singillatim | Being born again into the sweet morning fog

Raju squeezes Francis' shoulder. Blanket and the fire — it's the comfort of sensation that Francis is looking for, then. Raju notes it. Then he follows Francis' lead, focusing on the way ahead. When he's not paying attention to it his expression moves into a frown, as much from chagrin as from the actual physical sensations causing all the trouble in the first place. He holds tightly to Francis' shoulders, reminding himself that it's more for the other man's sake than his own, and once they make it back inside he breaths out a sigh, even though he's only just inside the doorway and not sitting down yet.

Sliding his arm off from Francis' shoulders feels strange after so long holding onto it. He moves just far enough away to bend, breathing out carefully, expression tight as he starts to untie his shoes. There's a couple things hanging off his shoulder, too, from Francis' earlier bargaining; he'll figure out where to put all of it in a moment. This first. Then the next thing. Then check on Francis just in case, try to see how he's doing. He might feel ridiculous, all this trouble for a stupid injury, but at least there are things to do.

Some of the burden Raju had been carrying Crozier takes without a word, and not just because he needs his friend to focus on resting his feet - though that influences a lot of what he does. He knows where everything needs to go, can build up the fire again and set out the bed without much effort, though most everything gets set aside to be dealt with later. For now they need to thaw and shake off some of the melancholy Crozier can feel clinging to them.

He kneels in front of the fire to prod it back into life, meeting Raju’s stare briefly and offering the hint of a smile.

Raju’s smile back is as warm and lasting as Francis’ isn’t, regardless of Raju’s own various frustrations, because Francis needs it to be. The look of it is easier to maintain here, where he doesn’t have to split his focus on navigating the ground and the damned snow even as he navigates the pain and the expressions it wants to put onto his face.

He leaves his shoes by the door, leaves his socks on, leaves Francis’ coat on — the days of stripping layers off being something more comfortable are behind him, and dearly missed — and slips his notebook and pen out from his things, then finds himself starting toward the kitchen before he stops, looking a little thoughtful and a little lost, behind the smile fainter now on his face.

He thinks he remembers it, the ritual of pulling out a home’s comforts to soothe some kind of ill. He thinks the memory is there some place. But he can’t seem to get to it. It’s been a long time, he realises, since he’s actually used it. Not on himself, certainly not on anyone else. Maybe not even for a while before he’d left home.

No food. Francis has already said that. And Francis is taking care of the fire.

Blankets. He’d mentioned those too.

“The blankets, where do you keep those?” Raju shifts from one foot to the other, absently trying to ease the pain of standing by continuing to stand, focusing more on looking around. He’s spent too much of his time here sleeping, or trying slowly and blearily to wake himself up; he doesn’t know all of the things he should, having already spent more than one night here.

“In the hallway cupboard.” He needs to sit, but he’s learned to pick his battles in his very short time living with Raju. All he can do is make sitting down and relaxing more appealing than fussing over him or working.

Fire properly popping and hissing in the hearth, he sits back and waits for Raju to come back to him. Because he will, the look of worry is unmistakable in his eyes, even if his voice is steady and his smile genuine.

He lets himself get lost in the flames.

Raju makes an acknowledging noise, looking around and then heading toward it. His steps are a little stilted, not easy or confident as they usually are, but he ignores it, makes his way over to the cupboard and looks inside. Aha. There.

He looks around one more time as he holds the blankets, looking for some other way to help, something to do. Doing is always the thing that kept the sharp-edged, bowstring tension inside him at bay when an injury won't heal quickly enough like this, and Francis—

Well, Francis has already managed the fire. Raju can only feel the phantom of its warmth from this far away, but he knows the way the relief of it would sink into his skin if he were close. Maybe the warmth of the fire is helping Francis already. And after that, the blankets had been the only other thing he'd said he'd wanted.

Raju stands there for a moment, his own weight pressing cruelly down onto the soles of his damned feet, the air chill against his socked feet and exposed face.

Maybe the blankets are enough to be getting on with. He moves toward the fire, setting his notebook down next to a wall and spreading one of the blankets over the ground, to keep the cold away there. Then he eyes Francis, trying to see whether he's still staring into the flames that way, and drapes the second blanket over Francis' shoulders. If that gets Francis looking at him Raju will smile warmly, and then he's going to lower himself to sit. It's a slow process, and the grimace at it overtakes Raju's smile, but once he finishes he'll be sitting, and sitting close to Francis, and that will be reward enough.

Crozier does indeed smile warmly, eyes soft and unabashedly fond as he spares Raju any more of his help and lets him lower himself to the floor on his own. It’s a process - he’s clearly hurting in a level beyond what he should be thanks for how much they’d pushed themselves today - but once he’s down Crozier scoots the one or two inches closer to seat them hip-to-hip.

The closeness has a purpose. He takes a corner of blanket from his shoulders and drapes it around Raju’s, sharing the warmth between them. There’s plenty of blanket to spare.

Between the fire and the blanket and Raju’s body he’s feeling a hell of a lot more at ease. Maybe too much.

“Thank you.” Raju’s smile comes back and he tugs the blanket around his far side, then pushes the hood of Francis’ coat back and tugs his mittens off, leaning over to toss them some place near his notebook. There’s a chill without them still, but between the blanket around him, Francis inside it, and the fire in front, he’ll be comfortable soon enough. He’s as comfortable as this place gets already, barring the buzzing ache at the bottoms of his feet and the temperature, always too cold anyway.

But once he’s settled, he isn’t certain what to do. He frowns into the fire while he tries to figure it out, fingers toying with the fur at the blanket’s edge. An acquaintance at home — in Delhi — who’d mentioned a funeral, he could handle that smoothly. All that needs is platitudes. When someone at home — his real home, with the people who matter — dies, of age or disease, there’s the services to arrange, and the whole of them mourn together, and any more intimate, personal parts of that process need more from immediate family than they do from Raju. And he’s known what Francis has lost since that night in front of this very fireplace, but he hasn’t been around when it’s come up in quite this way.

Seetha and Raju grew up with their mourning, working out the routines of it together. And he hadn’t known Akhtar for long enough for anything like this to come up. He should have more examples to draw from than that, shouldn’t he? More than the two who feel to him the way the man next to him feels to Raju now? He can’t think of any.

Well. That doesn’t mean he can’t do something, anyway, and all at once Raju leans, decisively pressing their sides together. Sitting still doesn’t sit well on him, not out of the uniform, and he knows after a while he’ll start to fidget and look around for something to do— but he can try staying like this for a while, if it’s what Francis needs.

The breath expels from his lungs, the weight of Raju against his making him feel oddly lightheaded.

“Your notebook,” he murmurs after a beat or two. He can’t allowed himself to fall into too comfortable a lull. “It must be days since you’ve written in it.”

There is grief in him still, but there’s always grief, deep in his marrow. One gets used to it, like a single hand or pain from ripped muscles. He isn’t bothered by it now, for reasons he doesn’t quite want to entertain. He can turn his attention easily enough to Raju and all the curious objects and habits he’s brought with him.

"Mm." Raju twists to look over at it, then settles back. He'd have to get up again to get it, and he doesn't want to yet; even aside from being settled now against the warm, solid side of a friend who needs him, there's the blanket, the fire. The idea of moving and losing what heat he's gained in being right where he is makes the idea of staying still a little more attractive than it would have been in a place more hospitable. He tugs the blanket a little further over him, trying to figure out how much he can get it to cover before it starts pulling at the half that Francis needs to cover himself with.

"There's plenty to write down, too. There isn't always." And he'll have to decide how to cut the... the way Francis found him down to bare details, the ones relevant to the fire, what he's learned of it, to the sobbing from the sky as some vague example of what can happen in this place. Only take the parts of it that he can use, and leave the rest inside him where it belongs. Raju looks troubled for a moment. Then he turns to Francis, writing over those other thoughts with a warm smile.

"Maybe I'll write about you, now that I'm living here." He leans over to jostle Francis' shoulder, easy with how closely they're sitting. "What should I say? Should I describe you?"

He jostles him back, but doesn't leave too much space between them when he's done this little juvenile teasing. As much as he wants to pretend the long walk and the inadvertent reveal of something deeply private hasn't bothered him, there's no use denying the relief he feels in the press of his friend's body against his side and the easy conversation.

"For posterity's sake," he begins, nodding his head gravely. "I'm a tall, dark, strapping sea captain. Oh, and young, young too. A prodigy, in fact. I've scaled icebergs and glaciers and hopped ice floes, and I've commanded at least five expeditions. Write all that down."

He's clearly very, very serious about all of this. Not joking at all. He shares another smile with him and then looks back at the edges of the fire to spare his sight.

"You write down what's important, don't you? In the grand scheme of things I mean very little. Write...how we survive from day-to-day, how we plan and communicate and address the ill with the good. Write about the holes in the ceiling and the soft jumper you discovered."

“You think a jumper’s more important than a strapping sea captain? Nonsense.” Raju grins. “No, no I have to write about you now. I’ll say…”

Raju’s eyes narrow as he thinks over it. It should be something outrageous, for the teasing, but something true, too. Francis’ joking about it had sounded like something out of a romance novel — Raju can build on that. “I’ll say that I’m rooming with a tall, strapping sea captain with hair that shines like gold in the sunlight, and eyes the colour of deep water.”

He says it grandly, free hand waving in front of them as if painting the picture, and takes a moment to look a little wicked and rather proud of himself. Then he goes on: “One who’s old enough to have learned everything there is to know about sailing the open ocean, and young enough still to move with the passions of the waves.

“And then,” he says in an abruptly more casual tone, “if you’re still wanting me to write about your new jumper, I’ll write for you about that too. What do you think?”

What does he think? He thinks he’s going to drop dead right here and now, that’s what he thinks.

“Don’t be cruel now,” he chides him, trying to look amused and not completely stricken. “If you want to make up stories then just do that, don’t sprinkle in truths about soft jumpers to lend yourself credibility.”

He snorts softly and decides now’s a good time to prod at the fire. He wants the easy camaraderie to continue though, even if the teasing was more like a quick jab to his stomach. “Who else do you have in there?”

“Who else?” he asks, leaning over his knees to follow the movement of Francis’ shoulder as he reaches toward the fire, following Francis’ warmth. It doesn’t mean he’s forgotten what else Francis said, that he’s thinking about the answer, but it isn’t so urgent that he wants Francis to think that he’s ignoring the question. “Ah… A couple who had ideas about this place when I arrived. One of your men, William, ah… Gibson? Who wanted to figure out leatherworking so we could sew coats for the people here, but we couldn’t find any books that explained the way of it. Your Lieutenant, Little, who figured out the way this… this fire works, before I did.”

Frowning, Raju makes a circling gesture in front of his chest and stomach, indicating the thing inside him that he hasn’t mastered yet. Then he shrugs, leaving that uncomfortable part of the answer behind. “That sort of thing. Any clues or ideas that I want to remember, something about why we’re here, or how any of this strangeness actually works. Changes in circumstance, sometimes; you’ve been one of those, I think. You’d be the first I wrote about just because I wanted to. So what am I being cruel about?”

And here he circles back around to it, as he’d intended to since he started answering. Raju leans back again, his outer hand pulling the blanket tighter while his inner reaches around Francis’ shoulders to pinch at a lock of his hair, watching his thumb and his finger rubbing its fine, light strands gently between them. It’s another excuse again, a gesture to comfort a man who might need it, and the breadth of Francis’ shoulders is starting to feel right and familiar under his arm.

Strange how sometimes, times like this, it’s almost the way it was with Akhtar, though Francis has so much experience that Raju doesn’t, and is so much older where Akhtar had seemed young. But Francis sometimes needs guidance in the way that Akhtar did, though he’s so much more steady and confident about it, and Raju’s voice is matter of fact and fond, and happy to provide. Your friend knows best, Francis, so you would do well to be listening. “Your hair might be darker now in the shadows like this, but when we’re walking and the sun comes out, it gleams. And I don’t see how anything else I described could be in any doubt. So what part of it did I get wrong?”

Raju couldn’t know that he’s been inadvertently cruel, saying pretty, poetic things while he touches his hair. He couldn’t possibly know that Crozier’s thoughts have been straying, that his friend has been living in perpetual loneliness for years now. That’s all this is, he’s been rejected and alone and isolated, and the kindness from a good man is proving to be just a little too much.

And Sophia used to touch his hair like this. He hasn’t thought about that in years.

Crozier finds a crack in the ceiling to intently stare at while Raju is pressing in close and his fingers drift merely inches away from his neck. Are all the other words in your diary this pretty? Did you write about Gibson and Little this way?”

If he stops arguing about it then maybe Raju will drop this very earnest attempt at making him feel better. He can’t help but think of the look on his face when he finally understood what the cairns had represented.

A smile stays on Raju's lips but his eyes narrow just a little, and his gaze grows sharper. Raju's reminded at moments like this that Francis isn't Akhtar, exactly; it's harder to read him sometimes. He's staring up at the ceiling instead of looking at Raju or smiling, and Raju isn't certain why. Compliments, maybe? Francis is a modest man. Compare him to all the other men who've done a quarter of the things that Francis has and Francis will be quieter about his accomplishments, more reserved. It doesn't come from the failure of his last expedition, either, or it hadn't seemed to the last time Raju had noticed that modesty.

Maybe that discomfort extends past his accomplishments themselves and into the rest of him. His eyes, his hair, his build, his passion for the things he's discovered and the adventures that he's had— it all seems strange to shy away from, if shying away is what this is. All that Raju's done is list true facts, embellished a little around the edges in the same way men of Francis' day added all those curls and swirls at the edges of their letters when a bare T or D would do. But it's the only explanation Raju can think of. It's hard to tell for sure when Francis isn't reacting.

"Of course not," Raju huffs, instinctively amused at the idea. "Nothing against your men, of course. They seem like fine fellows. But if I were boasting about you anyway, that's what I would say, to start."

Raju drops his hand from Francis' hair to squeeze instead at his shoulder, half to affirm that Francis is special and half to reassure him for whatever it is that Francis isn't reacting to, and hopes that the gesture helps.

"But I really don't have to mention you much, if you would prefer that instead," he tries, watching Francis' expression for any change. "I know you're a modest man."

Raju is mostly sincere, so it makes it somehow worse that he feels like boasting about him he’d compliment his eyes and color of his hair. He laughs softly and drops his head into his hand, rubbing the heel of his palm against his eyes until he starts to see spots against his eyelids.

“Oh, I don’t mind,” he sighs, dropping his hand. “It’s for your eyes only, mn? What does it matter if you stroke my ego a bit?”

He laughs quietly, but it rings somewhat hollow. His ego. What ego could a man like him possibly have after how far he’s fallen? Oh, he doesn’t think he’s in the right frame of mind for any of this tonight, but he can turn it around. Push all the discomfort and pain deep, deep down, barrel on through.

“And if I kept a diary, how would I describe you? Give me some idea.”

Raju's having similar thoughts, watching him. Stroking a man's ego only works if there's something there to bloom underneath it, something that would see Francis grow instead of wilting this way, sit up straighter instead of curling down into himself. If it really did work on Francis that way, Raju might change his journaling to say all sorts of things— but maybe it's for the best if he doesn't, now.

The hand on Francis' shoulder moves down under the blanket to rub alongside Francis' spine, a conscious motion but an absent one, too, a narrow oval traced there by a hand conditioned to moving this way over a more slender back. His hand moves, and he thinks about it. Wild compliments, trying to prop up an ego that isn't there, that won't help. That might do the opposite of help. But Francis is trying to move past it and Raju's gaze moves ahead of them and unfocuses thoughtfully as he answers, moving past it with him.

"I don't know, a dashing..." He pauses, the motion of his hand slowing briefly. He huffs. "Not an officer, am I? Not here. Then... A young man."

He flashes a faint grin at the wall ahead, nudging his side teasingly into Francis' again, and then continues.

"'I've invited a dashing young man to stay,'" he starts, voice rolling in a vague circle around the idea of Francis' accent, swaying closer to it here or there, and then curving away from it again, "'who's got the temerity to make me wear nice clothes and who might still burn down my house.' Oh no, that was horrible."

Raju huffs, ducking his head. If he's going to do something that he's no good at in front of someone else, at least it's in service of trying to make his friend feel better. But still, the sting of some soft embarrassment makes Raju laugh a little. "Tell me never to try an impersonation of you again. Or to do it better than that. Did I get the words right, at least? Something you really might say?"

As far as accents go, Raju’s isn’t so terrible, and definitely not the worst he’s heard in the last few years. The worst would definitely be Hickey on the gallows, mocking him in just the laziest way imaginable. Raju’s is charming by comparison!

“If I tried my hand at your accent I would butcher it completely,” he chuckles, glad to share an easy laugh with him. It helps him focus less on that gentle touch along his spine from said dashing young man currently rooming with him. He follows it up with a gentle nudge back with his own shoulder.

“But it wouldn’t be what I’d say,” he tells him, nodding decisively. “I’d mention less the fire or the rooming situation, more the fact that a beautiful man saved my sorry arse from an icy grave of my own making. I’d lay the heroics at your feet; you were born to be some sort of valiant hero.”

You can flatter me, but I can't flatter you? he thinks first, playfully and wanting to tease, but: Better not, he thinks second, if the flattery bothers him that genuinely in this mood, and then he thinks, beautiful. A beautiful man.

It wouldn't be the first slightly strange thing that Francis has done, would it? Acting as Raju's equal, not authoritative in the way Raju might expect from an older man, and more than comfortable with touch, intimacy, not distant in the way Raju might expect from the place that Francis is from — though when Raju thinks that he's thinking of England, isn't he? Of England's ways. He doesn't know much about Ireland at all, knows the bare details of history, but not culture.

But that kind of strangeness has frequently been Francis' way, in moments a little more intimate than Raju's expecting, and it's always been a pleasant surprise. Maybe it's his time with the Netsilik that's moulded him into those unexpected shapes. It's made Raju want to smile before, and now is no exception: there's something warm unfurling in his chest, the pleasure of a compliment from someone whose opinion really matters, even if the word itself might have been said like an insult from anyone else. But Francis says it so matter of factly that it becomes a fact in his mouth, one that makes Raju feel a little bit lighter to hear.

Lighter, and... odd, at hearing the rest, considering. Not bad, just... well, odd. "A hero?" he murmurs, smiling faintly, hand on Francis' back moving slower again. "Even after... What I told you? You still think so?"

He's only told Francis the one thing. But it'd been bad enough, hadn't it? And he can't say it didn't make for a good sample, the culmination of the last few years of Raju's work and life. Not something to think too deeply on here when Francis needs Raju's focus, but true, still.

Of course he can’t see it; he’s too headstrong, too…just too young.

He’s too young. His heart sinks. He has an entire life ahead of him, doesn’t he? And Crozier is nearing the end of his own. He wonders if he’ll meet it here, changing one cold place for another.

“How could you think otherwise?” A man’s not measured by his actions alone. “You’d rather sit in the snow and let your feet freeze than put someone else in danger.”

He shakes his head gently, pulling his hand back from where he’d been keeping it around Raju to massage at the ache in his wrist. “You’ve been deliberately vague about yourself, my friend. It hasn’t gone unnoticed. This isn’t to say I mind, we all hace our secrets, but I know a valiant man when I see one.”

And that’s to say nothing about the pain behind his eyes that he catches from time-to-time, or the way that he called out to his father for forgiveness.

Raju's faint smile turns into surprise. His eyes widen, his lips part a little. "I..."

No one's ever noticed it before. Raju himself doesn't notice it, most of the time; pulling his attention to it now, the first time Francis has ever said that he's been thinking it, is enough to turn Raju's attention from most anything else. He straightens up, his hand slowing even more to a stop and drifting toward Francis' shoulder. A little dismay creeps in alongside the surprise. He wants to explain... something. He wants to explain all the other... everything else the people who need to believe in him can't ever know, that Francis has already had a taste of. And he wants to explain the rest of it, the things the people who used to look at him like something heroic did know. The actions and the needs driving all of it. Let someone who isn't a part of any of it weigh the two against one another, and tell him which one sits heavy enough to judge him by.

He glances at the fire, grimacing briefly. He wants all of it explained without actually having to do it, having to walk through the memories step by step picking out what words to use, having to live in all of it again long enough for someone who wasn't there to know.

He's glad that Francis is so close. He's glad to feel Francis' shoulder held tightly under his hand. It helps.

"I'll tell you the rest of it someday." It's the closest he's ever come to acknowledging out loud what Francis was able to point out so easily and it comes out tighter, rougher than he was expecting it to. It's that feeling at the base of his throat pressing at his words as they pass through. "We'll see then whether you still think so.

"But it wasn't your own making, was it, when your hut collapsed?" Because Francis can't really judge either way, can he? No matter how right it feels now, how much Raju wants to believe him. Raju tries to shed the weight in his voice; he'll get there in another moment. "Unless they're supposed to hold up under branches that size."

All ghosts are personal, private things; Crozier would never push if someone didn’t want to expose what so haunts them.

“Some day,” he agrees, wanting to say more but stopping short. No, privacy. Raju’s built walls around his choices strategically, and as a friend he should - no, must - respect them.

Someday Raju will share. It’s a promise that he’ll hold tightly and protect until that day comes.

“Sleeping in the ice house where there are perfectly good homes was a mistake of my own making,” he reminds him. “Had you not come by when you did-”

He doesn’t think he needs to say it.

"But I did." There's more deep feeling behind his smile than there might have been otherwise, had they come to this same idea by a different route. His voice isn't exactly back to casual yet. "I did come by. And here we are."

Raju had only been going that way at that particular time by chance, that much is true, but that isn't what's important. What's important is that Raju is warm, that he feels the heat of the fire and the pain in his feet that he doesn't have to push through anywhere, he can just let it sit, and that there's a man next to him who cares, and that all of that matters in a way the desperate search for enough chores to fill the hours hadn't, before. "You know, I'm almost— would it be strange if I was glad? The days here don't stretch so long with someone to spend them with, but I don't know if I would have sought you out if it hadn't happened. And your ribs are all healed up now anyway, aren't they?"

Raju grins, bumping their sides together. "And so you see, it all worked out."

“Maybe don’t lead with you’re glad my home fell on top of me,” he smiles, adjusting the blanket around his shoulders again. All that playful jostling knocked something loose - maybe in his brain.

The sentiment is shared. Companionship isn’t just pleasing, it’s nourishing. It makes life worth living, and he’d forgotten completely what it was like having a life that wasn’t constantly dour and depressing.

“It isn’t strange. It isn’t strange at all. Worrying about you takes all the monotony out of my day,” he deadpans.

Raju leans forward as he laughs, hand on Francis sliding from Francis' shoulder to the base of his neck. "So once these finally finish healing—" he shifts his loosely crossed legs, indicating his feet, "—what will you do? Back to monotony again?"

Fishing for compliments? No. Well, maybe. He wouldn't mind compliments. But he thinks things have developed nicely since the near-misstep of trying to praise Francis — watching Francis' smile, it had seemed real — and something in the idea that Raju could tell someone everything if he wanted, and that he doesn't have to now, is warming him nearly as much as the fire and Francis' body heat; teasing will do just as well.

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