Fic Dump, part II.
Feb. 8th, 2006 05:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quigonejinnAnd now we get to the stuff that's actually done. This one has been sitting around, completely written, for about two weeks. And I still can't figure out how to fix it. The problem is, I think, mostly with the Bush characterization in the first part and ;lkgjdkfjghdf. *stabs self in the eye*
Your captain was reading a history about the French navy to you.
He wanted to improve his French, and he had a notion, too, that he could teach you the language. You were quite sure that you could not, in fact, learn, and your eyes keep flicking over to the clothes laid out by the fireplace. Trousers. Shirt. A pair of socks. One shoe. The fire had been banked down for the night, and the clothes were drawn close enough to the embers so that they would not be bitterly cold in the morning, but not so close that they might spark and catch on fire.
The house had gone to bed for the night, and your captain was doing you such a favor by keeping you company. You knew that, and it is embarrassing to think of it now. It had been embarassing, then, too, but you were tired, still a little dizzy and very weak. Your eyes kept moving back to the clothes by the fireplace, and eventually, Hornblower asked you about something that he had just read aloud -- a technical question that he wanted your opinion about.
He looked at you; you had trouble keeping your face appropriately still, more difficulty getting the words out, and he colored up, and his face took on a pained expression.
He had, after all, been watching you watch the things. He had been sitting in a chair by your bed, reading to you while your mind was elsewhere, and the awkwardness of the whole situation struck him very strongly. Now, he put away the book and started to stand up, put the book, make to leave. You tried to say something -- you were full of embarrassment yourself -- but the words wouldn't come out, and you could not stand the way that he was making to do. You had no idea what you could do, so when he leaned forward a little because he was trying to get out of the room without looking at you again or the pile of clothes with the single shoe and this positivley required contortions since the chair was so close to the bed and he had been propping his feet up against the edge of the bed, you did the only thing you could think of.
His face was turned away, but very near yours.
You kissed him.
...
You remember when you met Hornblower. Tall. Skinny. Dark eyes, bony face, a uniform that looked like it had been put on in the dark and not readjusted because the knots at the throat were professional enough, but they were a little crooked. The coat was not worn straight across the shoulders; the hat was well cared for, but it was old, and it was at a something of an angle, too, because the wind would push it in a direction, and he would forget to push it back the other way.
Eyes. Hungriness. The fact that you distrusted him because it seemed like he was playacting at being so fierce in the crew, then acting again, in a different way, when he saw that you looked him in the eye.
You had not wanted to like him, but by the end of his time on the Renown, it had been impossible. You knew that he was one of the very best officers you had ever worked with, and even now, you are fairly sure that he is the best captain that you have ever served or will have the privilege of serving.
...
When you kissed him, his mouth was slack. He was surprised. You felt him snort, let out a breath, and for a moment, you did not know what was going to happen, but then your captain put his hands behind your head and started to kiss you back. You had kissed him with your mouth closed, but he pressed against you with his tongue until you opened your mouth. After that, he took your face in his hands, held you still while he bit at lips, pulled your tongue into his mouth. When you shivered, he put his arms around you, and when he broke away to breathe, you pulled him into bed on top of you.
Before your back was against the sheets again, he had shoved your nightgown up to your stomach, so that it was the cloth of his trousers against your bare skin. He moved his hips, and you let out a noise that made him freeze.
The light of the fire was mostly gone. Horatio had been reading by a pair of candles on the table by the side of your bed, and at the angle they were set, his eyes were in shadow, and the only clear thing were spots of red on his cheeks. He made as if to pull away from you.
"Bush -- are you -- "
For an answer, you hooked your fingers around the waist of his trousers and tugged.
...
You remember, too, Horatio getting married. You had stood by him for it, after all. Suggested a church where many officers got married, helped him dress the morning before because the steward was aboard ship and the two of you were in the attic. After all, he ought not look like he dressed in the dark on the day that he was married. Two days before, you stepped in to help him haggle at the jeweler's for the ring. The morning of, you arranged the double rank of seamen with cutlasses, the horseless post-chaise.
You handed him the ring at the altar, and as you did so, you remember thinking to yourself, again, that Maria was dumpy, plain, old to be marrying for the first time. Her mother had a voice that could have put her on the gun deck, and in addition to the memory of the wedding, you remember that scene by the door the night that he had won forty-five pounds playing whist in the Long Rooms.
The mother was a drunk, but the daughter was devoted to him, and even then, you knew your captain well enough to know how much that counted with him even if he would never admit it.
It might not have been the most important thing, but it was, nevertheless, deeply, deeply important. They were happy together; your captain had loved her, and you suspect that he loved her still, even after Barbara, that he thought of her at all in that terrible, quiet period when he had run up the tri-color and waited for the French to come take possession of his ship.
The noise of the boarding attempt had been infinitely preferable. You even wanted the men who were being or had been amputated to start screaming again -- not that low, soft moaning they were doing, but honest screaming to drown out the sound of your ship being surrendered.
There is a great deal of pain involved in thinking about the Sutherland these days, and you know that you have only the faintest notion of what your captain must have endured as he stood on deck and waited to surrender his sword.
...
Hornblower had, in fact, once tried something with you.
He wasn't your captain then, of course. The two of you were lieutenants together in Kingston, and you were drunker than you had ever been in your life, and so, you suspct, was Horatio. You had been thrown out of the gambling establishment drunkenness and rowdiness -- you'd tried to fight someone or something, so you were tossed out. Horatio had followed you out.
Shadows. Light from the windows of the gambling room, Horatio coming down the steps, tall and cool even when drunk, and you had cobblestones under your back. He stopped, hat under hand, and studied you -- you weren't able to see much of his face, but you could see the set of his shoulders, that he was looking at you with his mouth open a little.
His mouth is open now, too, and it feels so good that you wonder where your married captain had learned how to take it like that, hot and warm and soft with just the slightest scrape of teeth when he pulls back. You have no idea how he managed to pick up this ability without you having found out, but his tongue and his mouth and the tickle of his hair against of your thigh, brush of ribbon over the inside of your knee -- it's slow and steady, and you have your legs pulled up a little. The temptation to push them over his shoulders, pull him down hard, the way that you normally like it, is almost overwhelming, but you don't. You don't think you could.
His mouth on you, warm and soft. The scrape of teeth every now and then that makes you groan. Tickle of hair. His tongue. Blood on your teeth because you've bitten at your lips until it hurts even to breathe on them because he doesn't go very deep, and there are moments where all you can think about are putting your legs over his shoulders, putting your hand on the base of his queue and jamming yourself all the way down until he --
You won't let yourself do that, though.
His mouth on the tip, fingers curled around the base. The tickle of his hair ribbon at your knee, burningly sensitive because the stump is only healthy, not healed. This ache that is in your stomach and chest and balls and what is left of your legs, and this time around, when you wonder how he learned to do this so slow and good, the answer pops into your head that maybe he just happens to be this way. Maybe in just the same way that your captain was born an excellent captain and navigator with a head for spherical geometry -- maybe he just happened to be good at taking men's pricks into his mouth.
The thought makes you buck halfway off the bed. You have the feeling that even naked like this, in the middle of an act of sodomy, you're blushing, and your captain has to wrestle you back down onto the bed. Hornblower puts a forearm over your hips, holds you there until the world starts to come back and you think that you can hear the spaces in between your heartbeats.
You open your eyes, break the learned, self-imposed habit of weeks by looking down at him, and he looks back at you. Those brown eyes. The dark hair. The face, looking more bony than you can remember it ever looking. A black ribbon, lopsided now, and you watch as he slowly, deliberately, eyes still fixed on your face, gets his breath back. Bends his mouth back down.
And works, at the same time, a finger into you.
The pleasure is, for a moment, so intense enough that you think that you're blind as well as a cripple.
...
Horatio came to visit you while you were in the Infirmary, but in all truth, you remember very little of that time. It was a haze of pain and stifling heat, of a creeping feeling that felt like fever in every corner of your body. You remember waking up to the hanging sheets that set you off from the rest of the infirmary -- sometimes, that was all you saw when you opened your eyes. Sometimes, there might be a servant bringing food on a tray.
Other times, you woke to blinding pain as one of the surgeons did something with your damned foot, and whenever that happened, you would throw yourself against the arms and hands holding you down and roar that you did not want to lose your foot. You did not care that it might gangrene. You did not care if there was a danger of fever. You should have died with your ship. You would never be able to go to sea again without both of your feet, and sometimes, the surgeon's assistants holding you down would meld into the Sutherland's loblolly boys. The white ceiling would swim and turn into wood, and you thought you could still hear the roar of the cannons and the shouts of men, and you were trying to count roars and see how close the Sutherland was to the enemy, how many guns ought to still be manned.
Still other times, you would wake, and it would be relatively quiet. Afternoon. Sunlight coming in and filtered through the sheets that set your bed off from the others, and your captain would be sitting by your side. They only had a low stool for him, which always distressed you to have him crouching for your sake, but whenever you woke, he would always help you to a sip of water. Try to get you to eat something, then ask if you needed anything.
"Tell the Dagoes that they can't have my foot, sir. Don't let them take it, sir."
"Bush -- " he said then, and he would look as though he had been wounded.
And he would lift the sheet, and you would look down, and you would realize that you were, were in fact, missing a foot. There was your thigh, then your knee, and a little ways beyond the knee, bandages. After that, nothing at all. Sheets. The edge of the bed.
You had not had a foot, it seemed, for days. Not since the initial moment on the Sutherland, and after your memory began to clear, you realized that this scene happened several times in almost exactly the same way. Your captain asking you if there was anything he could do. You asking him to help you keep your foot. The pain on his face and the lifting of the sheet.
All in all, you had to be shown the stump four times before you finally believed that it was not a fever dream of some sort.
...
Kingston, somewhat less than a decade before: you were on the ground, and he was standing over you. Both of you were disgracefully drunk, and he had his hand out to help you, but you looked at the hand, the shape of it, and then you looked at the face with the strange emotions hiding at the corners, the intensity with which Hornblower was looking at you, and you struggled to your feet ungracefully on your own.
You were drunk enough and the resultant effect was comic enough that Horatio took no offense, assumed that you failed to have noticed the invitation. He never tried again.
You took his hand in the Spanish prison, though, after the last time where he had to show you that you did not have a foot and a good part of your leg anymore. You took his hand, again, in the coach, and you held it as tightly as you dared. Both of these happened years later, but it was an acceptance. You remember very vividly the feel of his hand, cool and thin, more bone and will than actual flesh.
...
Afterwards, the captain gets up, walks across the room, and locks the door before coming back to bed. It is almost entirely dark in the room after that -- the candles have burned themselves out, so you hear rather than see the key turn in the lock. You also hear rather than see how he trips over first the book and then the armchair and then a third, unidentified item. Muttering mostly, a few curses dropped in between.
On your part, you curse when he crawls in and lets in some of the cold from the room. It is getting to be bitterly cold in the mornings, and once he slips in next to you, you smooth the blankets, make sure that they are tamped down tightly and will hold the heat.
While you do this, he curls up behind you so that his lips lay against your shoulder and his arm trails down across your ribs. When you lie down, his fingers brush one of the scars you had acquired on the Renown all those years ago. He remarks upon it; you say that it did not hurt. He asks whether you ever thought of the Renown, and you say that you ran across it on a trip to the Azores a few years back.
Eventually, his breathing grows regular, and so does yours. The hand that had been at your stomach settles on your hip, which is more comfortable for you because the scar did, in fact, hurt when touched lightly, as he had been doing, and you had, indeed, loved him as an officer before. Respected him deeply, stood by him at his wedding, come to his house to tell him that the treasure fleet was not going to be dished out as prize money, tried to console him for the death of his children. You loved him for being a captain, for being better than you were. He had always been better than you.
And now, the two of you fall asleep that way that night, curled around each other. Both of you dream, in your own ways, of the Sutherland.
Both of you remember the days when you had, in any sense of the word, been free.
It is a great doctor for sore hearts and sore heads, too, your ship's routine.
Joseph Conrad, "The Mirror of the Sea"
Your captain was reading a history about the French navy to you.
He wanted to improve his French, and he had a notion, too, that he could teach you the language. You were quite sure that you could not, in fact, learn, and your eyes keep flicking over to the clothes laid out by the fireplace. Trousers. Shirt. A pair of socks. One shoe. The fire had been banked down for the night, and the clothes were drawn close enough to the embers so that they would not be bitterly cold in the morning, but not so close that they might spark and catch on fire.
The house had gone to bed for the night, and your captain was doing you such a favor by keeping you company. You knew that, and it is embarrassing to think of it now. It had been embarassing, then, too, but you were tired, still a little dizzy and very weak. Your eyes kept moving back to the clothes by the fireplace, and eventually, Hornblower asked you about something that he had just read aloud -- a technical question that he wanted your opinion about.
He looked at you; you had trouble keeping your face appropriately still, more difficulty getting the words out, and he colored up, and his face took on a pained expression.
He had, after all, been watching you watch the things. He had been sitting in a chair by your bed, reading to you while your mind was elsewhere, and the awkwardness of the whole situation struck him very strongly. Now, he put away the book and started to stand up, put the book, make to leave. You tried to say something -- you were full of embarrassment yourself -- but the words wouldn't come out, and you could not stand the way that he was making to do. You had no idea what you could do, so when he leaned forward a little because he was trying to get out of the room without looking at you again or the pile of clothes with the single shoe and this positivley required contortions since the chair was so close to the bed and he had been propping his feet up against the edge of the bed, you did the only thing you could think of.
His face was turned away, but very near yours.
You kissed him.
...
You remember when you met Hornblower. Tall. Skinny. Dark eyes, bony face, a uniform that looked like it had been put on in the dark and not readjusted because the knots at the throat were professional enough, but they were a little crooked. The coat was not worn straight across the shoulders; the hat was well cared for, but it was old, and it was at a something of an angle, too, because the wind would push it in a direction, and he would forget to push it back the other way.
Eyes. Hungriness. The fact that you distrusted him because it seemed like he was playacting at being so fierce in the crew, then acting again, in a different way, when he saw that you looked him in the eye.
You had not wanted to like him, but by the end of his time on the Renown, it had been impossible. You knew that he was one of the very best officers you had ever worked with, and even now, you are fairly sure that he is the best captain that you have ever served or will have the privilege of serving.
...
When you kissed him, his mouth was slack. He was surprised. You felt him snort, let out a breath, and for a moment, you did not know what was going to happen, but then your captain put his hands behind your head and started to kiss you back. You had kissed him with your mouth closed, but he pressed against you with his tongue until you opened your mouth. After that, he took your face in his hands, held you still while he bit at lips, pulled your tongue into his mouth. When you shivered, he put his arms around you, and when he broke away to breathe, you pulled him into bed on top of you.
Before your back was against the sheets again, he had shoved your nightgown up to your stomach, so that it was the cloth of his trousers against your bare skin. He moved his hips, and you let out a noise that made him freeze.
The light of the fire was mostly gone. Horatio had been reading by a pair of candles on the table by the side of your bed, and at the angle they were set, his eyes were in shadow, and the only clear thing were spots of red on his cheeks. He made as if to pull away from you.
"Bush -- are you -- "
For an answer, you hooked your fingers around the waist of his trousers and tugged.
...
You remember, too, Horatio getting married. You had stood by him for it, after all. Suggested a church where many officers got married, helped him dress the morning before because the steward was aboard ship and the two of you were in the attic. After all, he ought not look like he dressed in the dark on the day that he was married. Two days before, you stepped in to help him haggle at the jeweler's for the ring. The morning of, you arranged the double rank of seamen with cutlasses, the horseless post-chaise.
You handed him the ring at the altar, and as you did so, you remember thinking to yourself, again, that Maria was dumpy, plain, old to be marrying for the first time. Her mother had a voice that could have put her on the gun deck, and in addition to the memory of the wedding, you remember that scene by the door the night that he had won forty-five pounds playing whist in the Long Rooms.
The mother was a drunk, but the daughter was devoted to him, and even then, you knew your captain well enough to know how much that counted with him even if he would never admit it.
It might not have been the most important thing, but it was, nevertheless, deeply, deeply important. They were happy together; your captain had loved her, and you suspect that he loved her still, even after Barbara, that he thought of her at all in that terrible, quiet period when he had run up the tri-color and waited for the French to come take possession of his ship.
The noise of the boarding attempt had been infinitely preferable. You even wanted the men who were being or had been amputated to start screaming again -- not that low, soft moaning they were doing, but honest screaming to drown out the sound of your ship being surrendered.
There is a great deal of pain involved in thinking about the Sutherland these days, and you know that you have only the faintest notion of what your captain must have endured as he stood on deck and waited to surrender his sword.
...
Hornblower had, in fact, once tried something with you.
He wasn't your captain then, of course. The two of you were lieutenants together in Kingston, and you were drunker than you had ever been in your life, and so, you suspct, was Horatio. You had been thrown out of the gambling establishment drunkenness and rowdiness -- you'd tried to fight someone or something, so you were tossed out. Horatio had followed you out.
Shadows. Light from the windows of the gambling room, Horatio coming down the steps, tall and cool even when drunk, and you had cobblestones under your back. He stopped, hat under hand, and studied you -- you weren't able to see much of his face, but you could see the set of his shoulders, that he was looking at you with his mouth open a little.
His mouth is open now, too, and it feels so good that you wonder where your married captain had learned how to take it like that, hot and warm and soft with just the slightest scrape of teeth when he pulls back. You have no idea how he managed to pick up this ability without you having found out, but his tongue and his mouth and the tickle of his hair against of your thigh, brush of ribbon over the inside of your knee -- it's slow and steady, and you have your legs pulled up a little. The temptation to push them over his shoulders, pull him down hard, the way that you normally like it, is almost overwhelming, but you don't. You don't think you could.
His mouth on you, warm and soft. The scrape of teeth every now and then that makes you groan. Tickle of hair. His tongue. Blood on your teeth because you've bitten at your lips until it hurts even to breathe on them because he doesn't go very deep, and there are moments where all you can think about are putting your legs over his shoulders, putting your hand on the base of his queue and jamming yourself all the way down until he --
You won't let yourself do that, though.
His mouth on the tip, fingers curled around the base. The tickle of his hair ribbon at your knee, burningly sensitive because the stump is only healthy, not healed. This ache that is in your stomach and chest and balls and what is left of your legs, and this time around, when you wonder how he learned to do this so slow and good, the answer pops into your head that maybe he just happens to be this way. Maybe in just the same way that your captain was born an excellent captain and navigator with a head for spherical geometry -- maybe he just happened to be good at taking men's pricks into his mouth.
The thought makes you buck halfway off the bed. You have the feeling that even naked like this, in the middle of an act of sodomy, you're blushing, and your captain has to wrestle you back down onto the bed. Hornblower puts a forearm over your hips, holds you there until the world starts to come back and you think that you can hear the spaces in between your heartbeats.
You open your eyes, break the learned, self-imposed habit of weeks by looking down at him, and he looks back at you. Those brown eyes. The dark hair. The face, looking more bony than you can remember it ever looking. A black ribbon, lopsided now, and you watch as he slowly, deliberately, eyes still fixed on your face, gets his breath back. Bends his mouth back down.
And works, at the same time, a finger into you.
The pleasure is, for a moment, so intense enough that you think that you're blind as well as a cripple.
...
Horatio came to visit you while you were in the Infirmary, but in all truth, you remember very little of that time. It was a haze of pain and stifling heat, of a creeping feeling that felt like fever in every corner of your body. You remember waking up to the hanging sheets that set you off from the rest of the infirmary -- sometimes, that was all you saw when you opened your eyes. Sometimes, there might be a servant bringing food on a tray.
Other times, you woke to blinding pain as one of the surgeons did something with your damned foot, and whenever that happened, you would throw yourself against the arms and hands holding you down and roar that you did not want to lose your foot. You did not care that it might gangrene. You did not care if there was a danger of fever. You should have died with your ship. You would never be able to go to sea again without both of your feet, and sometimes, the surgeon's assistants holding you down would meld into the Sutherland's loblolly boys. The white ceiling would swim and turn into wood, and you thought you could still hear the roar of the cannons and the shouts of men, and you were trying to count roars and see how close the Sutherland was to the enemy, how many guns ought to still be manned.
Still other times, you would wake, and it would be relatively quiet. Afternoon. Sunlight coming in and filtered through the sheets that set your bed off from the others, and your captain would be sitting by your side. They only had a low stool for him, which always distressed you to have him crouching for your sake, but whenever you woke, he would always help you to a sip of water. Try to get you to eat something, then ask if you needed anything.
"Tell the Dagoes that they can't have my foot, sir. Don't let them take it, sir."
"Bush -- " he said then, and he would look as though he had been wounded.
And he would lift the sheet, and you would look down, and you would realize that you were, were in fact, missing a foot. There was your thigh, then your knee, and a little ways beyond the knee, bandages. After that, nothing at all. Sheets. The edge of the bed.
You had not had a foot, it seemed, for days. Not since the initial moment on the Sutherland, and after your memory began to clear, you realized that this scene happened several times in almost exactly the same way. Your captain asking you if there was anything he could do. You asking him to help you keep your foot. The pain on his face and the lifting of the sheet.
All in all, you had to be shown the stump four times before you finally believed that it was not a fever dream of some sort.
...
Kingston, somewhat less than a decade before: you were on the ground, and he was standing over you. Both of you were disgracefully drunk, and he had his hand out to help you, but you looked at the hand, the shape of it, and then you looked at the face with the strange emotions hiding at the corners, the intensity with which Hornblower was looking at you, and you struggled to your feet ungracefully on your own.
You were drunk enough and the resultant effect was comic enough that Horatio took no offense, assumed that you failed to have noticed the invitation. He never tried again.
You took his hand in the Spanish prison, though, after the last time where he had to show you that you did not have a foot and a good part of your leg anymore. You took his hand, again, in the coach, and you held it as tightly as you dared. Both of these happened years later, but it was an acceptance. You remember very vividly the feel of his hand, cool and thin, more bone and will than actual flesh.
...
Afterwards, the captain gets up, walks across the room, and locks the door before coming back to bed. It is almost entirely dark in the room after that -- the candles have burned themselves out, so you hear rather than see the key turn in the lock. You also hear rather than see how he trips over first the book and then the armchair and then a third, unidentified item. Muttering mostly, a few curses dropped in between.
On your part, you curse when he crawls in and lets in some of the cold from the room. It is getting to be bitterly cold in the mornings, and once he slips in next to you, you smooth the blankets, make sure that they are tamped down tightly and will hold the heat.
While you do this, he curls up behind you so that his lips lay against your shoulder and his arm trails down across your ribs. When you lie down, his fingers brush one of the scars you had acquired on the Renown all those years ago. He remarks upon it; you say that it did not hurt. He asks whether you ever thought of the Renown, and you say that you ran across it on a trip to the Azores a few years back.
Eventually, his breathing grows regular, and so does yours. The hand that had been at your stomach settles on your hip, which is more comfortable for you because the scar did, in fact, hurt when touched lightly, as he had been doing, and you had, indeed, loved him as an officer before. Respected him deeply, stood by him at his wedding, come to his house to tell him that the treasure fleet was not going to be dished out as prize money, tried to console him for the death of his children. You loved him for being a captain, for being better than you were. He had always been better than you.
And now, the two of you fall asleep that way that night, curled around each other. Both of you dream, in your own ways, of the Sutherland.
Both of you remember the days when you had, in any sense of the word, been free.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-08 10:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-10 12:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-08 11:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-09 01:27 am (UTC)You seem to like second person in your rejected fics.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-10 12:36 am (UTC)*poke the fic, wonders if she'll ever be able to get it the way she wants*
Thanks for reading, yo.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-09 02:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-10 12:58 am (UTC)I'm really glad you liked this, though. *draws hearts around Bush and Horry and their winter of Love on Ice*
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-09 03:15 am (UTC)Your fic dumps are more than any finished fics of mine could ever hope to be.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-10 05:10 am (UTC)CAN'T DO IT. WILL NEVER HAPPEN. I HAVE BEEN TRYING FOR MY ENTIRE WRITING LIFE, AND IT STILL HAS YET TO HAPPEN.
*smoothes Horatio's poor, befuzzled brow in your icon*
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-10 05:32 am (UTC)*ahem*
You totally didn't just see that, mm'kay?
IF THIS MEANS MORE HAND PORN :D
Date: 2006-02-10 05:36 am (UTC)Dude, I think the language in the handporn was actually really very good. :> And I've tried, believe me, to do the narration thing? But I just can't get it to work. I think of actions as being all imbued with emotion and shit, but the only way I can figure out how to express it is by going back in time and explaining the buildup and throwing in a section break and here, have some extraneous adjectives and and and.
A bit reading Forester and how he manages to pack so much emotion into a straight narrative is in order, I suspect.
Re: IF THIS MEANS MORE HAND PORN :D
Date: 2006-02-10 05:57 am (UTC)I think you can. I don't think every action or motion has to be imbued with emotion. You help set that up early in the story, or by the way the characters DO the action, what they are thinking while it happens, etc.
Um, I really have no idea about what I'm saying. Hee.
:( :( but horry's fingers will be all lonely.
Date: 2006-02-10 06:03 am (UTC)We'll see. I'm kind of a giant emo puppy, but as soon as this break from fic-writing is over, I've got a monster of a Live Kennedy Unvierse project that I'm kind of itching to try, and if it goes over the way that I want it to, there'll be a sea battle where I try to Be Like CSF or something.
... I am watching the worst movie that I have ever seen in my entire life solely because it features Paul McGann running around with Bush-type curls and while wearing a wifebeater. I cannot believe how horrific it is, and yet, I can neither stop watching or turn off the audio.
Our icons are kinda twins!
Date: 2006-02-10 06:10 am (UTC)I'm not much into the LKU, mainly because I'm such a sap and an emo girl at heart. I just love to rip my heart out over Kennedy OMG SACRIFICING HIMSELF FOR HIS BOYFRIEND. *weeps bitter tears*
...eek. That movie does look horrible. Can't say I've heard of it. But almost any film is worth the McGann pretty. You've seen the Three Musketeers, right? There's nothing I love more than fop!McGann. And to think I used to watch that film as a wide-eyed innocent of 8, before the wonderful world of Hornblower fandom evolved itself.
dhgkj oh jussac. :/
Date: 2006-02-10 06:29 am (UTC)Which is totally fine, if that's what the author wants, but it doesn't crank my gear or answer my burning, personal question of whether Kennedy could be expected to step directly into Bush's shoes for Atropos - Ship of the Line - Flying Colors - Commodore - Lord Hornblower. Would have taken his own path? How would he deal with Captain Hornblower's crazy? Would the creazy develop? And I can't imagine that he'd take to living in Hornblower's shadow nearly as well as Bush, who seems to believe, very deeply, in the notion of a natural pecking order. What sort of story do you get, then?
So yeah.
Re: dhgkj oh jussac. :/
Date: 2006-02-11 03:42 am (UTC)Bingo. And yes, if that is the authorial intent and makes one and all happy with their work, then I say go for it, but I can't help but see those sort of stories as anything but a fix-it.
The other reason I'm not real fond of LKU's is that I feel it cheats the idea of the war itself because in most cases, no other real question is being asked or answered. It turns the movieverse world into the old Star Trek. The only people who die and pay any price at all are the red-shirted guys with no name who aren't the pretty and the loved.
I'm all for main characters taking the plunge especially in this scenario of the Napoleonic War which was basically a generational meat-grinder. It makes the point about cost and loss. And it makes it pretty damn well.
Then again I'm a bit of a ghoul. *g*
Re: dhgkj oh jussac. :/
Date: 2006-02-11 04:43 am (UTC)No, really? REALLY? I WOULDN'T HAVE GUESSED THAT AT ALL FROM YOUR ICON.
And you're right, of course. It does take away a lot of the sting and the "this shit is for real" if Archie survives, particuarly after the super-amazing coincidental rescue and superhero bits from earlier in the series. However, there's so much grief and death in the later HH books that I can buy the notion of Horatio having had a little bit of luck early on -- the substitute son that pretty much dies in Horatio's arms, the substitute Bush who gets blown to smithereens, BUSH -- that I can deal with a little bit of grief-avoidance early on.
The movies don't deal with that nearly as much, though Hammond & Hammond upset a good bit, but I stick my theory that the movies are the daydreams of an old retired Admiral's version trying to make his sad life happier.
Re: dhgkj oh jussac. :/
Date: 2006-02-11 04:58 am (UTC)super-amazing coincidental rescue and superhero bits
This is probably why I don't watch genre TV. Or at least a large part of it. When week after week the heroes always win in an ZOMG fashion, and you KNOW that it's going to happen week and after week because they are ZOMG the heroes
and are also under contract for a specified run, I just can't take any of the plot stuff seriously enough to suspend my disbelief when a crisis arises. Eh. Whatever. XDAnd I might actually be around for at least part of the weekend kickoff of Midshipman Hornblower discussion because we are about to be nailed with a hefty bit of snow. Which also means I should get off LJ and go to bed as tomorrow will be tall ship + much snow = HOLY SHIT. It will be like reenacting "Duty". I swear I better find Mr. Bush on the quarterdeck. XD
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-10 04:09 am (UTC)The amputation section really stands out for me because well ... AMPUTATION FIC ... and the whole fever dream part of it. And the phantom pain and the sort of one thought that keeps bleeding through is that he should be on the Sutherland to die with his ship. Bush and his harem of wooden women.
I like the second person especially in the smut scenes regardless of why you are writing it that way. :)
And of course bringing the bookverse dirty is a public service. ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-10 05:18 am (UTC)And yeah. I'm really glad that you liked the amputation scene and the porn scene -- out of the whole damn story, those were the two bits that I liked best and were what kept me from trashing the whole thing into the deep, deep sixes. I couldn't get Bush and his phantom limb out of my head.
Poor Bush. I really do want fic that focuses on him during that period. The weeks of boredom, the awkwardness of being fitted out for a foot, the joy of building the boat, the nights he goes and sits alone and looks at it after he's done enduring whist. Fiddles with some small detail while singing under his breath and Hornblower stands outside in the cold and watches.
<333 Thank you for all the kind words, man. Seriously.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-10 05:40 am (UTC)Like some cracked out version of Pygmalion and Galatea. XD
And he does sing under his breath. He just does.
and Hornblower stands outside in the cold and watches.
Good old Hornblower.
pervingwatching his boyfriend from a distance.hornblower the voyeur.
Date: 2006-02-10 05:49 am (UTC)I can imagine Bush and Brown working on the boat together during the day -- one on each side -- and Brown starts singing a bit. It's a song that Bush knows, of course, but he doesn't join in because it would be undignified to sing with the ratings, even if it is only Brown and Brown has seen him in waaaaay more undignified situations, but yeah. Him, later at night, alone with the boat and singing for him and the boat.
Maybe not even a sea shanty or whatever. One of those old English ballads about lasses and love, you know? The only poetry that he knows.