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The first thing Edward registers isn’t warmth. It’s not even the second thing, or the third. By the time he makes it through those— light, pain, thirst, in that order— he’s all but forgotten that warmth was a thing to feel at all.
He’d thought a lot about it, sure, out there underneath the summer-constant glow of the Arctic sun, huddled up close against Henry to exchange what they’d called body heat, even though there was never any heat to go around, only a bitter and bony escape from the cold. Warmth. He hardly remembers what it feels like, after so many months. Add it to the rest of the pile— greenery, birdsong, proper meat. Tie it up with a nice little bow, a burlap package with a tag labeled things you’ll never have again, Edward Little. Stop dreaming.
Perhaps it’s because of this that when the warmth does come, it takes so long for Edward to recognize it for what it is.
He’s been moved, he knows that much. He tries to open his eyes, but it hurts too much to pull them apart, the lids feeling as though they’ll rip and tear away from themselves if he works the muscles any harder. That’s alright, though. He doesn’t need to see to know he’s no longer where he fell asleep. The voices told him so— Edward Little, Frank’s man, come on, let’s get you on the sled, Christ, does anyone have a spare coat, furs, anything— but the voices have told him lots of things lately, and very few of them have been true.
Still, it’s hard to pretend that the rocky jostle of the shale underneath him is a figment of his imagination. Edward doesn’t tend to dream up anything so uncomfortable as this. Perhaps they’re moving again. Perhaps Henry has found the strength to pull him along, after all.
Henry.
No, Henry wouldn’t pull him along— Edward knows that, knows it maybe better than anyone on this desolate wasteland of an island. Not that there’s anyone left, not really. It’s been just Edward and Henry, just them for so long now.
Henry wouldn’t pull him. Henry would leave him—
No, that’s not right. Henry has left him. Henry left him just last night, put one final chain through the skin of his numb face without a single word, and then shut the tent flap behind him and walked off into the sunlit Arctic night. Edward’s not stupid. He’s not a dog. He knows when he’s been abandoned.
Henry’s always been rather good at that, it was only a matter of time.
The board underneath his back rattles, jostling his head to the side— the chains catch on the wood, pulling uncomfortably at his skin. Ah. There’s the pain again, reminding him that he’s not dead yet.
—not much further, the voice is saying. It’s unfamiliar, hard for Edward to place, which is new— he knows his men, hears them speak to him in weak wails over the length of the camp every night, calling out from where their bodies are piled in their tents. Sleeptalking, he supposes. Lord knows sailors do enough of it. Hang in there, sir.
Sir— that’s a nice one. No one’s called Edward sir in a long time. Certainly Henry never called him sir, aside from the one instance in the spirit room back on Erebus, when Edward had come in at Francis’ request and found him there, halfway into his cups with a deep red flush down his pretty, infuriating face. With all due respect, Henry had spit, his words thick and slurred from the gin on his tongue, get fucked, sir.
It had been funny then, if somewhat irritating— a reminder that he did technically outrank Henry, though only by the barest of margins. Not that that had stopped Henry from undercutting his authority. Not that Edward ever acted the part, anyway.
A hand touches his face, and it is cold.
Cold, Edward realizes, which means that he must be warm. Nothing feels cold when the ice in your bones is thick enough to freeze you from the inside out, but the fingers on his cheeks are frigid and skeletal, tugging at the icy chains there, and so Edward Little is warm. Thick and heavy as molasses, he unpicks the tendrils of his consciousness from the tight ball they’ve made of themselves, extends them out to the forgotten extremities of his limbs, catalogues the sensation.
This is what it’s like, he thinks. A prickling along his skin, fingers and toes feeling as though he’s had a hundred thousand slivers of glass embedded into them, but feeling all the same.
The voices say something else that Edward can’t quite catch, the words carried away in the blistering howl of wind around them, inaudible over the sound of wood dragging along the shale. The fingers on his face catch on the chain— Henry’s chain— one last time, before disappearing altogether.
Part of him wants to reach out, to pull them back and warm them against his skin, to follow the thin and emaciated lines of the fingers up the length of the bony arm, to press his own palms to whatever face he can find there.
But it’s cold, and Edward is tired, and he has not moved in so long— perhaps, he thinks, he’s forgotten how to. His fingers twitch once, palm turning upwards and rubbing up against what feels like the velvet-soft weight of a pelt atop him. There are no animals nearby, save for the bear, but Edward’s not fool enough to believe he’s wearing it as a blanket. Perhaps this, too, is the kindness of his addled mind— the tent’s collapsed atop him, most likely, the canvas of it brushing up against his skin.
But that wouldn’t explain the movement. That wouldn’t explain the wood under his back. That wouldn’t explain the hand on his face, gentle and familiar despite how gaunt and cold it had been.
Henry left him. There is no one now to caress the thin hollows of his cheeks.
Nearly there, sir, says the voice. D’you suppose Cook’s got the pot space to heat a little bathwater, says another. Hold fast, Edward, says a third.
Edward turns his hand back over, palm flat against the wooden board beneath him, feeling the vibrations of the shale overturned as he’s dragged across it.
He sleeps.
The next time Edward wakes, he feels as though he’s floating.
Everything aches, from his neck to his hips to the small joints between his fingers and toes, which feel like he’s had pins pushed straight through each one of them. It’s dark— which is strange, because it’s never dark under the Arctic sun, not even with a layer of canvas above and his face hidden beside Henry’s under their shared pile of cobbled-together blankets and coats. With a start, Edward realizes he’s still got his eyes closed. Gingerly, he opens them— his eyelids no longer feel as though they’re about to tear when he tries to blink, which is perhaps a good thing.
It’s still dark, though.
There’s a shape above him, something brown and blue and blurry, and Edward shifts himself in an attempt to face it. The sound of splashing water reaches his ears, and then a voice.
Easy, Lieutenant, it says, soft and soothing and unfamiliar. Edward blinks again, the hazy shape above him coalescing into the figure of a man. It’s not one of his men— Edward knows his men, knows them like the back of his hand, knows them the way he knows every single link in every chain strung through his face. This man, this stranger above him with soft hands and a soft voice and a soft smile on his face, is not one of Edward’s men.
Edward opens his mouth to speak, or tries to— his lips won’t seem to pry themselves apart from each other, the muscles in his jaw won’t obey him.
Unsurprising. Nothing seems to obey him anymore, if ever it did.
The man above him is still speaking, Edward can see it in the movement of his lips and teeth, full and soft and unblemished by cold or thirst or sickness. He licks his own, tongue like sandpaper against the cracked and bloody line of his mouth. He doesn’t understand a word.
It would be so easy to relax— he aches, but whatever bed he’s been placed in is a softer one than any he’s known. He closes his eyes again, lets the darkness lapse into more darkness, sinks down lower. Something warm covers his mouth, then his nose, and the next breath he tries to pull in burns like fire.
Then— water again, that splashing, hands firm around his shoulders pulling him upwards. Edward coughs, pulls in a ragged inhale that catches on something wet and painful in his airways.
—must try to stay awake, Lieutenant, the voice is saying. Edward doesn’t much like that— he’d rather be asleep. He’s so good at being asleep these days, curled up in the tent with Henry pressed against his side, eyes shut against the light and the cold and the faces of the dead men scattered around them like autumn leaves.
There’s no Henry, though. Not anymore— this man is not Henry, and he will not let Edward sleep, will not lie down hard and bony beside him or pull Edward’s hand across his chest so Edward can feel him breathe.
Henry, he tries to say, but the only sound that escapes him is a dry, rasping wheeze. The hands pull him up, further, and oh— suddenly he’s cold, colder than he’s felt in a long time, before a soft cloth is pulled tight around his body.
He’s naked, he realizes. He’s naked and his eyes are still closed.
Opening them again, Edward blinks the sleep-fog from his vision and stares down— not at a bed, like he’d thought, but at a tub full of water, steaming and gray with filth. The strange man in front of him tugs the cloth tighter around his shoulders, rubs at him with it until the warmth returns to his limbs.
Edward opens his mouth, tries to force his tongue to unstick itself from his palate. He can’t remember the last time he spoke— days, almost certainly. Perhaps weeks. There was no room for words between himself and Henry, not with how infinitesimally close they’d held each other. Words took energy, and energy took food, and they’d had none of that, by the end.
Henry, he tries to say again, but all he manages to do is part his lips before the man in front of him brings a glass to his mouth. Water, cool and clear, fills his mouth, overflowing in rivulets down the side of his face before he remembers that he must open his throat in order to drink. He coughs as he finishes, the force of it painful. His chest is wet, and cold again. The man brings the cloth to it, dabs away the moisture.
This time, when Edward tries to will his body into submission, his throat makes a sound— hoarse, cracking at first, and then stronger after he breaks off to cough and wheeze into his fist.
“Henry?” he asks.
The man blinks down at Edward, the soft expression on his face going tight and pinched for a moment— dead, then, or gone— before schooling itself back into careful ease.
“Just beside you, sir,” says the man, which Edward knows to be a lie. He knows the feel of Henry beside him, knows it intimately. There is no one here but himself, himself and this man he does not recognize, in a tiny wooden room. “Don’t worry yourself about it.”
There’s a pile of white things in the corner— blankets, Edward realizes after a moment, freshly cleaned and starched and folded over a soft mattress with military precision. He can’t remember the last time he saw cloth so pure and white— certainly before Henry convinced them to abandon the men. Perhaps before they left the ships at all.
The man guides Edward to sit down on the bed, still naked, still wrapped in the cloth like an infant. Reaching into some unknown corner out of Edward’s sight, he produces a small bundle of fabric that unfolds into a simple set of clothes— underthings, warm and woolen, followed by a plain pair of trousers and a thick white sweater. Edward takes the last item in his hands, marveling at its softness— the knit is tight and well-fashioned, the material rich. It reminds Edward somewhat of the sweater Henry had worn, before time and hardship and the elements had worn it away into a miserable patchwork of its old self. It had been Captain Fitzjames’ before that, pilfered out of sentiment or selfishness by Henry’s delicate fingers as they’d methodically left cans of tainted food beside every sickbed.
“It’s not much,” the man is saying, when Edward remembers to open his ears and listen. “But it’ll keep you warm, sir. Sir James has said he’ll see about finding you a uniform, but it likely won’t be of your proper ranking.”
If Edward could have laughed, he would. The thought of it is ridiculous to him— that he should still be afforded the deference and symbol of his rank, when he’d blundered his way into perhaps the worst failure he could. Men dead, not at his hands but under his watch all the same— near a dozen of them, bodies piled in their beds and left to rot or freeze where they’d slept. Edward reaches up a hand, counts the chains on his face with careful fingers. Lawrence, Sinclair, Thompson. More men, each one a careful incision in his skin, Henry’s steady hands driving the needle through him. Edward, repeating the names of the dead in his mind until he was sure he wouldn’t forget, no matter how deeply the lead settled into his brain.
His fingers brush the newest chain, dull gold links running from lip to earlobe. Henry.
“If— if I might, sir,” the man says. His fingers twitch, reach for Edward’s face. “You were far too frozen to attempt to remove them before, but now that the steam has loosened your skin some I was thinking I could—”
Faster than he’d thought possible, Edward finds himself in the corner— his chest heaves, and it’s only after a moment that he realizes his breath is coming deep and panicked. Sharp as knives, his body screams in protest at how quickly he’d scrambled back across the mattress, pressed up against the walls as though he’d tried to meld himself into the wood paneling.
“Don’t,” he croaks, the word thin and broken but still enough to get the man to lower his hands reluctantly.
Slowly, gingerly, the man steps back, and Edward collapses forward as the panic subsides. The clothes are still in his hands, the sweater tangled in between his fingers.
“As you wish, sir,” says the man. He sounds less soft now. Good— softness should be reserved for others. Not one such as Edward, after everything he’s done. “I’ll— I’ll give you your privacy, come check on you in an hour or so.”
He leaves the room through a wooden sliding door, dim light filtering in through the slats in its surface. Edward drops like a cut marionette and slumps forward into the soft white sheets.
He drifts.
Consciousness comes evasive and slippery, tugging him from the depths of black dreamless sleep for only seconds or minutes at a time. Someone dresses him at one point or another— they must, because Edward cannot for the life of him remember what it’s like to dress himself, and yet there is cloth against his body, sleeves encasing his arms, warm wool clinging to his legs.
The man returns and returns again, and by ten or twenty visits in Edward understands him to be a doctor. They’d lost all their doctors, he’d thought. Even Goodsir had been taken from them before the end, victim to Hickey’s cruel mutiny. Henry had said so, hadn’t he— the sick didn’t stand a chance without a doctor, and with none left, they would die before long. Better to let them rest, Henry had murmured, with a hand firm and heavy on Edward’s shoulder.
And yet— this man is a doctor. There is nothing else he could be, not with the way he presses the cold bell of his stethoscope to the bare skin underneath Edward’s shirt, the way he funnels hot clear broth into Edward’s mouth a single spoonful at a time, running clinical fingers along the sides of his throat to work the liquid down into his stomach.
When the doctor leaves, Edward sleeps. When the dark wooden door slides open, he wakes. Underneath him, all the while, the ground yaws and pitches ceaselessly.
“You’re on a ship, sir,” says the doctor, when Edward has gathered enough strength to speak a handful of words again. “The Enterprise, captained by Sir James Clark Ross.”
“Ah,” Edward replies, before devolving into another hoarse coughing fit. The doctor leans forward, sets the cup of broth on the table at the bedside, guides Edward back to the mattress with steady hands. “H—how long?”
The doctor pauses, looking down at Edward with something strange and discomfiting behind his light eyes. “Two weeks, sir.”
Noises filter in through the slats in the door, a commotion. More voices Edward does not recognize, voices that do not belong to his men. They’ve been silent, absent, ever since he woke up in this room— on this ship, if the doctor is to be believed. Edward casts his eyes to the right. He cannot see the tents, the boots exposed to the elements, limbs tangled together like so many lovers as his crew piled atop one another in death. All he can see is the cold empty room, the wood paneling and the lone table with a solitary candle atop it.
“Drink this when you feel able,” the doctor instructs, nudging the cup of broth until it sits within Edward’s easy reach. “I’ll return when I can— small sips, sir, and try not to get up.”
And then he’s gone, and Edward is alone.
The broth is still warm when he brings the cup to his lips, steaming and salty on his tongue. Small sips, the doctor had said— not that Edward can manage much more, not with the way his stomach churns and his body tries to convulse with every swallow. Still, it’s hearty, and the heat of it soothes his ragged throat.
Speaking is difficult at best, and Edward struggles to manage more than a few words at a time, but with his strength returning in fragile increments and the harsh rawness of his vocal cords easing at last, his tongue seems to finally be willing to work with him, rather than sitting there like a lump of useless flesh between his teeth.
Drawing in a breath, he braces himself, wets his lips, then whispers:
“Lawrence.” It’s difficult, putting voice to the vowels when every attempt scratches his throat red and bloody— but he manages. “Sinclair. Thompson.”
A hand touches his face, tracing the lines of the chains. Edward flinches back reflexively, turning his head away and into the soft down pillow, before realizing the hand had been his own.
Lawrence— the first to go, collapsing onto the shale before they’d even made their first camp. Edward wears him from the lobe of his left ear up to the shell, the chain short and tarnished and taken from Lawrence’s pocket watch. Sinclair next, frozen in his sleep with his hand clutching the nearest warm body, laid to rest along the curve of Edward’s jawline. Thompson—
Edward opens his mouth, then closes it again. He can’t remember how Thompson died, now.
“Gunshot, sir,” says a voice— ah, Edward thinks, there he is. He turns his head, smiles up at Thompson in the chair at his bedside.
“Gunshot,” Edward repeats. “Through the temple.” He touches his own, then drags his fingers down to his cheekbone, where Thompson rests.
Careful, methodical, Edward catalogues his men. It’s hard, speaking their names— his chest tightens with each one, the terribly icy grip of guilt digging claws into his flesh and twisting— but it has to be done. Edward has to do it. Each tug of the chains loosens the horrible knotted ache in his chest, lets him breathe a little easier.
His fingers brush the newest— his own, an adornment taken off of what had remained of his officer’s greatcoat. They’d needed to pull the metal off. Henry had needed to pull the metal off, after they’d fallen asleep with one of the brass buttons pressed up against his ankle and he’d lost a chunk of skin peeling the frozen thing off in the morning.
One short chain, lip to earlobe.
Edward swallows, parts his cracked lips. “Henry,” he says, then pauses. His fingers trace the chain, the still-healing puncture wound where Henry had pressed the needle through his bottom lip. It aches. “Frozen in your sleep.”
“Not quite.”
Edward pauses, finger lingering on his lip. He glances over to the chair— Thompson is gone, faded halfway through Edward’s list of names, and the wooden seat of the thing is bare and empty. Henry is nowhere to be seen, not that Edward is surprised. He’d hardly expected Henry to come back. It wasn’t his style.
But then— that had been his voice, hadn’t it? Edward would have known it anywhere.
“Henry,” he tries again, firmer this time. “Henry Le Vesconte, cause of death—”
“Starvation,” says the voice, Henry’s voice. Edward sucks in a breath, holds it until his chest aches. “Or exhaustion— or lead, I suppose. Take your pick.”
God, he sounds tired. Edward had nearly forgotten the sound of it, the hoarseness in his voice, the tight and strained way he would force the words off his tongue. It’s been so long since Henry’s spoken to him. They didn’t need words by the end, not with their men dead and mourned, not when they’d both known they would die out there on the shale before long.
Only— Edward didn’t. Edward made it here, somehow, onto a ship that moves underneath him even when he’d thought he would never know the rocking of the open sea again. Edward is alive, for all the good it does anyone.
He tugs at the chains, wincing at the tender pull of the brass embedded in his skin.
Alive, like the rest of them should have been. Like Henry should have been.
“Does it matter?” he asks, the words bitter like rust on his tongue. His throat burns, the effort of speaking sending shards of glass through the soft flesh of it. “When you left before I could so much as say goodbye?”
There’s a long moment of silence, a beat where he wonders if Henry has disappeared again, after all. Edward casts his eyes around the small, dark room— the chair is empty, the small alcove beside the door as well. There is no body in bed beside him, warm or otherwise. He curls onto his side anyway, fists his fingers into the softness of the pillow and pretends he can feel a beating heart beneath.
Then, after what feels like an eternity—
“I didn’t leave,” says Henry, voice a low whisper, muffled as though spoken through water, or the thin fabric of a canvas tent. Edward curls tighter in on himself, presses his forehead to the cold wood wall. “I didn’t— I wouldn’t do that to you, Ned. Not to you.”
It’s a kindness, one Edward isn’t sure he deserves, to hear those words. Even if Henry has left him after all— and he has, Edward is sure of that. Even if the sentiment is nothing but the product of Edward’s own addled, dying brain.
Edward is a foolish man, but not an idiot.
He opens his mouth, tries to form a response, but the sting in his throat and the dry, sharp cracking of his lips hurts too much— he can feel Henry there, the wound of him refusing to heal, reopening with every painful movement of Edward’s mouth. The chain is heavy against his face, the weight of it impossible to ignore.
A trickle of blood runs hot down his chin— whether from the still-unhealed piercing or the chapped split of Edward’s bottom lip, he cannot say.
Henry is silent.
By three weeks in— the doctor’s count, at least— Edward has recovered enough to stand on his own. It’s difficult work, and more often than not he finds himself winded before he can finish pacing the perimiter of his small room, but the doctor says kind things like you’ll be on deck in no time, sir and you won’t even need a cane before long, at this rate.
Edward’s not entirely sure how much he believes the doctor, or how much he believes anything. His men still visit, still whisper to him in the night and tug at the chains on his face while he sleeps— more often than not he wakes to a reopened wound, pillows stained scarlet where he’d rubbed the tender split of his lip against them in the night, Henry’s chain pulling the skin open until Edward bleeds out all over the nice white linen.
Edward never sees his face. Henry never bothers to visit him, doesn’t sit in the chair like Thompson or hover nervously in the door like Lawrence. He doesn’t curl up close to Edward’s side in the night, not even when Edward had begged him to, whispering something almost like a prayer into the cold empty air of the cabin for just a shred of the comfort he’d had out on the shale.
Still, Henry is there, undeniably. Edward hears his crisp accent, the soft soothing tenor of his voice. He doesn’t always speak, rarely appears unless Edward calls for him— and even then, Edward’s soft murmurs of Henry, Henry, are you there are met with silence as often as not.
When he does speak, though—
“Ned,” Henry says. Ned, not Edward, he hasn’t been Edward since King William Land. It’s one of the reason he knows this isn’t Henry, just another miserable figment of his addled imagination, conjured up by grief and his terrible aching need. “Ned, breathe.”
With what little strength he can muster, Edward sucks in a deep, shaky breath— he’d woken heaving, fingers clutched so tightly into his sheets that the joints had gone white with the strain of it, face hot and sticky with tears. He’d woken alone.
“Henry,” he gasps out. “I dont— I can’t—”
Edward breaks off, a great shuddering sob wracking his thin frame. Drawing his knees up to his chest, he shuffles his way further up the mattress until he can feel the walls press on him from two sides, tucked into the corner in the smallest ball he can manage.
Henry’s voice filters through his mind again, still soft, still faraway. “Talk to me, Ned, I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me.”
A harsh, watery laugh tears its way from Edward’s throat. “You can’t— you can’t help me, Henry. You’re not even here.”
He curls in tighter, hands threading into his hair and dragging down his face. They catch on the chains— he’s belatedly aware that he’s crying out in pain, that Henry is saying Ned, Ned, please, Ned like a prayer in his ears. When he pulls his hands away, there’s a smear of blood from his lip left across his palm, pooled in the center with a single angry streak up the length of his fingers.
“Don’t call me that,” he bites out, eyes fixed on the scarlet stain. Henry left, Henry doesn’t get to call him Ned as though they’re still sharing a bedroll with Henry wrapped tight in Edward’s arms, lips to throat like he couldn’t get close enough. Henry left, and Edward is alone, and it’s cruel for his miserable mind to conjure Henry’s soft tongue wrapping around the letters of the fond nickname so gently.
He’s met with silence.
For a long, awful minute, he thinks Henry might have disappeared again— he does that, sometimes, drops off into nonexistence and leaves Edward to sit in the yawning awful emptiness left in his wake.
Finally, when Edward’s all but given up and braced himself to unfold from the corner and attempt to lie back down, Henry reappears.
“Edward, then,” he says. He sounds contrite, hesitant. Edward’s stomach clenches uncomfortably. “Are you hurt?”
Edward laughs. Hurt? There’s holes in his face that won’t heal and he can’t stand for more than a few seconds without the help of a cane or the doctor’s arm. He still can’t stomach solid food, and the idea of breathing clean sea air makes him want to vomit.
“Oh, sure,” he says, bitter and sardonic. “At least I’m not— what, dying of starvation on King William Land? I’ve never felt better.”
It sounds mean even to his own ears, the bite of it, the sting. Henry doesn’t deserve his ire like this— but Henry isn’t real, Edward is speaking to his own fractured brain, and no one has earned cruelty more than himself.
Edward is alive, and that is far more than he can say for any of his men. Edward is alive, on his way home, after leading every last one of his men to the grave.
He reaches up, tugs at the chains again.
“I should never have listened to you.” He clenches his jaw, grinds it until he can hear the bones of his teeth creak in protest. “I should have made you stay, made all of them stay.”
“They would have died anyway,” says Henry. He sounds tired, finished, empty. “It wouldn’t have changed anything.”
“But it wouldn’t have been our fault,” Edward bites out. “Yours, for convincing the men to leave. Mine, for not standing up to you better.”
“Ned— Edward.” Edward is silent. Henry presses on. “I didn’t leave you a choice. That isn’t your burden to carry.”
A rich joke. Kind, if stupid, for his madness to attempt to soothe his guilt like this— but Edward knows better. He’s confused, yes, hearing voices and very likely clinically insane, but he knows better. Of course it was his fault, when Crozier’s absence had left him acting commander. If he could have gone back, if he could have bargained with God or the island and whatever higher power held sway over it, Edward would have traded his life for his men a thousand times over.
He pulls his gaze away from his hands, lifts them to stare around his small room. Henry is still nowhere to be seen.
There’s a noise from outside, a shadow in front of the door and then the small thud of someone knocking into the wall, the sound of voices low and unintelligible filtering in through the slats in the wood. Something in Edward’s chest clenches— he’d forgotten he wasn’t alone on this ship, that the world extended past the small box of his quarters, that there were more lives out there than just his own, that there were voices belonging to someone other than himself and Henry and their dead crew.
Edward swallows, unfurls his limbs. It aches to move, his joints creaking painfully after being clenched tight and stiff for so long, but after a moment of struggle he manages to lift himself from the bed. Propping himself up with one hand on his cane, he begins the slow circle around his room, ignoring the scorching protest of his limbs.
It takes only seven steps before he has to pause and lean against the wall to keep from collapsing. His lungs burn, breaths coming quick and shallow, his wasted legs shake with the effort of keeping himself upright.
God above, what a pathetic sight he must be— Edward Little, great first lieutenant of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, reduced to a shadow of a man who can hardly keep himself upright on his own. It’s no wonder Henry had convinced him so easily to march their men into death’s waiting arms. If ever he had a backbone, it’s surely gone now.
Edward isn’t sure if it takes minutes or hours, but when he finally manages to pull enough breath in his lungs to stand upright again, he totters the seven steps back and collapses heavily into his bed. Whoever had been in the hallway has moved on. The shadow is gone, the world quiet save for the rhythmic shuffle of footsteps on the deck above. Edward lays back, arranges the thick quilt beside him into a sorry substitute for a body, wraps his arms around it and presses his face into the cold fabric.
“Why did you do it?” he asks, speaking the words into the white linen. He’s not entirely sure what he’s asking— why did you leave, why did you take the men, why did you give me something to remember you by if you were just going to walk away from me— but he supposes it doesn’t matter. The questions are all the same anyway, when stripped down to their organs. Henry will know what he means.
Henry’s voice, when it reaches his ears, is small and watery, with a quiver to it that makes Edward’s ribcage cave in on itself like a landslide.
“Because I wanted you to live,” he replies, and Edward almost believes him. “That’s all, Edward. I wanted you to live.”
“Well,” says Edward, mouth bitter and blood-soaked. “Congratulations, then.”
There is a body in the chair, and it is not Thompson.
Edward knows this because Thompson always speaks first and lets Edward see him second, and the figure is already there when Edward blinks his eyes open, silent and steady and dressed in his greatcoat and epaulettes as though not a day has passed since they first set off from England.
“Captain,” Edward gasps out, the sight lancing through his chest like a gunshot.
Crozier looks down at him and smiles, crows’ feet crinkling, thin lips pulled upwards in the gentlest expression Edward’s ever seen on his captain’s face.
He can’t be here. He can’t— Edward doesn’t think he can bear it. It’s enough already that he’s surrounded by the ghosts of his men, the men he doomed and left to die while he got to carry on in this awful sort of half-life. It’s enough that he’s got Henry following him around, his voice lingering like an illness Edward can’t shake.
There’s something sickeningly close to forgiveness in his captain’s eyes. If Edward had more strength in him, he’d run.
“They told me you were awake,” Crozier says. He’s got a cup in his hands, steam wafting off it in soft white wisps. “Walking, even.”
“You— you’re not—” Edward stammers out. He feels dizzy, sick, head spinning and mind unable to piece together the vision in front of him. “You were taken— Hickey and his men—”
Crozier leans forward, shushes him gently as though he’s a child, or a spooked horse. The cup in his grip is warm, full of broth, and when he brings it to Edward’s lips he cradles the back of Edward’s head with his free hand to prop him up. It’s tender, more so than Edward deserves— it’s not fair, not from a man he abandoned and left to die, not from the captain he so thoroughly failed.
His touch is chilly, fingers like ice on the nape of Edward’s neck. For a horrible, gutwrenching moment, he thinks perhaps this too is a conjuration, a ghost at his bedside, Crozier as cold in death as the bleak Arctic wind .
Edward peers up at Crozier, studying the worn lines on his face. “Are you real?”
Crozier frowns down at him, pulls the cup back and away, then shifts his hand from where he’s propping Edward up and places it on his forehead instead.
“Christ, you’re burning,” he murmurs. “Has the doctor been in?”
Edward doesn’t feel like he’s burning— he feels colder than ever, in fact, a shiver stealing its way across his skin as soon as the thought passes through his mind. With fumbling fingers, he reaches up, wrapping his loose grip around Crozier’s wrist and pulling his hand tighter against his face. The captain lets him, a kindness Edward isn't exactly sure he deserves, shifting until his whole rough palm is cupping the bruised expanse of Edward's cheek.
There’s pressure under his eye, Crozier’s thumb swiping from left to right beneath it, and Edward realizes belatedly that he’s crying again.
“I only ask, sir, because— because I left you sir, I failed you, and I’m sorry—”
“Hush, lad,” says Crozier, in that same warm tone that leaves pinpricks of guilt stabbing through Edward’s stomach like knives. “You’ve nothing to apologize for.”
And that can’t be true, this must be a hallucination, because in no iteration of this terrible world could Edward possibly be innocent— not with the blood of dozens on his hands, not with whatever cosmic price he must have paid to survive it all.
“It’s my fault,” he gasps out, voice wet and thick and shaking. “Captain— it’s my fault they’re dead, that you’re dead—”
“Woah there, Edward,” Crozier cuts in. His frown deepens, lines of concern etched between his brows— that’s not good, that’s never good, he’s upset with Edward again, he's always upset with Edward. “Who said I was dead?”
His hand is there again. Edward registers the touch dimly, knuckles pressed up against his brow like four little blocks of ice. He shivers at the feeling, or maybe at the way Crozier’s mouth pulls into a tight line at whatever he finds there on Edward’s forehead.
“You’re feverish,” he says, grimacing. “I’ll call for the doctor, just give me a minute—”
“No,” Edward bites out, grabbing at whatever he can reach— Crozier’s hand, his wrist, the thick wool of his coat. “Don’t— don’t leave, sir, please, I’m sorry.”
Crozier pauses, halfway out of the chair, then relents and sits back down. “You’re not well, Edward, we’ve got to get you seen to. Christ, none of the others were this bad. Have you been down here by yourself this whole time?”
The others, he says, as though that makes any kind of sense. He’s not been alone, sure— his men never leave him alone for long, and neither does Henry— but if his captain isn’t dead and he isn’t an apparition, Edward’s not sure how to say that without sounding like a complete lunatic.
“Sir,” he tries instead, careful and hesitant. “What— what others?”
Crozier pauses. His hand hovers in the air, still just above Edward’s forehead— the fingers twitch, and for a single moment Edward thinks he might reach out to grab the chains— but instead, he just sighs and drops it down to rest on the bed beside Edward’s shoulder.
“Did no one tell you? God, I suppose this is my fault— I should have come to see you sooner.”
Edward tries to sit up, struggling to balance his weight on his elbows so he can look his captain in the face. “What others, Captain?”
“Myself, for one,” says Crozier. “Captain Fitzjames.”
Which— that can’t be right, Edward thinks. Fitzjames had been there in the tents, only days away from death. Hadn’t Henry said so himself? Hadn’t he told Edward there was no chance for the sick, no hope of recovery? Edward had been out there for weeks before Sir James had found him, long enough for even the strongest among their sledge party to wither and fall victim to the cold Arctic death.
“I don’t understand,” he whispers. “I thought— we thought—”
Crozier pinches his lips into a thin line, averts his eyes.
“James— Ross, that is— and I made it back to them over a month ago,” he says. “Not long after Hickey and his men took me. I’d managed to get free, with the help of some others, and then he turned up soon after. You were gone by then— we spent over a week getting the sick back to the ship, and you were nowhere to be found. It took us far too long to catch up to you, and by then— well. You’re aware, I’m sure.”
Edward shakes his head. That— that can’t be right, can it? “Jopson?” he asks. “Sullivan, Fowler? Andrews?”
“Well— we lost Fowler in the return, and two others.” Crozier turns again, meets Edward’s eyes. Edward drops his own gaze, staring down at his hands— thin, skeletal things now, his veins cold and ice-blue underneath the parchment-thin layer of white skin. “But the rest are recovering in sickbay as best they can. Some are up and about by now, even.”
No. Edward’s mind whirls, static rushing in his ears, the howling Arctic wind drowning out Crozier’s voice until it’s nothing but an afterthought. He can feel the acrid sting of bile in his throat, his stomach threatening to heave, the terrible cutting guilt sawing through his soft parts like a knife.
They’d survived. The sick, the dying— the men he’d abandoned. The men he’d let Henry tell him to abandon. They’d survived, against all odds, while Edward and Henry had led the rest into a shallow, icy grave.
If he’d convinced them to stay, Edward thinks, a horrifying abyss tearing itself open in the pit of his stomach— if he’d held his ground just a little longer, they all might have lived.
“Edward,” Crozier is saying, but Edward cannot turn to face him. “Edward. No one blames you for leaving. You made the best decision you could.”
Had he? What a fucking joke that is— he hadn’t made a decision at all. Henry had been the one to pull that trigger, taking the vote, leading the men. He’d owned that choice, even to the end. And what had Edward done?
He’d rolled over like a dog. Shown his belly, let Henry plunge the knife into it. He’d been spineless, and it had killed them all.
And then Henry had left. He’d stayed to the end, warmed Edward’s bedroll and kissed his cracked lips, strung every single one of their dead friends from Edward’s skin, and then he’d gone. Had Crozier found him, too, among the pile of bodies he’d pulled Edward from? Had Sir James discovered him lying there on the shale somewhere? Starvation, or exhaustion, or lead, Henry had told him. Take your pick.
“And— and Henry?” Edward asks, before he can bite through his traitorous tongue to keep the words from escaping.
Crozier blinks. “Le Vesconte?”
“What happened to him? How did he die?”
Confusion flickers across Crozier’s face, his mouth opening and closing again for a brief moment as he considers his words. “We found him with you, Edward,” he says. “Right outside the flap to your tent. You were brought in together— he’s not dead, although he made a pretty good show of it there at the start.”
Not dead. That— that can’t be true. Edward shakes his head, stammers out the beginnings of some half-formed argument, but Crozier shushes him again before he can finish.
“Look, Edward,” he’s saying, but Edward can’t parse the words— his voice is hazy and distant, as though spoken through rushing water. All he can hear is an echo, not dead not dead not dead battering around the inside of his skull. Henry, alive. Henry, here. Some raw, aching thing in his chest, dormant since he laid it to rest on the shale, rears its head.
“—don’t know entirely what happened, and clearly something’s done a number on you,” Crozier continues. He’s leaning over Edward, now, peering into his face with concern inkspilled all across his weathered expression. “But if you’ll allow me, lad, you might feel a bit better if I can get these off of you—”
He reaches forward, coarse sailor’s hands gentle against Edward’s cheeks— all at once, Edward is hit with the vision of himself on the shale again, Henry leaning over him with his cracked bottom lip drawn up between his teeth in concentration, fingertips soft against the arches of Edward’s gaunt face. The lead-madness had shifted the picture, Edward thinks— Henry was himself, and then he was Crozier, and then he was Henry again— but always soft, always gentle and apologetic, always with Edward’s blood on the tips of his fingers when he pulled away.
There is a hand on his face, and it is not Henry’s.
Edward rips his head away from the touch, breath shallow and ragged, eyes wide as a rabbit’s as he stares up into his captain’s face. Crozier pulls his hands back as though burned.
“S— sorry, sir,” he chokes out. “I don’t— you can’t—”
Crozier doesn’t seem upset, or angry— Edward almost wishes he would, if only to justify the terrified hammering of his own heart, the fear that spikes through him at the idea of anyone but Henry putting hands to the heavy brass chains.
“It’s alright, Edward,” says Crozier, still as though Edward is a spooked faun. It does nothing, nothing to ease the torrent of thoughts whirling in his brain, the restlessness in his tired limbs telling him to run. “But we really must get these off you— you’re not well, and the wounds won’t heal until you’ve stopped worrying at them.”
“I can’t, sir— don’t ask that of me. Please.” Edward shakes his head, straining to keep himself out of his captain’s reach. Crozier just sits there, looking at him with maddening pity in his eyes. “I’ve got to keep them on, I’ve got to keep them with me— Henry, he knows, he understands.”
He did this to me, Edward doesn’t say. He did this, and I let him. I asked him to.
Crozier just sighs, reaching out again— Edward flinches back, but Crozier doesn’t go for the chains again. Instead, he brushes the sweat-soaked hair from Edward’s forehead with gentle fingers, softer and kinder than Edward deserves.
“Very well,” he whispers, a small, sad smile on his lips. “Can you wait here for me, Edward? I’ll only be a moment, I just need to fetch the doctor.”
Edward tries to open his mouth, tries to form the words on his tongue to ask Crozier to stay— but the cacophony of not dead not dead not dead henry not dead still echoes through his skull like ship’s bells, and by the time he’s willed his voice into submission, Crozier has stood, nodded once, and left.
Edward does not like being alone.
It’s a pity, really, when so much of his life lately has been spent alone— the doctor visits twice a day, and the ghosts of his crew filter in and out of his periphery when they feel fit to, but Edward has spent the last month so bitterly, achingly lonely.
All of it, all of it pales in comparison to the feeling of Crozier walking out, sliding the wooden door shut, footsteps fading down the hallway. The sound of the latch clicking into place rings like a gunshot— Edward flinches back when he hears it, muscles tensing and joints freezing.
Two seconds he sits there, then three. By the fourth, the fight drains from him, leaving him hollow. By the fifth, a prickling restlessness begins to fill the gaps.
Struggling upright is difficult, more so when his head decides to pitch like a storm sea every time he moves it— the dizziness is nauseating, but Edward manages somehow to drag himself to a sitting position, then to a standing one once his blind flailing reunites him with his cane.
He should stay put, like Crozier told him to— he’s good at following orders, always has been, and though it hadn’t been a direct order he’d known what his captain had meant.
But it is quiet, and the room is empty, and Edward does not like being alone.
The hallway is silent when he steps into it, no sign of the captain or of anyone else. He can still hear the boots above his head, the crew on deck, but the belly of the ship is still as a graveyard. His lungs already burn with the effort of crossing the room, his head swims uncomfortably with every step he takes.
Still, the air smells clearer the second he passes the doorway, none of the stale blood-soaked haze that’s hung about him ever since he first awoke— he gulps it down in lungfuls, gasping and pitching forward until he feels his body hit the opposite wall, leaning into the wood for support.
He’s unsure what he’s looking for when he slides open the first door. Perhaps Crozier, perhaps the doctor. Perhaps one of his fellow survivors— though the thought of facing them makes Edward’s stomach twist up in knots like a bramble bush.
It doesn’t matter, in the end. The first door he throws open, across the hall from his own, yields nothing but an empty cabin. Edward staggers to the next, lurching forward unsteadily with one hand on the wall and the other on his cane.
Empty.
The next, empty as well.
He’s never seen officer’s country so quiet— for that must be where he is, up in officer’s country, he may be mad but he knows the belly of a ship when he sees it. Maybe they’re all on duty. Maybe he’s dreamed this all up, as well.
Edward stumbles back across the hall, catching his shoulder on the wood paneling. It should hurt, he thinks— but then, everything hurts, his whole body aching as though he’d spent a day hauling the sledge boat all on his own. It’s painful, and he’s cold and damp to boot, his hair limp and ragged and sweat-plastered to his skin uncomfortably. There’s another door in front of him.
Breath tight in his lungs, Edward peers through the gap in the wooden slats. Behind them, he can see a figure laying in the bed, huddled underneath a lump of blankets. His heart clenches, throws itself up against the bars of his ribcage like an animal.
The figure shifts, then goes still again.
“Edward?”
That’s Henry. Edward would know his voice anywhere. He finds himself halfway into the room before he can think, his feet carrying him forward blindly.
With a heaving gasp, Edward pulls up short at the bedside, coming to a stop so quickly the world tilts underneath him. A dizzying rush crashes through his head like a wave, forcing him to stumble up against the mattress to keep from keeling over entirely.
The mattress, with Henry atop it.
When the world stops spinning, Edward looks down at him, and has to bite down on his tongue to keep from cursing aloud at the sight— Henry looks half-dead, even covered as he is by the quilts. His face is gaunt, skeletal, only the barest flush to his hollow cheeks. His hair, already grey when Edward had first met him, is streaked through with icy silver, thinner and more brittle than Edward’s ever seen it. When he turns his face up to Edward, his eyes are puffy and rimmed with red, wet trails of tear tracks carving glistening lines down his cheeks to his cracked, bloodied lips.
One of his eyes is bruised, purple and yellow-green blotches spilled across his sharp cheekbones like wayward ink. Edward follows the path of it with his eyes— he’d punched Henry, he remembers, square across the face the very first time Henry had told him he hadn’t planned to go back for the rest of the men, after all.
It had been, Edward thinks, perhaps the most bravery he’d ever shown in his life. Of course, he’d forgiven Henry before the other man had even crawled into bed that night— and it had amounted to nothing. Dead men scattered across the shale, a bruise across Henry Le Vesconte’s left cheek.
Henry inhales, breath staccato, the air catching in his throat. Edward grabs onto the sound like a halyard, lets it pull him down to his knees, collapsing heavy onto the rocking wooden floor.
“You’re alive,” he breathes. “Henry.”
Henry stares up at him, recognition dawning in his grey eyes. Edward feels unmoored, set adrift by the sight of him.
“I thought—” Henry starts, then breaks off to cough. “I thought I dreamed you.”
Which is silly, really— it’s been Edward, this whole time, dreaming up Henry to keep him company, to soothe his guilt and whisper kind things into his ear in the night. Only—
Just beside you, sir, the doctor had said, when Edward had asked after Henry for the first time.
Henry lifts his hand from the mattress. His movements are slow and weak, but even still, his fingers don’t shake. Edward watches them, steady as they’ve always been, hovering there in the empty air between Henry’s face and Edward’s own. Like the sun dawning over the ice after months of darkness, Edward stares as Henry’s cracked lips split into a wide, incandescent smile.
“I thought I dreamed you, Edward— God, you made it. You’re alive.”
Alive. The memory of it all cuts through the moment like a knife. Everything that had happened, everything that hadn’t, the reason Edward had thrown himself into the hallway after Crozier in the first place— the guilt of it hits Edward like a steam train square to the chest, kneeling in front of Henry’s bed and staring at his thin, unwavering fingers.
“Yes,” he says softly. Then, harsher— “I’m alive.”
Alive, he does not say, unlike our men.
“The doctor said so,” Henry continues, horribly bright. He sounds so happy. It makes Edward’s skin itch, his chest tighten, his stomach twist. They don’t have the right to be happy, not now. Not after what they’ve done. Henry is alive, flesh and blood and bone just inches away from Edward’s twitching fingers— but all Edward can feel is the churning, miserable dread that fills his gut, the terrible guilt of victory.
“I almost couldn't believe it,” says Henry. “I thought I was the only one— you were there, but I could never see you, and the doctor wouldn’t tell me a thing— but that was the captain, was it not? And— and he’d mentioned Jas, too, Ned—”
“It’s just us,” Edward cuts in, sharply. He doesn’t mean to interrupt, not really. It’s just— Henry looks so excited, so thoroughly joyous, and Edward doesn’t want to be cruel, but he can’t just sit and let it be. He’s always been the type to pick at the wound until it bleeds.
“What?”
“From the forward party,” says Edward. “You and me, that’s it. No one else survived.”
Henry pauses, flicks his eyes across Edward’s face, the chains. “...Yes,” he replies slowly. “I remember.”
Edward sinks his teeth into the tip of his tongue, lets the pain ground him. “Do you know how many survived from the rear camp?” The rear camp, Henry had called it on their first day out, back when Edward had been foolish enough to think he was still planning to return for the sick once they’d settled. “All but three, Henry. All but three.”
Henry blinks his grey eyes owlishly. “Is that… Edward, that’s a good thing, why do you sound so upset?”
“Ross found them weeks before he found us,” Edward bites out. “Got them back to the ships, tucked up safe, then came back out looking for us.”
Henry props himself up on one skeletal elbow, turning to face Edward properly. “I heard. Ned, I don’t get why this is such—”
“I told you not to call me that,” snaps Edward, and Henry’s eyes go wide and surprised. “Not after this, Henry. You don’t get it, do you? It’s our fault they’re dead— we could have lived. We all could have lived.”
Edward’s heated now, his heart thudding in his throat. The hot angry thing in his chest screeches, digging its claws in and ripping at wherever it can find purchase. Henry is still laying there, hand still hovering in the air.
“Edward, listen,” he says. “You can’t blame yourself for that—”
“Of course I can,” spits Edward. And it’s the truth— if not himself, who is there to blame? Henry, sure— but Edward cannot stay mad at Henry, not for long. Even now, he can feel the fight drain out of him, the wolf loosening its jaws from around Henry’s throat and turning its teeth inward, instead, to tear at its own belly. “Because they’re dead, Henry, and we’re alive, and we don’t deserve that. I don’t deserve that.”
Henry moves, reaching out.
“Then blame me, if you have to. It’s not about what we deserve, Edward,” he whispers. “You were good. Are good. All that matters is that you lived, regardless of how.”
His fingers brush the side of Edward’s jaw— just once, the barest of touches.
Edward flinches back as though he’s been shot, sharply enough that it unbalances, sending him toppling back onto his heels. Henry pulls back, eyes wide and sad, and draws his hand back underneath the covers.
It takes a long moment for Edward to recover, with the wind knocked so thoroughly from him— he sits there frozen, chest heaving and gaze locked on Henry’s, for what feels like an eternity. Then, with enough effort that it scorches his lungs, he grips his cane and struggles to his feet.
Henry doesn’t argue when he goes. Henry doesn't say a word, in fact, the entire time— he’s silent as Edward stands, and as he hobbles back out into the hallway, the latch clicking shut behind him. He’s silent as Edward returns to his room, just one door over. He’s silent as Edward crawls into bed, the cup of soup the captain had left at his bedside now cold and unappetizing, his blankets cold from his absence.
“I’m sorry,” Edward hears, once he’s stopped shuffling about and let his breathing go deep and slow. Henry’s voice is soft, muffled through the wall, just as it ever was. “For how it all happened, if that makes a difference to you.”
It does, not that Edward is eager to admit that to himself. Or to Henry.
“But I won’t apologize for trying to keep you alive,” Henry finishes. “I’d do it again, every time.”
Edward’s not sure what he means by that— their kinship on the shale, perhaps, Henry offering himself up as the warmest thing Edward could wrap himself around through the cold Arctic nights. It’s the only possibility he can think of.
Edward wraps himself in the quilts, tugs at the chains.
“You should have let me die, Henry,” he whispers. Henry does not speak.
Days pass, and Edward spends them in silence. A week later, or perhaps more, the worst has come and gone— the doctor tells him so, comes in twice a day to feed him broth and clean his wounds— but Edward still feels as though he is in the thick of it, caught in the weeds, his pierced skin still tender and his limbs heavy and leaden.
The taper candle burns itself down to a pitiful stub, and the sounds of the ship above them settle as the crew berths down for the night. Edward drifts fitfully, not quite asleep but not quite awake— his strength has returned, but the shakes persist even through the coal-bright warmth pumped through the walls of the ship, the feverish chill to his skin leaving him aching and unsteady. He thinks he can hear voices, sometimes. Perhaps it’s the ship’s crew in the halls outside, or his small cluster of personal ghosts paying him a visit. But then— they haven’t shown their faces since Crozier’s return. Edward almost misses them.
Perhaps, it’s Henry, on the other side of the wall— but the sound is too muffled, the voices too low for him to make them out.
The door opens, the doctor steps inside.
“Lieutenant Little,” he says, in the same sort of voice one uses with weeping children. “I’m afraid I have a request you won’t enjoy.”
Edward blinks the sleep from his eyes. He still feels hazy, unmoored— but the world has stopped pitching beneath him, and the rest seems to have done him some good. “What is it?”
The doctor steps closer, taking a seat in the chair at Edward’s bedside and laying one cool hand across his forehead with a grimace.
“Your…adornments,” he murmurs, eyes flicking across the chains strung through Edward’s face. “I understand that you have an… attachment to them, as it were. I have tried to be understanding, and do what I can without disturbing them— but some of the wounds have become infected, and I worry that your condition will worsen if they are not cleaned and treated as quickly as possible.”
Absently, Edward lifts one hand and touches his fingertips to the start of Henry’s chain. His lip stings at the contact, his hands come away bloody.
“I—” he starts, then falters. There’s no good way to explain it— the guilt, the grief. The closeness he’d felt every time Henry put hands to his skin, the reminder that he was alive enough to feel pain with each stab of the needle. The way Henry had dropped to his knees the night their first man died, cradled Edward’s face in his gaunt hands and said how can I fix it, tell me how to fix it.
“Sir,” says the doctor, “I must stress the importance of this—”
Edward shakes his head, mouth set in a stubborn line. He clenches his jaw, the pain of it radiating up through his skull. “I can’t.”
“Edward,” says another voice— oh, that’s his captain there, standing in the doorway. Edward feels small, microscopic underneath the weight of his pitying gaze. “I don’t want to order you, lad, but the doctor says you must.”
As though the universe hadn’t bled him enough, Edward begins to feel the hot prickle of tears behind his eyes, threatening to well up and cascade down over his cheeks. He shakes his head harder, squeezing his eyes shut against the burn of them, wincing at the way the chains rattle and swing with the movement of his head. “Don’t make me, sir— please, I can’t. ” He sucks in a rough, rattling breath, shoulders shaking. “It’s all I have of them, captain.”
Crozier steps forward, murmuring something low and unintelligible into the doctor’s ear. With a displeased little quirk to his lip, the doctor stands, nods, and then leaves.
For a moment, there is nothing but silence, filled with the sounds of Edward’s ragged breath and the creak of the ship’s timbers as the sea buffets her gently from side to side. He wonders, all at once, if Henry is asleep on the other side of the wall, or if he’s sitting up as well, blankets in disarray around his narrow hips, listening to the wood groan around them.
Crozier sits down— not in the chair, like Edward had expected him to, but beside Edward on the low, narrow bed. With one hand, he reaches into the pocket of his coat, fumbling around for a moment before pulling out something small and tarnished gold.
“It’s not mine,” he says, taking one of Edward’s hands in his own and dropping the small ring into it. The metal is warm, and lighter than Edward had been expecting. He looks down at it, then up at Crozier. “Goodsir was charged with bringing it back to a girl in London— a sister, I think, of one of our boys.”
“Which one?”
“That’s the thing,” says Crozier, with a small sigh. “He can’t remember. Treated him, he says, early on in the journey— but we’ve lost so many that he can’t even recall the names by now.”
Edward turns the ring over in his hands, looking for an inscription or some other clue— there’s nothing, only a plain golden band with three dull clear stones set inside it. Something tugs at him, some nameless and faceless memory buried under the fathoms of ice and shale in his mind. He can’t place it, can’t figure out where he’s seen the ring before— only that he has, in a life far kinder than this one.
Crozier is silent for a long minute, studying Edward’s face. “I spoke to Le Vesconte,” he says, and Edward snaps his gaze up.
“You— Henry? When?”
“Before I came to see you,” Crozier says. “He says he was responsible for your, ah— bold new fashion choices.”
Edward’s fingers twitch with the urge to reach up and pull at the chains. “I asked him to,” he says, and Crozier raises one surprised eyebrow. “He— one of the men died, after we’d split off from the party. Lawrence. Edwin Lawrence. One of our ABs.”
“Lawrence,” Crozier parrots. “I remember him.”
“So do I,” Edward murmurs, soft and apologetic. He casts his eyes over to the chair. Lawrence is nowhere to be seen. “I didn’t— I didn’t want to forget. I couldn’t. They followed me out, me and Henry, and we got them killed, and for nothing, sir. I couldn’t live with myself if— well.”
Try as he might, Edward can’t bring himself to voice the words— it’s unthinkable, the idea that he might forget them, that one day there might be a day where he can’t call to mind the way Lawrence had clung to his hand and apologized for not being strong enough to haul any longer, or the way Henry’s hands had seemed so strong and steady as he’d pulled Lawrence’s personals from the pockets of his coat and handed them over for Edward to sort through.
He’d strung the chain through Edward’s skin just hours later, hands still steady and warm. In the moment, Edward remembers having the delirious thought that he’d never felt a touch quite so gentle.
“He said that, too,” says Crozier. Edward blinks, drags his gaze back up to meet his captain’s— he’d nearly forgotten they were speaking at all, as caught up in his tempestuous thoughts as he is. “Told me you carried them with you the whole way, wouldn’t let a single man go without saying a proper goodbye.”
Except for one, Edward thinks, bitter and tired.
“And who might that have been?”
It takes a long minute for Edward to realize that Crozier is speaking to him, that he’s let his tongue slip amid the haze of his muddled thoughts. Something cold and aching wells up in him, icy fingers searching for purchase in the hollow cavity of his chest— who indeed, he wants to reply, but his mouth forms around a name, instead.
“Henry,” he whispers. His throat burns with the effort of speaking. Two fingers come up, entirely of their own will, to hook themselves around the metal of Henry’s chain and tug. Crozier’s hands twitch, reaching up in an aborted gesture then hanging halfway between Edward’s face and his own, some stilted attempt to keep Edward from recentering himself around the pain of the wound.
“Le Vesconte? He survived, Edward, remember?”
Edward remembers. Of course he remembers— as though he could forget the sight of him, Henry laid out in those sheets, blood in his cheeks and light in his eyes and his hands so, so warm when they’d reached for him. “No, sir,” says Edward. “He left— walked out on me. That’s what I mean.”
Crozier’s face twists up in confusion, but he doesn’t speak, and Edward can’t stand the horrible yawning silence.
“It was just before you’d found us,” he continues, unsure if he’s trying to fill space or if the words are pouring from him of their own volition, tired of being stoppered up in the back of his throat. “We were— are— the only ones left, had been for maybe a week at that point. Maybe more.”
It had felt like months, years even, but Edward knows saying that won’t help here.
“There was no food. We’d left most of it with the sick— and good we did, too. Might have been the only thing we’d done right.” Edward grimaces at the memory of his fingers clenching tight around the cans as he’d left each one stacked at a bedside. They’d done the math, and none of it looked good. It was a kindness they had allowed, back when Edward thought they’d still return. “We knew we were dead out there. We’d been dead out there for days— truly, I don’t know what we’d held on for, we couldn’t have known you’d survived, or that Sir James was on his way.”
It’s a lie, only the second he’s ever told his captain, and no less damning for it. He knows perfectly well what he’d held on for— Henry, the warmth of him, the knowledge that Edward wasn’t alone at the end of it all. The soft press of his lips against Edward’s own, the tenderest kind of grace they could find in the howling barren wasteland they ought to have died in.
He’d loved Henry, he realizes with a sick sort of clarity— loved him in every way that mattered, by the end of it.
Edward swallows, ducks his head, turns the little gold ring over and over in his fingers. “He left,” he says, when his tongue has remembered how to work itself again. “Without a word. Came into the tent, gave me one last— adornment, I suppose, then walked off into the night without so much as a goodbye. Didn’t get very far, not from what you told me, but— but he left, just like we left the others, just like we left you— ”
A shudder wracks his thin frame, cutting him off with an audible, heaving sob. Before he can stop himself, he pitches forward, collapsing onto the broad surface of Crozier’s shoulder. He shouldn’t, he knows, it’s behavior unbecoming of an officer, and he’s getting blood and tears all over the clean fabric of his captain’s jacket— but Crozier’s hand comes up before he can bring himself to pull away, patting gently at Edward’s arm.
Dimly, Edward is aware of movement, of the noise and bustle of the world around him, footsteps and the creak of the ship and the sliding of the wooden door— he can’t force his eyes open again, though, not with the sobs battering his lungs like a sea storm, leaving him shaking and breathless and dizzy with the weight of it all. The chains pull uncomfortably, links catching against Crozier’s jacket and tugging Edward’s skin open afresh, and the wounds sting like fire where the salt of his tears runs over them. He feels flayed alive, raw and unmoored and unable to dam the flood of it all— the guilt, the grief, the horrible sinking inability to understand why he’d had to bear it all alone—
A hand touches his face, and it is warm.
“Edward,” says Henry’s voice, from somewhere vaguely above him. When Edward lifts his eyes, pressing first into the soft touch before letting it pull his face upwards, Henry stands there at Crozier’s side— he looks awful still, with his thin quilt wrapped around his shoulders and his eyes red-rimmed and sallow, but there’s something firm and unreadable behind his gaze. His thin fingers linger on the curve of Edward’s jaw, tangling his grip through the chains, taking care not to brush up against any of the wounds— of course, Edward thinks, no one knows the map of his skin like Henry. No one has ever been as careful with him as this.
“I’m sorry,” says Edward, gasps it, because he’s still struggling for breath and Henry’s touch is so very tender. “I’m not— not angry with you, Henry, I could never—”
“Edward,” Henry says again.
“—only it’s true, isn’t it? And I still don’t know why—”
Henry steps closer, skirting around where Crozier sits perched at the edge of the cot, and sinks to his knees right there on the cold wooden floor of the cabin. “Ned,” he whispers, brushing his pinky up against one brass chain just enough to get it to clink audibly against another. Edward’s voice dies on his tongue, words petering out into vast echoing silence. Henry’s eyes, level with his own now, are impossibly soft.
“I didn’t leave you,” Henry says. “I didn’t.”
Edward tries to shake his head, but the feeling of Henry’s hand on his skin is too much, dangerously intoxicating— he can’t pull himself away, not now. “I wouldn’t blame you, Henry— not as I was.” Not as I am, he doesn’t say. “Unable to haul, to hunt, nothing but a mouth to feed. Better that you had lived, anyway, and gone on without me.”
Henry’s face does something strange, a pained little grimace flitting across his expression before his gaze softens once more, and his mouth smooths itself back out into a gentle line.
“You don’t seriously believe that, do you?”
Edward can’t help it— he leans in a little more, pressing into Henry’s soft touch until he’s got the whole of his cheek cradled in Henry’s broad palm. It stings, the pressure against his sensitive lacerations, but not enough to get him to pull away.
“What was I supposed to think, Henry? That you were— what, going off to hunt? To look for help? When you left me this—” he turns his head, pressing his lips to Henry’s palm, the weight of Henry’s chain through his mouth settling neatly along his heartline— “and walked off without a word?”
“Christ, Edward,” says Henry, his voice sounding tight and choked-off in his throat. Edward pulls away, glances down at Henry’s hand. There’s a smear of blood there, and the taste of iron on Edward’s tongue. “You weren’t supposed to carry it this far.”
Edward shakes his head. It dislodges Henry’s touch for the briefest of moments, and he has to bite back the urge to chase the warmth, to press himself back into Henry’s skin the instant that they separate. It’s just that though, an instant, and then Henry’s hands are back on him— cradling his jaw, the slope of his neck, taking his face in a gentle grip and turning it up to look Henry in the eyes again.
“You’ve got to put it down somewhere,” he murmurs.
“I can’t,” says Edward, voice weak and wavering. “I don’t— you have to understand.”
Henry soothes him, swipes the soft pad of his thumbs across the unpierced apples of Edward’s cheeks, coming away wet with tears. “I do,” he says. “I do, but this isn’t a life, Edward.”
“He’s right, lad,” a voice beside Edward chimes in, and he balks at the realization that Crozier is still sitting there, one hand hovering gently in the space above Edward’s shoulder. For a brief and terrible moment, Edward is afraid that Crozier has seen, looked right through him and witnessed his horrific display of tenderness— but when he meets Crozier’s gaze, there’s nothing but soft pity written into the lines of his face.
Edward can feel himself shaking, the rabbit-like urge to run coursing through him like hot lightning— it feels wrong, still, to have hands on his face, to have a soft voice asking to remove the chains. But it’s Henry, he reminds himself, blinking the fear-haze from his vision and staring down into Henry’s wide grey eyes.
Henry presses his thumbs into the soft skin of Edward’s cheeks one more time, then ghosts them down over his skin until he’s got one chain tucked between two fingers; he holds fast, hands steady.
“Captain’s orders, Neddie,” he whispers. “Will you let me?”
He could say no, Edward thinks. He could say no, and some small part of him even believes they would let him— but Henry’s grey eyes are wide and beseeching, and his touch is so gentle, and they’re alive, aren’t they?
Edward heaves a slow, shaking breath, and nods.
The slide of the metal through his skin hurts. It burns like fire, the wound raw and irritated, and Edward only realizes he’s whimpering with the pain of it when Crozier’s hands come down around his shoulders again, tucking him close. His captain is speaking, Edward realizes distantly, soft words on his crooning Irish tongue no doubt meant to soothe him— but Edward can hardly understand a word of it past the rush of blood in his ears.
He keeps his gaze fixed on Henry as he works, first twisting at the thick metal ring to open it wide enough that he can pull it through the skin of Edward’s cheek, then gathering up the chain carefully, following it down to where it ends, pulling that free as well. His fingers are red-tipped when he draws them back, the chain itself more so.
Crozier wordlessly reaches over for the cup of water and cloth at Edward’s bedside, passing them to Henry, who wets the cloth and begins to dab gently at the red, weeping cuts. Edward hisses softly at the sting of it. Henry gives him an apologetic grimace.
When the wounds are clean, Henry takes one of Edward’s hands in his own, flipping it face-up and placing the chain gently into the center of it before closing Edward’s fingers around it. The weight is heavy in his palm, the metal cool and slick against his skin— but his head has never felt lighter, and the horrible tangled knot in his chest begins to loosen just the slightest bit.
The next chain goes much in the same way— with Edward tense, body aching with the strain of trying to keep himself still. Crozier keeps him steady, an arm wrapped around his shoulders and a steady frame for Edward to lean up against. It’s nice, perhaps one of the kindest things his captain has ever done for him, but it’s not what keeps him grounded.
No— that’s Henry. He works slowly, methodically, whispering soft apologies as he pulls the metal through Edward’s skin, as he cleans the wounds after. It’s almost too much, the feel of him; Edward has to fight the bone-deep urge to pull away and run, but Henry never lets him. Always, always, Edward can feel him— a single point of contact, if nothing else, Henry keeping one free hand pressed against the curve of his jaw when he’s not working at the piercings, even when his other is busy wetting the cloth or cleaning the chains.
When the job is nearly done, Henry sits back on his heels, looking down into the cup of blood-soaked water with a grimace. He’s still got a hand on Edward’s cheek— for a moment, Edward thinks he’s about to pull away, and a sob nearly wrenches itself from his ragged throat— but Henry just drops the touch down to his knee again, long elegant fingers splayed out across the lower half of his thigh. His thumb drags down the side of Edward’s knee, tracing the crease of skin where it bends, warm and impossible to ignore even through the thin layers of fabric between them.
There is a single chain left, running from Edward’s lip to his earlobe.
“Do you need a moment?” Henry asks.
Edward shakes his head— he doesn’t, he wants to say, he can do this, his captain has ordered it and he would never disobey— but Henry fixes him with a careful look, tightening his grip on Edward’s knee just the barest fraction, and Edward realizes all at once that he’s shaking hard enough for the chatter of his teeth to echo audibly through the room.
“Please,” he gasps out, when he manages to pry his lips apart. Then, softer, “Henry—”
“I’ve got you,” whispers Henry, catching the bulk of Edward’s weight on his shoulder when Edward slips forward out of Crozier’s grasp and collapses heavy onto him. “Captain?”
Crozier shifts at Edward’s side, pulling away and standing. Once, Edward thinks, that would have sent him into a tailspin, but all he can think of now is Henry— the warm solid weight of him, the heat coming off his skin, the smell of salt and soap on his skin masking something deeper, some soft and familiar scent that Edward had longed for even underneath the blood and sweat and grime that had covered them on the shale.
“Thank you, Le Vesconte,” says Crozier, from somewhere above and to the left of Edward’s awareness. Le Vesconte— so impersonal, so unfamiliar. Edward cant remember the last time he’d been anyone but Henry . “I’ll be in the sickbay. Bring him in when he’s ready to be bandaged, would you?”
There’s silence, then footsteps, then the soft scrape of the wooden door sliding open and shut again. Henry breathes out, rough and shaky, against the crown of Edward’s head.
“Not going to run out on me now the Captain’s gone, are you?” he asks— Edward can hear the lighthearted tone in his voice, anchor-weighed by something harder, more hesitant.
Of course not, he tries to say, but what comes out is—
“That’s more your style.”
The moment it’s past his lips, Edward tries to bite the words back, sinking his teeth into his lip hard enough that he tastes copper on his tongue. It’s no use though— he can feel Henry’s arms go tense and sharp around him, the only warning he gets before Henry is suddenly pushing him back, hands tight around Edward’s shoulders and his brow creased deep with agitation.
“This again, Edward— I don’t know how many more times you’ll make me say it.”
“You didn’t leave, I know,” Edward says. “I’m sorry, I— I’m just trying to understand—”
“What is there to understand?” Henry hisses, and Edward pauses with his lips still agape. Henry doesn’t sound angry, not like Edward’s heard him before— but there’s a weight to him, a tension that Edward can’t place, a wild kind of desperation in the way he pulls one hand away like it hurts to separate himself from Edward, running it haphazardly through his grey curls. “Did I not paint a clear enough picture for you already? Did you really need it spelled out like a child?”
Feeling adrift, confounded, Edward ducks his head, trying to catch Henry’s eyes again. He’s struck, all at once, with the odd sensation that Henry is trying to have a conversation Edward’s only privy to a portion of— he tries to connect the thoughts in his brain, the jagged scraps of memory he can piece together from their time on the shale, but they’re too few and far between for him to make any sense of.
“We were dying,” he bites out. “I think that’s clear enough, no? That I’d rather have done it with you than—”
Than alone, he thinks, the words loud as cannonfire even left unsaid.
Henry makes a wounded, horrible sound in the back of his throat— animal, broken. “We?” he says, bitter and acidic. “Christ, Edward. I was dying. Not you.”
“What difference would it have made?” counters Edward. “What, a day, maybe two? With no food—”
“Edward.”
The look on Henry’s face is pleading, desperate.
“Edward,” he says again. “Ned.”
We found him with you, Crozier had said. Something awful creeps into the corners of his thoughts, dark searching claws digging in and refusing to let Edward be rid of them. Just outside the flap to your tent.
They’d had no food.
Edward shakes his head. “No,” he murmurs, voice edged with horror. “Henry, no.”
He feels sick, nauseous with the dawning realization. For the barest of moments, he tries to imagine it— waking up, gathering the strength to crawl from the tent only to find Henry collapsed there in the shale. Had he been waiting there, stretched out like a lamb on the altar? Would Ned have had to hunt down the knife, butcher Henry himself, cover his face with a cloth and try to pretend he was merely an animal as Edward cut into him?
Would the thought have even crossed his mind? It hadn’t before then— not for any of their fallen men, piled like firewood in their blankets or scattered where they fell along the hard trail. But then, they’d still had food when the last man dropped. They’d still had hope, scant and emaciated as it was.
He tries to picture taking up the knife, carving into flesh like livestock. Perhaps for the first time, Edward hates himself for knowing Henry’s body so intimately.
“I tried to tell you,” says Henry. His hands come up, palms cradling the sides of Edward’s face— the wounds ache, but they’re clean now, his work careful and diligent. The lone chain, Henry’s chain, dangles heavier than an anchor from the corner of Edward’s bottom lip, brushing gently against Henry’s thumb. “That it was okay, that I wanted to help you stay alive— you have to believe me, Ned, I tried.”
Edward casts his mind back to the shale. He hadn’t understood, surely, if Henry had tried to tell him— but in those terrible final days Henry spoke little, and Edward heard even less.
"I’d only have made it another week, maybe," he murmurs. "No game, no water, no— no warmth . I'd have died in days if Sir James hadn't found us.” He exhales, slow and ragged, and brings his hands up to encircle Henry’s wrists, rubbing nonsensical patterns into the gaunt divots of his joints. “Tell me, Henry— what kind of sacrifice would that have been?”
"Not a sacrifice," whispers Henry. "An offering."
Edward scoffs, but it sounds shallow even to his own ears. Henry is so warm under his touch, so near— they haven’t been this close since the shale, since the last time Edward woke up in the soft cradle of Henry’s arms. "Of what, food?"
“Of myself.” Henry pulls back, tugging frustratedly at the jagged ends of his hair. He looks recently-bathed, his grey curls clean and soft, and Edward bites down hard on the urge to reach for him. “They told me, you know. James told me, more than once— you’d be the death of me.”
Henry drags his fingertips down the lines of Edward’s face, thumb brushing over the piercing in Edward’s lip, then over the soft skin there, skating gently over the seam of his mouth as it parts in gentle anticipation. He shakes his head.
“I felt so selfish,” he says, thumbing at the piercing again. It hurts— everything hurts, though, and Edward’s grown so used to the dull ache of Henry under his skin that he hardly registers the discomfort of it now. “Giving this to you, as though I’d had any right to ask you to carry me with you. Like I could— like I could be more than a body, something to keep you warm and fed.”
“More than— Henry,” Edward whispers. It feels heavy, enormous— he watches Henry’s face, wonders if he knows the weight of it. “You were more than that, you were always more than that. You must know that.”
Theres a sound, bitter and acidic in Edward’s ears, and he realizes after a miserable second that Henry is laughing. His heart clenches tight and painful in his chest, threads of hunger and fear and despair winding over themselves into a stifling tapestry of want bearing Henry’s gaunt, impossible face. Edward loves this man, loves him enough that the pain of it settles into his skin, rendering flesh from bone with divine precision.
“Must I? Tell me, Edward— what else would you ask of me?” A quiver rattles Henry’s hoarse tenor, echoing through the room like scattershot. “Obedience? Apology? I can’t give you any more than I already have. If I could have carved myself up to save you the work of it, I would—”
Edward pitches forward, swallows Henry’s shaking voice.
Kissing Henry, he’s always thought, is rather like kissing the sunrise. There’s a brief stutter of hesitation at the start— a flash of pain, a ragged inhale from one of them or the other— before the fiery celestial eye breaks the horizon and Henry surges forward, hands fisting through the limp locks of Edward’s hair to pull him impossibly close.
His tender wounds protest, but Edward ignores them. There’s nothing else he can do— every facet of existence has dwindled to this, to the feeling of Henry under him, under his skin, kneeling at his feet like a devout at the altar. He’s so warm, heart beating strong and steady under Edward’s roaming hands.
Henry makes a soft, broken sort of sound, muffled into the seam of Edward’s lips, and it’s only then that Edward realizes he’s speaking— Edward, Ned, Neddie love, like a mantra. He pulls back, tilting up and away so that Henry can put proper voice behind the words. A ragged noise of protest rips itself free as Henry follows, toppling forward to kiss Edward again, gasping into his open mouth like a drowned man seeking air.
It’s fumbling, it’s messy and desperate and more than a little ill-advised, but Edward can’t stop himself from licking past Henry’s tongue and teeth to taste him— the weight and warmth of him, the low rumbling purr in the back of his throat. He’s so very alive, Edward thinks, the both of them flayed raw and dripping bloody want.
He can’t remember what the shale felt like, what the cold did to his flesh. He burns.
It’s no work at all to haul Henry up and into his lap— he’s such a slip of a thing now, thin and skeletal even if he still stands half a head taller than Edward. He comes easily, stumbling foward blind and hand-searching with his refusal to part his lips from Edward’s for even the briefest of seconds. After a fumbling moment he settles, thighs bracketing Edward’s own and Edward’s hands palming blindly at what little skin he can reach.
“Henry,” Edward gasps, unintelligible as the words spill over onto Henry’s waiting tongue. “Henry, wait—”
“Don’t.” Henry bites at the raw skin of Edward’s lip, a splash of copper hitting his tongue. “Edward, please, just— just stay.”
Edward’s head spins, the taste of blood and Henry’s spit driving him to near delirium. “‘M not going anywhere,” he whispers, running soothing hands up underneath the hem of Henry’s soft sweater to feel the way his abdomen twitches and shifts at the cold touch. Slower this time, he tries to pull back and catalogue whatever is happening on Henry’s face, but he only manages a scant few inches before Henry reaches for him again. “Henry. Henry.”
When Edward finally manages to extricate himself from Henry’s grip— to a displeased huff and another desperate attempt to recapture his lips— he finds Henry’s thin face red and flushed, his eyes blown so wide that Edward can hardly make out the cool, beautiful grey of them. He pauses for a moment, drinking in the sight of him, cataloguing the valleys of his cheeks and the sharp cut of his brow. The bruise is still there, purple along the ridge of his cheekbone. Edward reaches up, drags the pad of his thumb gently across it— Henry shudders at the touch, leaning in ever so slightly, and the terrible creature holding Edward’s heart in its hands digs its claws a little deeper.
“I’m sorry,” Edward whispers, leaning forward to mouth the words into the soft skin of Henry’s throat. “God above, Henry— I thought I’d lost you.” It’s all he can do not to fold himself into Henry’s skin, to content himself with drawing Henry up in his arms until he’s got both palms pressed flat and wide between the gaunt jut of his shoulderblades.
Henry shivers at the touch, some kind of wretched sound pulling itself from his throat. Edward feels it more than hears it, soft and nearly-inaudible as it is, Edward’s lips pressed to Henry’s pulse point. The realization hits him, the unshakeable certainty that if he were allowed, he’d spend the rest of his life here, tucked secret into the tiny sleeping alcove of his borrowed cabin, Henry enveloping him like a promise.
“Couldn’t,” says Henry, nonsensically. “Would never.”
Edward hums his assent, nosing gently at the soft line where Henry’s beard meets the skin of his throat. It makes sense to press a gentle kiss there, so he does; it makes less sense to nip at the flush of blood underneath with sharp teeth, but he does that too. Henry gasps like a dying man, like a gunshot, and bucks his hips up against Edward’s own with intoxicating desperation.
All at once, he stills, going rigid atop Edward. For a heartwrenching moment, Edward is struck with the awful thought that he’s done something wrong, asked for too much, wanted too terribly— but when Henry pulls away, it is shame written across his face, not anger.
“I didn’t mean,” he starts, eyes darting between Edward’s face and somewhere vaguely to the left of his head. “I know on King William Land things were different, a matter of convenience—”
Convenience, he says, as though Edward wouldn’t bear a hundred more days on the shale for the sole gift of Henry’s touch. Convenience, and the way he averts his gaze makes Edward suspect he truly does believe it.
Carefully, as though soothing a spooked animal, Edward brings his hands down to rest on Henry’s narrow hips. Henry whimpers at the touch, the sound caged in the back of his throat. Edward wants to pry his jaw wide, draw the song from his lungs. “If you think convenience was the thing keeping me in your bed every night, Henry, I think I’ve done a rather poor job of expressing myself.”
Edward digs his grip into the sharp bones of Henry’s hips, pulls him down flush and pliant against Edward’s own. A ragged, intoxicating moan tears itself free— Edward’s not sure which of them it came from, thinks it might have been himself, wanton as it was.
Henry is hot and hard atop him, more than ever now that their bodies aren’t fending off the hunger and the cold. Edward feels drunk with the heat of it, with the heady sensation of skin on skin, Henry’s hands roaming over his forearms and shoulders and the tender skin of his cheeks.
“You’d— ah— have me, then?” Henry murmurs. His voice is hoarse, a pleading whisper against Edward’s tongue, something hesitant still underlying the thick tenor of it. “When we return to England?”
Edward kisses his way down the long column of Henry’s neck, rucking his sweater up about his ribs to put his hands all over that soft, exhilarating skin, thumbing his way across one peaked nipple and drawing a punched-out breath from Henry’s lips.
“I’d have you anywhere,” he admits— it’s damningly transparent, but Edward can’t bring himself to care. “Would’ve spread you across the command table on Terror if I could, if I didn’t think I’d get whipped for it—”
Henry stills under his touch. “That’s— that’s not what I meant.”
Edward pauses, pulls back. Henry isn’t meeting his eyes again. Ducking his head, Edward insinuates himself into Henry’s field of vision, tucking himself close enough to recapture Henry’s nervous gaze.
“Tell me what you mean, then.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Henry.”
He feels more than hears Henry’s ragged inhale at that, the way his hands go tight in the fabric of Edward’s sweater. When he speaks, his voice is tense as a bowstring. “If you would have me,” he says, chewing on each word as it escapes him. “Then have me, all of me, or none at all. If a warm body is all you desire, Edward— don’t ask that of me. Please.”
Henry’s voice is soft, so horribly tender that it tears at Edward’s soft insides. He reaches out, takes one of Henry’s hands in his own, brings it to his lips to press a gentle kiss to the skin of his wrist. Henry’s fingers tremble.
“When have I ever asked that of you?” He tries to picture it— keeping Henry at arm’s length upon their return, contenting himself with furtive glances and cold, impersonal relations in empty parlors followed by hollow, gaping absence. Heart in his throat, he turns his face into the skin of Henry’s palm and presses a shaking kiss there. “I couldn’t,” he murmurs. “I don’t think I could stand it, Henry, loving you like that and not—”
Henry reels back like he’s been shot, Edward’s cheek icy with the loss of his touch. His grey eyes are wide, searching, flicking erratically between Edward’s own.
“You love me?”
Edward pulls up short, his heart thudding staccato against his ribcage.
Had he never said it? That can’t be true— he’d bled it out of every cut in his skin, swaddled himself in it like sealskin on the shale, nearly shook apart with grief when he thought he’d lost Henry to the cold and the hunger.
Of course he loves Henry— he’d thought that much was plain.
“Edward,” says Henry, voice small and tinged with a horrible coldness. Edward realizes, like a shard of ice through him, that he hasn’t spoken yet. “Don’t be cruel, not now. If that was in jest—”
“I love you,” Edward breathes, the words spilling from him like a prayer. He gathers Henry in his arms, presses his face into Henry’s shoulder and wets the fabric there with his watering eyes. “I love you— God, Henry, how could I not?”
For a brief and terrible moment, Edward worries he’s got the wrong end of things— Henry tenses in his arms, breath catching audibly in his chest, and Edward’s pulse slows to a glacial halt— but then Henry melts into him, a sob wrenching its way into the still air seconds before Edward feels soft hands cup his cheeks and warm lips crash into his own like a wave. It stings, the press of Henry’s mouth against the cuts on his tender lips as sharp and cutting as a branding iron, but Edward hardly registers the pain. The ship pitches beneath them, or perhaps his head simply goes dizzy and unbalanced, leaving him reeling with the feeling of Henry enveloping him.
“You love me,” Henry murmurs into Edward’s waiting mouth. “Say it again, Edward, darling—”
And Edward does— whispers it against his lips, then against Henry’s cheek, then into the skin of his forehead before pressing a gentle kiss to his brow. Each time, he feels the tension drain from Henry, his weight sinking into Edward’s grip, a stone into the sea.
Gentle as anything, Edward pulls his weight backward, pillowing them into the soft down mattress of the bed. Henry follows, elbows bracketing Edward’s head and hands fisting soft into the linen sheets. He lowers himself slow, sucks a red mark into the hollow of Edward’s throat.
“I thought I’d gone mad with grief,” Edward admits, half to Henry and half to the empty air. Henry murmurs something unintelligible against his pulse point. “When they brought me in— you were gone, but I could hear you, clear as though you were there beside me still. I thought I’d spend the rest of my ill-bought life dreaming you. Christ, I thought you’d left, and it nearly broke me— of course I loved you, how could I not?”
“Could never leave you,” says Henry, “not then, not now. You’ll have to ship me back to King William Land yourself if you want to be rid of me.”
He noses at Edward’s jaw, at the warm weight of the final chain where it lays across his face. It’s too much, the tenderness of the gesture ricocheting through every one of Edward’s veins like hot lightning— he pulls away, unable to stand it, and presses his palm to Henry’s cheek softly.
Edward thumbs across the line of his cheekbone, careful of the bruise. “I wouldn’t dare.”
A smile, slow and incandescent, steals its way across Henry’s face. With one hand at his jaw and the other in his soft grey locks, Edward pulls him in for a kiss, and then a second, and then a third that stretches on into impossible eternity.
He’s flagged somewhat between the tears and the worry and the heartsickness, but when Henry shifts to press his warm weight back into Edward’s body, Edward’s stomach keels over itself with want. He runs his hands up Henry’s sides again, marveling at the feel of him lean and lithe, pressing soft fingers into the small dimples at the base of his spine until Henry catches on and grinds down against him.
“Ned,” he whines. “Christ, Neddie—”
It’s heaven, more than that, feeling Henry swell against him again— they’d never had the luxury of this on the shale, both too weak and tired to manage much more than soft, shaking kisses in the shelter of their shared tent. Here, though, they’re warm and well and alive.
Edward wants to take his time, would prefer to lay Henry out over silks and invent new ways to take him apart— on his fingers, his tongue, a different kind of meal made of his soft flesh— but the ship still rocks beneath them, and boots still walk the deck above, and their captain is waiting in the sickbay. Edward reaches down between their bodies, palming first at Henry’s thighs and then at the aching length between them. Henry keens, high and wanting and beautiful, against the shell of Edward’s ear.
There’s no finesse to it, not with how close their quarters are and the way Edward feels as though he’ll shake apart without Henry in his arms— but he finds he doesn’t mind terribly with the way Henry’s fingers card through his hair, tugging his head to the side so that Henry can trail his lips up the path of his chain, lip to earlobe and back again.
When Henry sits back up, straddling Edward’s hips, Edward can see his trousers stretching with the movement. There’s a shallow outline where he presses insistent against the fabric— Christ above, Edward thinks, tongue darting out to run across his bottom lip. Henry kisses him again before he can do anything about it, though, and Edward bites the tip of his tongue lightly in retaliation before reaching forward to palm at him with both hands, canting his hips up and pulling Henry down until Henry throws his head back and moans at the friction. The curve of his neck is exquisite, glistening faintly with sweat, stretched long and beautiful. Edward finds himself overcome with the urge to follow it down below where it disappears beneath the collar of his sweater, and then the realization that he can hits him like a blow to the sternum.
“Neddie, please,” Henry babbles as Edward manages to tug down his collar and latch his lips to a patch of skin just below his clavicle, and then he grinds down again all of his own accord. Edward groans, presses up against him, marvels at how intoxicatingly warm he is even through all the thick layers of fabric.
Long fingers, thick and delicate as a pianist’s, tease at the fastenings of Edward’s trousers. Above him, Henry looks down, a mischevious smile stealing its way across his handsome face as he dips first one finger, then two, then his entire hand past the band of Edward’s breeches to palm at him.
“God,” Edward breathes, catching on the inhale. Henry feels divine atop him, deft fingers dancing down his length, twisting on the upstroke until Edward feels dizzy with it. He nips another desperate mark into Henry’s pale skin.
“Should’ve had you like this earlier,” Henry murmurs, breath hitching at the feeling of Edward’s teeth on him. He grips tighter, rutting his own hips down to press his own desperate hardness against Edward’s. “You’ve no idea how long I watched you on the ships, Neddie, how long I wanted you—”
Edward won’t last long like this, he knows— it’s been so long since he’s had Henry’s hands on him in any capacity, longer still since they’d last had the energy for anything even approximating a proper fuck— but Edward will be damned if he lets this chance pass him by. Surging upwards, he drags his teeth up the side of Henry’s neck to plant another bruising kiss on his lips, anchoring one hand at the nape of his neck and the other gripped tight around his sharp hipbones.
Quick as a flash, he flips them, pressing Henry down into the mattress with his hands and his hips and his mouth. A low, broken groan escapes him as his own cock— maddengly stiff, leaking copiously into the linen of his underthings— brushes up against Henry’s own, sending a scattershot spark of heat through him. Christ, he hadn't ever thought he'd feel this again, feel this real and alive, blood thrumming like a river beneath his skin and Henry warm, warm, warm under his hands.
Edward doesn’t have the patience nor the time to do this properly, a fact he mourns, and one he plans to remedy the moment they set foot on English soil again— and isn’t that a thought, the dizzying realization that he wants to live to see England again, wants to live to see Henry step onto her shores.
Half-drunk on want, he fumbles open Henry’s fastenings, pulling him free with a choked-off gasp and shucking his trousers down about his thighs so Edward can dig his grip into the soft skin of Henry’s backside and pull them flush against each other.
“Don’t tease,” Henry hisses, tangling his fingers back into Edward’s hair— not tugging, just gripping tight and resting there, as though steadying himself. “Not now, please—”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” exhales Edward, soft and breathy. With one hand, he fumbles blindly for the lamp on the bedside table, dragging it closer and plunging two fingers into its warm oil. It's not enough, not what Henry deserves, but it'll have to do until they make it back home and Edward can lay him down in soft sheets, work him over with perfumed liniment and layer him in sweet kisses instead.
Henry whimpers when Edward grazes the sensitive skin of his cleft with slicked fingertips— it’s a quiet sound, barely-there and so soft he might not have heard it had Henry’s lips not been pressed tight against his jaw. In another life, at another time, Edward would have played with him for hours, working him over with gentle touches and drawing out his sweet little sounds one at a time.
Time is short, though, and Edward can’t bring himself to mind too much— not when Henry’s breath catches short and sharp in his chest in an instant at the feeling of Edward’s fingertip circling his tight, puckered hole. Edward slides it in slow, careful, one arm wrapped around Henry’s slim waist to arch his spine up off the mattress and lips pressing messy, desperate kisses everywhere they can reach. Henry’s throat, his collarbones, the tender skin of his chest— Edward leaves them spit-slick and marked red with tangible proof of his want.
And Jesus, if Henry doesn’t feel like heaven around him. Edward’s cock twitches in his trousers at the feeling of the tight, slick heat at his fingertips, the way Henry’s body gives way so deliciously when he adds a second. They’d none of them had the time or the privacy for something as indulgent as buggery, not since they were still on the ships, and the sensitive twitch of muscle around the base of Edward’s fingertips is so tantalizing he has to slow down, withdraw, before he makes a fool of himself by spilling in his underthings like a virginal ship’s boy.
When he pulls free, Henry makes another bitten-back sound of displeasure, canting his hips up as if to chase the touch. It’s maddening, perhaps the most wanton act Edward’s ever seen from him— without thinking, his hand drops to his own prick, pulling it free and squeezing tight around the base to bring his flurried mind back into order, whispering soothing nonsense into Henry’s ear to placate him.
“You promised,” Henry murmurs, words slurred with desperate need. “You said you wouldn’t tease, Neddie— ah—”
A gasp cuts through Henry’s words at the feeling of Edward’s cockhead nudging softly at his entrance. Edward takes a moment to gather himself, to sweep his eyes over the soft angles of Henry’s face and commit them to memory, to catalogue the feeling of his rapturous heart beating a steady rhythm within the embrace of his ribcage.
When he presses in, inch by agonizing inch, Henry clings to him like a lifeline— hands at the back of his neck, fingers tangling into the soft curls at his nape, thighs drawn up tight as a vice around his sides. The feel of him is intoxicating, hot and tight and divine, and Edward inhales slow and bites down on the raw skin of his lower lip to keep himself under control. He allows Henry a moment when he’s fully seated, a silent and soft handful of seconds where all they do is breathe, foreheads pressed together and warm air filling the scant centimeters between their lips.
The first thrust draws a punched-out gasp from Henry, their bodies rocking up the length of the mattress sharply enough that Edward’s lips brush feather-light against Henry’s own. The second earns him another soft whimper, whisper-quiet in the still air of the cabin.
On the third, Edward shifts his hips downward for a better angle, and brushes up against something deep within Henry that wrenches a beautiful, ragged moan from his throat— it’s gone as soon as it escapes, Henry tipping his head forward to sink his teeth into the fabric of Edward’s shirtsleeves to silence himself. The pain of it is sweet, a bright circle of sharp sensation in the meat of his shoulder.
Edward picks up his stilted rhythm, driving into Henry with what meager precision he can manage and marveling at the litany of soft, smothered sounds that escape him. “Henry— fuck, Henry, I won’t last—”
Nghhh, Henry says, unintelligible through the linen in his mouth. He pulls away, gasps out a sharp breath. “Don’t care,” he repeats, putting teeth to the shell of Edward’s ear and nipping gently. His teeth catch at the chain there, hook into it where it swings with the rhythm of Edward’s thrusts. “Come on, Neddie, love—”
Edward doesn’t need clearer encouragement than that. He presses Henry into the mattress once again, letting one hand drift from his waist down over the jut of his hip and down the endlessly long line of his leg, hooking his grip behind Henry’s knee and bringing it up to his chest so that Edward can fuck himself deeper.
Henry tries, for the briefest of moments, to reach for his own prick to stroke himself to completion. With a gentle huff, Edward uses his free hand to bat him away, taking Henry in his fingers instead and dragging a tight-fisted grip along the length of him in time with Edward’s desperate thrusts.
Within moments, Edward is rewarded with the slick, pearly spill of Henry’s release over his fingers, the clench of him hot and impossibly tight around Edward’s prick as he shudders and gasps his way through his crisis.
Henry’s teeth are back at his shoulder, mouthing soft and nonsensical words into his shirt, dragging his lips down to press against whatever spare inch of skin he can find. He nips at Edward’s pulse point, then soothes the pain of it with a quick pass of his tongue.
Blindly, Edward becomes aware of a soft, thin hand on his face, caressing the curve of his jaw. Henry skates over the aching wounds on his cheeks and rubs his thumb gently across his lower lip before gathering up the chain— his chain, Henry’s, a gift of desperation and selfishness and impossible love at the end of the world.
Henry tangles it between his fingers, loops it around the base of one like a gold ring, tugs just enough that Edward feels the sharp sting and the weight of it embedded in his skin, and that’s all it takes— Edward spills himself into Henry’s waiting warmth, collapsing boneless into his arms.
Edward isn’t sure how long he drifts for. His consciousness sways and stumbles into hazy unawareness, coaxed gently along by the feeling of Henry’s hands in his hair, petting soothingly at the crown of his head. It had never been like this on the shale, he thinks. They’d shared a bed before, of course, more times than Edward can count— but it had always been desperate, tinged with the fear of death, the two of them trying their best to crawl through the thin fabric separating them and burrow into each other’s skin.
Now, though— Henry exhales soft against him, his breath fluttering the loose locks of Edward’s curls. He’s warm in Edward’s arms, warm and alive. Edward tucks himself closer, cataloguing the shape of Henry’s smile where it’s pressed against his temple.
“Captain’s waiting,” says Edward, once his pulse has slowed enough. His hands wrap themselves around Henry’s thin frame, his fingers tucked underneath the hem of Henry’s sweater to press at the skin of his back. Edward rubs soft, nonsensical patterns into the expanse of it, ghosting his touch over the valley of his spine, scratching his fingernails gently against the pale skin to revel in the way it makes Henry shiver against him.
“You’ll stay?” Henry murmurs. “After we get you seen to?”
Edward hums, burrowing the cold tip of his nose further into Henry’s throat. Henry makes a soft, contented noise at the feeling, lifting his chin just enough for Edward to press closer and lay a chaste kiss against the skin there, atop the red marks he’d left earlier. “For as long as you’ll have me.”
It won’t be difficult, he thinks, to sneak into Henry’s room after the doctor’s final rounds— no one bothers them here, not up in their little corner of officer’s country. He can hold Henry on a proper bed and sheets, can curl up around him for reasons other than survival, can prop himself up on one elbow and watch the way the glow of the lamp flickers dim and golden across his face.
He does it now, in fact— untangles himself from Henry’s warm embrace and leans up to let the firelight dance over his pale skin. Henry reaches up, traces one long, delicate finger down the length of the last chain still embedded in Edward’s skin.
It should sting, Edward thinks. It does, really— he can feel the pressure of it as the brass tugs at his lip, the faraway and dull sensation of the metal rubbing up against the raw wound there. It’s not the same, though— something’s shifted, he thinks, tilted his universe on its axis the moment Henry put his careful hands to the very first chain.
“Do you plan to keep it?” Henry asks, tapping one fingernail against the chain with a soft clink.
His voice is soft, hesitant. Edward’s heart clenches in his chest, some nameless thing curling up protectively between his fourth and fifth ribs, hollowing out a space for Henry to make a home there. He’s not sure how to answer— if he’d been asked a day ago, or even an hour, he’d have buried himself beneath the wood planks of the ship in his desperation to escape the question.
Now, though— he considers it, darting his tongue out to trace over the shape of the piercing in his lip, watching the way Henry’s eyes crease with concern at the sight of it.
Edward reaches up to capture Henry’s hand where it rests against his cheekbone, pulling his fingers away and tangling them with his own. “I plan to keep you,” he replies. With gold rings, not a brass chain, he nearly adds— but it’s too early for that kind of talk when they’re still weeks away from England’s shores, and when Henry is laid out soft and sated in his arms. Better to save it, he thinks, for a brighter day, an easier one. They’ll have all the time in the world, now— Edward won’t waste a second of it. “Take it out for me?” he asks instead, running his thumb along the creases of Henry’s palm before releasing him.
And Henry does, as careful and light-fingered as he’d been for the rest of the chains. The metal tugs at his skin when Henry twists the fastenings open, the way made slick by Edward’s blood, the taste of it sharp and coppery on his tongue. Edward hardly feels the sting of it, though, blanketed as it is by the elation filling his chest, the sight of Henry real and vibrant and alive in front of him, the knowledge that they’d survived it all.
When Henry pulls away, the little brass chain held carefully in his fingers, Edward is certain he could float straight into the heavens for how light he feels. He goes to touch his face, to feel the evidence of Henry’s work— but Henry stops him with a gentle bat of his hand and reaches for the cloth and water instead, dabbing the blood away from Edward’s lip.
“Oh,” he says, once he’s finished cleaning Edward’s wounds, reaching over to put the cup and cloth back onto the little bedside table. “Is this yours, too?”
Edward props himself up, cranes his head to see what Henry’s got in his hand. A flash of gold flickers in the lamplight.
It’s the ring, he realizes, the one Captain Crozier had given him. He’d forgotten to return it in the chaos of it all, and Crozier had left before he’d managed to regain enough of himself to realize he was still holding onto it. Three clear stones set into a simple gold band— something about it tickles at his memory, hazy tendrils of recognition at the back of his mind.
“It’s not mine,” says Edward, plucking it from Henry’s outstretched fingers and turning it over and over in his hand. He’s got so few memories from before the expedition went wrong— the shale had taken most of them, lost forever to the cold and the hunger— but he’s sure he’s seen it somewhere before.
Henry watches him, silent. Edward thinks of a young man, hardly older than eighteen, who had nodded and blushed and stammered his way through Edward’s questions when they’d boarded the first of the ship’s boys. He’d been so eager to prove himself, Edward remembers. He’d been so young.
“Young,” he murmurs, watching the way the gold plate of the ring catches the lamplight and throws its reflections over his hand, over Henry’s face. “David— David Young, I think. Died of— not scurvy, no. The tins, maybe. Before we ever froze in.”
Henry reaches forward, gathers Edward’s hands in his own, tucks Edward’s fingers closed around the ring and then laces his own over top. “And to think,” he murmurs softly, “you were worried you would forget.” He tilts his head forward, brushes the tip of his nose gently against Edward’s own before stealing a sweet kiss.
“I might still,” whispers Edward, soft against Henry’s lips. “I don’t— I can’t put this in a memoir, Henry, not a truthful one at least. I won’t remember forever, in five years, or ten—”
Henry squeezes his hands, and Edward peters off into silence.
“In ten years,” Henry starts, voice gentle. He raises Edward’s hands, presses a soft kiss to his knuckles. “If you’ve forgotten, I’ll still be there to remind you.”
Edward tries to picture it— the two of them older, lines creasing their faces, a record of the long years they’ll live after the Passage. Perhaps they’ll retire in London, or out in the countryside on some modest plot of land where Henry can spend his time soaking in the rays of the sun and Edward can dig his fingers into soft, fertile earth instead of shale and ice. The ship around them rocks gently, a cradle to keep them safe, keep them warm, keep them alive. Their captain waits for them in the sickbay, their surviving crewmates litter the ship like stars across the fabric of the sky. Henry’s heart beats when Edward reaches out to press his hand against it— the rhythm of it settles him, its soft and steady cadence a soothing balm for his weary soul.
Edward turns his head to look at the chair beside his bed, and finds it empty of ghosts.