14 Works by cosmogram
Listing Works
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“Say you got married,” Robby found himself asking. “Would you wear your dress blues? Or civilian clothes?”
It had only been an idle thought, no different than any number of easy, directionless musings of the sort that often came over the two of them on mornings like this one, when no one had a shift to go to for at least thirty-six hours. Robby didn’t mean anything by it. But he regretted the words the instant they left his mouth, even before he saw the incredulous grin slide over Jack’s face.
“Say I got married?”
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That winter, for the first time in his life, Francis Crozier gained a fear of flight.
An interlude.
Series
- Part 3 of Earthrise
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“I mean,” the stranger said, “to suggest that perhaps we are compatriots in more ways than one? Men of that—how may I put it—that antique homeland of the mind; countrymen of Harmodius and Aristogeiton; fellow-mourners after Hyacinth; confrères in the licence grecque—”
“I am from County Down,” said Francis uncertainly.
At a sculpture gallery in Rome, a certain misunderstanding unfolds.
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“You said you had a question,” Francis snapped, irritable already.
“Yes,” James said, flushed and resplendent still from the company next door—undaunted and loose-limbed in just the way that plucked cloying ire from a raw place in Francis. “How’s your chess game?”
A seduction.
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They were going to break the sofa carrying on like that—James was sure of it—and they’d all get billed for it, just as they would for the rest of the wreckage they left behind. Smashed windows, busted instruments, red wine stains on the carpets, holes punched in the walls. If they kept it up they’d get kicked out of the studio, and the album would never get made, and the album, of course, was the last thing, the only thing, holding any of the rest together.
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But there was nowhere to be alone on the space station. There was no privacy to be had. There were cameras, meticulous schedules, open hatchways. One did not simply abscond to a disused cargo block for a quick fumble with a colleague. It couldn’t be done, and that was that, and Francis would not even entertain the thought.
With just eleven days in left in orbit, Francis Crozier finds himself beginning to entertain the thought.
Series
- Part 2 of Earthrise
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James couldn’t say what made him go into the cantina. Just that he’d never once been able to leave well enough alone, just that if there was any constancy to him at all it was his talent for finding the raw and flicking it till it bled. The man’s eyes narrowed as James made his way over. Just that he’d always felt others’ disdain the way a moth felt a lantern in the dark.
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Francis shut his eyes. At this very moment, somewhere in the module behind them, complex plasma hung in suspension inside a charged chamber—a delicate crystal lattice, ordered and pristine, a wonder not of human design and not for them to keep. The plasma crystals were an experiment only possible in microgravity. Take the chamber back to earth, and the lattice would crumple under its own weight.
He dared to look. They were not so fragile, he and James.
Eighty-six days at 17,000 miles per hour.
Series
- Part 1 of Earthrise
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In a lifetime of unsubtleties, the affair with Crozier is James’s worst. Crozier’s hand resting on James’s lower back, there for all to see. Crozier’s fingers nudging gently at James’s shirtcuffs when they stood around at receptions; Crozier’s pale eyes going soft and foolish when James entered the room. Sometimes simply Crozier’s nod, sharp and proprietary, as though to say get upstairs, get in my office, close the door—as if the rest of them were not right there.
Or, the one where James and Dundy are bright young things (baby post-docs) in English literature, and there’s a cranky new professor in town ...
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Francis does not seek him anymore, but neither—still worse—does Francis bother to dismiss him when James arrives of his own volition, each time with all the hope of the most wretched fool. “Oh, get to it, then,” Francis muttered with sublime disinterest that very day when James appeared in his cabin’s doorway. James had, in fact, come to talk—but he had not hesitated when Francis gestured dispassionately to the front of his trousers. He had dropped, wordlessly, to his knees to obey.
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You’d make a lop-winged god by cosmogram for kitseybarbours
Fandoms: The Terror (TV 2018)
05 Dec 2021
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“I am not a hot-house orchid. You needn’t fear for me as you do. You needn’t be so gentle with me.”
“How else would I be?” Francis asks.
James’s voice pitches low. “Rougher. Quite a bit rougher, in fact.”
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“What would good Sir John say, if he knew what obscenities occupied your mind? If only Sir John could see you now, the spectacle you make of yourself, displayed here, dripping with my spend and still begging to be used.”
Francis has so few delights these days. The particular rosy blush that comes over James’s face when embarrassment knifes through him is one of them, and Francis seeks it unsparingly.
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Just six weeks into the voyage, Francis and James have fallen into a certain easy understanding—but it's not made to last. -
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“Oh,” James gasps, and really, it’s almost too easy. James ought to have some modicum of shame, ought to be able to master himself better than this—better than turning to a doe-eyed dissolute the second a man so much as breathes near his eager young cock. “Not here, Francis,” James pants out, voice already hitching high. “The great cabin, at the very least.”
“Here, I think,” Francis returns crisply. “On your knees.”
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“What was it, James, all those men before did that didn’t please you?” Francis asks quietly, a menacing gleam of certainty crystallising in his gaze, and James feels his stomach drop at the warm, queasy sense that some trap has been laid that he’s been far too foolish to see. “Or, rather," Francis whispers, "what did they fail to do? Tell me, so that I may not repeat their mistakes.”
James has a secret, and Francis has a way of seeing far too much.