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Mr. Tozer
Irving is at my apartments. Was injured during his outing, has received medical attention and is well, not in danger, wants you here.
T Jopson
Trust the man to be bluntly efficient with it, and thank God, to be perfectly honest. Sol is halfway across Portsmouth in record time, boots sloshing in the half-mud from the foggy half-rain, ignoring the ache in his muscles from a full day at the dockyard in favour of cycling between anxiety, self-reassurance, and the spiritual equivalent of banging his own head against a wall. He’d been just about to set out to look for the bastard himself when Jopson’s letter came: had been sitting at the table getting progressively edgier as the clock ticked away and dinner cooled on the stove, and John Irving, over and over every second, continued to not come home.
“He’s had some laudanum,” is the first thing Jopson says when he opens the door, immediately stepping aside to let Sol in, though he follows it up with a calmly judgmental, “boots off, please.”
“Where is he? What happened?”
“He’s in the sitting room, we’ve made up the sofa for him.” Jopson does his version of a grimace, which, while involving very little change in the outward mask of his expression, is a grimace nonetheless, and recognizable to those who have spent enough time in his presence. “He made one of the patrons at the pub he was in very angry, and they attacked him with a knife. He didn’t lose all that much blood,” he adds rapidly, off something happening on Sol’s face as he shucks his boots off that he isn’t entirely aware of, “the whole place jumped in to break them up, no one was awfully hurt, I’ve wrapped him up, he should be fine. The laudanum was mostly to calm him down, actually. He was, er…”
“Shouting bloody murder,” volunteers Crozier helpfully, emerging from a door at the end of the hallway and closing it behind him. “Even once they got here.”
Jopson does his grimace again. “Very upset, I was going to say.”
“Captain,” Sol says, nodding to Crozier, who nods back.
“Sergeant.”
Neither one of them is either of those anymore. If anyone else tried to call him ‘Sergeant Tozer’ ever again, he’d run the risk of decking them before rational thought got the chance to take over. Still.
The space between himself and Crozier always feels tense, even a year and change on from the court-martial, the weight of each man’s decisions a well of inexorable gravity. Captain and Sergeant is a handshake re-offered, and so far always re-taken. An apology of sorts, where both men bend the knee so that neither is left humiliated.
John is half-asleep, but rouses groggily when Sol enters the room. He has no shirt; bandages stretch diagonal from his shoulder blade to just under the other arm. Firelight makes the sweat shine clammy on his pale skin. “Solomon?”
“Are you completely stupid?” Sol demands as he closes the door behind him, and thinks he hears a smothered laugh before it clicks shut. “Are you mad? Have you gone properly, finally mad?”
“No,” says John, looking somewhat disappointed by this greeting. He sinks back into the cushions. “I’m sorry. I’m alright.”
“You’d bloody well better be, you blithering idiot.”
“I’ve had worse.”
Sol kneels at the side of the couch. Taking John’s face in his hands, he leans in and kisses him, first firmly on the lips, and then, gentler, on the forehead. He lingers there, letting his nose rest against John’s cool skin, and breathes him in. He smells of blood.
Their eyes meet through John’s eyelashes. “What was that for?” John murmurs, unable to not sound breathless.
“You having worse.” John flushes. Sol straightens, just enough to be able to look him clearly in the face, elbows resting on the edge of the couch cushion. “Angel. For the love of God. Stop getting stabbed.”
“I’m not making a habit of it!” John protests. “Really, it was just a misunderstanding. I’m sure Thomas explained it all to you—“
“Not by bloody half.”
“Oh. Well…”
Sorry bastard that he is, hopelessly tender for this strange sea-bird who can’t seem to stop breaking its wings, Sol grabs an extra pillow and helps John prop himself more steadily upright, pours him a glass of water from the carafe on the coffee table, and lets him explain. He does have to help him take the first sip, steadying the glass so he doesn’t spill it all over himself. John’s hands haven’t stopped shaking since the Arctic; sometimes it’s more intense, sometimes barely noticeable, but they never truly go still.
A few years ago, John Irving very nearly died. Bleeding out onto the shale, he… he saw God, or felt God, or sensed Him in some way—he’s never been able to put into words exactly what it is that happened, and Sol doesn’t blame him. What Sol does know is that in the aftermath, he’d had to rebuild his world alongside his body in order to live.
We all have a little of the Lord within us, John had explained to him, in soft and loving tones, one hand resting open against Sol’s bare chest. That’s why we can see Him, sense Him. How we can know when we find Him.
Do you see Him much? Sol had asked, half-joking in case it was a good time for a joke.
John had looked at him for a long moment, met his gaze with a helpless abandon. Please kiss me? he’d asked in a whisper, and Sol had obliged.
Despite everything, the two of them have received nothing but grace and goodness since the first time they let lips meet. Sol’s pardon by the Admiralty; his job at the shipyard; a sudden inheritance from John’s uncle; over and over, by the will of God, they were granted the ability to stay together. “The Church may not allow it,” John declared one night, on fire with it, the cross around his neck dangling above Sol’s bare chest, “but the Church is only men. The Lord… He is watching, He is listening. And He hears us, Solomon. He sees the trueness of our hearts. There is nothing holier, nothing He could more approve of.”
Sol’s been a hopeless romantic since birth, no matter how embarrassing he might find that truth. He would happily stand in front of God and make his vow. There will be no rings for them, no documents, no marriage bed, no children—
They’d had to stop once, while they were making love, because John had started to weep, and the response that had come once Sol had finally calmed him down enough to get one was I can’t give you children. I can never give you… I’ve taken you from—oh, God forgive me—there’s still time for you, Solomon, you should go and—and find—and forget this, and save yourself—!
It’s not always easy.
Sol tries to spend his time in ways that bring him peace. He smells wood and salt at the shipyard, purposefully loses card games to the younger dockworkers at the pub, and bakes loaves of bread of varying levels of edibility (at least at first). John fills his days with correspondence and art and study. He splits bottles of good wine with Jopson, and endures the Hilsop boys down the road in an attempt to teach them a higher level of arithmetic. He sings in the church choir. He stains the quick of his fingernails black losing himself in charcoal drawings. He sketches like a man possessed and then colours his sketches like he’s performing surgery, but like he’s never actually gotten to do the cuts himself before and is very nervous about accidentally killing the patient. And sometimes, when he’s very troubled in a specific kind of way, he puts on his coat and goes to different pubs down by the docks.
“It is not evangelising,” is how he chooses to defend himself tonight, and the worst thing about how stubbornly he says it is that Sol knows he believes himself. He’s seen the truth—that love, friendship, kindness is the only thing that matters in this life—isn’t it his duty to try and help others who have become confused and overwhelmed and lost sight of it? “Though I understand that… well, obviously it is received that way by some.”
That’s an improvement, at least. “John, you keep going around like this, you’re asking to get hurt.”
“How was I supposed to know he had a knife? Nonetheless that he’d be willing to use it in such a fashion.”
He’d been at the Cherrie Graye tonight, which is a fisherman’s bar. Sol briefly evaluates how on earth he can be so deeply, madly, infuriatingly attached to a man who can forget that all fishermen carry knives as part of their profession. “Don’t do that again. Don’t…” Sol struggles with his words, his anger and his affection and his terror. “Don’t do that again, don’t bloody well do that again, you understand?”
John looks at him. “No,” he says plaintively, and then continues in a peevish tone, “I mean yes, I will endeavour in future to avoid angry men with knives—“
“Don’t go looking for trouble!”
“The world’s full of it, Solomon.” John’s face is fretful, his words frustrated. “Someone has to do something.”
“Does it have to be you?”
“What else am I supposed to do with my time?” John demands, his voice becoming accusatory, “what else am I supposed to do with—with this? With everything? Where can I put it? Go on, tell me! Sometimes when I’m falling asleep I wonder if I’ll ever wake up again—sometimes I dream that I wake up and I’m looking up at the roof of a tent, with the wind howling and the smell of everything awful and rotting, and I know that all this has been the dream, and now I’m awake and this time I’m going to die there, I can never come back! It’s been nothing but a punishment—but then when I properly wake up, I don't know what to do with myself, and I’m full up to the brim with it and it’s making me sick, it’s just another poison in this fragile little body, and I feel as though if I move I’ll go to battered, bleeding pieces right there beside you in the sheets… I know you were there, but it didn’t happen to you the way it happened to me, Solomon, I might’ve been dead for years!”
John is shaking with anger, a wildness in his eyes. Sol’s mouth is very dry. “You never told me that,” he says hoarsely.
“I didn’t want to frighten you.”
They both sleep light, not unusual for sailors; one man’s nightmares often mean a shared awakening. Sol has always understood that sometimes it feels better to just try to go back to sleep instead of discussing that night’s visions. “You frightened me tonight,” Sol says, though he wishes he could stop himself from wanting to make John feel guilty for being so reckless. He wishes it had happened to him too. He wishes it had never happened at all.
Shame flickers on John’s face. As if in a last ditch effort to justify his actions, he offers hesitantly, “I didn’t even need stitches.”
Sol doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at that. One instinct, or perhaps both, must show on his face, as John reaches out with his good arm—he’s been instructed not to move the shoulder on his injured side, for fear of aggravating the wound and starting it bleeding again—and draws him closer, into as much of an embrace as they can manage together. “It doesn’t hurt too much, does it?” Sol asks. “And you’re feeling alright?” He brushes two fingers of an open hand against the bandages. John’s breath catches.
They both have their quirks, when making love. John likes to be tied up—held down—likes the solidity of the embrace and the plausible deniability it brings. It comforts some deeply ingrained part of his mind. Sol recalls a night in the early spring: the smell of the oil lamp, the quilt, the last chilly breeze of winter kissing bare skin through the window, the frame still draughty (he’d finally fixed the thing only last month). His leather belt, warmed by John’s wrists. The way John shivered and the noises he made and the way his eyelids fluttered as Sol traced lines in his skin with the edge of his fingernail; pressing a little bit harder to make him whine, pleased by his lover’s pleasure. Sol thinks about that night now.
“I’m… fine, Sol,” John says after a pause, his voice unsteady. “It doesn’t hurt if I don’t move too much.”
“Why do you do this?”
The answer comes low and remorseful. “I… think,” John falters, still in that unsteady voice, looking reluctant, looking at his own hand where it rests on Sol’s shoulder and not in Sol’s eyes—looking very haunted indeed—“someday, I’ll… understand him? Why he did it. Any of it.”
Sol becomes nauseous in an instant. “Angel…”
“You think about it too,” John says hotly, “about him. Don’t be a hypocrite.”
“I haven’t said anything—!”
“I think about all of them. And myself—why did we act that way?”
“I don’t know,” Sol pleads, reeling with helpless memory. “I don’t know, Johnny, I don’t know either, I just want us to be safe.”
This is the cost of living; they now have to live with this. Is it worth it? Of course it is, but it hurts and it’s never going to stop hurting, it just gets blotted out by good things for a while sometimes. Good things like Sol’s pardon by the Admiralty and his job at the shipyard and a sudden inheritance from John’s uncle; good things like a fresh pint, and sunshine on the waves, and moving under your own volition, and a clean pair of socks after finally doing the laundry you’ve been putting off. Like how John grumbles when Sol gets out of bed before he does and lets the cold air in under the quilt, and how he stops grumbling once Sol returns with breakfast.
There’s all of that, and there’s also this. Fuck, but John Irving scares Sol out of his bleeding wits.
His lips softly parted in that way they get when he’s startled and upset, John puts a hand in Sol’s hair and tilts his face upward to look at him directly. “We are safe,” he says, “God is looking after us.”
Tears of frustration well in Sol’s eyes: deeply humiliating every time it happens. “Sweetheart, just let me keep you safe.”
“Sol!?”
“Please, I couldn’t live with meself—“
“Solomon, Solomon—“ John’s other hand comes up quickly and cups his cheek, swiping away a tear with his thumb. “You do keep me safe, of course you do! You keep me… grounded, I suppose. You keep me here.”
John’s skin glows in the firelight, his sad, light eyes glittering. He’s got a look on his face as though he hadn’t realised him getting hurt would affect Sol this much, which might make Sol disbelievingly angry later—though not at John, of course not at John, but on John’s behalf—once he processes it.
John’s fingers scratch idly at his scalp, carding gentle and soothing through his hair, as though petting a dog. It’s one of Sol’s favourite things to receive from his lover, and he knows it means I love you and I care about your happiness. Sol searches his face. “How are you really feeling?”
John relents. “My head aches some,” he says sheepishly. “And where I was cut, of course, but it’s not too bad if I stay still, really. When I tried to stand up earlier I felt very lightheaded, and my heart was beating very fast, but I didn’t faint, and Tom says that will probably pass by the morning.”
“You’re shaking.”
“I’m…” John sniffs. “It’s just a bit cold.”
“Oh, here.” Without a second thought, Sol begins wriggling out of his jumper. John begins to protest in some alarm, but Sol shuts him down. “I’ve got a shirt on underneath, you nonce,” he says, so fond it hurts. “Here, let me help you. You’re the one in your skivvies.”
The fire crackles and pops. On the side table is a closed book, one of Jopson’s medical texts, probably referenced while he was bandaging John’s wounds. He’s taking a break from his studies right now; according to John, it had all just gotten a bit much for him, and he’d had to stop for his health’s sake. They’d shared a cabin on the Enterprise, these two strange, reserved men, and despite being strange and reserved and also both very unwell at the time, had come out of it with a quiet kind of brotherhood. Their friendship does both of them good.
Sol, personally, finds Jopson an unsettlingly tough nut to crack, with that polite mask of his, but it’s not like he doesn’t like him. Plus, years measuring the temperature of different groups of soldiers has made him a good judge of when a man has very few confidants and could do with more, so he makes an effort to show a friendly spirit towards him. Mostly, John doesn’t tell Sol what they talk about. One of the rare exceptions was explaining where Jopson was to take him, that night in April.
Sol assumed it was a well-meaning, if misplaced attempt to help him in some way. To show him a little of that other world that he found so fearful, with a guide to gentle the sights for him. Still, Jopson can slip in and out of that world easily, with his perfected steward’s invisibility. He has this ability to belong anywhere he is, to be both of a scene and apart from it. John doesn’t work like that. He has this need to belong in wherever he is, like he throws his whole soul into being something that could fit in whatever world he inhabits. Sol understands—he feels it himself, on some level—but certainly not with the intensity that John does. Dropping him in the deep end like that could be overwhelming.
He’d come home in the early hours of the morning looking uncomfortable, as though he’d put his body on wrong while getting dressed and, unable to fix it, was being forced to hold himself in an odd way to prevent it from slipping off. “I did not know there were… so many,” he’d said. “Like us. Even just here.”
“They might not all be… you know.”
Quietly, John said, “Thomas said there was a young man, whom I would get along with. He left me alone with him.”
“Oh.”
“I didn’t realise at first. I… felt very stupid. He was very kind about it, at least.” John looked at him. He might as well have been naked with how much he was exposing himself, curled up and quivering in the corner of his soul like a hunted animal who knows what the rifle means. “Doesn’t it scare you?”
Sol’s heart had sunk right through to the base of his stomach, leaving him nauseous and dizzy. “Do you want to… stop?” he had asked, feeling a crucial part of his world begin to fray away.
“What? Stop what?” John had seemed in a daze. Sol wondered if he was drunk.
“Erm.” He swallowed. “Us.”
And John had done what he very, very rarely does, and instead of asking Sol to kiss him, had gone over and kissed Sol himself. All hot and desperate, and maybe fifteen minutes later he had gasped out, “I couldn’t let him touch me; he wasn’t you.”
Here in the present, Sol touches him freely. Carefully, they maneuver together to get John into the jumper without having to move his arm too much, Sol bunching up the fabric and tugging gently, working him slowly into it. It’s not unlike making love, or at least what making love was like with John when they’d first started doing it: easing him in, coaxing his little movements, making him warm.
The painkillers have all but worn off by now, and pain and exhaustion are having their way with him. As Sol leans in to kiss him again, his eyes droop closed, and stay closed when they part. There’s a sleepy, wanton little nip at Sol’s tongue, which Sol snorts at but doesn’t indulge, not right now. “Better?”
“Thank you, Sol. Much better.” Sol rests his cheek on John’s abdomen, feeling the steadiness of him, buoyed slightly up and down with John’s breath. John hums softly, his hand returning to Sol’s curls. “I’m sorry for frightening you,” he says. With that rare, precious spark of tongue-and-cheek that Sol treasures so much, he adds: “And for stealing your shirt.”
Sol grins. “Never apologised for that before.”
“Well, there’s a first time for everything.” John’s fingers play in the hollow curve behind his ear. “Have me, when we get home?” he ventures hopefully.
Once again, Sol just barely stops himself from laughing out loud. John makes an offended little huffing noise. “You are injured, Johnny, dunno if you noticed.”
“So? You’ll be gentle.”
Sol can’t say no to him. And wouldn’t if he could. “I’ll be very gentle,” he cedes, and John grins so sweetly at him that in a single moment, everything else is both forgiven and forgotten. This is enough; this is worth it. It has to be.