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Victory, 1810
Joe thought that now was as good a time as any to start Kite along the road to understanding that they were together for good. For better or worse, in fact, though they'd been through so much worse already that Joe hoped they were due for a good long run of better. And what better way to start that off than with a thorough kissing of Kite's dear face?
He leant in again, pushing Kite's face up with his nose and sliding their lips together, Kite's hot and dry under his, roughened by the cold. Kite sank into the kiss for the barest second, then his hands came up to Joe's chest, shoving him away. There was no violence in the push, though, only something that felt horribly like sorrow and regret.
Joe felt the strings of his heart tighten, winding like the copper coils of his telegraph battery, the quickened thumping of his chest a message he couldn't translate.
"What's the matter?" he asked, dismayed at the edge of a whine threading his words. "I thought we…"
Kite shook his head, violent now. "Joe, don't. Of course I want you. I never wanted anything else."
Joe caught Kite's hand in his, the misshapen, broken fingers forcing gaps between them. "Then kiss me."
Another violent shake of the head, and Joe felt a pang of loss for the curl that should have come loose with it. It had been an excuse to touch, sometimes, to tuck the rare wayward hair behind Kite's ear.
"Something bad happens," Kite said, and paused long enough for Joe to have composed half a rueful joke about the pedestrian calibre of a poor sailor's kisses. "Every time we kiss." Kite exhaled the words in a rush. "Something bad."
Joe frowned, wanting immediately to refute such a ridiculous claim, but a voice in his head said, he's right you know. Let me count the ways. And they tumbled into his head, a catalogue of misery for Kite.
"First time I kissed you, we went home, I married your sister." Joe raked a hand through his hair. "God, Kite, I should never- I thought I was doing the right thing by all of us, but it just messed it all up, didn't it?"
Kite didn't meet Joe's eyes, but his fingers flexed in Joe's grip, and his shoulders hunched.
"And then the second time we...oh!" The memory flooded into him now, not a vague phantom to haunt his dreams, but a buzzing, electric halo of a thing, bright and clear and so real it seemed to Joe as if he just stretched out a hand he could touch it, taste it in the air. "The train," he said. "Kite, the train. When I kissed you and we locked the door and-"
The copper coils wound tighter and saltwater swam in Joe's eyes. Kite had resisted Jem's attempts to kiss the burn scars, turning his face and moving Jem's hand away until Jem had murmured soft words into Kite's ear and Kite had melted against him, all resistance gone, offering up his burned cheek to Jem's gentle lips. Jem had been so careful with him, too, desperate not to spook Kite with the sheer intensity of his feelings. Just the press of Kite's chest against his had made him want things he'd never dreamed he could have. It had been everything.
And then he had forgotten.
He had forgotten and left Kite to remember for both of them. Joe badly wanted to give himself a slap. Kite: lonely, broken, grieving Kite. Left to carry it all alone. Again. Joe groaned.
"I would never have left you if I'd had any choice. You know that, don't you?" But even as he said it, he could see Kite's ramrod straight back walking away as he and Agatha waved him off, his excision from their lives an honourable inevitability. The coils were wound so tight now they were pulling Joe in, hunching him over himself. Kite had not moved.
Joe squeezed his hand, and spoke with a desperate cheerfulness. "But we're beyond all that now. The pillars are being bricked up."
Kite raised his eyes and met Joe's briefly. His expression was soft in a way that was still unusual to Joe, but Jem had once known well. It loosened the coils and flooded Joe with happiness. That was then. This was now. Third time round they were getting it right.
"I kissed you just now, didn't I?" Joe said, with his most charming smile. "And I didn't accidentally marry anyone or forget anything. That puts us ahead, if you ask me. We're safe, Kite. What could go wrong now?"
Kite drew his hand out from Joe's, but only so he could take hold of his wrists, gripping them so tightly his knuckles whitened, ringing Joe like a pair of iron cuffs. The soft set of Kite's face hardened into tight lines.
"It's against the law, Joe. The Navy law, the King's law. All of the laws. We could be shot or hanged. They could make me watch as you-" Kite clenched his jaw hard enough for Joe to hear the clash of his teeth. The unspoken words lay heavy between them. Joe heard them anyway. Felt them too in Kite's iron grip. He wanted to pull at his collar to loosen it.
And then, mutiny. What had Agatha said? A mutiny didn't have to be anything more than a strike. A strike was an easy enough fight and Joe would do a thousand worse things to keep Kite alive. He set his jaw.
"No. They won't. They won't hang me or shoot me or flog me around the fleet, because if they did, how could I make them machines? And I'd promise them such machines, Kite." (Out in the future, beyond the pillars, a woman on an omnibus on her way to an important meeting shook off the strangest sensation that she'd been scrubbing floors only a second ago. A man faltered mid-proposal, horrified that he'd been about to utter the wrong name. A scientist flicked through a dense textbook frowning at a chapter she could have sworn hadn't been there earlier that day.)
"And of course," Joe continued, unaware of the unspooling of his intentions, "I'd make you a condition of my own cooperation. Anything you wanted, too. Admiralcy? Fancy house? Lawrence eating humble pie. You name it!" He was grinning by now, imagining Lawrence's pale, buffalo face as Joe laid out his demands. Kite wouldn't want any of that, of course, but daydreaming never hurt anyone.
Kite wasn't grinning, though. His mouth was twisted into a smile that held no humour at all. He loosened his grip and shook his head. "Joe, Joe, my heart has been broken too often to take another blow." He dropped his head, pressing it in the curve below Joe's collarbone. His voice came again, muffled against the thick cloth of Joe's scarf. "All the times I hurt you. All the times I watched you walk away."
The strings of Joe's heart tightened yet again. He slipped his hand out from under Kite's grip and laid it on the back of Kite's neck, pushing his fingers up into the thick, red hair. It was warmer there than Joe had expected and he curved his hand against Kite's skull, thumb restlessly sweeping back and forth.
"I see it," Joe said slowly, finding his way towards the right words. "How could you not have forgotten how to hope? God. All you've ever learned is how to dodge the next bullet, or ride out the inevitable storm. But, Kite. Hope is here. With us in this room now, and sleeping in hammocks down in the nursery." Gently, Joe slipped his hand round to Kite's shoulder and pushed him upright. He took Kite's arm in both his hands, turning it to see the wreckage of a lighthouse in a starless sky streaked with pink and silver crosses. He lifted it, bending his head to meet it, and kissed Kite's wrist and then over the burns. The lighthouse had been in ruins when Joe saw it first, decades from now, an omen of his future here.
"I was always coming home, Miz," Joe said. "Once I remembered how."
London, 1903
The door closed behind Joe and Kite could not move, not wanting to lose the last vestiges of Joe's warm embrace by shifting even an atom. Eventually there was no pretending and he sank onto the foot of the bed, the creases of his shirt pulling away from where they had been pressed against his skin. Kite wrapped his arms around his ribs, hugging himself hard, pulling the shirt tight again. It wasn't the same. Of course it wasn't the same.
Kite let himself cry then, not even bothering to cover his face with his hands. He must have looked wretched, he thought. Already ugly as sin and now twisted with ridiculous emotions that tangled him up in their confounding currents. How was it possible to hold so much joy and despair at the same time? Seeing Joe's face had been miracle enough, and then both Joes and Jem had begun to knit themselves together in front of Kite's eyes, and Kite had allowed himself a small thrill at knowing that when he left, he would be leaving part of himself with Joe this time. Not forgotten any more.
The self-same thoughts crashed despair through him, troughing the wave he was riding. To walk away again, knowing what he was leaving behind, knowing that somewhere in the future a man might stand still, sometimes, looking north, wishing it were possible to reach back through time and find him, the missing piece.
And then, crazed with hope, back up to the next crest he climbed, bones creaking with the effort of holding everything together. Joe meant to come with him, had called Kite family, had sounded just like Jem-on-the-train when he said he couldn't leave him again. It had splintered Kite like chain shot and he'd had to fight hard to stay calm, to stay upright, even, when all he'd wanted to do was drop to his knees and encircle Joe with his arms and tell him that he shouldn't, then. He should stay.
But Kite was forged a realist, and as much as he wanted to believe Joe, experience had shown him that things didn't work out for people like him, the misshapen pegs in a world of perfectly round holes. He had his duty and his people to care for and that had to be enough. They followed him into danger, willingly even; that was love of a sort, and if it didn't come with a warm embrace and a relentlessly cheerful breakfast cup of tea then Kite must simply live on less. He'd had enough practice.
The night seemed endless there in the dark, covers pulled up under Kite's neck, eyes wide open and straining to see, to hear anything that might be the world turning in another unanticipated direction. Anything might cause a shift, a forgetting and the fog settling over Joe a final time. He didn't have any fight left in him, nor time enough either. If he slept at all it was in fits and starts, and in his half-waking state he saw Jem's blank face as he stepped off the train, saw Joe at the water's edge looking at Kite with concern that was wrong enough to feel like drowning might be the better option, saw him walk away down the gangplank, bag held lightly at his side. Kite reached out to grab his wrist and caught only air, the memory fading like the smoke of one of Joe's cigarettes.
Kings Cross, 1903
Kite was at the station far too early for someone spooked by the incessant growling and hissing of the great engines, so he bought himself a newspaper, found a pillar to prop himself against and pretended to read. The station was full of smoke and devoid of people. Kite couldn't decide if he was grateful for this or not. On the one hand, he wasn't having to force himself not to jerk his head up at the sound of each approaching voice or shadow that caught the corner of his eye, on the other, how could anyone find anything through this infernal vapour? The future may have its advances, but did it have to come at the expense of breathing? Kite felt a sudden, sharp longing for the clean salt of the sea air. How did people live like this?
At least the noise of the engines drowned out Kite's fearful thoughts as the minutes ticked by. Each time he would start to catalogue doom scenarios, there would be a long, loud hiss of release, or a shrill whistle followed by a deep, rhythmic grind of something great fighting inertia, and Kite would lose his place, all his concentration set on staying absolutely still. In theory, he knew the machines were harmless, had mildly enjoyed being aboard them, yet he distrusted them. In his worst flights of fancy they were snorting beasts of burden, biding their time until their day of reckoning.
More minutes passed as Kite leaned, attempting nonchalance and entirely forgetting to turn the page. He didn't hear them coming. A little, warm hand tugged at his and he looked down, then up, the horrible plunging hope-despair like a ship dropping down a storm wave swamping him again because how could Joe leave children three times? Joe looked like he was going to cry. Kite thought he might too.
But then they were on the train, travelling north, all four of them close on one side of the compartment as if it could keep them from losing each other: Beatrix on Joe's lap, watching out of the window and exclaiming at passing sheep, George warm against Kite's side, and Joe's leg pressed against Kite's for so long he lost track of where he ended and Joe began. Joe slung his arm around Kite's shoulder and smiled. Not the charming smile he used on strangers and acquaintances to slide out from things he didn't want to do. No, a different, gentle smile that echoed something in his eyes. The smile he kept for Kite. The one that told him things, if only he'd learn the language. He's so fucking French, Kite thought, and laughed out loud.
Victory, 1810
Kite raised his eyes from his arm, looking up at Joe who was smiling that same smile. He finally allowed himself to recognise what had been in Joe's eyes all along, to remember that first revelation on a train: that he, Missouri Kite, was loved the way he loved, was worthy of it. And so, laws be damned, he tipped his head up and kissed Joe softly, for permission, both corners of his mouth, then harder, his arms looping around Joe's neck. Joe's hand cradled his head the way he'd done many times before, but this time Kite allowed himself to feel the intention in it, to understand how deep this ran, had always run.
His heart should have been beating a mile a minute, running fast to get away from himself but for once--for once--Kite was not sick with worry or grief or despair, but steady as a rock, as a pillar, with Joe the other steadying half. There would be time enough for caution later. For the first time in his life, Kite had come home.