More Fools Than Wise

Wolfskin stinks worse than buffalo hide, but the blessings of captured warmth are enough to make it not only tolerable but desirable. Two men or more can sleep snugly, and retain some crumbs of heat. Two men stuffed into a fur-lined sack – the last of the Terrors and Erebites will be eating them before long, cutting the leather into strips and boiling it until it breaks down. They’ll eat whatever will fill their bellies, and forget that there are other hungers that besiege men out here – the need for warmth, darkness, ease, quiet.

But for now there are only two men locked together tight beneath layers of wool and fur – fumbling in their clothes like a couple of midshipmen. He can spread out his coat and shirttails over the both of them, and fumble out his prick without undue exposure to the cold – instinctively squirming closer to the furnace-heat of James’ buttocks and groin, the last warm tender place.

“I want you to touch me,” Fitzjames says, hoarse-whispered in the dark. “Francis, will you do it?”

“Tell me what to do with you.”

“Frig between my legs,” he says. “But for God’s sake, Francis, be gentle with me–”

The urgency in his voice is terrible and exciting – though less thrilling are the sticky black bruises that stain his thighs and tender parts, Crozier doesn’t need to see them to know they’re there.

“Yes, James.” He bows his head against Fitzjames’ shoulder.

The handsomest man in the Royal Navy – what beautiful hair James must have had, and he’d been too blind to see it, dark and waving and supremely sweet. How he’d come to hate the dandified smell of Fitzjames’ hair, polished up for a bout with brandy and cigars or a night at the theater – now he smells like salt and grease, like nothing but a man. Nothing more or less than that. Crozier nuzzles at his shoulder, smelling wool and coal dust and old blood – Fitzjames grinds his hips into Crozier’s cupping hand and crooks his legs to admit him closer. Their boots knock against each other in the bottom of their sleeping bag.

Every creak and rustle is amplified by the wind-whipped canvas, yet the wind carries sounds in queer ways – it sweeps away the sounds of men’s voices and swallows it up. They must cleave close together, and make no sound. Crozier’s cock fits nicely between Fitzjames’ wasted thighs, the thickness of him pushing past his balls – gently, gently, gently, he won’t ruin him, but they’ll come together so closely and deliberately that the borders of their bodies are nearly indistinguishable.

In the dark – in the heat, and proximity, and terrible airless closeness, like the inside of a great mouth. He can stir him, but not much – his own member is treacherously ready for the task. Crozier runs his hand into the leg of Fitzjames’ drawers, as gently as he can – cupping his slim thigh, which has so little of the comely strength it once possessed, so little of the long muscle that used to fill out his uniform so becomingly. The soft hairs of his body are all broken and bent at corkscrew angles – another queer effect of this poison. Crozier wants to stroke them all into straightness.

“Am I hurting you?” Crozier asks.

“No, no. Carry on.” Fitzjames almost sounds distracted in his desire. Crozier kisses his cheek, his hair, his poor bleeding head, anywhere but his mouth. Francis can hardly smell like roses himself but there is too much of rot in the breaths of those ulcerated lips. Every man among them breathes the odor of the grave.

“Are you with me, James?” Gently, gently – scurvy strips memory away from a man, layer by layer like an old onion, Francis has seen it. Men forget the orders that they themselves have just issued. Men walk outside without their gloves and comforters. They forget where they are, and where they’re going. Fitzjames will forget him, he will forget their closeness of these last dire months, and he will forget the scalding intimacies that brought them to this place.

Fitzjames doesn’t answer his question. “Have you ever been had on all fours? There’s nothing like it.” Fitzjames’ voice is broken with thirst and fatigue, but it still carries the ghost of his splendid arrogance. “If we were in England I’d show you.”

“If we were in England, I’d let you.” Crozier mouths at the nape of his neck.

If they were in England Francis would toss him down on the sorriest bed in all of creation and have his way with him – any remotely horizontal surface would do in a pinch, but he’d have him in the fullness of his natural beauty, if that meant nursing him at all hours for years and years and years. A beautiful wide bed with no rail and silk pillows like a Shanghai brothel and the two of them all to themselves alone, undetected. If Fitzjames were a woman, he’d marry him without shame. He’d marry him in a heartbeat.

Fitzjames twists against him, breathing raggedly – there is a point of friction between them as hard as a stone, and building. Every tight heated thrust makes Crozier a little more dizzy, a little more lost in himself – the maze of his recollections is like a hall of mirrors, breaking apart and recombining. Sophia in his arms, her body crushed against his – the way they had been together, the friction of her body. They hadn’t slept that night, they hadn’t had the time – and he’d lain in bed remembering the weight of her limbs against him, the unseen mysteries of her. The promises she’d made without meaning to. Crozier forgives her now. He can do nothing but forgive.

At least he needn’t fear deflowering the man – no doubt James has had his pick of beauties on three continents. From the wanton press of his hips and buttocks against Crozier’s man-parts he’s no stranger to this form of evasion, either – not sodomy but its near neighbor. Wasn’t this the man who’d said he had no more use for a sweetheart than he had for a wife? It seems like centuries ago, another world. Fitzjames’ intact arm is bent beneath him at a crooked angle, and the wounded one is curled gingerly to his side – Crozier gives up fumbling for an erection and twines their fingers together, feeling Fitzjames wince as the weight of Francis’ arm brushes over his new-old wounds.

It shouldn’t be possible like this, but he loves him more than ever – the feeling in his throat is not the dull flare of annoyance after these long years but something else. How badly he wants to tell James that they’ll survive this, even when he doesn’t believe it himself – if there had to be a sole survivor it ought to be Fitzjames, the youngest of the three of them and the freshest and the finest. Fitzjames before the Queen, explaining what’s become of them all. Fitzjames before Lady Franklin, transfixed by those eyes.

He’s nearing the brink, lost in the sound of Fitzjames’ soft breathing – quickened by something other than pain at last, Crozier can feel his own slickness mingling with Fitzjames’ even as the aching of his own bones threatens to undercut the necessary moment of pleasure. Pleasure may not be the right word for it. It is necessity that brings them together like this, on aching hip-bones and tangling legs with nothing to ease the passage. They’re both beyond the threat of court-martial now, beyond any stir of shame at their own dirtiness. In a difficult land it can be forgiven of them.

Crozier spends between his legs, spilling hot and painful as he stifles a gasp – his jerking muscles burn like fire and send him curling closer against Fitzjames’ back. He can feel the hard dividing line of Fitzjames’ backbone against his chest so keenly that he could weep.

Here they are in their wolfskin bed, and who could be more prettily provided for in their last days? They won’t want for chocolate, or handkerchiefs, or pairs of spectacles – the boats on their sledges are weighted down with ephemera, simply because no man knows what they will need. There are no words here in this place, on the raw edge of the world with all the power gone out of them, all the dregs of their strength. Fitzjames grips his hand punishingly tight, emitting a faint groan – Crozier clinches against him, and feels a flinch of sympathetic pain pierce through the dull ache of his bones.

Nothing more could be said like this, close together in their shared heat and shared shame. James trembles with stifled sound; Crozier can feel it against his chest, all the way down to his unstrung guts. If he’s trying not to weep, he’s doing a fine job of it – years of practice, from scabby-kneed midshipman of twelve to a doomed explorer who won’t live to see forty summers. There should have been more time for him – there ought to have been more time.