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1797
Two weeks into his marriage to Agatha, and Jem couldn’t sleep. It had been expected, of course. All Agatha’s glittering society acquaintances, the half-friends in rich colors and bright silks, had warned him that sleeping next to another person was always less comfortable than sleeping alone.
He sat up in bed and reached over to light a cigarette. Agatha slept peacefully next to him, her dark hair in tendrils on the white pillow. The bedroom was cold in the way that made everything feel almost damp. His shirt clung to his collarbones, eggshell-thin. The tip of the cigarette flared tangerine. Jem sat back against the cool pillow and wished, obscurely, for something warmer.
He thought of his honeymoon and the gray foggy beach strung with black seaweed. In a monochrome world, Missouri appeared like a signal flare, with that characteristic expression of perfect patience, like he would have waited years for Jem to show up.
On the back wall of the bedroom, silhouette portraits of Jem and Agatha faced each other in profile. There was no portrait of Missouri. In fact, there was not a single image of him anywhere in the apartment. For some reason, it bothered Jem obscurely.
The portraits of him and Agatha were, at least, a perfect matched set. In a way, it was why he had married her.
That, and it was a beautiful, mathematical engineer’s solution. All loose ends were tied up, all forces accounted for, with checks and balances for every party. He wouldn’t have to see the face Agatha made when she thought she would have to marry someone else, bright tears just on the verge of forming in her eyes. If Jem could just feel the way he was supposed to, everything would click mechanically into place. It looked so nice on paper. Sometimes solutions that looked nice on paper resulted in sleepless nights, a cigarette clutched between tired fingers, and the desperate, exhausted summoning of old memories: Missouri sitting completely still as Jem traced the lines of a tattoo onto the soft skin of his forearm, Missouri’s eyes flicking up after Jem’s gossamer half-kiss, alight with wonder, Missouri waiting by the sea as if he would do it forever if he had to.
1903
The frost fair was cold, but the sunlight held the same warmth as another person’s touch. Heat radiated from the roasted chestnuts in Joe’s hand, along with the smell of burnt sugar.
The mix of electric light and winter sun turned Kite’s hair into a halo of molten copper. Joe looked at him and marveled at the fact that just an hour ago, his first instinct had been to find him ugly, an instinct fuelled by the contrast between his weathered, scarred skin and the porcelain fineness expected of an English drawing-room.
Memories sparked and ignited one by one. Overlaid on Kite’s face were the memories of every time he had made Joe laugh, every harsh decision, every instance of unbreakable calm. His eyes were the jadeite color of shallow water. As the conversation went on, Joe began to know him, and it made him the most beautiful person he had ever seen.
Kite’s voice did not shake, because he was Kite, but the corner of his mouth tightened slightly.
“And then you asked her to marry you,” he said.
“I did,” said Joe, who remembered.
Kite’s eyes flickered to his face, and then away. He was never going to ask, but something about the way he held himself was more fragile than usual, and Joe thought he was wondering how he had meant it when Jem said he loved her, and whether he had regretted it. Suddenly, fiercely, Joe was aware that there was only one thing he regretted, and it was the half-kiss outside the Admiralty’s New Year party. Consequences be damned. If there existed such a thing as useful time travel, time travel that could fix one’s mistakes instead of tying them into a more complicated tangle, Joe would turn it from an ambiguous brush of his lips against the corner of Kite’s mouth into something that brooked no doubt. Given the chance, armed with Jem’s courage and carelessness, Joe would have kissed Kite until they both forgot how to breathe.
1797
The first and last time Agatha ever kissed him, Joe held still and waited for it to end.
Her hands rested close to his skin, one by his cheek and the other by his shoulder. Joe felt pinned like a dead thing to a piece of cardstock, like one of those curious butterflies from the tropics whose colors leeched away the longer one kept them on display.
She had come straight from the hospital. The smell of antiseptic was in her hands, perfume in her hair. It was something wintery, sweet as jasmine, and it clashed oddly with the chemical smell in her hands.
Distantly, across the room, a small silver mirror reflected them both. It was foggy, and it showed them paler and cleaner than their usual colors, like a pair of ceramic dolls. All the color in their clothes was only a watery glaze. She must have felt him stiffen under her hands, because she drew back.
Joe focused on the diamond pin in her hair, the little rainbows it threw, white light shattered into washed-out versions of its constituent parts. Everything was so still he could hear fabric shift as she moved away. The floor creaked slightly. It was so different than the moment he had kissed Missouri: birds taking flight across the river, the sparkling contrast between a warm touch and the clear, frosty air, even the air seemingly fluttering with joyful potential. Electric potential, Jem thought, the lifeblood of a circuit. There was none here. Jem hadn’t seen the difference coming.
“Should I not?” Agatha said.
Her face was ordinary, but her voice was too crisp. It had a fragile, cut-glass quality. It unsettled him sometimes, the way she hated that quality in Missouri. Now, for the first time, it hit him that she hated it in him because she had never managed to fully eradicate it in herself.
He summoned his usual mask from somewhere and tried to inject some kindness into it, but all he could manage was the same tired, glittering charm. “
Better not,” he said, smiling.
“Right, then,” she said. “Right. I’ll leave you to it.”
She picked up her muffler at the door. It shut behind her. Jem wasn’t certain what he had meant to leave him to, but in the end, he thought about sinusoidal functions: never settling, simply cycling through the same ups and downs, potential bouncing between capacitors in an undamped circuit, ultimately going nowhere. Deep in the back of his mind, he wondered what Missouri was doing.
Afterwards, Agatha returned and smiled at him. Once again, they settled down to sleep side by side. Once again, Jem found himself restless and awake, watching the moonlight etch shadows onto the wall.
1811
On the Victory, Joe sat on the edge of Kite’s hammock. Kite raised an eyebrow at him over the cover of Joe’s copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, and Joe felt a rush of something that had once been misdiagnosed as epileptic euphoria. The correct diagnosis: love, disconnected from its source. All the sourceless yearning of three lifetimes hummed in his chest, reconnected and fulfilled.
“Zhang,” Kite said dryly.
He had been aiming for a reproach, but he didn’t quite hit it. Joe glowed internally.
“Miz?”
“What are you looking at?”
“You.”
Kite blinked. Joe leaned in and kissed him on the forehead. As always, he looked surprised, as if some part of him had managed to forget that Joe still liked him. Someday, he hoped, in the distant future, Joe hoped he would lose that flicker of surprise.
Scars faded, he told himself, brushing the hair back from Kite’s forehead. It was shorter than it had been when Joe had last left him. He looked older and younger at the same time.
Kite still looked startled. It was the same look he might have worn if, after walking past the same blank wall for a decade, he had suddenly found a stained-glass window in it. At some point, the confusion would go away, but the wonder would most likely stay. It had for Joe, after all. In the meantime, all he could do was press their foreheads together, soak in the warmth, and feel the buzz of electric current in his chest, like the beating wings of something taking flight.
1815
Bea hadn’t wanted them to go. She was fiercely protective of Kite and always had been, and it made Joe’s chest feel warm. Stories of Lord Lawrence, and sometimes even of Agatha, sent her into a quiet incandescent rage. George admired him, but only Bea really seemed to see that he was fragile. She had an instinctual understanding of what the war had been like, even though they never spoke to her about it. Though she never spoke to them about it, Bea, with her quiet, shrewd view of the world, knew exactly how expendable they had been.
It manifested mostly in Bea reaching over to place the last baozi in Kite’s bowl. Today it manifested in her small dark figure, lion-like, standing guard at the gate of the cemetery.
Military tombstones stretched out like clean teeth. Agatha’s was simple: her name, the dates of her birth and death, and that she had been a surgeon killed in action aboard the HMS Agamemnon. They had fought with Lord Lawrence about it. He had tried to pose as her only living relative. He had repeatedly voiced the opinion that Agatha was not a common soldier. Bea and the tiger had bared their teeth in unison, with the exact same expression on their faces. Joe had finally stepped between them all, quite calm, and pointed out that Missouri Kite was a war hero now, and that-- even regardless of the fact that he had been Agatha’s brother-- the Admiralty would want him listened to. This shut Lawrence up for a while.
The thing was, Lawrence hadn’t wanted her tombstone to say that she was a surgeon. It was cold comfort, and both Joe and Kite were of the private, atheistic opinion that nothing could really matter to the dead, but while living, she had been quietly and fiercely proud of it.
1797
The day Agatha kissed him, she came back late in the evening. Jem was glad for it; it had given him the space to make dinner for himself, a quick and familiar stir-fry which he wouldn’t have made if she had been there. She entered the room more quietly than usual in white satin shoes. She hung her scarf by the door and wished him a good evening, bright and brittle, and they drank tea by the fire in their perfectly matched chairs.
Jem was sorry: she could cut weakness out of herself the same way she cut out shrapnel, like a lifelong surgeon, but he was beginning to know her, and he knew she was watching bright parts of her future slowly wink out. It wasn’t what he had wanted. But then, thinking back, what was it that he had wanted?
He waited, over and over, for her to ask the horrible question. It hung in the air between them, almost tangible: is it because you prefer my brother? Jem didn’t trust himself not to answer with the truth.
She never asked. Jem was never sure if that was a polite kindness, or if she just genuinely could not fathom that, given the choice between a proper life and one spent longing pointlessly after the son of a carpenter from Cadiz, someone like Jem could choose the latter.
1815
Kite knelt down, almost reverently, to place a small bundle of flowers on the mossy earth in front of her grave. Joe understood why Bea had been worried. Now that the war was over and they all had the luxury of mourning, it would be a very sensible time and place to fall apart.
He only straightened and brushed a few stray white petals off of his gloves. “It seems almost cliché.”
“This is what people do,” Joe said. “They leave flowers at people’s graves.”
Kite hummed to himself. Time was a slow-acting, inadequate medicine, but every year they did this, it felt less and less like a pilgrimage. Joe was quietly glad he had never told him that Agatha died on the way to shoot him. Now, thinking back, the memory of her death had new and old perspectives layered dizzyingly on top of it: Joe Tournier’s fragile conviction that Kite did truly need to be stopped, like a thin coat of paint over Jem’s heart-stopping panic. The exact same incident, re-measured in a new light.
Now, in the cold and empty cemetery, Joe Zhang noticed that a deep, silent well of fury had opened in his chest. It joined the pointless, directionless anger at the way Kite had always been treated: by Lawrence, by the Admiralty, by his own sister. By Jem. He couldn’t talk about it. Kite still thought it was the way things were meant to be, George was still too young to understand, and he could picture the look on Bea’s face, heartbroken and furious.
It would have to join the ranks of all the other things they didn’t talk about.
Some things didn’t have to be said. There was no one in the cemetery but the dead. They were guarded from the main road by leafless sycamores, tall box hedges, and Bea, as somber as a copse of yew in her long plum dress, so Joe reached over and laced their fingers together.
It was a small, inadequate comfort, but as always, Kite was disproportionately grateful. He leaned into the warmth, knocking their shoulders together.
“Do you wish you were still married to her?”
Joe thought of how he had woken up that morning: at eight in the morning, warm to the core, sunlight in the air and tucked behind his ribs. He had woken up that way every day for years.
“Never,” he said.
Kite smiled, and finally seemed to believe it.