Work Text:
He rolls over, reaching for someone who is not there. The bed is empty, the sheets still warm—and then a questing hand finds his own. Its fingers are roughened by sea work, strong in their grip, and alive.
“Ah,” murmurs John Bridgens, “a little touch of Harry in the night.”
“Not night for long,” comes the soft reply. Harry Peglar’s voice is a strong one, meant for shouting loudly enough to beat the wind—but around John it gentles, comes to heel.
John pulls his hand back and lets Harry slip beneath the covers. Sturdy knees slot beside his own. Harry’s feet are cold.
“And how did you know it was me, John?” Harry teases.
In the darkness, John feels more than sees Harry’s hand come to hover just above John’s temple, a bird about to land. He allows himself a smile.
“Word of visitors travels quickly on a small ship frozen in the ice,” he quips back.
“Let us hope that word of visitors to your bunk does not, then.”
John chuckles and adjusts his head on the pillow. Harry’s fingers find a strand of his hair and tuck it behind his ear, though both their faces are quite invisible in the dark. John feels the heat of Harry’s closeness nonetheless, the resolute continuing of his body. His heart beats on and on.
“Do you have to hurry back to Terror?” John asks.
Fabric rustles as Harry shakes his head. “No. Captain Fitzjames had no response.”
The captain of the foretop is now reduced to running messages, John thinks. I suppose there is no foretop to captain any longer.
John can’t help himself; his senses have come alive at Harry’s nearness. It is not safe, but he curls a gentle arm around Harry’s middle all the same, pulling him close. He feels the intake of his breath. When he presses their lips together, Harry’s are still cool from his time outside.
Harry’s hand tightens in his hair. John allows himself to sink into the sensation for a long moment. Were they on shore, it would be so easy to pull Harry closer still, to strip him of his underclothes and light a lamp to see his beauty. He would be all wiry muscle in the flicker.
“Would you care to take a stroll?” John says instead, his mouth pressed to Harry’s neck so that he speaks the words directly into skin.
Harry shudders against him. When he speaks, his voice too is muffled, but by desire rather than flesh.
“By all means,” he breathes.
Night follows them out onto the ice. They are wrapped tightly in their overthings, but John can make out the gleam of Harry’s eyes above his scarf. Neither John nor Harry carries a lantern. The moonlight is luminous enough, after the dark of John’s cabin.
There is no set path to their wandering; John lets Harry lead the way. His feet find purchase on the ice as soundly as if it were land. John follows, marveling at his youth and strength.
Even in this dark wilderness, he wants to say, it is a blessing to have you at my side. It is worth a dozen such journeys to make this one with you.
Instead, he says, “I’ve read the American writer.”
This is the pattern of their conversations. Familiar ground. There is no great, gleaming love to leap from John’s chest and shatter the fragile peace that he and Harry have found. The keening abyss he sometimes allows himself to brood upon can be papered over with casual words: easy conversation that passes between them like a clasp of the hand.
When Harry doesn’t reply, John elaborates: “The chap who caused little Dickie Aylmore to receive fifty lashes for his inventive set decorations at our late, unlamented carnivale. A strange little fellow by the name of Poe, if memory serves.”
It does not take him long to trip out the words, even delayed as they are by his labored breathing. It takes some effort, walking out on the ice like this. While he wasn’t looking, it has begun to mix with stone: loose, flat shale that shifts beneath his feet with each step.
Harry does not seem to find the walk difficult at all. His face shines beneath the moonlight as though it were the sun.
“I did not, however, read the fateful story that brought on the lashes,” John continues.
Harry has become distracted. John stops and watches, grateful for the respite, as Harry scrambles up the side of a nearby mound of ice.
Be careful, John does not say.
But Harry never loses his footing. In fact, once he has crested the serac, he extends a hand down to John and helps him to make his unsteady way up. The top of the ice is flatter than John expected: not a serac, really, but a hill.
Not night for long, Harry said in John’s bunk, and he was right, because already a copper-colored disc is beginning to creep above the horizon, washing the sky in orange and pink. It must have been many months since John saw it last. Somehow, the sight fills him with apprehension.
The sun pours over the lumps of ice below them, illuminating the forms raised by the buckling and creaking of the pack beneath. Light and shadow reveal them for the maze they are.
“I almost can’t believe it’s returning,” says Harry.
He puts his hand on John’s arm. Through the many layers they both wear, John can barely feel the pressure.
“Yes,” he agrees, faintly. “Yes.”
The sun is in his eyes, and Harry’s touch is ephemeral as he helps John down from the ice. When his vision clears, he finds that the shapes before them are not more seracs at all, but tents: grimy, triangular things whose sides heave in the wind. Harry leads John among them even as he tries, with grim realization, to hang back.
There are not so many tents that John cannot recognize the one that looms before them.
He pulls on Harry’s arm, but Harry won’t turn his head any longer. Desperate to keep his attention, John looks to the sun again and gestures. It has risen, is still rising into the flat, implacable blue.
“Dawn stretches forth her rosy fingertips,” John says. The Greek is clumsy in his mouth. How long has it been since their lessons ceased?
Harry has ducked inside the tent. John must, too. After all, he never left it.
He reaches out to find the waiting hand. It is cold and soft, its calluses ripped away. John kisses it nonetheless, then straightens Harry’s hair, tucking a stray strand into place.
Poe. He was telling Harry about Poe.
And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy dark eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams—