Work Text:
At last, he began again:
My dear Malcolm—Do not think for a moment that the tardiness of my correspondence in any way reflects the affection and esteem in which I hold you. As ever, you are my dearest friend, and should my sentiments still be of any concern to you, there is no one for whom I am fonder—
Only now that wasn’t quite true, John thought, dropping his pen back in the inkwell once more.
Sinking in his seat, he rubbed a hand over his face as the other searched blindly for the decanter of whisky. He poured himself another glass and brought it to his chest, cradling it close like a babe. Staring down at the letter, his own gentle falsehoods bleeding from the page, he found himself no longer able to look at it.
He stood abruptly and sank an inch of his whisky.
It was as he was standing there, one hand tight around the cut glass, the other clawing through his hair, that a knock came at his door. A moment later, Edward stepped through with his usual dither. He dropped both of his hands to his sides, motionless as a child caught misbehaving.
“I’m going to take a walk,” Edward told him.
John turned his head to the window. “At such an hour?” he said, noticing it dark outside, though not necessarily late. Winter had brought the nights in early. “Aren’t you tired?”
It was a silly question. Edward seemed in a constant state of fatigue these days, eyes tired and moving slow. It was as if the air around him had become thicker than treacle, or he were moving in a dream. For so he giveth his beloved sleep, John often recalled, willing him to sleep or slumber.
“As ever,” he said, a small smile on his face. “Join me?”
John’s lips, stinging wet with whisky still, twitched around an answer. His eyes dropped to his desk, to the letter sat upon it. Edward’s followed.
“If—”
“Yes, I think I will,” he said in a hurry, rubbing the back of his wrist over his forehead to disturb the sweat that sat there. He set his glass down atop the letter. “A little fresh air will do me good.”
Edward nodded, pleased beneath his features.
They parted momentarily, brushing shoulder-to-shoulder in the doorway, so John might find his coat and shoes. Unsteady on his feet, John braced himself with a hand on the wall as he moved, paying little care as he shoved on his boots and pulled down his coat from its hook. Edward’s own jacket, usually in its place beside his, was already on his back.
Despite the winter chill that he knew awaited them, he forewent any gloves, no longer able to stand the feel of the material between his fingers. Sometimes, when he least expected it, they would ache as though severed at the knuckle. He looked down at them, welted and scarred, and flexed them. His hands were trembling.
“John?”
Turning, John found Edward stood by the door with his arm extended towards him, his scarf neatly held out in offering.
“Thank you,” he said, taking it with an inadvertent graze of Edward’s hand.
It was dark, the moon hidden behind the clouds, but by such a late hour the lamplighters had lit a dim path through the streets of Edinburgh. John huddled further into his scarf as he stepped from the townhouse stairs onto the pavement, the feel of cobblestone a new joy underfoot. I never want to feel ice under my boots again, he remembered Edward saying, a chill rising through his feet with the memory.
It had been the land that troubled John.
“Shall we?”
John sucked on his teeth, nodding. He put his arm through Edward’s and together they made their way down Dublin Street.
Plastered to his side as he was, John gave himself over to the simple pleasure of Edward’s body heat. Do you remember, he wanted to ask, how it had felt before? Like we may burn together? Sweltering in tents, under sheets, only to freeze again when they left. He had wanted to die like that; bleeding and toothless and starving, but not cold, not alone.
He had made peace with that, and no fire or brimstone had rained upon him yet.
They turned onto York Place, heading towards St. Paul’s. In the distance, John could just about make out the crenelated turrets rising into the night air, a lick of light crawling up their sides. He reached across himself to place his other hand on Edward’s forearm, holding him closer as they passed it.
“I received a letter from the Admiralty this morning,” Edward said suddenly. “About a commission to the West Indies.”
John squeezed down harder on Edward’s arm.
Neither of them looked at each other.
“With view to a promotion, I would hope,” John said, keeping his voice level. He knew, logically, that Edward could not stay here, on half-pay, forever. And yet he had let himself think it, dream it, voice it aloud under the shroud of the finest whisky. God, he had prayed for it. “Captain Little. It would suit you well.”
“You needn’t pretend to be pleased, John,” Edward said.
And he was not pleased, but it mattered little what he thought, what he wanted. He knew, perhaps more so than anyone, what it meant to be in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, and what it took from you, what hell it gave you, what wretched places it sent you. But, he thought, was it not Peter that Jesus had told, one day, when he was old, that he would stretch out his hands and be led somewhere he did not want to go?
Was that not His will and glory?
They turned down Leith Street, heading south towards Princes Street. John felt his feet slow. Distantly, he could hear the puff and clang of the late-night locomotives crawling through Edinburgh. If he closed his eyes, if he rested his head, it was almost like he—like he was back on Terror and—
“John,” Edward said again. They had stopped and stepped apart. “I mean it.”
John looked down. Though their arms no longer linked, their fingers had become entwined. Despite the swathe of private darkness, he felt his fingers twitch in anxious retreat, but they did not move. Instead, he held on tighter, like he intended to crush the very bones of him under his hand.
“Forgive my selfishness then,” he said quietly.
With that, Edward raised their hands and kissed the backs of his knuckles free of their tension.
It was on their way back, joined at the arm again, that John contemplated love. They moved like old sweethearts, aged in ice beyond their years, like the steps they took had been thought and measured over time. But we have had no time, John thought with a strange petulance, and not least time enough that my eyes have been open.
For it, deep down, he knew he had only himself to blame.
*
“You’ll have to leave soon,” John said, giving the parlour fire a prod with the poker. “If you are to make Portsmouth in good time, I mean to say.”
“Aye,” he said, “I will.”
Before the fireplace, John placed his hands on the mantle, careful not to touch the gaudy ornaments Mary had sent upon finding his new home devoid of all character. You need not live like this house is father’s, she had said. He is quite unlikely to walk through that door. Only he might, John had thought, but did not say. He hardly thought death excuse enough to stop his father’s interference.
Above the mantle was a mirror. In it, John watched Edward’s reflection shift to sit forward on the settee, his hands clasped between his knees. A curl of dark hair covered his face. John so desperately wanted to push it back, so he did.
Stepping from the mantle, he turned and crossed the short distance that separated them. He sat close, brushing the side of Edward’s body all the way down as he moved. Never so brave in the act, there was a gentle shake to his fingers as he reached over to tilt Edward’s chin up towards him. He rubbed his thumb over the stubble there, accidentally catching the damp inner edge of his lower lip.
His other hand, slightly clumsier, pushed a strand of hair back behind his ear.
“They’ll have to fair tidy me up,” Edward said.
John suppressed a noise of disagreement at the mere thought. He had, quite selfishly, become rather fond of the way his fingers could disappear in the locks of Edward’s hair. It was as if they had finally found a place to settle.
Edward’s own hand, it seemed, had found that place on the soft inner edge of John’s thigh. Still, after all this time, he gave a small jump when he felt his fingers curl into his flesh.
Weak, he thought, but warm under his touch.
There was a smile on Edward’s face, his eyes creased in weary joy. John slid his hand up his cheek, tracing the dark line beneath his eye with his thumb. Though he could never comprehend it, he knew where he went when he slept—not a place, exactly, but a moment of immense burden that could never be reconciled. Bringing their foreheads together, John thought, if I cannot go there with you, you can stay here with me.
He thought, God only knows what I would do without you.
“You’ll write, won’t you?” Edward asked, breath fanning warm and damp over his cheek. “You’ll write to me?”
For a moment, John’s mind flickered back to the letter sitting in his study. He wondered, if they should be parted, if Edward’s patience with him would be as much a blessing as Malcolm’s had been, or if time and life and distance would so severe them from each other’s concerns. Oddly, for reasons quite unknown to him, he doubted it very much.
“Of course,” he said, “till there’s no paper or ink left.”
Edward laughed, showing his teeth.
“And even so, with all your words I shall still be wanting for them in your voice,” he said. “Such is the cruelty of life, I suppose; not having all that we want.”
But it would all one day be returned us, John thought, in a more glorious place than this. This, however, was not something he thought Edward was in particular want of hearing, so he pressed a small kiss to the edge of his mouth instead. And then again, with his usual shake of timidity, to his lips.
It was as he was going to kiss him a third time that he found his head turned down, lips meeting the small stretch of skin above Edward’s shirt collar. There John was held, a hand cradling his skull, nose pressed to the curve of his neck. It was like this he was embraced and pushed back against the settee by the momentum of Edward’s body—a warm, eager weight on top of him.
Fully clothed, they touched and groped at each other in any which way they could, the sweat against their skin an irritant. John touched the back of Edward’s neck where his hair had grown damp, pushing his hand up through it, feeling no ache. He guided his face like Edward had done, keening when the wet heat of Edward’s mouth settled over his collarbone.
Then, like a storm quickly passing, their movements slowed to a calm. Edward nuzzled lazily against his throat. John drew languid shapes on his back. Their legs came together in a half-hearted tangle, thighs trapped between thighs.
“I will write too, of course,” Edward said, voice carrying over his chest.
“Of nicer weather,” John supplied, imagination skipping off to Edward in his uniform, on deck, someplace under the sun. What a rare sight he would be, where that old grief, terror and burden could no longer touch him in such magnificent light. “And books you’ve read.”
“I shall bore you with it all,” he said, like he really thought it possible for John to grow indifferent to his every thought and opinion, or that the mere act of writing him was not already enough. In truth, he would read an encyclopaedia where it written in Edward’s indecipherable hand. “If that should please you.”
Not quite in the business of wanting, John gave a dismissive flap of his hands against Edward’s back.
With an errant elbow to his side, Edward moved himself up John’s body so that his face came hovering over his. For a moment, it seemed all there was in John’s little world. His finger traced over his shoulders, like one side of the map to another. And how well it could be. They had walked so far on land and ice that no distance now seemed insurmountable.
John bracketed Edward’s face with his forearms, his hips with his knees.
“And you’ll pray for me, won’t you?” Edward asked.
“Each night,” he said, though he trusted well in God’s kindness in keeping him safe on his wanderings. There was little else in this world of which he was more certain. “I already do.”