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There is no way forward from here—and had James even for a moment, before he dropped to his aching knees on the ice-cold boards of Terror’s great cabin, thought there could be?
Trudging over the pack, he’d had a notion to speak his mind and be heard, to see if his captain might yet be reached. He had found his captain unmoved—had found him, more to the point, drunk, had found him utterly so. That’s nothing new: there’s nothing new under the sun, and the sun above them has not set in weeks.
No way forward but through, admonishes the dim, tiny voice of James’s better nature: the mantra of the icebound, but, just as well—so James thinks, bobbing his head diligently—of any man foolish enough to lay stock in the moods of Francis Crozier.
He’s been at his task in fits and starts for more than a quarter of an hour, doing his level best, to little effect, to coax Francis’s sullen cock to hardness with lips and tongue—rewarding work, he’s so often found, for all that the odds with Francis have never been in his favor. But in this habit of theirs—months and months of sordid trysting—a horizon of diminishing returns, once distant as a sailor’s proverb, spectral as any sundog, has crashed up, real and imminent and too sudden to swerve: over its crest, James will fall off the edge of the map.
His knees ache; his jaw twinges; saliva cools unpleasantly on his chin in the frigid air of the room—and all this without so much as a hand in his hair to guide or hold him steady, without so much as a single word from the man above him, except, finally—
“Useless, you are.” Cold and bare as the observations of a scientist. They might as well be in the blasted frozen Beechey hut where for so many hours Francis had watched him maneuver the dip circle as though he’d no more grace than a child learning his letters. Absolutely useless, Fitzjames.
James twists fretfully at the hips, shakes his head, swallows around Francis to quell any indignant whine that would escape. Drawing back he licks urgently at the base of Francis’s dormant flesh, spurred on by some need that won’t be studied. “Christ,” Francis sighs after some minutes of this. “Give it up, James, don’t waste the effort.”
Crystal clinks somewhere over James’s head. The silky sound of whiskey being poured.
But there has never been anything wasted for James, not truly, in taking what Francis will allow him. Let returns diminish as they may—they mean nothing, not when the truth of it is that James would kneel before Francis for hours or days if he were given rein to do so, would gladly empty his head of any object but the elicitation of the faintest sound of pleasure or approval. How could effort be wasted here, absent any goal but submitting himself just as he is—bending his head and allowing Francis’s prick in its slow heaviness to fill the hollows of his cheeks?
“Stop that,” Francis says at last. The words fall from above, slow and final as ash.
James murmurs softly—a muffled, fretful, query—and begins to move off Francis’s yard, but a sluggish hand comes off the table, off the glass, and presses his neck back down.
“No, no. Hold still. Christ, James, just—just—” Francis mutters. “Stay there, hold still.”
James waits, his shoulders tensed, expectant. He longs for instruction, and if Francis will not speak it aloud then James will seek it from Francis’s hand, solid and sure at the nape of his neck like a cuff, like a new harness on a skittish creature. With the slightest urge of fingertips he will go where he’s led, do what he’s asked, and understand his use with a near-joy that surpasses any matter of the mind. He longs for the calm of it; he longs for Francis’s hand, perhaps, to loosen and rake through his hair. But when the hand falls away again, swiftly as it had come, he knows Francis has reached instead for the drink, and he sways there, unmoored, choking down the sudden, appalling urge to cry.
Francis says nothing more—only grunts in some bare satisfaction as he settles lower in the creaking chair, letting his thighs fall wide—and his soft prick slides deeper into James’s mouth. James accepts it anxiously, greedily, gently as he can. He would look up, desperate as he is to see something flicker in Francis’s eyes, to see some expression play across his lips, to notice anything, indeed, that will prove the man above him is no ghost, but his own eyes are too damp to chance it. So James can only shift his knees, absently grateful that the frigid boards have made them nearly insensible with cold. In the lazy splay of Francis’s thighs he makes room for himself, wedging his broad shoulders there so as to be surrounded, dropping his hands at last from Francis’s hips to the floor. Mere months ago, to be on all fours before Francis—arched, pert, daring, ready—would have made James mad with his own coy power, the intoxicating, playful delight of presentation, his to wield. But his palms burn with cold, his mind is taut and sore—
“Jesus. Look at you,” Francis rasps.
James can’t resist. He strains, tilting at the neck to meet Francis’s eyes. He sees for just a moment the bleary, lecherous smirk tugging at the corners and creases of Francis’s face; the way one eye drifts lazily shut, pouchy and haggard, while the other rakes lewdly over James’s back; the way Francis’s lips twist in utterly undisguised disdain—and just as quickly, he sees Francis slip back to lassitude, his pale eyes as flat and filmy as a shark’s, his jaw slack.
Yes, look at me, James wants to say. Had he the power—had he any power here at all—he would insist. In a different sort of world, he would pout and coax, madden and infuriate, cant his hips and bat his lashes like the sultry young slip of a midshipman he once was, like the commander he made not two years gone, and then gratify Francis most earnestly for his troubles.
James had never dared to think them lovers, but there had been a time when, alone together, after all due affronts had been traded—warning volleys of uneasy ships—and after they had torn at one another’s clothing with fingers cruel enough to equal their words, they took their pleasure with something close to understanding. With something very near rapport, James teased and prodded and goaded Francis, then bent with cunning grace to take all that Francis, maddened, would give him. James had not thought them lovers, and yet the road before them, like the sea, lay open. Even hostilities held crystalline potential, entire small cosmoses untraversed—shared futures, further voyages, confessions, trust, and care—and James had thought to make a project in those earlier days of winnowing them out. Francis drank then, too, but he’d been alive with it for a time, ruddy and immediate, heavy and insistent and hot, even when the blood in him couldn’t be compelled. One night some months gone, Francis, muddled and sluggish from four glasses of whiskey, had softened inside James, and James, bold as brass, tossed his hair over his shoulder to say something impudent—but Francis had simply snarled and filled him at once with three fingers instead, then four, giving no quarter. Francis plied him like that, whispering urgent filth in his ear, his other hand tangled in James’s hair, until James spent across the great cabin table, sobbing, shaking, insensible.
It’s been weeks now, or months. Francis does not seek him anymore, but neither—still worse—does Francis bother to dismiss him when he arrives of his own volition, each time with all the hope of the most wretched fool. “Oh, get to it, then,” Francis had muttered with sublime disinterest that very day when James appeared in his cabin’s doorway. James had, in fact, come to talk. But he had seen the bottle before Francis and had known at once that the conversation he wanted would not come to pass. James had come to talk—he’s sure of that—but he had not hesitated when Francis gestured dispassionately to the placket of his trousers. He had dropped, wordlessly, to his knees to obey.
***
James prides himself in a talent for the act: he has done since the St. Vincent, where as a midshipman he’d knelt before a handsome third lieutenant and felt himself seized by a wild and novel ecstasy when the man whistled low, brushed his cheek with a rough thumb, and said, you’re an eager one, aren’t you, my God, Fitzjames—
The man was neither kind nor unkind; he took plainly but not harshly; and he accorded James no particular regard in the company of other men, well or ill—but with his cock in James he became floridly coarse in his speech, and like an unstoppered cask would give forth all manner of dizzying nonsense, your tight pretty arse and look at you, look at you, and the fucking mouth on you, and yes, that’s it, there, good boy, good lad, and if James did not reach crisis unaided, in his own smalls, as the lieutenant made use of him, he would do so later, tucked away in the queasy, shifting dark of the midshipmen’s hammocks. He would bite the flesh of his own hand to keep from crying out as he frigged himself with the other, frantically savoring the words and the incredible, piercing delight they bore: good lad, good.
Above him, Francis is silent.
***
It is an undeniable tenderness, to hold Francis’s soft prick in his mouth—to make himself a cradle, a haven, or a mere sleeve—it’s a breathless intimacy that, even now, thrills James to the marrow. He had never dared to think them lovers, but in the thick, drunken silence of the great cabin, on his frigid hands and knees, James can’t help but picture it: Francis in a parlour somewhere, in a cozy, neatly appointed set of rooms in London—lodgings to which James would be invited warmly and asked to stay. Francis drowsy on a sofa before a fire, draped in a dressing gown that for all its richness would fail to conceal the muscled thickness of his thighs, which would spread to reveal a pale stripe of skin, dusted with hairs made golden by firelight. There James would tuck himself, safe and cherished between Francis’s strong legs, to lick up that stripe of flesh to Francis’s groin. James would use his mouth: he would kiss Francis’s heavy stones and draw his tongue over Francis’s dusky, puckered hole if he were allowed to do so, would swallow down Francis’s cock like a man at altar, and if Francis wouldn’t rise it would be due not to whiskey but to days well spent and age well reached. James would remain there, drifting, blissful and adored, cherishing what Francis had given him to hold, savoring the heaviness of Francis’s prick on his tongue—the way it would fill him—and he might rest his cheek on Francis’s thigh, and Francis might stroke his hair and say, oh, James, my own James.
But from here there is no way forward. No way forward for James, who’s stiff and freezing on all fours—how he must look!—suckling softly at the recalcitrant prick of a man who’ll do no more all the while than gaze into the middle distance and drain his bottle dry. No way forward but to shift gingerly at the hips, for he is, improbably, hard and leaking in his smalls.
Once, Francis, folded double over James’s back, had thumbed at the red tip of James’s cock, rubbing through the dripping slick there: what’s this, now? Oh, James. All this, from just a man’s prick in you. Francis had tasted him, then. Sweet as a pretty girl’s quim. And Francis’s fingers, licked clean, had tangled in his hair, touched his lips, and his chest: James, James—my own James—
Francis had not said it again, and in the days that followed James doubted whether he had heard it at all, or whether he himself had not succumbed to some creeping derangement in this miserable expanse of the world. In truth he thinks it more likely every day that he is mad—mad for this miserable, acrid, intemperate waste of a captain, in whose strange gravity they may all yet sink, in whose glancing light James might have at last seen himself clarified.
Some part of it, all at once, is too much—James shakes with the effort not to reach and palm his own cock; he presses forward around Francis’s yard, wishing madly for more to swallow down, pressing his nose into the dense curls of Francis’s pubic hair and groaning aloud at the scent of him there, drunk as Francis himself. Too much—he can’t hold still, can’t bear it, can’t stop himself—he leans in and sucks luxuriantly on Francis again, beyond cognizance or shame at the desperate, extravagant whine that leaves him as he does so, and at the heat, thick as honey, that sweetens through his limbs and up his spine, smoothing away sharp edges, salving what’s raw, fulfilling some aching purpose he could not fully know. There—there—bliss enough to forget, nearly, Francis’s dead eyes, bliss enough to render James finally brainless, floating, afire despite the cold. He’ll come like this—spill over untouched from the simple, lovely pressure of Francis’s soft, precious cock on his tongue—
“Stop that, I said,” Francis barks, fisting at once in James’s hair, yanking sharply. His prick slips from James’s mouth to plop fat and obscene on the dark wool of his trousers. “What on earth you think you’ll achieve like that, I can’t imagine.” He gestures, impatiently, to himself. “Good Christ, there are others who’ll bugger you if you need it so damned much, and you can see very well I couldn’t if I cared to, can you not?”
James falls back; he crumples to his haunches, stunned and panting, too dizzy even to wipe the spit from his chin.
“Francis, I—that’s not—” he begins when he’s caught his breath. He will explain, he must—but to his horror, and all at once, the tears he’d blinked away in Francis’s lap swell up afresh, they rush on him with no warning, and when they spill over his cheeks there’s no chance of hiding. “I don’t—” he says again, but it comes out with a cracked sob. Little hiccups shake his shoulders, and slumped there on the floor he feels, though he’s fully clothed, as wet and ruined as he ever has in Francis’s presence.
Above him, Francis is agape. His mouth moves silently, uselessly—the dazed look of a man compelled into complex calculation, unaided by sense or ink or paper, in his first waking moments. “Good God, James, what’s the matter with you?” he asks at last, and James is mortified to find him far less sneering and cruel, now, than simply exhausted. Francis sways forward, reeling like a failing prizefighter, hazy and grotesque in his stupor, for all that he’s fumbling for lucidity. James would have Francis’s disgust—let it wash over him—but far worse is Francis’s confusion, plain and sharp as a punch in James’s gut.
“You truly don’t know,” is all James can say. He wipes at his chin with a shirtsleeve, smearing tears and spit, feeling like a child. “You mean to say you truly don’t know.”
“You’ve never known me to riddle with you, James. I’ll thank you not to start—not now.”
James wonders for a moment when it was he last wept at sea—he’s been maimed, shot, and sick to near death and has never, to his recollection, shed a tear over it—not since he was a volunteer of twelve, curled miserably in his hammock at night, desperately homesick for the Coninghams after only a week aboard the Pyramus. Now, heaving and messy on his knees before Francis, he wishes he could curl away once more, small and out of sight.
“James,” Francis says again, suddenly intent. “What’s the matter?”
“I’m sorry,” James whispers. “I shouldn’t have come.”
“No,” Francis agrees, but not unkindly. He draws a handkerchief from his breast pocket and wipes his cock in a terse, perfunctory manner before tucking himself away. “You should not have.”
“I’m sorry,” James sobs again, helpless. “I’m sorry.”
“James,” Francis says slowly, as though trying to piece something together. He blinks, scrubs at his eyes with his jacket cuff. James watches his fist flex on the table, once, twice: he watches Francis’s fingers twitch toward the whiskey glass, falter there, tap the crystal, drum on the wood, and then, finally, as though after some great inner battle, lift to flutter tentatively in the direction of James’s tear-soaked cheek. “James, I’m afraid I don’t—” Francis murmurs, reaching for him.
“You can’t go on like this,” James says suddenly.
And the change is lightning quick. Francis loosens: the hand falls to his side, his eyes dull and flatten, and bleary laxity slurs his facial muscles once more, melting him like candle-wax but for the crude, mirthless smirk that remains.
“And you can? You’ve a God-damned nerve, haven’t you, James? Look at you. Get up off your knees, God’s sake, man. Look at you.”
He’s not wrong to say it, James knows. Above him, Francis is shifting, swallowing what remains in his glass, and making to rise.
“Clean yourself up.” Francis gestures with his bottle, swaying there in his boots, muted and glassy and halfway bored, leering at the place where James’s cock still presses at the front of his trousers. A dark spot spreads out from where he’s leaked through. “You’re a mess. Clean yourself and go.”
In seconds Francis is gone, shut away in his berth, and James is alone. He wills his frozen joints to unlock so he can uncurl himself from the floor, right himself and stand, return himself to order, and look again like a man—a man, and not a desperate, feral creature that had begged to be tamed and was refused. James breathes deep and feels the air rattle in his lungs; he breathes deep to master the jerking, empty sobs that tug his chest. He will stand and be whole again—but first, fleetingly, he closes his eyes and feels the place on his cheek where just moments ago Francis’s thumb, warm and rough, might have touched.