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They’re holding tight to each other across the coffin lid when the Rachel finds them. For a moment, he’s terrified that it will pass them by, and isn’t it what they would deserve, the way they had stood by idly as Ahab had left a boy with a grave and a father without anything to grieve over.
Ishmael isn’t sure he’s not dead, not dreaming, shivering on the quarterdeck under a scratchy wool blanket. Not until Queequeg presses his forehead to his own, alive and warm somehow, like he carries the sun with him wherever he goes, and Ishmael presses closer to him.
If they’re dead they’re in some heaven together, and that’s alright by him.
Someone is asking him questions, someone is trying to give him water and that’s the last thing he wants to see now.
“Ishmael,” Queequeg says his name like a nagging wife, pushes the wooden cup into his hands and curls his fingers around it. “You take-a care me, now I take-a care you.”
“Yeah.” Ishmael says, nearly drowns himself in a sip of water. “Yeah. We take-a care each other.”
Captain Gardiner asks him questions, not unkindly, and Ishmael knows that there’s a part of the Rachel’s captain that is terribly vindicated that Ahab is gone.
He thinks of Tashtego, of Dagoo, of Starbuck and evening Stubb and Flask, how they didn’t deserve this. “Did you find anyone else?” Ishmael asks, grips the captain’s sleeve and feels the threadbare wool pull under his fingertips.
“Rest ye now.” Captain Gardiner says, and when Ishmael’s dry sobs heaves out of him, like retching, Queequeg rubs soothing circles against his back.
Queequeg doesn’t cry, not like Ishmael. He grieves, in his own way, for his own reasons. For Tashtego, for Dagoo, perhaps for Starbuck and Flask and maybe even Stubb. Maybe he grieves for Ahab too, but Ishmael doesn’t ask and Queequeg doesn’t say.
“That gold is still on the mast.” Queequeg says, cards his fingers through Ishmael’s hair and it takes him a moment to understand what’s been said.
When he does, it’s so absurdly funny that he laughs, loud and ugly and echoing in the hold and Queequeg laughs along, whether he finds it as funny or if he’s laughing at Ishmael, he doesn’t know and doesn’t care.
“Oh Queequeg!” Ishmael says, wiping tears from his face, his cheeks hurting with his laughter. “That should have been yours and we all knew it. I’m sorry, dear.”
“Would rather have my Ishmael than gold.” Queequeg says with such solemn sincerity that Ishmael takes his face between his hands, stares at him long and hard and hopes that all the love he feels and doesn’t have the words for can show plain on his face, before he leans in to kiss him.
It’s chaste at first, and then desperate and deep, breathing each other in, hands touching and grasping and digging in fingertips against skin, fingernails through clothes, like they’ll open their eyes and be alone in that sea again.
Whatever the Rachel’s crew thinks of them, they don’t say, wouldn’t dare , not with the way that Queequeg wraps his arm around Ishmael’s waist when he’s been out of sight for too long.
They fall back into the routine of ship life soon enough, pitching in here and there. The crew makes room for them and they become just two more moving parts in the ship’s machine. They take watch together, take their meals together, sleep together, curled into the same swinging hammock, dipped so low with their combined weight that it nearly brushes the wooden floor of the focsle.
They return to port with little fanfare, and Captain Gardiner tells them they will have to answer an inquiry. Ishmael smiles and nods, relays this to Queequeg who simply shrugs. They fall asleep on the Rachel one last night and before the dawn, they take what little belongings they were given and steal away off the ship, disappearing into the Nantucket fog.
They don’t dare stay in Nantucket, they trade what paltry coin Gardiner has paid them for a ferry away from the island and Ishmael spends the ride with his face pressed into Queequeg’s neck, trying to remember how to breathe.
On the cart ride to New Bedford, Ishmael traces the lines om Queequeg’s palm and tells him, you know I didn’t have a plan when I thought to become a whaler, I just packed a bag and set out one day. He cannot remember which lines mean what, and decides that the longest, deepest line that cuts across his lover’s calloused palm is his life line and presses a kiss there. I have even less of an idea now.
Queequeg doesn’t say anything for a long time, not until the cart stops and the driver bids them off, threads his fingers through Ishmael’s and helps him off the cart.
“We take-a care each other.”
He doesn’t know if he’s laughing or if he’s crying, and it doesn’t matter, because Queequeg is warm and alive against him, arms around his waist and forehead to forehead, they stand there waiting for the future to arrive.