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The first time he wakes in what he considers ‘the aftermath,’ he is confused.
When consciousness had last slipped from his grasp like a silk scarf on a windy day, he’d expected that to be the end of it. You can feel when you’re close to death, he knows that now. It was frightening at first, but the longer the pain went on, the gladder he became to know it would soon be over. There’s no small measure of comfort in knowing that the pain you will have to endure is limited.
The body surrenders, eventually.
Still, here he is all the same.
Around him are fragments of familiar shapes: a forearm in a uniform coat, a bit of rope attached to a hammock, the edge of a table. He is too close to place them in their proper context, and his hold on consciousness is too tenuous.
“He’s awake.”
A face enters into focus above him, wearing a furrow-browed expression of concentration. James tries to speak. Between the thought and the action lies an unbridgeable gulf.
An object is shoved into his mouth. Later, he will muse on the impossibility of recognising the leather strap for what it is with nothing but the aid of his tongue. How much we rely on sight to interface with the world, to render it understandable. Now, he makes a noise of confusion.
Then, there is pain.
He realises he must have passed out when he opens his eyes again, and the view before him is different. He now recognises the vantage point of a hammock, and can more reliably interpret his surroundings as the sickbay on one of Her Majesty’s ships.
This means he did not die: A proposition as relieving as it is mystifying.
Die… how?
One of the snipers must have done him in, or nearly so. James’s party had been advancing over the wall, and Chinese marksmen had been harassing them from the top of the fortifications. More than one man had learned that flintlocks, primitive or not, could still kill.
Strangely, he does not remember being shot. One should remember being shot, he feels, but the event has been scrubbed clean from his consciousness. He can only recall the moments afterwards: the pain, and the fading of his mind.
And he remembers something else.
A man.
He cannot cleanly fit this image into the sequence of events he knows must have occurred. The man does not make sense on the battlefield, nor on the return, nor in sickbay. Yet, still, there he is, a lone figure in a tan coat, smiling reassuringly at James. His smile reveals a gap between his front teeth that looks oddly boyish on his aged face. The resulting contrast is as intriguing as it is charming.
The memory brings James comfort. Some aspect of the man or his smile let him know that things will be alright.
He shakes his head. How strange.
A boy comes in and brings him something to drink. James, suddenly finding himself parched, is distracted. Later, Doctor Stanley comes in to check on the wounded, of which there are several in this room, and undoubtedly more elsewhere. He shows James the musket ball he dug out of him.
It’s really quite a little thing. It doesn’t seem to warrant the holes in James’s arm, or the one in his side.
They’re beginning to throb faintly now despite the opium.
Doctor Stanley leaves him to rest. James gratefully sinks into his hammock.
When he wakes up, the man is there.
James sits up. Something about the white, curved walls, the fur he is lying on, the lone light of an oil lamp flickering in the middle immediately seems wrong to him, but he doesn’t know what.
The man sits across from him, face in shadow from his hood and the flickering light of the fire.
James throws back the furs covering him, or he tries to. When he reaches out his arm, the pain seizes him, and everything becomes blurry. He drops his arm and breathes.
The man says nothing while James regains his composure. He just watches him, as far as James can tell. It’s awfully dark under that hood.
Finally, the throbbing fades to a bearable ache and the colours stop dancing in front of James’s eyes. He takes one last fortifying breath, then turns on his uninjured side so he can face the man.
“Do I know you?” he asks.
“No,” the man says.
Oh. Well, so much for that, then. James frowns.
“Do you… know me?”
He imagines he sees a smile. It is so difficult to tell with the hood. But he remembers what the man’s smile looked like, earlier in the day, and his mind fills in the details.
“I forgot how much you liked to talk.”
“I beg your pardon?”
James feels like he should take offense, and because he hates being on the back foot, he finds himself actually offended. But also—the man does know him.
James composes himself.
“It seems you have the advantage of me.”
The man’s mood darkens. How James can tell, he isn’t sure. Perhaps it goes together with a flickering of the lamp, a dousing of light that isn’t actually physical but felt.
“Much good it does me,” the man says, and scoffs.
Something is off about all of this.
“I’m injured,” James says, trying to cling to facts he knows. “Are you supposed to take care of me?”
Silence. The man withdraws into his hood and himself, a shrinking of a figure already bent and haggard.
“I’m sorry,” James says. “It’s just that I don’t know where I am, or what’s happened to me.”
Quite suddenly, the man speaks.
“Go back, James,” he says, his voice suddenly a snarl. “You don’t belong here. Go back. Survive that damned bullet so you can turn it into a story with which to torment me. I don’t want you here. Go back.”
James wants to tell him he can’t go anywhere in this state. The thought occurs to him, and then thought ceases.
The doctor tells him he is running a fever. He looks a little sorry to wake him, like he’s only too aware that waking is hell for James, but he also knows it can’t be helped.
His capacity to care is limited. He’s got other bodies to look after.
James drinks more and eats a little, but he throws that up quickly. It’s as though his body is seeking to expel not just the miasma of his wound but every extraneous element within him, to leave him cleansed and lighter than air, ready to ascend. Yes, he can feel his hold on life growing ever more tenuous.
They give him more laudanum. That helps a lot.
The man releases his breath in a huff when James shifts under his blanket to face him.
“I meant to go,” James says. “I’m sorry. It’s only that I’m running a fever, or so they’ve told me.”
“You never told us about any of that,” the man mumbles into the fur surrounding his hut, but the room is not large, and James can hear him clearly.
“Told whom?”
The man looks up, and James gets his first clear look at his face.
It’s weather-beaten and pockmarked, a cratered moon of a face, bearing the evidence of a thousand little hardship over the course of a long life—but it’s above all a kind face, he thinks, one that looks upon the world with a generous eye.
“Never you mind that,” the man says and pulls his hood back into his face.
Sickbay is at capacity, so they move him to a hammock that has been strung up on some lower deck of the ship. James is not the only injured here, and not the only one running a fever. He can hear their moans and cries all throughout the day, and through most of the night. The air is thick with a foul stench. When he is awake enough to mind, it’s hellish.
All in all, he has been lucky. He has fared better than those who have lost limbs, who are not only combatting a fever but also adjusting to the fact that there is now a part of them that will forever be missing.
He sleeps worse, here. For nearly a day, he can only lay in some half-dazed stupor while his hammock swings gently with the motions of a ship at anchor. He throws off his blanket, then begins shivering and covers himself again. He is sick, and no one comes to clean what he vomits up. He doesn’t have the strength to call out.
Appalled by his own weakness he tries to rally his spirits. But mental fortitude is no match for a fever, and quickly his thoughts turn scattered and self-pitying once more. By what cruelty of nature should he suffer so?
Then, in the evening, someone does come by to bring him more laudanum for the pain. With the aid of the drug, the moans of his comrades in sickness bother him less. The anxious cycles of his mind ease.
He slips easily under the waves of consciousness. and does not even wonder if it will be the last time, he is just so glad to be rid of the pain for even a moment.
The touch of a cool cloth to his forehead stirs him. He opens his eyes and looks into the kind moon face of the stranger above him.
He smiles.
“Thank you,” he says. “My fever seems to have gone up.”
The face above him frowns, lines of deep concern making ridges and furrows on this storied surface.
“You’re burning up, James. Can’t they give you something?”
“I believe they’re presently occupied. There are too many of us injured.”
The man clicks his tongue in annoyance and turns to dip the cloth into some water and wring it out again. James sighs when its coldness touches his heated skin.
“That’s good.”
“Someone should tell you you’re too reckless.”
When the man is speaking like this, James gets the impression that he isn’t really talking to James. There’s a quality to how he directs the words at a point behind James, as though he is looking through James to address some third person in the room who shares James’s name, and who shares with the man some knowledge about James’s qualities. It’s an irritating habit, really.
“I’ll have you know I conducted myself admirably in Her Majesty’s service. I took no unnecessary risks, but I didn’t flinch from danger.”
“And distributing that proclamation to the Egyptian soldiers? Or diving into the Mersey to save a drowning sailor? Or firing a rocket at that bear?”
“What bear?” James asks, then adds: “How do you know about the proclamation?”
He tries to sit up, but the man places a hand on his shoulder and gentles him back down. There’s a strength in that grip, delicately applied. James does not ordinarily enjoy ceding someone else’s point, but he cedes to that grasp of his shoulder. He lies back down.
The man wrings out the cloth again.
“Ask for something for the fever,” he says.
James closes his eyes and enjoys the cold on his forehead.
The surgeon breezes past him on his mourning round, but James manages to catch a passing sailor who fetches Doctor Stanley later in the day.
The doctor takes a critical look at him. The expression on his faces makes James hold his breath—there’s a permanent dissatisfaction there, but James can’t help but take it personally. What if he’s beyond help already?
He realises, with a shock, that he might die, and that he would very much like to live. This is a different sort of fear.
“We’ll take you back to sickbay,” Doctor Stanley says. “I want to keep a close eye on you, and the miasma down here is not good for you.”
They carry James back up some twenty minutes later, and a surgeon changes his bandages and gives James laudanum and something for the fever.
The stranger sits across from the fire when James wakes next.
He finds himself disappointed. The stranger’s touch and the cool cloth had both been a relief to him. He almost wishes for the fever to return.
He sits up. The stranger raises his head at the sound of him stirring. At least he has given up hiding his face. James likes his face.
“I seem to be doing better,” he says.
“That you are.”
The man gives him a small smile—a poor imitation of the radiant smile James remembers from after he got shot, but it still pierces his heart. The kindness in that smile. Like something private reserved only for James.
“I should thank you,” James says. “For taking care of me.”
The stranger waves his hand.
“Won’t you tell me your name?” James pleads. “You know mine. It’s only fair.”
“Believe me, you don’t need to know. It wouldn’t help.”
“Will I see you again?”
The stranger’s face turns sour. “Soon enough,” he says bitterly. “But you won’t remember this, and it wouldn’t have changed anything if you did.”
“You know the future, then?”
James juts his chin out, defiantly. If he knows one thing, he knows that the future isn’t written in stone.
“I know the past.”
The man closes his eyes as though against some intense pain. Before he can think better of it, James stands as much as the low ceiling will allow and crosses the distance between them. There, he sits next to the man and puts a hand on his shoulder.
He can feel a sigh move through the man.
“Look, James, I lost you once already. At least this time, when I let you go, you’ll return to your life and I’ll know you’re out there somewhere, healthy.”
James frowns. The stranger insists it’s not the future he knows but the past, but he constantly speaks of James in the future tense. Is it possible that the man is from James’s future?
“You know when I’ll die, then?”
He feels a suppressed sob rock through the man and tightens his grip. It feels almost as though he has to keep him upright, like a companion who’s had too much to drink to sit up straight.
“Maybe you can prevent it,” James suggests. “If that were the case, shouldn’t you tell me?”
The man half turns. He is suddenly quite still. “Would you really want to know?” James realises he has shocked the man.
Would he want to know? Of course he would. Nothing is immutably written. If he knows what is to come, he can change or avoid the outcome.
The man continues, as though speaking to this other, future James again.
“But I won’t tell you. I’m selfish that way. It would mean that we never meet, and that would mean forfeiting the greatest happiness I have known in my life.”
James keeps his hand on the man’s shoulder.
“I make you happy?”
The man turns, and now he smiles at James with the full radiance of his smile. It’s charming and brilliant.
“Incredibly so, James. You have made me so happy.”
James looks away first. He’s never been the subject of such emotion. In truth, he can’t imagine he will ever be worthy of it.
“I suppose I’ll have to return to find out how I accomplish this feat.”
The stranger turns sombre, but he does reach for James’s hand on his shoulder and takes it between his own. His hands are rough, like skin out in the cold for too long, and calloused like a sailor’s.
For a moment, James thinks he is going to say something. His thin lips part, and there is the slightest intake of breath—
But then he just squeezes James’s hand.
James wakes in the sickbay of HMS Cornwallis. He feels weak, the way one does after a long illness. Yet there is no doubt that the worst has passed—there is a clarity to his thoughts that he’s been lacking the past few days, and he can feel a faint rumble of hunger in his stomach. All signs pointing to the fact that he is coming into health again.
Later, when Doctor Stanley stops by to take his temperature, he seems quietly pleased to tell James that his fever has broken.
“You were giving us all quite the scare. Looked like some battle you were fighting.” He chuckles inwardly at his own joke. “Did you slay any dragons in your sleep? Scaled another wall, perhaps?”
James shakes his head. “I cannot remember. I do not think I did.”
In a tent at the end of the world, by the light of a single oil lantern, Francis wrings out a cloth and places it on James’s forehead.
The fever has gone up again, and Bridgens has run out of remedies. In any case, they don’t have anything to help James. The rot of his wounds has spread throughout his body. It’s only a matter of time now.
Francis looks down at the thin frame of this man he loathed, and that he has grown to love. It doesn’t seem fair or plausible that his happiness should only last a few short weeks.
James has been unconscious, but he stirs at the touch of the cloth. He opens his mouth. Francis has to lean in to understand his words.
“You did that in China.”
“What?”
“China,” James repeats.
“I wasn’t in China,” Francis says, even as he wonders if it wouldn’t be kinder to agree, to let James have whatever illusions of memories come to him in his last moments.
“I saw you,” James tries again, insistently. “When I was asleep. In China. You took care of me.”
What he is saying makes no sense. The pain of the wounds must have taken him back to that other time in his life.
He turns to call for Bridgens, to find some more pain relief they can give James, when he feels a surprisingly strong grip on his wrist, and turns to find James’s eyes fixed on him.
“You’ll see me. Again. When I’m gone.”
The words cost James. He has to inhale multiple times through the sentence. But his conviction is unshakeable. Francis feels unsettled.
“You should sleep, James.”
James’s eyes don’t leave him for another moment, and then he lets go of Francis. He sinks back onto his pallet like he could fall right through it. Francis tucks the blanket back up under his chin.
The great cruelty of illness, and of death, Francis will think often in the coming weeks—he is thinking it for the first time tonight—is their privacy. Suffering draws a man into himself, into a world that others can no longer touch. He has already lost part of James, the part that belongs to his pain now, and he will lose more over the course of the night, bit by bit, until nothing of James remains that Francis could call his.
He looks down at that face, the sharp angles of James’s bones now more pronounced than ever. How would he have looked, in China? Would Francis have recognised him? There are so many versions of James he never got to love, save this last one, when it was almost too late.
James’s eyes have closed now. Francis allows himself a small kiss to his brow.