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Tharkay starts awake. The room is dim around him, the shutters closed, the air still and quiet. He’s still propped up in his sickbed, his hands all crabbed and supported on a soft pillow on his lap. And—yes, there it is, the pain again, the sharp burn in his hands, the dull, heavy ache in his back and down his legs, the twisting spiky itch across his scalp. He takes in a sharp breath, and quickly stills: the movement hurts his ribs.
“Tenzing?” Laurence is sat by his bed; how long has he been there? Tharkay turns his head painfully to look over. Laurence is in a bad way, too, all scabbing headwounds and bags under his eyes. But he’s dressed very properly, a good sign, and he has clearly taken some care with his hair: it’s been combed back into the usual queue, and all the blood brushed or washed out; it’s shining. Tharkay automatically reaches up to feel his own shorn scalp, but his hands protest instantly and he lowers them, gingerly, back to the pillow.
Laurence is looking—anxious, perhaps? There’s a look of concern on his face that makes Tharkay wonder how battered he really appears—they have not let him anywhere near a mirror—but a blush is also rising on Laurence’s cheeks. Strange; Tharkay thinks he has catalogued all of Laurence’s expressions, but he’s not sure what this one means.
“You’re awake,” says Laurence, awkwardly, obviously. And he smiles.
God help him, Tharkay feels the smile in his very bones, warming him up from the inside out, like being bathed in sunshine. What a ridiculous notion; and Tharkay tamps all the feeling down, harshly, so that he can simply respond with a brief “yes”, with no foolish emotion behind it, none at all.
Laurence looks down, and then back up again, as if embarrassed. “I brought you a gift,” he says, and he holds out his hand, clenched around something. “It is a mere trifle; not really anything.” Tharkay nods, inquiringly, and regrets it: everything hurts.
Laurence opens his fist, fingers splayed. And there, in the middle of Laurence’s palm is a—it’s a—can it really be a gold ring?
It is a gold ring; the room is dim, but it shines brighter than Laurence’s newly clean hair.
Tharkay cannot breathe. Is this a joke? Is this a dream? What the fuck is going on?
And then Laurence gestures to the left side of his face. “Your earring—they took it from you. I thought you should like another, perhaps.”
Tharkay is a—he’s a fucking idiot, a मूर्ख केटा, he’s an amadan gòrach , 白痴, a salak—to think, even for a second, that this impossible thing could be.
“May I?” says Laurence, leaning forward as if to put the earring in.
“Of course; I thank you,” Tharkay manages to grate out as Laurence fiddles with the hoop and threads it through his earlobe.
It’s the pain and exhaustion, probably, or the remnants of the laudanum in his bloodstream, that make his eyes start to prickle with wetness; and so he blinks hard, to dismiss it.
—
Tharkay looks down at his hands. His fingers, imperfectly healed, will never be straight or elegant again; and so for years he has avoided much thought of his hands, save for the purely practical and medical, for fear of being transported again, in his mind, to those dark smoky caves of pain. His left is still covered with a tracery of thin scars, faded over time to an almost-invisible silver, the record that remains of his hawk, eagle, and kestrel companions over the years: more reminders of loss.
But now there is something new to admire; and it is the signet ring on his pinky finger that catches his eye. Plain gold, unadorned to the casual observer: only he, Laurence, and a discreet Glasgow jeweller know that WL is engraved on the inside. Laurence’s similar ring has तेन्जिंग, Tenzing in Nepali script, which had caused the jeweller some disquiet; but Tharkay had written it out neat and fair and the jeweller had, in the end, done a decent enough job of it. The ring is barely a month old, and he knows that he twists it when he is anxious, or ruminating; an obvious tell, unworthy of him, which he is working, ruthlessly, on suppressing. But he has never worn a ring on his hand before, and it feels heavy; heavy with significance as well as the weight of metal.
The gold hoop in his left ear, he still wears; has not, in fact, taken it out since that laudanum-hazed moment in China when Laurence had threaded it into his lobe, when neither of them had had any clue that their future might hold twinned finger rings. Unlike the signet, it does not form part of the usual accoutrements of a gentleman; but Tharkay is hardly cast from the usual gentlemanly mould, and privately he enjoys that it adds to his disreputable and slightly rakish air with the local gentry.
He is also quite sure that some of the village children think he is, or has been, a pirate king; a story which he takes no pains to correct.
—
Tharkay has taken advantage of his business in Ayr to visit the barber there, and the hair at the precious nape of his neck is freshly shaved close, and prickly under Laurence’s fingers.
Tharkay is lying with his head in Laurence’s lap; they are both reading books, or at least, have been until this moment of distraction. Laurence scritches his fingers through the stubble; it feels rough, spiky and yet sensuous to the pads of each sensitive finger. Tharkay shivers involuntarily into the touch.
“I like this,” Laurence observes, and Tharkay just murmurs, “Mmmm,” in response, stretching out on the settee like a pleased cat.
And then the darker thought: the recollection of a thinner, more broken Tharkay, propped up painfully in a bed in the Imperial Palace, his head shaved by the physicians against his fever. Laurence had longed to run his hand over Tharkay’s vulnerable scalp, to feel the suede-like texture of his hair growing back. At the time he had attributed this to his desire to comfort his friend, to provide ease. He knows better now: comfort was part of it certainly, but not the greater part. And yet—
Tharkay looks up as Laurence’s fingers still, narrows his eyes in understanding. “Will, come back to me. We are not there; I am not there.”
“We will never truly escape it, though, I think,” Laurence says, low.
“That may be so,” Tharkay agrees, calmly, though he is turning his signet ring on his finger, often a sign of unease. His hands quiet, and he adds, “But here we are: in our own home, in front of our own fire; with Temeraire sleeping outside in his pavilion; and tomorrow we will rise, and go about our day, and the day after that, and the day after that.”
“And all the days after that?” Laurence asks; but he knows the answer, knows it in his bones.
“Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt wi’ the sun,” Tharkay confirms, with a wry smile at his own ridiculousness.
He tips his head back for a kiss, golden earring glinting in the firelight, and Laurence bends to oblige him.