Padawan, because he was the sort of person that he was, he did not demand to see the research or press you about it.
You choose to keep the physical charactistics of what you had been at the very end of your life now, even though you are dead and have been dead for almost two decades. It disconcerts your Padawan, as he now is, entirely too much to see you otherwise.
...
Obi-Wan lives on the edge of a mountain range. His house is close enough to remain somewhat cool at the height of the afternoon, but built so that Obi-Wan can watch the Lars homstead, and thus, far enough from the base of the mountain so that sandstorms are not entirely blocked. Sand drifts into the hut, coming in through the chimney, the seams between the blocks, sometimes even the pores of the blocks themselves if the sand is particularly fine and the wind especially strong.
It is a dry, lonely existence. Obi-Wan wakes at dawn to make the most of daylight before the heat becomes oppressive -- water must be brought in from the collector. The rock wall that keeps the creatures of the high ravines from coming down must be repaired. He must examine the walls of the hut to see if cracks have developed in the intense cold of the night; otherwise, the next sandstorm will blow in and bury everything in sand up to the knee.
There are patrols to be walked, things to be repaired, supply runs to be made. At night, deeper into the mountains, Tusken raiders let off their rifles; cold will strip the unprotected flesh from bone in the course of the hours. Anything that falters in the darkness dies.
It is a lonely, hard life full of reminders, by contrast, to what the Temple had been, and the first time that Obi-Wan managed to see you, he would have jumped up and tried to embrace your ghost, but he was in shock.
He was also holding the week's supply of water in an open container in his lap.
This is the first Hornblower fic I actually wrote, in fact. It kind of makes me WRITHE WITH EMBARRASSMENT when I look at it again, but *HEAVES OVERBOARD*
Camilla yielded, Camilla fell; but what wonder if the friendship of Lothario could not stand firm? A clear proof to us that the passion of love is to be conquered only by flying from it.
Don Quixote, Chapter XXXIV, Miguel Cervantes
There is a moment in your mind: your eyes are closed in it, and yet it is there, very vividly. You are on a boat; you are rowing. The sea is in front of you, and the man that you trust most in the world is standing behind. The ship that has, just recently, become the center of your world again looms behind you both, and when Horatio bends his knee to drive the rudder against the current, his knee almost brushes your back.
It is probably his knee, not a spray of water because you feel that brush more than once, but you cannot tell because, for some reason, during this moment that you remember so vividly, your eyes are closed.
Perhaps it was only a spray of salt water. Perhaps your eyes were only closed because you were blinking. Perhaps it was only a Spanish prison that you were rowing back towards.
...
On the fourth night back at there, it is some kind of Don holiday, so there is, with dinner, for each of you, a cup of very acidic, very bad wine.
Horatio comes and sits down on your bed next to you, and you pass each other the cup -- the wine is too foul-tasting to be enjoyed, and it is not strong enough to actually get either of you drunk, but it tastes better when taken in small sips while talking or singing or telling lies. You joke with Horatio, asking him whether he wants to make a toast to his duchess, and he smiles in that way of his, and soon, both of you are drinking out of the same tin cup.
The moon coming in through the bars, and the torches have long been taken away from the hallway outside. You are surprised at how slow your heart is beating when you watch Haratio drink out of the side of the cup opposite to where you put your mouth.
Horatio grips the same handle, though, and your heart is still slow, slow as a wave, slower than the slowest thing you have ever imagined in your entire life when you reach over and touch him at the waist.
In fact, he makes these noises when your hands are on him, your hand on his bare hip, your hand on the inside of his knee. The leggings do not get pulled down very far, but Horatio cannot figure out where to put his hands, how to move, and what he should be doing when you go down on him. You have to position him on the edge of the bed so that you can kneel down by the side, and he says Oh, Archie. Neither of you is all that drunk, but Horatio gasps like he has forgotten to take in some bit of weather-rigging or has entirely lost the position that he was plotting. It is somehow the most flattering sound you have ever heard, and you push your mouth down a little more quickly.
The moon is on your back now, and not just over the grates on the window. It is as cool and steady as the head that Horatio puts in your hair is not.
Horatio gasps again. He acts like this has never happened to him. It quite possibly has not.
You, on the other hand, remember that moment on the rowboat where your eyes were closed. You remember that feeling.
The sea was on both sides of you, the Indy was firing in salute behind you, and you were going back to the Spanish prison.
You close your eyes.
...
Simpson was the one who taught you how to do it, of course.
When you came aboard, you got a speech much like what Horatio got, except you failed to have a locket that Simpson could steal from you because you'd already long lost whatever money your sister had pressed into your hand as you were climbing into the rowboat that would take you out to sea. You also failed to have any reaction when he insulted your mother, as you had no memory of the woman and had moved somewhat beyond caring if she had made her living on her back. You hadn't really even had much of a facial expression when he asked you if you liked boys.
You had, however, gone still for just a moment.
A tensing of the stomach that he only felt because he was laying on top of you. A hitch of breath for a tiny portion of fraction of a second.
There was, after all, nothing serious in your past. You had paid for boys a few times in port, on previous ships. You got excited, sometimes, when you were lying in bed at night and heard someone nearby working away at it. Maybe there had been a friend that you had been close to, that you might have done something with if only you didn't like him so much, if only you hadn't been transferred, if things hadn't been so complicated, and Simpson felt you freezing for just that moment. He knew he had you, and he taught you how to play the role of a boy for him.
On a ship with that many men, there was very little privacy.
That was, quite possibly, the worst of it.
...
There was far more privacy here. With Hunter gone, it was just you and Horatio in the cell. The wall were thick; the grated window was high, and the watch too far away to look in. Nevertheless, the next morning, you woke in your bed, and Horatio woke in his. You didn't speak to him at all the whole morning as far as you could manage; you ate your food in silence, and he had to come and find you when everyone was in the yard.
There were great spaces of silence. One of the men had thought to grab a pair of dice with him before he left the Indy, so they played against a wall, gambling away shares of their evening beer, and Horatio kept trying to catch your eye. He kept trying to interest you in a bit of phrasing in the Cervantes or some meaning that he didn't quite grasp in the lexicon, and when all of that still failed, he started to ask you, jokingly, about your escape attempts.
You liked to talk, to make jokes and play at being witty, and he almost had you going with his jokes about Spanish donkeys and mountains, but when he started started to talk about escapes, you looked at him sharply. He had given his word, after all, not to try.
...
Horatio came to you a few nights later, and he was hesitant. He was not quite sure how to go about it, but when you saw him standing at your bed, your heart and slow suddenly went slow again while everything went fast. You had the notion that you were speaking without actually intending any of the words, and then Horatio drew close to you, and you couldn't even hear what he was saying because of the rushing noise in your ears.
It may have been something to do with fairness, though. His lips moved as though that was word that he was saying, and then he bent close, as if to try and kiss you, but at the last second, he stopped, uncertain again. You had looked away, but he wanted to do for you what you had done for him, and he got down on the floor of the cell and looked up at you.
There was a feeling in your throat, and he said again, "Fair is fair, Archie."
So you let him.
Horatio did not have much experience with undressing another man. Your pants were much the same as his, but he did not know how to handle weight, how to lean someone over on one hip while working the waist down over the other. He knocked his elbow against the frame of the bed, apologized rather loudly, and both of you froze for because it sounded as though there were footsteps in the hallway.
No footsteps. Just wind, stirring up dust and making light gravel move against stone walls.
Horatio was, in the end, very bad at it.
His teeth scraped; he had no idea what to do with them to keep them out of the way, and he could not keep his mouth on it for very long at all, but you could not, would not say a word to him about any of it. You refused. In fact, there were moments when it was almost painful, and then you would look him -- Horatio would close his eyes and then open them again and look at you, and you wanted nothing in the world so much as to reach out and touch his cheek, to touch the bridge of his nose and see if he would close his eyes when you did.
You wanted to ask him what you had done to deserve the friendship of someone like him. The question burned in your mouth and behind your eyes; the last time you had held a feeling like this in, it ended up giving you fits in your sleep and at the most inopportune times, but all you did now was hold on to the edge of the bed and try not to look too much at his face.
...
What can a man in the Navy give a woman that he loves? He marries her properly, if he can. He sees her whenever his ship brings him back to port, and he tries to get her a good living. Money. Food. A new dress once a year, more frequently if she is either a great beauty or vain. A trip to the theatre when you could and if she liked that sort of thing. You, Archie, used to think about all this when you went down to the clerks' room -- your sister's husband would beat her, but she would turn and start hitting you herself if you intervened, so the only thing to do was to go downstairs to sit with the empty desks.
You would dream of the sea; you would dream of freedom. Carriage lights passing over cobblestone streets looked like water. Sitting in the dark, you would pretend that you were at sea, and every once in a while, when you thought of it or when your sister's weeping grew loud enough to filter down through the floorboards, you would ask yourself: what could a man give to the woman he loves? What could he possibly do? Before he died, your father gave his girls -- the gillies, one after the other -- his heart, not to mention everything that he happened to have in his purse.
You could have run away to the merchant navy, but you stayed until you were fifteen, waiting for your chance at the Royal Navy as a midshipman.
The lantern in the hand of the night guard on the wall makes an effect like water. Horatio is asleep, lying in his bunk, and it's hard to see him because he has the upper bunk, but you tilt your head up, and you sit. You watch.
...
Horatio told you about Simpson's death, of course. It was while he was nursing you. He thought it would help you recover more quickly, so he told you twice, once when you were pretending to be more delirious than you were, again when you had calmed down, were recovering, and he was feeding you.
You were perfectly capable of feeding yourself, but you did not want to. If he set the bowl in your lap, it would sit there, so he began to feed you, spoon by spoon, with his face bent close to yours. You let him, though you would also unfocus your eyes so that the room and Horatio's face was nothing but a blur of moving shadow and paleness that meant nothing to you. It was a trickthat you'd learned as a small boy when ignoring your father and whatever he had brought home, and when Horatio set the bowl down to add a little hot water to the mash, while his face was hidden in shadows from the fireplace and his back was half-turned to you, he said the words. "Simpson is dead."
You thought about telling him that you heard him the first time or, alternatively, asking him how it had happened. Instead, for once, you said nothing. The fire popped, a Spanish speaker passed the guard set in the hallway outside, and after a while, Horatio began to work the hot water properly into the mash.
...
[The prison is only a mile or so from the sea, the don talking to Archie about it, asking Archie had thought. How Archie had tried to run away all thoe times as much of boredom as anything ele, and at the end of the conversation, realizing, with a sudden flash of inisght, that the Don would run away, too, if there were anywhere that he could go.]
...
[Scene flashbackgoing up and seeing Horatio on the rigging. Wondering, when Hornblower came aboard what his flaw would be. How Simpson would get to him, and how Archie now realizes that there was nothing that Simpson could get on Hornblower]
...
There is a moment in your mind: your eyes are closed in it, and yet it is there, very vividly. You are on a boat; you are rowing. The sea is in front of you. The man that you trust most in the world is standing behind, steering, and when Horatio bends his knee to drive the rudder against the current, his knee almost brushes your back.
Your eyes are closed. Perhaps you are holding them shut against the spray from a wave. Perhaps your eyes are only closed because you were blinking away tears.
Perhaps it is only the rest of your life, a world full of possibility, that you are rowing towards.
Years ago. Cheap lodgings, their first shore leave after getting to the wretched Renown. An inn with the door locked and the only chair in the room shoved up against the door. They were kneeling on the floor, and Archie had his lips on Hornblower's shoulder, his hand across Hornblower's mouth. Loosely at first, mostly for the feel of Horatio's lips, but also to make sure that Horatio couldn't get away with taking more than he could handle.
So Archie lay his fingers across Hornblower's mouth, and Archie stopped. He was not quite sure if this was what they should be doing or that Horatio was ready yet, but then, Horatio reached a hand behind him, gripped Archie's waist and pulled him just a fraction of an inch deeper and held him like that.
It went like that for a while.
They were kneeling on the floor next to the bed, and Hornblower had his fingers at Archie's waist. Archie had his hand loosely over Horatio's mouth. Horatio pulled him a little deeper whenever he thought he might be able to take more, and Archie would hold there, waiting with his heart pounding and his eyes closed because if he looked too much at the sight of Horatio with his head bowed, naked, shoulders bare except for the tumble of hair, he was not sure what he would do.
And then, that moment when Archie sank all the way in, and Archie's eyes flew open just in time to see as well as feel Hornblower press himself all the way back. The arch of the spine, the movement as Hornblower he threw his head back, and the sight of Horatio spreading his legs for his best friend.
The sound of Horatio saying Archie, over and over, with his heart in every syllable, and the feeling of the rest of the world -- Sawyer, ship, memories of the Spanish prison, lingering ghosts of Simpson everything, absolutely everything -- dropping away.
He had refused to take laudanum the morning before he testified to make sure that he would be absolutely cogent, but the pain almost made him blind and unable to speak anyways. He had not sure, in fact, that he had even said the right thing until he heard the rush of sudden talk and saw Horatio's stricken expression.
NC-17, grim, quite possibly OOC, rather out of the usual HH/AK line and references to Archie/Simpson, terribly overwrought, and eventually abandoned because I was so horrified at the shitty characterization in here.
Things We Do in Our Sleep
- Talk.
For a man who carried entire acts of plays in his head, Archie did not carry around much in the way of books in his seachest -- even officers who were not fond of reading carried a few to give their chest a little weight and make it easier to maneuver across deck or up the side of a ship. Horatio was, in fact, very fond of reading, had the first two volumes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall, three different seamanship guides, a book of logarithmic and other mathematical tables, whatever volumes on the area of dispatch that he could both find and afford, and, finally, a volume of complex geometry problems, the solutions to which Horatio had worked out on paper previously and would, as a habit, assign the problems to himself.
Thus,when the ship was at anchor and all was as quiet as it got on a wooden ship, Archie would occaisionally hear Horatio muttering in the next hammock over about spherical excess and steradians. Pause.
A half-turn in his hammock. A sigh. The slap of a wave against the side of the ship. Neper's pentagon.
And then so quiet that Archie had to lean half out of his own hammock and be as intent as if he were listening for the name of Horatio's sweetheart: replace the arc angles adjacent with their complement. - Dream.
Archie still thought about Simpson, and he was quite sure that the thoughts translated over to dreams. - Remember. [Skylarking with Horatio, envy of Horatio]
- Forget.
[The fits that he had. Wonder that he didn'tchew his owntongue off at some point. How Horationever ever mentions them, had only the faintest memory of them even when he had apparently had conversations after the worst of them. The terror of slipping -- not knowing whether he still had them or whether people on the Indefatuigable were just too kind to mention it.
Archie had set to sea with a complete set of Shakespeare, plays and poems, a little Marlowe, and one volume of seamanship. The Shakespeare had gilt trim and good leather covers; Archie remembered the frontis page with the inscription from his father, and later, from a slip of Horatio's, he learned that the locket he had been wearing when he came aboard and that Simpson took from contained had been his only picture of his dead mother. - Love.
[Horatio dreaming about Mariette, him brooding over a French grammar, having to take care of Horatio now.] - Lust.
Kennedy didn't think of kissing, actually. He he had felt those lips against his cheek a number of times in friendlines. He also had little experience in that direction. Other things, instead.
What it would be like, for instance, to watch Horatio undress and have Horatio know that he was being watched. The span of Horatio's back, pale because he was conscious of his thinness and his dignity and rarely took his shirt off, even in summer. The dark hair, curlier than Archie's, held by a bit of black tie. Horatio would be sitting on the other side of the bed -- the inn, it would be an inn with a real bed and real pillows, he would have his back turned to Archie, and then he would lie down on the bed, face in the pillows, and Archie could envision the inn down to the scrollwork on the wooden headboard because it was where Simpson had once forced him to go to in Portsmouth.
The brick walls. The creak on the floors as others walked to their lodgings. Voice that he recognized. He could see nothing because it was his face that was in the pillows, and then there would Simpson's touch at the small of his back and his voice, slow and venomous and, worst of all, honest-to-God lust. "Until you beg, Kennedy. Until you scream."
Archie remembered the terrible, terrible fear that followed, and the shame that had hurt worse than the pain. He could not, in fact, imagine Horatio afraid in the same way, terrified and panicked and frozen as if his arms and legs were made out of stone. Too ashamed to move or resist, and whenever Archie's thoughts arrived there, there would follow a vision of what Horatio would look like in that position: that long, pale back. The hair. The long fingers gripping the headboard when he got driven up into there. The noises he would make, pained at first, perhaps even a little fearful, but eventually changing because Horatio had better luck, mastered pain and fear better than any man that Archie had ever known.
What would he sound like then?
Archie had no idea of what it felt like to fuck another man, after all, so he imagined that it was something something like what it felt like to be inside a girl -- and the notion of fucking Horatio up against the headboard and naked and breathless and flushed across the shoulders as Kennedy had seen girls get and perhaps even pressing back, Archie's brain could barely comprehend it. Fucking Horatio until he begged, until he was pressed flat between Archie and the headboard and gasping -- the notion made Archie ashamed and furious and dizzy all at the same time, and he would so angry with himself that he could barely convince his muscles to work and let him breathe.
In fact, the shame made him feel as though his skin were on fire. His stomach would twist and wrench until Archie had to take deep breaths to keep from vomiting, and the worst of it was that, occaisionally, while he thrashed about in his hammock to try and get some air and rid himself of the burning in his chest and stomach, Horatio would wake.
He would half-rise out of his hammock and would ask, in his gentlest, most concered voice, whether Archie was all right.
Whether he had been dreaming again. - Prophetize.
Archie and Horatio did not talk about Simpson, not directly. Archie even preferred to talkabout the Spanish prison, which, in his accounts, was entirely composed of leisure time, Horatio's greatness, and good-looking Spanish women who threw fruit over the wall. It was entirely an invention, truthful only to show Horatio's good deeds, but Archie would even nter an honest conversation about spending time in the hole in the ground than Simpson.
Simpson was not discussed, not between the two of them. Horatio had told him about Captain Pellew shooting Simpson dead, but that had been while he was nursing Archie. The conversation never went further, and thus, it was all the more surprising that one morning, Archie woke with Horatio shaking him awake and telling him him that he had a present for him.
It was a volume of Shakespeare that he had intended to give to Archie for a Christmas present or Archie's confirmation as a lieutenan, whichever came first. He was handing over early, though, because they'd jut been given two days of port leave and transfer to the Renown under the famous captain Sawyer.
During the course of mad, celebratory dancing and capering around that they then embarked on, it crossed Archie's mind that it should be wonderful -- amazing, just like [insert name of play] -- that Horatio should give him back one of the books that Simpson had taken from him.
It was deeply to Archie's credit that it didn't occur to him until far later, until he was lying on his back in a Kingston infirmary and had already testified in front of the court martial, exactly what sort of book, Horatio had given him. It had been the cheapest volume in the store, probably. The only one that Horatio, with his non-existent budget, would have been able to afford.
Archie was dosed on so much laudanum that he should have been asleep, but he was awake to talk to Horatio, to laugh when Horatio told him that he was the bravest man he had ever known, and to remember that Horatio's gift to him had been a copy of Shakespeare's early tragedies -- Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, even Richard III, which Archie had personally thought should not have been included and had noted at the time that Horatio gave him the book and to which Horatio had made faces because he, himself, did not consider plays in general to be a particularly worthy of reading but was willing to make a concession for his dear friend.
The early tragedies.
The ones that his father's gillie had summarized, giggling in that brainless way she had, as where everyone dies. - Feel Pain.
When he was awake, it was worse than anything he had ever felt before. It was a little better when he was asleep, but it was difficult to tell, sometimes, whether he was awake or asleep.
Archie had never had an intention of dying young. - Rest.
Not all of Archie's dreams were about Simpson or Horatio or pain, though. Not all of them were terrible. There was, for example, a dream where he was back in London, at the theater with his father as he had been when he was young and with his mother before she had died.
Richard III was playing, and Queen Elizabeth was on stage, reporting the death of Edward to the Duchess of York.If you will live, lament; if die, be brief,
It was taken out of context, and Archie could not imagine why his mind would call it up except that he still resented the erroneous inclusion of Richard III, but there was Queen Elizabeth up the stage, and there he was, standing in the audience, holding his father's hand with his right and clasping his mother's hand with his left. When he turned, twisting a little, he saw that Horatio was standing on one of the balconies and wearing a crown that was brighter than what the queen on stage wore. Pellew was there too, standing behind Horatio, as were, strangely enough, Clayton and Keene and that Bush character who had been with them at the taking of the fort.
That our swift-winged souls may catch the king's;
Or, like obedient subjects, follow him
To his new kingdom of perpetual rest.
Archie looked at Horatio. Horatio looked back at him. He made to say something over the sound of the play, and he also gestured for Archie to come up and join him, but the words were lost in the noise. Archie was locked in the past, and after a long, struggling while and because it was the best, bravest thing that he could do, Archie turned and went to his rest.
By the time that he was forty, Hornblower had buried his mother and two of his children. A wife and a father had died while he was at sea and been put in the ground before he returned, and by the time that he was fifty, Horatio added to the list a mistress who he had loved more than any woman he had ever married at the moment he married her and a friend who was dearer to him than his own body.
He could, at that point, grieve in his sleep.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-08 10:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-08 10:55 pm (UTC)And no. I do not. If you would care to share, I would be even more eternally indebted to you are than I am now.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-08 11:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-08 11:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-09 01:14 am (UTC)Keep circling, O hawk, you're closing in...
... i think your icon is hypnotizing me.
Date: 2006-02-09 05:28 pm (UTC)Archie is so !(@*#@()*$ hard for me to write. I cannot get a hook into him to save my life -- I can figure Hornblower out by his ambition and neuroticism, and Bush is all about the duty and affection, but goddammit, Archie, will your internal emotional workings please comprehensify to me?
So yeah. I'm glad this worked in any way, shape, or form for you.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-09 01:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-09 05:36 pm (UTC)Someday. Right now, I don't have the excess processing power to, like, light a chain of Christmas lights, but someday. <3 Someday.
By the way. You might as well go ahead and post links to whichever of those two stories of mine that you want. I'm not going to be doing anything with the Dumbass Piece of Doom because of time issues, but yeah, I need to get over my own shit. So whatever, and thank you so much for putting up with my crap. <3
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-09 08:30 pm (UTC)1. Write about Old Ben.
2. Failing that, write about Obi-Wan.
3. Include Luke.
4. Or Darth Vader.
5. Or Anakin/Obi-Wan.
6. Or Anakin/Obi-Wan porn.
7. Or Luke/Obi-Wan.
8. Or Luke/Obi-Wan porn.
9. Or Anakin/Obi-Wan/Luke. (Not sure how that works, but I'd read it.)
10. Or Anakin/Obi-Wan/Luke porn. (Again, not sure how that works, but I'd read it.)
11. Baby!Padawans are a bonus.
12. Include lots of details about tiny things no one else cares about but me.
13. AND MAKE IT IN-CHARACTER. :DDDDDDDDD
Ahem. That's the just the quick and dirty list. ;D
I shall look forward to someday, then. I understand the busy. *pets*
All right. It didn't bother me. I shall pick one and link later on. Just make sure's it's not f-locked! :D
you have so many buttons! :D :D it's the button lady!
Date: 2006-02-10 05:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-09 01:59 am (UTC)I'm adding these to my memories.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-09 07:48 pm (UTC)Your icon makes me so sad. Jesus.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-09 07:52 pm (UTC)Hee. I am full of sad icons. I'm such a damn sap.
*ramble*
Date: 2006-02-09 11:01 pm (UTC)In fact, I think that's the reason why I have no confidence in the way I write him: he's too decent and reasonable and generally emotionally different. It's also why I have problems writing movie characters, really, who are all so sane and normal and decent compared to crazyfucker!Horatio and controlfreaksecretemo!Bush.
There's just about nothing left unposted on my LJ, I swear. There's an HH/WB FST that I haven't written up, and the beginnings of a wee short HH/Book!Edrington, but nothing substantive.
Anyways. I'm flattered beyond belief that you'd even make jokes about wondering. XD
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-09 06:15 am (UTC)...
No more coffee for me today.
(What was the typo, incidentally? I want to know about the embarrassment! *G*)
Also, thanks for the kick reminder about that. *double-underlines it next on the to-do list* But also, dude, no pressure. I mean, obviously we are the slowest collaborators on the planet anyway. *G* I'll get my act together and try to send you stuff, but if real life is requiring both hands and concentration, think about the history faculty later. I don't mind.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-09 07:46 pm (UTC)We are the slowest collaborators on the planet, which is something that I actually enjoy and gives this thing a shot of actually getting done. *pokes her midterm next Friday for which she is fucked, and yet is somehow provoking her to study* It'll be good. Just throw it over whenever you've got it, and I'll work my getting my ass on over.
History faculty! :D
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-09 10:59 pm (UTC)Yay for slow collaboration. Yay for history faculty. Boo for midterms. Best of magical luck with it.
hooray for fic dumps
Date: 2006-02-09 11:27 pm (UTC)You would dream of the sea; you would dream of freedom. Carriage lights passing over cobblestone streets looked like water.
That's beautiful.
The sound of Horatio saying Archie, over and over, with his heart in every syllable, and the feeling of the rest of the world -- Sawyer, ship, memories of the Spanish prison, lingering ghosts of Simpson everything, absolutely everything -- dropping away.
And that. *____*
Rest is wonderful and sad.
Also, Qui-Gon noticing the attractiveness of his young Padawan is lovely, and strange, because he probably shouldn't, but he's a bit powerless in *noticing*. And that's a really interesting thought.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-20 12:20 am (UTC)