#character: jerott blyth
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Whumptober 2022 day 4
Dead on your feet: Hidden injury | Waking up disoriented | Can't pass out
Content: mainly just Francis having a horrible migraine, while suffering the effects of diazepam addiction. No one getting stabbed or anything! Just. Bad migraine. Bad substances. And important stuff to do. Oh ig CW Graham Reid Malett, unfortunately he is There Again.
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For the audience, what was at stake was a grand cash prize; for Francis Crawford it was art, freedom, life itself. If he didn't win this contest, his son would never be returned to him, lives would be split apart and hopes shattered, and he would be locked out of any act of creation that didn't directly profit Graham Reid Malett.
It was, all being said, not the ideal time for a migraine to strike.
He waited backstage in the darkness behind the thick, velvet curtains of the stage at the Topkapi Casino. He had no qualms about using meditative techniques the Rajneeshees had taught him back at the studio in London as he tried to imagine that he was separate from his body, from his surroundings - nothing but a pair of hands waiting to pick up an instrument, and a heart to set the audience alight.
Beyond him, on stage, Jerott was holding his own just as Marthe and Philippa had done before him. Although Marthe had fought to be the one to play opposite her old teacher, Francis had insisted, much to her fury, that Jerott would be the one to outplay Georges Gaultier. Gaultier was a fussy, classical player, and Marthe had mastered all he could teach her - she could match him note for note, arpeggio for arpeggio - but even with the extra years of practice she had on Jerott, Marthe had never had the opportunity to cultivate her own style much beyond her teacher's.
She would have done fine, in all likelihood, but out there, past the ringing in Francis' ears, he knew Jerott was doing more than fine - he'd soon grown bored of Gaultier's staid choices of Flamenco staples and had let his own influences leak in. The innovations George Harrison had borrowed from Indian culture were reclaimed, foregrounded and blended with Django Reinhardt's louche, jazzy beats; the precision of Davy Graham's Andalusian-inspired picking collided with cocky, raï-infused syncopation.
Francis managed to smile wanly despite the weakness in his legs, the cold sweat springing to his skin. He could hear the frustration building in Gaultier's dry, heavy finger-work - he fumbled more notes as the audience talked over him and began to heckle, and when Jerott's guitar cut in again the listeners screamed and cheered. The sound was like a bolt gun to the base of Francis' skull, but it meant that soon he would be the one to take the stage - Gaultier was finished.
Archie - ever observant, ever vigilant, always managing to be where he was needed most - handed Francis a pair of sunglasses as he stood at the edge of the stage, his eyes closed, his pulse speeding, his stomach empty and volatile.
He felt the plastic frames between his trembling fingers and tried to get enough air in his lungs to counteract the growing feeling of nausea.
"Maestro, did ye take a dose...?" Archie asked softly. Even so, gentle as he made his voice, his gravelly accent was like needles in Francis' gums, like a vice tightening on top of his spine.
"Yes," he said hoarsely. "I've had enough." The diazepam didn't do anything for the migraines - in fact he'd been on it for long enough that it just added to the fuzzy, unbalanced feeling he had anyway - but without it he would be a wreck, unable even to hold his guitar.
"And ye can play?" Archie asked, as the audience in the vast arena erupted to confirm Jerott's victory.
Francis grimaced and forced the sunglasses on, though he kept his eyes closed as he did, and struggled to settle the frames over his ears with the interference of his violently shaking hands. He swallowed, but his throat remained dry. "I must play, Archie," he murmured.
Behind the shades, he cracked his eyes open and even his teeth seemed to ache at what he could see of the stage lights. He grunted and winced and turned his face towards Archie, his eyelids shut tight again behind the tinted lenses.
"Archie."
"Maestro?"
"A red light on Reid Malett. Blue on me. Nothing more, you hear?"
"Aye, Maestro. I'll speak wi' the technicians."
Even with his eyes closed, even with the relentless howling agony in his head, Francis knew that Jerott had stepped off stage and come to stand by him. His breathing was heavy - self-satisfied, scented with bourbon and tar-rich cigarette smoke - but the hand on Francis' arm, though sweaty, was kind. "You're up."
"I know," Francis pushed his body away from the scaffold he'd been propped up against. Belatedly, he added, "You did well, Jerott. At least the audience is on our side."
Jerott didn't acknowledge the praise directly, but his next words were squeezed by some new emotion: "Francis - are you sure about this?"
Francis sighed. He didn't have the energy to shrug Jerott's hand off him or to explain why this was the only option. Out on stage, the compere seemed to shriek into his microphone, and the record agent Kiaya Çalışkan giggled into her own mic - the sound felt to Francis much like he imagined it would feel to have sand rubbed into his eyeballs.
"He's better than you think on the electric..." Jerott persisted. "But you'd have no problem with this."
With the hand that wasn't on Francis' arm, Jerott was offering the acoustic guitar he'd played. Francis squinted at it, shook his head - once, slowly, feeling the pain behind his eyes turn to a swirl of colours as he did. He forced his clenched jaw apart and thanked Jerott in barely more than a whisper.
"But no - it must be the electric. We can't follow you with more of the same. It's a good instrument, and it's been set up well."
"He'll have - "
"He might have tampered, yes. I can tune my own guitar, Jerott," Francis tried to smile and moved unsteadily past Jerott and his instrument. The stage was dark except for a white spot on the compere and on Kiaya, the competition's sponsor. Francis put Jerott and his worries from his mind, he put Archie and the request he'd made from his mind, and waited for Kiaya Çalışkan to mince off stage in her figure-hugging gold dress and towering stilettos. He focussed on his breathing and opened and closed his fists in time with it, imagining stillness in his fingers until he had willed something close to it into existence.
"Ladies and gentlemen..." the compare yelled.
Francis lowered his head and closed his eyes again, picturing the distance between him and the guitar, counting the necessary steps in his head.
"Without further ado - please welcome to the stage your headline combatants! A real Highland fling here for you tonight..."
Francis had stopped listening to the words. It was too much effort to push past the static of chimes and electric shrieks his mind was telling him his ears could hear. He waited only for the mechanical thunk of the spotlight going off and then he shuffled out onto the dark stage - one step, one breath, two, two, three, three...
"Watch out, buddy, are you drunk?" the compere brushed past him on his own way to the side of the stage, but Francis was nearly there now. He grasped the neck of his guitar as a man dying of thirst would reach for fresh water.
In the darkness across the stage, from behind the lenses of his sunglasses, Francis could just about make out the glittering points of his opponent's instrument - metal tuning pegs, bridge and pickup shining like his golden cufflinks and broad, white-toothed smile.
Francis shouldered his own guitar, unplugged it, and checked the tuning. It wasn't quite what he'd asked for, but he was glad he had that to concentrate on as the crowd roared and the lights went up.
Archie had done his job at least, and twilight blue light bathed Francis as he stood with head bowed, listening with all his might for the hushed, metallic twang of the strings. It was probably muscle memory as much as anything that did it then - knowing how tight the pegs should feel relative to the tension on the strings. It seemed close enough - and if he was off, he would hide it with some elaborate distortion and retune it as he played. An advantage of playing electric, he reflected.
Into the hot, heavy, not-quite-silence beyond the chaos in Francis' head, his enemy launched into a wild, virtuosic riff. At the end, he shook the reverb on it out, letting the sound fade away as the audience's cheers built.
"Are you ready, sweeting?" Graham Reid Malett called across the stage. He chopped out a couple of chords as punctuation, and Francis released a steadying breath through his nostrils. He nodded, settled his hands on his instrument, and played a modest response to Reid Malett's opening that was, at least, in tune.
Francis' opponent threw back his head and laughed. He let rip, and Francis' eyes followed his fingers, picking up what his ears wouldn't let him observe. It wasn't necessary to copy, just to show he was capable of doing the same - and more.
Reid Malett's left hand moved effortlessly up and down the neck of his instrument, his fingers dancing over frets as the digits of his right hand plucked and flicked at the strings. He was quick, but not quite quick enough to hide his workings from Francis.
And at least, come his turn, Francis could close his eyes, forget about the noise in his mind, and think only of the movements of his own hands, of the mechanical processes of wringing emotion from metal and plastic and wood. He could be alone with the guitar and his breathing, where a calmness, sweetened by just a touch of the adrenaline he felt when performing on stage, led him to the point of balance he needed. While he stood there, his body wracked by the year's struggles, practically dead on his feet, he could put himself inside the instrument, inside the music and the patterns of it, and let the colours of the migraine drop into the background as he imposed his own art over the top.
One solo down, he let himself peer across the stage at his opponent from narrowed eyes. He didn't hope for the satisfaction of seeing fear in Reid Malett's expression, but hoped, perhaps, to have rattled his confidence.
Instead, Graham Reid Malett smiled, his eyes mad beneath the filters of red light and dark shades. "I am glad, my pet, that we will have a real contest tonight...don't pass out, now..."
#whumptober2022#whumptober#every day i write the book#character: francis crawford#character: jerott blyth#character: archie abernethy#character: georges gaultier#character: graham reid malett#character: kiaya khatun#band au: pawn in frankincense#setting: topkapi casino
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love the idea that jerott's loss of faith came from his understanding that a loving and just god would never allow something as annoying as francis crawford of lymond to exist.
#lymond#the lymond chronicles#please don't reblog this with serious criticism or meta this is literally a shitpost#most pitiable creature on earth jerott blyth#no one has suffered as much as jerott blyth#he deserves it though#he does it to himself#i love this character so much#i know francis crawford is the bastion of iconic characters in literature#but jerott blyth? this guy matters#i just love to see him in situations
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jerott + comparing marthe to lymond in pawn in frankincense
bonus checkmate
#lymond#lymond chronicles#francis/jerott#when the comphet HITS !!!#this post has an audience of one: me :)#this is how i celebrate my pifversary HAPPY ONE YEAR TOGETHER DARLING#jerott i love u sooooooo much#can you believe compulsory heterosexuality was invented by dorothy dunnett in 1966#when she introduced the character of jerott blyth in the third installment of her historical epic the lymond chronicles?#that is the reality i live in. and no one can tell me i'm wrong
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He spoke each poem through to the end, and beside Jerott, Marthe’s lips moved, following. Sometimes the hard-pressed voice, uplifted, made no sense of the words it spoke. Then when the violence died would come relief, and the voice would pick its way again. (Pawn in Frankincense)
have some slapdash Volos!
without poetry:
#the first of more than one drawing I hope#possibly even with more thoughtful poem incorporation#but for now…#pawn in frankincense#lymond chronicles#lymond chronicles spoilers#marthe#something I#my art now#lymond art#lymond#gay turned up right next to Marthe so I kept it like that#her girlfriend IS about to fly away after all#and ami ended up over Jerott so that’s nice too#anyway#I love this scene#they’re all going through it and that’s why the perspective of the room makes no sense#ha I just realized that the last three lymond drawings I’ve posted have featured francis Suffering#or coming to the end of Suffering#and one or more other characters tentatively keeping him company/reaching out#plenty of material there!#jerott blyth
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Meant to be sorting my life out for a friend's wedding this weekend instead standing in the middle of the house like
Yes but don't you see how Jerott is used by La Dame de Doubtance - when he says he'll never love again do you think La Dame wants to hear it because actually nothing would be sweeter to Jerott Blyth at that moment than hearing Francis defend his right to love and then Francis says don't let me drive you away but this is part of La Dame's plan isn't it and when it's said he's adequate to his task what is that precisely? to love Francis enough to go back again and again and again to save him even when Francis doesn't want to be saved even when it goes against common sense and Jerott thought he might just leave actually, Francis Crawford lives because of Jerott Blyth's heart while La Dame has an army of people to get Francis into trouble because his fate requires it her stupid plan relies on Jerott to pull him out of trouble because a dead Great Man just won't do but Jerott couldn't serve the Voivoda it would break his heart too much so he needs to be driven away, just enough, but not so far that he won't be back again to save Francis when he doesn't want to be saved in Checkmate and to let him die when it's the only thing that can give him life, so Marthe is used as well, but Marthe's eyes are open to her fate and she hates him and she hates it but she thinks she'll be rewarded for playing her part - with gratitude maybe, with a brother at least, with a Great Man - and she's so trapped in the game she thinks kindness can hold a man together who has no purpose but to wait until it's required of him to love again and to fight again only it's not kindness is it because no one believes it and it's love he needs and has always needed and the first one died the second one was a betrayal, hers is a trick too just like her wigs and her antique dresses, and the other the other is not for him it's not in his stars, so he's adequate to receiving kindness and how can Francis walk back into this illusion of life - it was the troop of St Mary's that should have been his - and say 'she's not your keeper' 'why did you marry her' when he didn't get kindness from Francis so turned to Marthe, when she married him for the work her grandmother started and Francis left them together at Volos all but making her his keeper - kindness. He shall have it. But what does La Dame or her granddaughter know about kindness? - and even after all this it's just like Fleabag said man he has all this love to give and he doesn't have anywhere to put it so he puts it in a single bullet fired into Austin Grey's head and then it turns out he's brought the stars into allignment Francis and Philippa can love and he can take his rightful place but Marthe Marthe never knew that was how things ended for her did she? did she not read her own stars as she looked over the tasks given to her the work she inherited when La Dame died and did she not read them and take out their injustice on the man who was going to cause her death which is the only reward in the cup for her, or did she not want to know did she suspect did she hope to the last that Francis would welcome her with open arms as a sister this is why Marthe's advice is 'lie back and think of England' you have to take whatever's coming to you so Francis can be a Great Man only he's already great and she doesn't understand it because she has no concept of a healthy family of love for parents and siblings, of being satisfied with enough just enough to live happily please give Russia to Marthe give Francis his fate back that is to say I know Jerott would never make him happy like Philippa does but I'd just like it to be known that being adequate to his task, no one loves like Jerott Blyth and you should take him seriously when he says you don't know what love is because he's a knight leaning his head on his lord's knee and þinceð him on mode þæt he his mondryhten clyppe ond cysse, ond on cneo lecge honda ond heafod, swa he hwilum ær in geardagum giefstolas breac. Ðonne onwæcneð eft manwineleas guma, gesihð him biforan fealwe wegas, baþian brimfuglas,brædan feþra, hreosan hrim ond snaw hagle gemenged. When he shoots is it La Dame he's serving or Francis? He believes it's the latter but events indicate it's still the former. Afterwards, does he even share any words with Francis? Nothing but practicalities, at any rate. It's like he might as well be dead to him. He's running away like he did after love's first death, to where love first betrayed him, there's nothing for him at St Mary's - just as he couldn't serve the Voivoda he can't serve Francis in love. What is love, Jerott? Not kindness and curiosity, but faith and fate. Being adequate to the task of bringing Francis' greatness to fruition, though you never understood the music and the art because you're a man who wishes for a leader and a companion and in the end you get neither.
#tumblr has tried to eat this post so many times but in the end it couldn't save you all#(unlike jerott saving francis 😇)#the insane ramblings of the diseased mind touched by pawn in frankincense#drama blonds and conspiracy theories#don't @ me for being a jerott apologist because#1) yes i am#and 2) he did many many wrong things in his life and i *will* punish him for them in fic#basically: the la dame de doubtance plot let me show you my problems with it#oh don't we all quote old english poetry in our character meta?#jerott blyth#otp: kindness for jerott blyth#la dame de doubtance#lymond#lymond screaming
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Jerott Blyth is so funny to me like he’s a violent mercenary he’s a tortured ex-priest he’s a snobby nerdy rich boy he’s deeply homophobic he’s pathetically in love with a man he’s too tender hearted for his genre he’s the biggest asshole hypocrite of all time he’s an alcoholic he’s a short king he canonically has the best ass in Scotland. So much character in that character
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ScotsSwap 2020
Bombycine
Recipient: Jo (@notasapleasure). I hope I’ve done Jerott justice. It’s been absolute torture not talking to you about writing this <3
Prompt: Philippa and anyone as a BroTP, ‘Take the words 'sharp' 'alone' 'close[near]' 'missed' and give me some Pain :’)’ - it’s mainly alone and pain really, although Jerott has had some close encounters with sharp objects in the recent past. I hope it’s still delicious angst, even if it has wandered a bit off topic.
Setting: St. Mary’s, early autumn 1560.
Characters: Jerott Blyth, Philippa Crawford, Francis Crawford.
Relationships: Philippa + Jerott, Francis + Jerott, Philippa/Francis.
Rating: I’m not sure? References to things that happen to Khaireddin, but nothing explicit.
Summary: Sleep is not kind to Jerott Blyth.
Word Count: 2986.
Note: This is broadly compliant with this and this, mainly so I could squeeze Astraea the cat in there.
Spoilers: Non-specific spoilers for stuff that happens in Checkmate.
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The pain rose up to meet Jerott Blyth, mingled with the waters of the Middle Sea, and he drowned in the scent of spikenard and jasmine, in roiling fumes and obscene kisses and all the stench and horror of battle. Even as he fell, half-blind from the blow to his temple that had swept him overboard and the haze of gunpowder that hung, cloying, over the churning blue-green waters of the Mediterranean, he heard behind him the low, animal noises of the foundering ship.
The pain at shoulder and temple and thigh howled in awful harmony with the tortured screaming of overstressed timber and the crack of snapping lines. Flashes of light filled his failing vision, amber and gold and cornsilk-fair, yet, through them all, he could see glimpses of palm and pomegranate beneath a blistering African sun; the smell of storax and benzoin clung to the aching tissues of his throat and curdled in the saltwater filling his burning nostrils.
Although Mehedia lay more than a hundred and fifty miles distant, set on its strangling neck of land in the shining sea, passing vistas reached him through the sheet of blue water and yellow fire. He thought he could see flashes of gnarled grey-green olive groves and fields touched with the blush of new barley and smell the sun-warmed earth and the fetor of bombyx mori. Even as the roiling waters of the Middle Sea saturated his padded gambeson, drawing him down and down into the currents that eddied and swirled around him, down into the vortex of the foundering ship, he thought he could feel the splintering wood of a burning hut beneath the tips of his blistered fingers. Even as his useless arm hung wavering and limp as storm-wracked kelp and a ribbon of blood like scarlet silk wound through the water around him, he touched the soft, pliant curve of a child’s back and the damp weight of of amber hair tacky with cooling blood.
İpec böceǧi, called the dry, whispery voice of the old woman, and Jerott Blyth flinched. For this wast thou born? What lack is there in Scotland that her sons grow so feeble?
The saltwater again burned in Jerott Blyth’s nostrils and, with the sudden clarity of the sleeper and the man nearing death, he knew that the sea battle and the olive groves alike were the mere conjurings of a mind caught in a drugged stupor. Slitting open stinging eyes against the fetid, poisonous fumes of burning silk cocoons, tasting bitter almonds like charnel flesh on the back of his tongue, he saw with little surprise that he lay beside the discarded body of a fair-haired child on the rough floor of the warehouse belonging to the silk-farmer’s sister in Mehedia. The marks left by the mutes were livid on a face touched also by the griefs of a short life twisted and warped against itself.
The great impulse to live that dwelt within Jerott Blyth’s sturdy flesh took fresh flame, and, even against the will that cringed against it, he drew a dragging, acrid breath and smelt the cloying, indecent reek of the perfume that clung to the boy-child’s cooling flesh.
The cornflower-blue eyes were open and far-seeing beneath their heavy, slack lids as they had not been beneath the merciful bindings of Amiens or in the wreckage of a shattered face on a Northumbrian hillside. The soft, kitten’s mouth, still bearing the last, revolting brush of paint, formed words without breath, as parched as the desert air. İpec böceǧi, for this wast thou born? Is there no failure thou hast not encompassed?
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The gasping breath that woke Jerott Blyth was his own, rasping like poison in his chest, and his outflung arm howled with pain. For a moment, he thought he could feel the raw burns of Mehedia licking its length and he was back in Djerba - the Djerba of some seven years past - with Onophrion Zitwitz’s jellies melting on his tongue and the golden warmth of the North African sun spilling through the latticed windows of his convalescent room. For a moment, he burned again with fever on the boat fleeing the carnage of Djerba with Giovanni Andrea Doria fretting and fuming at the prow and Danny’s hand clasping his own and the utter failure of the Knights of St. John sour in a mouth that cracked and bled. With a blink against the enveloping darkness that admitted neither sunlight nor the deadly fire of an overturned brazier, he recognised the shadow of the bed curtains and the dim glow from the last embers of the fire dying in the hearth. A dint on the pillow by his head suggested the recent warmth of a cat, but he was utterly alone, neither prisoner nor knight.
With a hollow, awful noise, half sob, half laugh, Jerott buried his head in his shaking hands, feeling the trembling weakness in the injured arm and the aching memory of the old burns. It seemed to him that, like the silk moth which has no organs by which it can nourish itself, he lacked in that moment any means to sustain himself, and could merely exist in the labouring of his lungs and the eddying horror of the dream. Khaireddin, who he had failed to save; Marthe, whose death he had caused, however unwitting; Francis, who might have died by that same act of mercy; the boy Diccon, weeping before a father who turned an implacable face to him, the warm light of the afternoon gilding both their pale heads.
Although he had regretted his hasty words as soon as they were spoken - Damn it, Francis, he’s not one of your men to browbeat. Can you not show him half the pity you gave the other? - he felt the previous day’s anger kindle again at the memory of the cool displeasure in Francis’s eyes and the flat, uncompromising line of his mouth, even as his infant son tugged at his silken hose and begged to be held.
Mo cridh is a good little boy now, said the voice of that other child with the pitiless clarity of memory.
With no more conscious thought than the doomed silk moth, Jerott swung his legs over the edge of the bed, groping with chilled toes for the slippers that had been set out for him. Although the day had been warm for Scotland on the cusp of autumn, a decided chill hung in the night air and he shrugged into the borrowed robe, feeling it pull across the shoulders where it was cut for a slighter man.
In the near total darkness, he let his feet and memory guide him through the corridors of St. Mary’s, grateful at least that although the house no longer maintained its martial aspect, Francis’s taste did not yet run to endless trinkets and furbelows to trip the unwary. At the head of the stairs, something sleek and pale regarded him curiously from a ribbon of pale moonlight where a shutter stood ajar, but, before he could do more than peer blearily back, it disappeared into the recesses of a court cupboard made monstrous by the shadows.
Once, on a night such as this, Jerott Blyth might have sought the wine cellar and all its bottled comforts; once, Lymond might have locked it against just such an eventuality. Tonight, however, Jerott wandered through the silent house with no goal in his mind save to put as much space as the night permitted between himself and the fading echoes of his dream. His slippered feet padded softly across the expensive carpets and he recalled with a shudder the carpet painted with red and white in the in the selamlìk like a terrible exchequer counting out life and death - say goodnight to the dark.
Despite his meandering path, Jerott was not overly surprised when he lifted his eyes and found himself in the passageway leading to the great, vaulted kitchen. There would be fresh water there to wash the taste of bitter almonds and smoke from his mouth, thanks to some mechanical contrivance of Lancelot Plummer’s, and the cool of the Scots night under cloud-veiled stars through the door beyond.
He had already stepped through the door when he realised that long room was not empty; the faint glow from the banked hearth was matched by a candle flame and in its light a slim figure moved briskly from table to cupboard. Jerott froze, for a startled moment half-fearing some apparition from his dream, or, worse yet, an encounter with Lymond for which he was ill-prepared, but as the figure turned to greet him, he saw the fall of dark, unbound hair swing out around slender shoulders and recognised his hostess in a robe de chambre belonging, like Jerott’s own borrowed garment, no doubt, to her husband.
‘Jerott!’ Philippa came more fully into the light, her smile warming with more pleasure in the encounter than Jerott thought strictly reasonable for some time after two in the morning. ‘Couldn’t you sleep either?’
‘No,’ Jerott said shortly, and wondered what else he could say, but Philippa seemed unperturbed.
‘She gaue him milke, the slepe fell in his hede,’ she pronounced cheerfully. ‘I was making myself a posset, guaranteed by Kate to knock out half the county - of course, that’s in England. Would you like some?’
About to demur, Jerott was shepherded without delay to a seat at the well-scrubbed board and had an equally well-scrubbed lemon deposited in his nerveless hands. Half-hysterically, he found himself thinking that Djerba might have gone better with Philippa Crawford and not Giovanni Andrea Doria commanding the massed forces of Christendom. Taking the knife presented to him, he set to paring dutiful curls of zest and listened to the surprisingly comforting sounds as Philippa clattered around the kitchen, collecting the milk and cream from the cool slate and the sugar and nutmeg from the spice chest. As she worked, she hummed to herself, a fragment of Salve intemerata virgo, a snatch of a filthy ditty that he had heard on the docks at Leith. In short order, he found himself in possession of a steaming goblet of spiced posset aromatic with lemon and nutmeg and the Crawfords’ good French eau de vie, and being appraised frankly by the appallingly candid brown eyes of Francis’s child-bride.
A child no longer, he conceded with a shade of reluctance, although he could see the ghost of the scrubby and dishevelled adolescent alongside the the elegant courtier in the lines of her face as he squinted against the flickering warmth of the candlelight. A single lock of brown hair fell in disarray across her high brow, but, even in the dim light, it was glossy and well-trimmed, and the thin-fingered hands cupping the second goblet no longer showed the effects of diligent adolescent gnawing.
‘So,’ Philippa said conversationally, pushing a plate of sweetmeats towards him. ‘You saw Diccon’s argument with Francis.’
The posset soured in Jerott’s mouth. ‘Argument? He’s a child. He was crying. God, Philippa!’ Francis’s retort had, as ever, raised an angry and impotent resentment within him only made worse by the recognition that he was over-matched.
‘He’s Francis’s child,’ Philippa corrected gently. ‘He could pick a fight with a fencepost and is as highly strung as a papingo at a fair.’
Jerott subsided sulkily into his chair and eyed a sticky square of something dripping with honey and jewelled with candied nuts.
‘Baklava has many curative properties, but the banishment of nightmares is not one of them.’
As so often with Lymond, the softly spoken words left Jerott feeling as if he had been flensed and scoured raw, but there was a kindness in Philippa’s face that Lymond rarely permitted himself to display, and Jerott consciously relaxed the fingers clenched bitingly tight around the goblet until the ache of the healing wound in his shoulder subsided.
‘What, then? What possible reason could Francis have to treat his own son like that after… after…’
‘After losing Khaireddin? But if Diccon’s offence was no grave matter, neither was Francis’s.’ And in quick, amused words, Philippa sketched the outlines of a scene quite different to that which Jerott had seen - or thought he had seen: the tired, overexcited child; the hand tangled in the cat’s inviting fur until she awarded the barest scratch to her tormentor for this impertinent ambuscade; Francis’s insistence that Diccon should render his apologies to his feline friend before any consoling cuddle; child and cat alike falling asleep in Lymond’s lap even as he himself drowsed in the late sunlight. The light in the cornflower-blue eyes that had been not cold anger but a carefully corralled excess of emotion.
Philippa licked a crumb of honey-soaked semolina from her fingers and continued in a quieter voice, recalling the outspoken, stalwart child that Jerott remembered from the long-ago voyage, the terror and exhilaration alike of playing for Roxelana Sultàn, the dawning fear she had felt in the sultana’s gilded and grilled listening post above the Divan as she saw Jubrael Pasha for the first time. Kuzúm’s whipping and the despair of her wedding night in the French ambassador’s residence and the long journey home.
As if it were drawn out of him like a skein of silk unravelling, Jerott found himself responding in kind, telling the story of his ill-fated foray to Mehedia, the horror that he had found there and the coming horror that he had been unable to prevent. Just a quarter-hour’s difference, just a little more wit to see the danger surrounding him, just a little more strength in his arm… Remembering the obscene travesty of the kiss pressed into the crook of his neck, Jerott looked away, into the shadows that crowded the corners of the kitchen, but Philippa’s fingertips pressed lightly against his own, a benediction of a kind, as cleansing as any priestly absolution. In a flash, he remembered the calm of Francis’s face set against the crispness of his pillow in Amiens, the blind, blank eyes and bloodless visage and quick, expressive features shorn of all emotion.
İpec böceǧi, for this wast thou born?
And - no; they had stood as well as they might against a malicious and terrible will and had found beyond its bounds some place of refuge, though it had driven them over distant lands and wide seas. It had made of them something which none of them had been able to contemplate, both for good and for ill, and, as storm-wrack, they lay upon its farthest shore. If there was grief here in plenty and a lifetime of Graham Reid Malett’s ill works to be unravelled in Scotland, there was no shame in that.
Perhaps he was not formed as the horned worm of India, unable to sustain life even in others.
With a start, Jerott realised that the goblet was empty and cool beneath his fingers, the plate reduced to a scattering of crumbs and the first faint glow of dawn spilling through the high, narrow windows. The cat perched on one end of the long table, glowering at them through narrow green eyes and batting at a scrap of honeyed pastry with a desultory paw. Blinking against the sting of tears, as caustic as any poison, Jerott saw that Philippa’s lids were drooping, her chin propped on one hand and the other laid lightly on the curve of her belly suddenly revealed beneath the fine lawn of her shift where the embroidered silk of her gown had dropped away. ‘You must forgive Francis, you see,’ she said in a voice warm and soft with sleep. ‘It is difficult for him at the moment.’
‘I - yes - there is nothing to forgive,’ Jerott said, and found that he meant it. Perhaps, like the pelican, Francis would sustain these children with the last of his own heart’s blood, as he might have sustained his firstborn, were it not for Gabriel’s schemes, but the stubborn light in Philippa’s drowsy dark eyes suggested that she had decided opinions on the matter. And, with abrupt solicitude, ‘You should go to bed.’
‘A moment longer. Goo to Morpheus; thou knowist hym well.’
Rising to his feet against the protesting ache of his own muscles, he was surprised to find himself swept into a hug comprised half of peacock-embroidered silk and half of flying dark hair that filled his nose with the scent of chypre. Cautiously, he let his own arms close around Philippa and felt a great flood tide of weariness sweep over him, as if all barriers to sleep had been swept away and that welcoming sea rushed in, bearing all before it.
Disentangling himself with only a little difficult involving Philippa’s hair and the carved horn buttons fastening the sleeves of his robe, Jerott padded sleepily from the kitchen, the cat weaving lazy patterns around his bare calves.
*******************************************************
‘Well, yunitsa?’ asked the figure lounging in the entrance to the larder, a sleepy, sardonic smile crooking one corner of his long mouth and pale linen sleeves falling back from his sinewy arms as he brought his hands up to frame her face.
‘Well,’ Philippa confirmed, and pressed a kiss to the scarred wrist. ‘He’ll sleep tonight, at least. And you?’
‘I see Astraea has absented herself, so I suppose we will find ourselves the next targets of the infant’s hair-pulling fervour in far too short a time, but for now my sleep, like justice, requires a witness.’
‘Then let me be witness by sight and by sign.’ Philippa smiled up into his face, smoothing the fingers of one hand through the disordered silk of his yellow hair. ‘Come to bed, Francis. There is nothing more to put right in the world tonight.’
*******************************************************
Notes
The first three paragraphs draw heavily on the description of Jerott’s approach to Mehedia in Pawn in Frankincense, pp. 111-112.
İpec böceǧi - ‘silkworm’ in Turkish (I hope).
‘Like the silk moth which has no organs by which it can nourish itself’ - some version of this is repeated at various places in Pawn in Frankincense and also in Checkmate.
‘Mo cridh is a good little boy now’ - Pawn in Frankincense, p. 445, aka the most distressing line in the entirety of canon (and, let’s face it, there’s plenty of competition).
‘She gaue him milke, the slepe fell in his hede’ - John Lydgate, The Fall of Princes.
‘Goo to Morpheus; thou knowist hym well’ - Geoffrey Chaucer, Book of the Duchess.
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a meme wherein i list 10 of my favorite characters
tagged by @knightwithakay--thank youu, this is my jam!
moiraine damodred (wheel of time series)
caleb widogast (critical role)
brienne of tarth (asoiaf series, tv show do not interact)
kanan jarrus (star wars: rebels)
leonard mccoy (star trek: tos, aos movies you’re on thin ice)
robert frobisher (cloud atlas)
the biologist (southern reach series)
jerott blyth (lymond chronicles)
lovelace (wayfarers series)
Q (craig!james bond)
#2 of these are theoretically played by ben whishaw but we don't talk abt cloud atlas movie that's not real#kay when i tried to @ you my fingers at first typed your old queerlittlething url what year is it
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Congrats on finishing the Lymond Chronicles! For all that I think that the melodrama gets to be Too Much in the last book, I still reread snippets at the slightest suggestion (I, uh, maybe a quarter of the way through rereading Game of Kings right now despite a huge backlog) and know that they will undoubtedly influence anything I write. Dunnett's prose is just SO good. What's you fav character in the last two books? Fav scene? Character who Deserved Better?
fav character
PHILIPPA MY DARLING, PHILIPPA FOREVER.
fav scene
I was so pleased that philippa got to have the LIFE-CHANGING MADCAP ROOFTOP CHASE WITH FRANCIS CRAWFORD that everyone else got to have! that was so delightful and I was so happy! and then it got soured at the end because lymond is an idiot with a martyr complex but we can’t have everything.
actually NO the scene with the disastrous court celebration of the retaking of calais was my favourite, because I laughed so hard I was making pained stuck-pig noises in the silence of my bedroom on a sunday morning. dunnett has SUCH a knack for deploying the pitch-perfect verb to make something completely hilarious, and every time she described any of the characters laughing I had to put the book down and howl until I had my composure back. I mean, look at this:
‘And now,’ continued the architect of the battle of Calais, his voice somewhat stifled, ‘there is a very large ship attempting to walk through the doorway.’
‘Argo,’ said Philippa. ‘I told you.’
‘And you recall those little budge wigs made of lambskin…? Could it be Jason?’ said Lymond. ‘In leopard fur, kicking the belfries in their white satin slops? It’s not their fault. They can’t see where the door is. But they’ve got the ship through. They’re trying to put up the mast. And who’s that?’
Philippa craned. ‘That’s Mopsus, the Argonauts’ soothsayer. He was killed by the bite of a serpent.’
‘Not this one. This one,’ said Lymond, ‘is going to be hanged like Mumphazard for saying nothing. You know how Jason died?’
‘Naturally,’ said Philippa, severely. ‘A beam from the ship fell on his… Oh, dear.’
‘Philippa,’ said Lymond weakly against the rising gale of anguish and laughter. ‘I do beg your pardon, but if I am to attend court again, I shall have to retire under the table with Piero. Gradatim.’
He gazed owlishly back at her and she, her eyes brimming, stared back at him. Acutely as she felt for the échivins’ suffering, there was a limit to one’s powers of civil endurance.
They exploded together, and Lymond slid, as he had threatened, under the table to lie silently shrieking beside the reclining figure of the Queen’s favourite cousin while Philippa, covering her face with her hands, sat helplessly through the heroic dregs of the Antique Triumph of Calais.
that scene is a work of fucking genius.
character who deserved better
Will Someone Who Isn’t A Sociopath Please Give Jerott Blyth A Hug
quietly crafting in my heart the coda where jerott comes back to scotland from malta because he’s bored of soldiering without a commander in whom he is in a hopeless love/hate relationship. and philippa looks at him critically and then goes and sits her husband down and explains to him that he needs to suck it up and fuck jerott blyth because she’s not going to put up with that level of sulkiness under her roof for the next two months.
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If you had to name a book that had a huge impact on you, which one would you pick and why?
Cool question! I’d love to say “oh, Austen, Dickens, Sterne...” but I’d be a lying middlebrow bastard. I can’t pick one so here’s a few:
- The Boy Who Followed Ripley (Patricia Highsmith) - this was my go-to teenage angsty misunderstood slash-leaning suicide-loving bible, I droned on about it incessantly to poor @killclaudia on our first morning in Berlin (sorry Missus) because it’s part-set in Berlin and I was beyond thrilled to actually be in streets and places I’d read about ahem almost 40 years before ahem. Years, decades before the internet and fanfic, when I was a disconnected teen who thought her endless romanticising / eroticising of all m/m relationships in fiction was a unique and freakish perversion, Highsmith was already there with Tom Ripley and his sexually ambivalent life of murder-fuelled luxury.
- my Misunderstood Gayish Teen Suicide-fetish bookshelf also included Susan Hill’s The Bird of Night, Alan Garner’s Red Shift, and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy. Om nom DEPRESSION!
- But to prove it wasn’t all gloom, they were probably all outweighed in terms of influence by The Lymond Chronicles (Dorothy Dunnett). Dunnettophiles will know all about how mesmerising these books are - they’re absolutely brilliant, vivid, intelligent world-building set all over Renaissance Europe in the mid-1500s, an era I adored. As an adult, at some point I became snotty and intolerant about Francis Lymond himself - the biggest moodiest most author-over-indulged Gary Stu you will ever encounter. Also, the actual end of the whole saga makes me want to punch Scotland repeatedly. But they really are a fantastic feat of imagination and gripping, complicated, clever narrative, and The Disorderly Knights / Pawn in Frankincense are burnt brightly into my soul. Marthe is utterly brilliant, Philippa is brilliant enough to overcome her almost as obvious Sueisms, Kate’s tolerable, Sybilla gets away with murder, Joleta and Oonagh and Guzel are a riot, and my heart belongs forever and always to the dense, ultra-handsome, bigoted, human, heroic, alcohol-fuelled, loyal and comprehensively outplayed Jerott Blyth. Oh Jerott! You’re too good for that rabble. Oh how i wanted to time and reality-travel and kidnap you to save you from those bastards.
- and honourable mention to Wolf Hall / Bring Up the Bodies (Hilary Mantel) as the only new fiction in the last couple of decades I’ve truly gobbled up without any hesitation and loved and admired (and envied). Again, the era is one I love, Cromwell himself was someone I sneakily admired at school - not nearly as much as Mantel clearly does, the books are a massive love letter to Cromwell and total, unblushing woobiefication (he’s a great Family Man! He does everything for Noble Reasons! He loves Smol Puppers!) But they’re again so good at conveying that feeling of granular life in mid-C16, the characters are tangible and plausible... I read them (can’t wait for the third), and they made me realise that it’s possible to write unashamed historical RPF fanfic and make it literate and classy as well as compelling. If you’re as good a writer as Mantel, obvs. One of these days I’m going to have a crack at exactly the same thing. Wish me luck!
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As yet untitled Jerott/Danny...something. Flungst? Angff?
Still not writing anything anyone actually asked me for smh...
Setting: post-Checkmate by four or five years, so early-mid-'90s
Characters: Jerott Blyth, Danny Hislop
Background (for more on the characters in the band AU, see notes at the end of the fic): During his relationship with Peder, Jerott got accustomed to travelling to Denmark via Paris - it made the journey longer but it was an opportunity to see his mum and to catch up with Danny. Danny helped him navigate his first openly queer relationship and was there to try and help Jerott not relapse too badly when he broke up with Peder. Even though Jerott doesn't need to go to Paris so often now, he still does - just for a few days every couple of months - so he can see his mother and see Danny and maybe record some music with Danny or play a couple of gigs. The vibe is Married and they just don't know it - but Jerott always seems to have some pretty young thing he's dating after meeting them at a movie premier or something, so Danny figures they just don't stand a chance. It's really just never occurred to Jerott that Danny would be interested in him because surely Danny is far too wordly and experienced to think of Jerott like that.
They do not get together in this fic, but the idea is that it can't be too long afterwards tbh.
CWs: reference to severe weight loss from illness; references to the AIDS pandemic and deaths, plus associated horrors (families not letting friends grieve, doctors not wanting to touch patients, general relentless misery of losing so many people/worrying about the obituaries). Also gratuitous descriptions of food.
---
Outside the metro station, Jerott slung an arm over Danny's shoulder and pressed his friend close for a hug. As he turned his face to present each cheek for Danny's kisses and suppressed a cough at the cloud of Chanel he was greeted with, he noticed the difference in the body beneath his hold.
"Alright - Jesus you're skinny, Danny!" he pulled back and let his hand remain on the shoulder of his friend's jacket, squeezing gently to confirm the contours he'd felt - bone and sinew far closer to the surface than he remembered.
Danny tossed their chin and twitched an eyebrow, grey eyes dark and hooded. "Oh, merci, he's in early with the compliments this time. What have you done now, doudou?"
Jerott studied Danny more closely: they were immaculately styled as always, but the silk blouse and the corduroy waistcoat beneath Danny's jacket hung unevenly against their body, implying a rumpled and gappy silhouette beneath the folds of the Burberry trenchcoat. The lines around the top of their voluminous trousers hinted at a belt cinched tighter than the fabric had been tailored for. Danny's face was sharper than Jerott remembered, too: the jaw almost uncompromisingly square, cheeks a little hollow beneath a subtle hint of pink blush.
"It wasn't a compliment..." Jerott said with the frankness that Danny expected of him. "You look like shit. What's up?"
Danny's brows shot up at Jerott's pronouncement and they looked down at him with a half-vexed smirk. "I look like shit?"
"You look like shit," Jerott nodded.
It was guaranteed to get a rise, and thus guaranteed to provoke some measure of honesty. Besides, even if it wasn't entirely true - Danny could have styled a Saturday morning midden outside a chip shop into something quirky and compelling - it was still true that Jerott preferred to see Danny with softer edges, more of a curious, assessing twinkle in their eye, more warmth beneath the pale tones of their skin. In general - healthier. It was a natural way to feel about one's friend, Jerott supposed.
Danny's eyes narrowed and their shoulder moved a little beneath Jerott's touch. Their lips - a natural pink that looked too pale, especially when one was used to Danny's array of neon-bright lipsticks - pursed a little and finally, shortly, Danny replied, "I've been ill. I'm fine now, thank you for your concern."
Jerott's hand tightened on Danny's shoulder again and his jaw shifted. He didn't manage to get a word out before Danny added, "It's not that. It's not. I've had so much blood taken for tests I don't think I'd feed a midge. I'm fine now, really Jerott."
Jerott noted that his heart had quickened anyway - he'd heard from Francis that Turkey had recently taken a turn for the worse as the weather cooled; he'd had Dagbladet Børsen delivered to his newsagent in Glasgow for several years now and he read the obituaries in a state of suppressed terror once a week, faithful to people he no longer knew, sometimes catching himself praying to distant gods that he wouldn't read a name he recognised there. He regretted the scientific understanding that had almost led him into a different career and now called him to spend sleepless nights poring over articles in medical journals, because it was that or give in to the whiskey again.
He swallowed and made himself take a deep breath - he'd not realised how much worry he attached to Danny and their defiant, flamboyant Marais lifestyle in the present context. But there, for a moment, he'd felt like the street had opened up beneath his feet and the air had turned to hot ash in his lungs.
"Ok. Good. What was it then?"
Danny's eyes had widened again and light seemed to have returned to their pale irises. They smiled crookedly, but it was more fond than defensive now. "Believe me, doudou, you don't want the details. Just some bug." Danny turned away and began walking down the pavement, strolling slowly enough that Jerott had time to light a cigarette and catch up.
"Some bug?" he repeated in a mutter around his filter, making a show of returning his fags and his lighter to his jacket pockets and wondering whether Danny had noticed how worried he'd been, or if he'd managed to hide it.
"Mm," Danny agreed, gazing performatively up at the rooftops of the buildings they passed and ignoring the odd cry of recognition from passers by. "Not helped, of course, by the fact that half the people I know do have it. I'm so bored of funerals, Jerott. Stressed and tired and literally sick of them."
Jerott took an involuntarily sharp inhalation and coughed at the way the smoke prickled in his throat. He grimaced and glared at the pavement, and decided, savagely, that he needed to do something about this - he'd never once in the years they'd known each other heard Danny's voice thrum with such brittle rage.
"You know what, Danny? Screw the market. There's a place yemma and I always eat at not far from here. I'm taking you there to get some proper food in you."
Danny stopped walking and blinked at him with limpid eyes. "Excuse me?"
"Algerian. Tagine, couscous, dips, bread?"
Danny still looked like they were trying to figure something out, but Jerott's brows rose and he pointed at the front of their waistcoat. A distinct growl had emerged from that flat belly at the mention of bread. "I heard that. Come on - we can go to the market afterwards."
Danny's frown deepened and they pressed their lips together, but then they nodded and shrugged. "Yeah. Yeah ok, lead on." Their voice sounded somewhat strangled to Jerott, like there was some undefined emotion trying to escape Danny's fearsome, formidable control over it.
Two silent streets later, when Jerott had finished his cigarette, Danny sounded more like themselves again: "So, will I finally get to meet dear yemma there?"
"No," Jerott eyed Danny and smiled knowingly. "Kahina doesn't just...hang around in cafés, Danny. We eat here together when she's visiting family in the dixneuvième."
"Ugh, then what's the point?" Danny exclaimed dramatically. "You want me to believe you sprang fully formed from the brutalist architecture, doudou, but the woman who made you what you are exists somewhere in Paris, and one day I will meet her!"
Jerott smirked tolerantly and stepped into the entrance of a building to hold the door open for his friend. "The point is -"
He didn't need to finish, as Danny's hands were clasped against their chest and they were already exclaiming rapturously as they walked into the restaurant: "Oh, do you smell that?"
The owner, recognising Jerott, approached to make small talk about his mother, and Danny listened thirstily, totally unconcerned by the proprietor's less-than-subtle attempts to suss out their identity. They introduced themself with a shark-like grin and shook the owner's hand: «Danny. I'm Jerott's friend.»
Jerott closed his eyes briefly and sighed at the effortless way Danny fudged the pronunciation of the word ami(e), so that it might even have been any one of several similar terms meaning lover or darling. He rubbed the bridge of his nose with his fingers and smiled stiffly at the owner. «Danny's in the band I play in. Danny knows Lymond and played in Russia with him.»
The owner nodded and attempted his own, reassured, smile, and he did not flinch from Danny's enthusiastic handshake. «Another...» he had been about to say 'musician' Jerott supposed, but ran instantly into another question of conjugation. His moustache twitched. «You play an instrument, like Sidi Blyth. How nice. What do you play?»
«All sorts,» Danny chirped happily. «I like synthesisers, but woodwind is my first love.» Their eyes roved over the decor of the restaurant, past rugs and lamps to seek out the guitars and percussion instruments the owners had salvaged when fleeing their home and now displayed in pride of place. «You don't have woodwind instruments here?» Danny gestured to the wall.
«No,» the owner answered with some relief. He showed them to the table upstairs that Jerott usually shared with his mother.
Over mint tea, as they waited for the selection of dishes Jerott had ordered, Jerott watched Danny gaze out of the window to the other side of the street, their long, freckled fingers tapping on the tablecloth in time with the frantic beat of the music playing from a cassette deck in the corner of the room. The midday autumn light was drawn to the crystal pendant of Danny's earring, and faint spots of rainbow colour were cast in fragments across Danny's cheek. It occurred to Jerott all over again how tiresome it was that anyone bothered trying to define Danny - once he'd learned a way of speaking around the need for masculine or feminine conjugations, Jerott had soon forgotten how clunky he'd found it to begin with. He'd simply become used to Danny as a singular aspect of the world - language rearranged itself around Danny, and Jerott saw no reason why it shouldn't.
Generally, though, Danny didn't care what pronouns strangers used. Danny had made their resilience and self-awareness key aspects of their personality, and Jerott reminded himself that Danny was steely enough to have survived being perceived - in whatever way they had been perceived - by Soviet Russia.
But sometimes, Jerott had begun to realise, the carefully constructed armoury of Danny's identity grew heavy in the face of others' engagement with it. And now Danny did look drawn - bruised by recent sadnesses, nervy about what might come next, both younger and older than Jerott had seen them look.
"Have you had Algerian before, Danny?" Jerott asked, summoning Danny's attention away from the flock of pigeons on the opposite building's roof.
Danny smiled fleetingly and took a sip of tea, then paused to look Jerott over with a more customary, lascivious flick of their lashes. "Not for want of trying..."
Jerott rolled his eyes. "How have you lived in Paris for over a decade and never tried Algerian food?"
"Maybe I've just been waiting for a recommendation from an expert," Danny said snippily. "You always did curries back when we were recording Checkmate. You could have made...this..."
Danny's eyes lit on the food that was arriving and between them, Jerott and the restaurateur explained the dishes as they filled the surface of the table.
"I didn't have much experience cooking Algerian then," Jerott said, helping himself to bread and pickled vegetables. "Curry in Glasgow, curry in Pune, curry in Nevada - with so little seasoning it might as well have been rice pudding..." he trailed off, muttering imprecations in Urdu.
Danny folded their arms and watched him. "So which one of these innocent-looking beauties is going to blow my poor Ashkenazi ass off?"
Jerott pulled a face and bit on a pickled chilli. "They're not hot, Danny, they just have flavour." He pointed out the dishes he knew how to make and explained what was in them and Danny dutifully helped themselves to some of each. Danny loved to make a show of bitching, but they were also eager to express their appreciation: every first bite was accompanied by a moan of delight or some other sound that made Jerott want to kick them under the table. Eventually he gave into the desire and prodded Danny's leg with the toe of his sneaker.
"All right, Meg Ryan - you can just tell the restaurant owner you like it..."
Danny wiped a drizzle of paprika-red oil from the corner of their lips and pulled an exaggeratedly lusty face at Jerott before kicking him back. Then Danny sat back and chewed pitta, watching Jerott's expression and preparing their review.
"It's good, Maeve. Like some of Adam's funky Georgian dishes but..."
"Less walnut?"
"Less walnut," Danny agreed, sipping tea. "It's not as rich as I thought, either. Good choice of comfort food, doudou," Danny surveyed the bowls again and dove in for more helpings of a few select items.
Jerott watched Danny load their plate up and smirked with satisfaction. "Just because it has more seasoning than chicken soup..."
Danny held a finger up. "You do not get to insult Jewish penicillin, no matter how delicious your fancy beans are."
Jerott giggled into his bite of borek and repeated, "Fancy beans..." so that Danny kicked him again.
When the owner had taken away the empty starter bowls and refilled the tea, Jerott looked again at Danny's face in the shifting afternoon light. It seemed to have taken on a new colour - their lips looked redder again, their cheeks brighter, their eyes less like the washed-out grey of the few low clouds outside.
Jerott raised his glass of tea in a salute. "Well, the fancy beans seem to have done more for you in one sitting than however many weeks of chicken soup you've been living off..."
Instead of a filthy rejoinder, Danny pressed their mouth shut and looked away. "Mm."
"Danny, I was just -" Jerott began to apologise, surprised by the frown on his friend's face.
"I know, I know," Danny attempted a breathy chuckle. "It's fine. It...would be fine, only -" they looked down at the exuberantly patterned table covering and traced the patterns on its surface with one short, un-painted fingernail. When they looked up at Jerott the deep, serious pain on their face was such that Jerott hadn't seen since Francis' near-fatal encounter with the river.
"I'm the one who makes the soup," Danny said. The attempt at levity in their voice made Jerott's chest tighten more than if Danny had just let themselves speak bitterly. Instead, the lightness in their voice faltered and stumbled, and Danny swallowed. "Ok, Diamme - you remember, from the cabaret? - Diamme brought me soup and pletzls from the deli when I first got ill, but he shouldn't have been outside himself. Diamme's funeral was last week. The rest of us couldn't attend - the family wouldn't have any of it. They gave him a good Catholic burial. So we're holding our own wake next week and I need to cook for it. I promised I would."
Danny's arm was shaking a little on the table, their fist clenched. They looked down at it and moved it beneath the table, letting out a tut of disgust.
Jerott sat in silence, his arms folded and jaw locked, remembering again all the horror of that moment when he'd imagined that Danny had the illness. The only illness that mattered those days. Anything else was trivial, wasn't it?
"I haven't cooked for myself in months, Jerott," Danny let their eyes fall blankly to the tablecloth. "I'm a catering service for wakes and funerals. Meals on wheels for people who used to be..." nothing seemed to change about Danny's expression or the tone of their voice, but an invisible barrier blocked any more words from emerging.
"Why didn't you say something?" Jerott murmured, sitting as still as Danny, noting that he could barely hear his own words over the hammering beat of his heart. "How many times have we spoken on the phone since you got ill?"
Danny looked up and met his eyes, and, glassy and wide-pupilled, their own grey gaze made Jerott shiver. A bleak laugh made it past their lips. "What, you'd deliver from Glasgow?"
Jerott didn't understand how talking with Danny could so often make him want to laugh and weep at the same time, but he gave Danny a perplexed smile all the same. "Sure. I'm serious though, Danny - you could have told me. It's no hassle to come to Paris and help you cook."
Danny bit their lip and looked down again, wresting with a smile or a grimace - Jerott couldn't say which.
When the restaurant owner returned to their silence he looked alarmed and Jerott tried to smile in reassurance as the man set down hot dishes of stewed aubergine and tomatoes, chicken, olives and dumplings.
«Is everything ok?»
«M'sieur it's perfect,» Danny looked up swiftly, their throat white as a swan's, drawing Jerott's troubled gaze as Danny swallowed down their grief again and smiled for the owner. «My first time trying Algerian food and it's better than I could have imagined. Restorative and delicious.»
The owner left again, somewhat mollified, and Danny turned a wonky smile on Jerott. "Do you think he believes me, Maeve? Have I ruined it for when you come back here with yemma?"
Jerott shook his head. "He believes you. Nothing ruined."
Danny sighed and leaned forwards on the table to survey the new dishes.
"Danny," Jerott was thinking about the way Danny's demeanour had switched for the restaurant owner. About the performative body language and cheerful lilt to their voice. About the things Danny was used to hiding. "You didn't even tell me you were ill. Why didn't you say anything?"
Danny was slowly pulling apart one of the chicken wings they'd plucked from the top of the tagine, their mouth pressed into a sharp line, the look they shot Jerott an attempt to make him back off that was half-hearted at best. "I didn't think I'd be ill that long. Do you tell me every time you get the sniffles, doudou?"
Danny didn't let him reply - they rolled their eyes and swept a hand through the air. "Yes, yes, you do, I know...always complaining about something..."
Jerott ignored the toothless attack and waited.
Danny spooned a heap of olives and dumplings onto their plate and gathered some bread before looking up at Jerott again.
"I didn't want to tell you because it's been miserable here, doudou." Danny's fist clenched on the table beside their plate. "I feel...responsible? When you were with Peder and you started telling me things, I was...I felt like your guide to this wonderful world where anything was possible, anyone was welcome, and if we all just talked it out and understood each other things would be ok. Better than ok, they'd be mind-blowing. Amazing. Earth-shattering."
Danny rolled their eyes at their own words, and Jerott contrasted their pale, pinched expression now with the way they used to lean across café tables and excitedly demand details of the Copenhagen queer scene. They way they'd grab Jerott's hand and shamelessly reel off advice filled with clinically precise vocabulary that had made Jerott's mind reel with possibilities he'd never even imagined. Their smile - proud, filthy - when Jerott chose to report back on a weekend spent with Peder, and the way they'd regale him in turn with tales of leather daddies and kink clubs that left Jerott speechless and perched on the edge of his seat.
Danny shook their head and the gems dangling from their ears swung and twinkled in the sun again. "I feel like I sold you a lie, doudou. We've talked it out here so much and none of us have anything to say any more. We can't talk our way out of death. There's no understanding it, or making meaning of it. It's unfair, and it just is."
Jerott held Danny's gaze, and felt something icy and uncomfortable squirm in his chest. Danny didn't even look on the verge of tears now, their expression was suffused with frosty, brittle fury, something that wasn't nearly as hopeless as the image they were trying to conjure. Hopeless people, in Jerott's experience, weren't near as angry as Danny clearly was.
He took a deep breath and nodded. "Ok. I mean, I don't regret...what did you call it? Joining this 'wonderful world' - and I'd have shagged Peder with or without your advice Danny, no offence."
Danny's jaw twitched and a startled flush of colour spread over their neck above the collar of their blouse.
Jerott pressed on, unable to offer any answer to the bigger questions, but still stung by the idea of Danny forcing themself to suffer stoically in case actually saying anything about how bad things were frightened Jerott off. "Do you regret it? Would you go back to...where were you when you found your people, London? Edinburgh? Would you leave them, go back to Glasgow and put a suit on and do what your dad wanted you to do? If you'd known about AIDS?"
A flash of annoyance passed over Danny's face again - maybe at the mention of their father, maybe at the mention of the disease by name, maybe at the realisation that they'd shared quite so much about their past with Jerott over the years - enough to allow Jerott to ask a question like that.
"I can't regret what I just am, Jerott," Danny said curtly.
"So why do you think I would, if you'd told me how bad things had got here?"
Danny hissed, drawing a sharp breath in over their teeth. Now there was a glossy sheen over their eyes, and they tried very hard not to blink. "M'sorry," they murmured after a moment.
"Yeah. I know," Jerott said gruffly and broke their stare, looking down at the dishes cooling between them and giving Danny the privacy of a moment to flick away the water gathering at the bottom of their eyes. He explained the tagines again and then helped himself to some of each before letting out a breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding and raising his eyes again.
Danny had returned to pulling apart the piece of chicken and they sighed deeply before saying, resentfully, "I can't believe you used my own tricks on me. I've taught you too well."
"I can't believe you 'talked it out' with everyone except me, you asshole," Jerott grumbled, but he smiled ruefully at his dish as he dunked bread in the sauce.
"To be fair, I also didn't tell Francis," Danny said in a voice more like their own, and Jerott had to snort with laughter. "Can you imagine? He'd have set up a Michelin-starred restaurant for my little crowd of queers and misfits. BDSM and brunch bar. Kink and croissants. Attached to an empty hospital building where the infected can get treated by all the experts we can find who are willing to touch our dirty, dirty bodies..."
Again, there was that lurching sensation, when Jerott didn't know whether he should be laughing along with Danny's smirk or weeping with fury at the image they painted. He grimaced.
"Would that be so bad though? Letting Francis help?"
"Perhaps not," Danny conceded. "I do still have some pride though. And I know he's already donating an unsustainable amount to research."
Jerott made a sound of agreement between bites of food, and was soothed somewhat by the sight of Danny voraciously attacking what was on their own plate.
"So what do we need to prepare for next week? When's the wake?"
Danny didn't miss Jerott's phrasing and looked up sharply. "We?"
He shrugged. "If you think my cooking's up to your standards..."
Danny narrowed their eyes. "It could be...if you can follow orders better than you used to..."
"And do you want company at the wake? I'm here to make up numbers, isn't that what playing second guitar to Lymond is all about?"
"Are you asking to be my date at a wake, Jerott?" Danny's eyebrow arched delightedly.
"Not a date, but a friend who isn't about to fuck off just because life's tough, puce."
Danny ran their eyes distastefully over him and pointedly pushed an olive stone out from between their pursed lips. They took it and deposited it on a side plate with careful deliberation. "Hmm, yes, and how is your lovely girlfriend? Kelly is it? The teenager?"
Jerott sat back and folded his arms. "She's twenty-three, Danny. And no gossip until you agree to my help."
Danny glared at him. "That's rude."
Jerott shrugged again.
Outside the restaurant, above the slate grey rooves, the autumn breeze nudged aside a cloud and the anaemic sun shone through, speckling the grubby window-pane with glitter. Abruptly, Danny let the act drop - just for a moment - and smiled warmly at Jerott.
It was agreed.
Jerott laughed in relief to see Danny relax.
---
Notes
doudou - teddy bear; puce - flea (because what kind of Married would they be without absurd nicknames for each other)
yemma - mother (Arabic)
Jerott Blyth
Band AU Jerott's mum is Algerian, a refugee who arrived in France during the war of independence, and his paternal grandmother was from pre-partition Lahore. He was born in Paris, where his dad met his mum while taking art classes between shifts on placement for medical school. His dad was a surgeon and his mother worked in an art gallery, but has always painted for herself too. Both his parents encouraged his musicality from a young age and he started classical guitar lessons as soon as he could hold a guitar. His parents divorced when he was around eleven and he lived with his dad in Glasgow - his dad's home city - until his dad died of cancer when Jerott was 18. Instead of joining Francis Crawford, who he met at the Solway Moss battle of the bands just before his dad's death, Jerott turned away from music to be a doctor like his father. He went to stay with his mother in Paris while studying and through her met a charismatic older man (Graham Reid Malett) and went off to find himself at an ashram in India instead. The medical degree was forgotten and he learned sitar, Ayurvedic massage, yoga, and some Hindi and Urdu at the ashram run by Rajneesh. He spent a few years in Rajneesh's cult and moved to a new ashram in Nevada with GRM - and none of it did his self-acceptance as a bisexual man any good. Having made a pass at GRM and been rebuffed, he later revealed his crush on Francis during a therapy session with GRM, who began to become obsessed with Francis through Jerott's recollection of him and through his music. GRM engineered a way for them to join Francis' new recording collective, St Mary's, and Jerott gradually realised the extent of the problems with the movement he was in, and with GRM particularly. He reaffirmed his loyalty to Francis, but GRM did him lasting damage that drove him to self-destructive alcoholism. He nevertheless tried to help Francis undo the mess GRM had done and in the process met Marthe - who it was easier to admit to being in love with than Francis. She needed a European visa and the potential for a passport, as well as a boost to her career, so she married him despite knowing she wasn't attracted to men. They had a deeply unhappy marriage and lived in France, using properties Marthe was able to inherit from a relative once she was resident in the EU. Jerott had a drunken one night stand with a Danish guy called Peder at a low point in his marriage, and then he ran into Peder again at another vulnerable moment (the end of Checkmate). He and Peder had a couple of good years together but it didn't work out. Since Peder, Jerott's seen some guys and some girls but hasn't really had anything long-term or meaningful - but at least he always had his best friend Danny to go to for advice!
Danny Hislop
Band AU Danny was born with PAIS and is intersex. The oldest child born to Rabbi Hislop in Glasgow, they were amab and given surgery to make their physical body allign with this assignation. While they were raised as a boy, they knew this wasn't right for them, and the bar mitzvah really cemented that feeling. Danny's family didn't understand their nonbinary identification (NB I know not all intersex people are nonbinary, but Danny is) and Danny left home at 14 with a clarinet and a grade 6 piano qualification and went to stay with a blue-collar, union-stalwart great uncle in Edinburgh. The great uncle helped Danny reconcile their faith with their identity somewhat - the discussions around tumtum (people of unidentified sex) taking place in rabbinic communities came a little late for Danny, but at least they became aware of the term through their uncle. At sixteen they made their way to London in search of a community that matched how they felt about themselves - they became bat mitzvah as well by choice, partly as a way of reclaiming what they felt was forced on them incorrectly by their father. They lived in squats and it wasn't initially a great time to be young and of indeterminate gender in a big city - it took a while to find the right people and they experimented with some stuff they regret. Then they found a healthier community, moved on again to Paris with a friend, became an apprentice in a kitchen and played saxophone and clarinet at jazz clubs. They settled in the Marais - which is both the Jewish and the queer quarter. When Lymond called for auditions to join his experiment in Russia, Danny submitted a klesmer cover of Lymond's song 'Crisco Disco', along with evidence of their fluent French and passable Russian (Danny tries to learn something from everyone they meet, and Paris has a big Russian expat community). They proved themselves resilient enough to travel the USSR with Lymond - though they probably had to deal with a lot of fuckery regarding pronouns and people's perception - and they remained a valued member of St Mary's afterwards, though they still live in the Marais near their drag cabaret friends. They've kind of been in love with Jerott Blyth since seeing him cover for Francis by playing a guitar solo that should have been impossible sober, while so drunk that he also shouldn't have been able to stand up. They are not proud of this fact. They also strongly believe that Jerott will never see them as anything more than a kooky friend who's into far kinkier shit than Jerott could stomach.
#everyday i write the book#band au: post canon#ship: a twinge of approval#character: danny hislop#character: jerott blyth#i mean it with those content warnings - i felt like that was kind of the elephant in the room in such a queer '80s au so.
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Whumptober 2002 day 5
Blood Loss | Running Out of Air | Hyperthermia
Good lord a bare draft of FAR too many words because I have no time to edit, was enjoying writing ashram weirdness and Jerott flapping, and will certainly be coming back to edit this and incorporate it into a current WIP anyway... Mainly, I spent the day researching aquifers in Nevada just to check the plausibility of the context and I’m not a geologist so screw it. This fic ties into various others I’ve posted already around Jerott’s wrist injury trying to escape the ashram and leading up to the Zuara equivalent (timeline is a little different in the AU, but still. Zuara!). Don’t you love how ExtraTM Pawn in Frankincense is? I know I do...
So warnings are really just about the build-up - dangerous roads, sink-holes, storms, tunnels, blood, flooding etc...
---
Since they'd begun the journey back into the mountains the weather had only worsened. Gilles was a competent driver, but he was angry, and there was no passenger side seat-belt - Jerott sat tense with terror, every hair on his arms and neck standing on end, as the truck's gears screamed up gravel tracks, its tyres fighting against the rainwater that was beginning to pour down from the peaks along roads and arroyos. In his arms, he clutched Dasypus the armadillo, trying not to squeeze the animal's leathery carapace too hard even as Dasypus' long claws scrabbled at him in protest.
The rain was so heavy up at the ashram headquarters that they didn't see the damage until Gilles had to slam the brakes to avoid hitting a crowd of sodden Rajneeshees in pinks and reds.
Regardless of the solid rain, they were gathered around a pile of dark rubble where half of Swami Geetesh's compound used to stand, some holding shovels, some gesturing angrily, all looking lost.
Jerott bolted from the truck, shoving Dasypus into Gilles' arms and ignoring his alarmed questions.
He grabbed the soaking wet shoulder of a former colleague, who didn't recognise him at first.
"Swami! It's me, Vadan! What the fuck happened?"
The other man peered at Jerott, at his short, scruffy black beard and over-sized clothes - none of which were in sannyasin colours. Still, whoever he supposed Jerott was, he offered the explanation Jerott needed: "A sinkhole, beneath Swami Geetesh's house...we can't see what the damage is, but it looks like there were tunnels, or a cellar beneath it. Ma Daso was inside when this happened."
"Ma -?" Jerott felt his stomach flip and his temperature drop. He looked about him in a panic. "What happened? Is she ok?"
"She's over there..."
Jerott squinted in the direction indicated and saw some of the Rajneeshees clustering around a figure seated on an upturned bucket. He slapped the other man gratefully on the shoulder and ignored the query that trailed after him: "Swami Vadan? What happened to your arm?"
The woman who had been rescued from the building looked small and folorn from a distance, but when he approached her, Jerott saw the fire in her green eyes.
Oonagh O'Dwyer held one pale, thin hand to her bloodied brow, but the other was clenched into a fist in her lap. She studied Jerott with a frown, her thick black brows fierce and her mouth a grim line, and he didn't expect her to recognise him - they had only met the once, several weeks earlier, when Geetesh had been occupied with tormenting Jerott in the room that now gaped open on the edge of the sinkhole.
"Ma Daso?" he said carefully, glancing at the others who had been fussing over her. "Ms...Ms O'Dwyer?"
Her eyes widened, though her expression remained suspicious. She nodded minutely. "You were here before..."
Jerott nodded and crouched down beside her bucket. Oonagh O'Dwyer shooed the others who had been helping her away and bent towards Jerott. She was thin, her skin barely more substantial than the clouds sitting low all about them, but even so, Jerott felt the power of her presence, the heat of her spirit and all that Francis Crawford must have found compelling about the ex-model.
"I thought he'd kill you," Oonagh hissed.
To Jerott's surprise, something like a memory popped into his mind: Swami Geetesh looking down at him, contempt and pleasure all mixed together in his expression. In Jerott's vision, he imagined a pressure on his throat and the taste of blood on his lip. He shuddered and shook his head. "No. Just sent me away. What happened? Was he in there?"
"He found Francis," Oonagh's words, low and urgent, struck Jerott with a piercing horror. "He was keeping him in the tunnels. Please for the love of God, tell me you knew about the tunnels? None of these precious fools did..." she rolled her eyes at the Rajneeshees standing around the sink hole, some of whom were now looking pathetically at their unresponsive pagers.
Jerott shook his own head, and felt despair clutch at his chest. There had been so much going on here he hadn't known about, so much Geetesh had been involved in that he should have recognised, should have stopped.
Oonagh swore in Irish and, he realised through the rain, blinked back tears as she gazed up at the sky. "He's in there with him. Can you imagine that?"
"What did he want with Francis? Why the tunnels?" Jerott asked, mortified to have let her down, to be letting Francis down, to find himself - yet again - just another of Geetesh's useful idiots.
Oonagh blinked and shook her head, her lower lip projecting miserably. "Music? I suppose? He was always whistling when he came back...singing..."
"Oh!" Jerott leapt to his feet. "There was the store beneath the studio! We started expanding it before I left, but I never knew why. Maybe it linked up?"
Oonagh looked up at him incredulously. "The studio's miles away!"
"By track, yeah, but if he went under the mountain it's just down there," Jerott gestured vaguely to the trees on his left.
"So they might not have been anywhere near the sinkhole..." Fear settled over Oonagh's body once more.
Jerott hesistated to put a reassuring hand on her shoulder - her wet hair hung over thin, clingy linen, and she seemed too exposed already, raw like a seam of precious metal. "I'll take the truck and go."
"Wait - " Oonagh stopped him, her voice a desperate whip-crack. "Wait, what's your name? Be careful. If Geetesh is..."
"I know," Jerott nodded tightly. "I know who he is. There's a shotgun in the truck."
Oonagh swallowed and took a breath. She didn't look as perturbed by the mention of the gun as most people would have. "Vadan, was it?"
"Jerott. Blyth. I knew Francis...ages ago. He probably didn't -"
"He did," Oonagh smiled tightly. "Best go after him, eh? I hear you didn't before."
Jerott reeled away from her, hurrying back towards Gilles and the car, trying not to think about what she'd said.
"Hey, hey! Where you goin'?" Gilles dashed towards Jerott, Dasypus under his arm.
"I need the keys, I need the truck..."
"Non, non, we use it to clear the hole!"
"No, he's not...he's not in there, Pierre. You want to find the land-owner? Reid Malett?"
"We gotta clear it out, get to the tunnels..."
"Arrêtes! Arrêtes, je sais, mais ils ne sont pas la!" Jerott grabbed Gilles' broad shoulders and shook him. He had no idea how clear his French was to someone who spoke a Cajun dialect, but at least it made Gilles understand his seriousness. He explained that he knew another entrance to the tunnels, that a friend was inside and likely in danger. Gilles didn't quite get it, but he'd gathered, through their weeks working together, that Jerott was the kind of maniac he could trust - and so he handed over the keys and told Jerott where the spare gun cartridges were.
Jerott was so used to working with the improvised cast on his left wrist now that it didn't impede him at all as he reversed away from Geetesh's house in a spray of mud and gravel.
Driving that had been terrifying when Gilles had been behind the wheel seemed perfectly sensible when Jerott was the one breaking, steering and then immediately feathering the accelerator as soon as he was on the exit of a bend. He hurtled down familiar roads, the windscreen wipers clattering like the brush hitting the sides of the car. He didn't even think about the last time he'd taken this route and what had happened - if he had done, it might have occurred to him how much more likely another landslip was in this weather.
Down the mountain he went and round its foot, into land that had been cleared for crops, across a plain that was still dry and dusty compared to the land at higher altitude. The road swept round, curving back to the wooded base of the range, where the little black studio building squatted all on its own - Jerott had often thought of it as resembling the Kaaba in Mecca.
The windscreen was covered in mud and dust that clung to the wet glass and Jerott had to switch the wipers off. The truck skidded in wet dust as he came to a halt and he leapt out, Gilles' old snake-scaring shotgun in one hand, a handful of cartridges in the other that he stuffed into the wet pocket of his jeans.
He sprinted for the studio and ran inside without stopping to consider what he'd do if Geetesh and Francis were there.
It was empty, luckily, and Jerott wove his way between chairs and equipment to the door at the back and the dark steps to the basement. He was beginning to think it had been a foolish thought, anyway - how on earth could Geetesh have constructed so many tunnels and bunkers without anyone's knowledge? He wasn't coming down here himself with a shovel every night...he had probably taken Francis far, far away. Oonagh must have been mistaken about the tunnels at the main building...
But there was a door in the basement there hadn't been before. Jerott fumbled around on the shelves and found a torch, and then he tried the handle.
No dice: the door was metal, and it was locked. Everything smelled damp and rusty, and there seemed to be a breeze from the other side and Jerott paused, leaned his head against the surface, and tried to hear anything beyond his own ragged breath.
There was a kind of rushing noise, like the sound of the sea in a shell, and Jerott shook his head in frustration and stood back from the door.
With a shrug, he readied the gun and pointed it at the lock, and gave up any pretence of subtlety.
There was a flash and a loud, metallic clang, and the lock broke open beneath the gun's bark, and Jerott shouldered his way into the dark tunnel beyond.
He trotted onwards into the depths of the earth, increasingly troubled by the coolness of the air and the damp floor. Rainstorm or not, they were in the desert - there shouldn't have been this much standing water beneath his feet.
Sooner than he expected, the tunnel widened into a chamber, and inside, beneath the wavering light of his torch, he was met with a scene of carnage.
The floor was covered by two inches of dirty water. In it various examples of detritus floated: clothes; plates; scraps of paper; a ukulele. Against one wall there was a table covered with papers, stationary, a broken lamp... Opposite it lay a narrow metal bedframe with a thin mattress on it, and on that bed a body was awkwardly sprawled.
Jerott caught his breath - there was blood all over the mattress: a dark, shining pool of it that spread from the leg of the man lying there. He wore rose pink linens, and he lay face-down against a pillow, his hair shining golden beneath the wavering light of Jerott's torch. Everything was wet, the blood on the mattress thinned at its edges like tie-dye, and the golden hair was matted with the same filty water that covered the floor.
Jerott stepped down into the room and moved his light around again so he wouldn't notice his hand shaking. As he did, he caught sight of the other body, which had been swept up against the table legs and lay half-submerged.
Jerott glanced once more at the body on the bed, wanting to be certain that it wouldn't move, and then he put the gun and the torch down on the table and dove down to check for signs of life.
"Francis!" He hissed, casting another nervous look at the bed as he touched the wet, cold skin of his friend's neck.
He wasn't breathing, but Jerott had had first aid training and didn't hesitate to haul him to the dry tunnel and turn his head to the side. He pinched Francis' fine-boned nose between his thumb and forefinger and covered his long lips with his own, filling his lungs with warm air and then forcing it into Francis' body with all the power he would usually put into singing the lyrics Francis wrote. Jerott's mind was on the amount of oxygen he could push into Francis' body and nothing more - he repeated the breaths until, beneath him, Francis flinched and retched, and Jerott had to sit back quickly as rancid water sputtered up from his lungs.
Francis coughed and coughed and Jerott helped him to sit up, and eyed the dim lit room with Geetesh's body inside.
He hadn't moved.
The boy who had almost gone to medical school hesitated, supposing that he should do the same for the other man. But Francis was leaning into him now, still coughing, his eyes screwed shut, his body struggling against the new availability of air.
The first thing he asked, when he was able to, and had cast a perplexed look at Jerott's bearded face, was: "Is he dead?"
Jerott froze and then nodded. Geetesh hadn't moved. The bed was covered in blood. There was so much blood.
"Yeah. Yeah he's gone."
Francis closed his eyes and bowed his head. Beneath Jerott's steadying hand his body shuddered and winced. The words he murmured sent chills up Jerott's spine: "O mill...o mill what hast thou ground..."
#whumptober#whumptober2022#band au: pawn in frankincense#character: jerott blyth#character: pierre gilles#characters: dasypus#character: oonagh o'dwyer#character: francis crawford#setting: ashram#every day i write the book
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Whumptober 2022 day 23
Forced to Kneel | Tied to a Table | “Hold them down.”
*sound of catching-up intensifies*
No whipping posts in the band AU, just have to rely on good old-fashioned kicking :’)
CW: a beating (inside a tent, so claustrophobia warning!), broken ribs, general GRM nastiness and references to what went down between Francis and Joleta and Joleta’s overdose. Joleta lying about things, Francis using whisky as a painkiller, also guitars as weapons.
Also something really weird happened switching between desktop and mobile editors and it screwed up the order of a bunch of paragraphs so let me know if any still seem out of order 😮💨
---
Francis' usual pre-gig routine was always disturbed when he was at a music festival. Peace and quiet were relative only, and he had to entrust set up and soundcheck to the roadies provided. There was little to do other than wait.
He might try to sneak off into the crowds in order to watch a band lower down the listings play - but sneaking was rarely an option these days. He'd graced the covers of too many magazines and people were on the lookout for him. His presence at a set might make or break a young band if he was noticed there - his expression could guarantee them a record contract or result in their immediate split.
He hated it. There was no such thing as simply being curious about new music, not for him, not any more.
So he went to lie down in his tent and to listen for anything other than the beat from the main stage.
It wasn't a particularly hot afternoon, but inside the blue canvas the sun was trapped and the air was stuffy. Francis closed his eyes and focussed on the sound of a fly battering against the inside of the tent, and another on the outside, its legs scrabbling on woven, water-proofed cotton.
The blue light was warm on his eyelids. In the distance the bass thudded and the crowds screamed. The ground beneath his tent roll and his flattened sleeping bag was hard and uneven - divots of grass and old pock-marks left by the hooves of the cattle that normally grazed this land were undulations he felt with the muscles of his back and legs. Habitually, his mind picked away at these thoughts in search of inspiration. He considered the land as a palimpsest, thought about its years of use...
The flies continued to scuff and scratch and buffet against the canvas, and Francis' lip quirked up in a smirk that was honest because it couldn't be seen by anyone else. His lips moved as he recited William Blake's poem, though he did not speak it aloud:
Little fly,
Thy summer’s play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
For I dance
And drink and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
If thought is life
And strength and breath,
And the want
Of thought is death,
Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.
By not speaking it aloud he felt as though he was testing his belief in it, rolling its assertions around in his mind to see whether or not he agreed. He found that it didn't fully sit with him like it might once have done. Ambition dug its heels in and rejected the ambivalence towards death - there were things he might do first. St Marys had already proved itself useful in achieving what he couldn't have managed alone with a band, and the men he was working with were learning their lessons well - though Francis felt he still had much he wanted them to learn and understand. There was much that he wanted to learn and understand alongside them.
He was thinking of the extraordinary tapes and songs Salah had managed to smuggle out of the war in the Aouzou Strip. His heart kindled with a secret thrill as he imagined that he might learn some of Salah's techniques, and his thoughts were lost under the Libyan sun when the shadows of several figures fell over his tent.
The tent flap opened silently, but it let in a bracing gust of evening air.
Francis sighed, preparing to congratulate Swami Vadan on finding him, to offer the leadership that Vadan needed in response to whatever minor inconvenience had been encountered during the stage set-up.
Instead, he opened his eyes and saw another linen-robed sannyasin gazing at him.
Swami Geetesh's face looked purple under the light of the canvas. His eyes glittered with malice and there was no friendly mask softening his square jaw and broad, high cheek bones. There was no guileless calm or self-satisfied peace there today: only anticipation, thirsty and fevered.
Francis pushed himself up on his elbows. He noticed the shadows of other figures on the sides of the tent and he realised just what sort of trouble he was about to be in.
"Swami Geetesh. You were granted compassionate leave for this fixture."
Geetesh's lips moved in a sneer. He stared with unblinking hunger at Francis. "Yes, how compassionate of you. Since you have sullied and used my sister, since you nearly killed her with your carelessness."
Francis' jaw tightened. He had said all there was to say on that matter already. Whatever confession Geetesh hoped to elicit now would tell him nothing new.
"Since you care for her so devoutly, I thought you might want to spend time with her while she recovers."
Geetesh lowered his head a little, so the shadows in his eyes deepened. "Actually, I have come to the conclusion that what I need is revenge, dear Francis. I am not yet an enlightened man - the path is a long one and rarely follows a direct line."
Francis did not show the fear that began to eat away at his bones. The inside of the tent seemed a lot darker and colder than before - outside, twilight was descending on the festival. Their headline slot wasn't far away now, and Geetesh evidently intended that Francis would never make it to the stage.
"If it's revenge you want, I can give you the name of the hospital that prescribed the painkillers she took," Francis said steadily, anger lending an archness to his voice.
Geetesh shook his head and smirked. His plan was not about to be derailed by minor inconveniences of history and fact. "How can you be trusted to lead a social enterprise, to preach of change and charity through culture, when you yourself behave so despicably? When you use your status to justify breaking a girl - little more than a child - on the rack of your...sinful body. It displays a truly staggering arrogance, my dove."
Outside the tent someone asked something.
"Wait," Geetesh barked. He turned back to Francis. "I'm afraid it's better if I take St Marys from you. You're not cut out for that sort of business - but I can make use of you in the studio."
Francis laughed hollowly. "You think I'll work for you?"
"I know it," Geetesh purred. "It's in your stars, my dear. I will have you on your knees, begging for me to include you." He tweaked one of Francis' toes playfully and backed out of the tent with a grin on his face.
Nearby, someone switched on a boombox and the opening bars of Satisfaction (I Can't Get No) blasted out.
"Hold the corners down," Geetesh instructed, and then Francis had seconds to prepare, curling himself tightly into a ball beneath the thin padding of his sleeping bag, wrapping his arms around his head - and the blows began to rain down on him and the tent.
Tent poles snapped, canvas bowed and ripped, and feet and other weapons thudded against Francis' body. Someone was using a baton of some kind, really whaling blows down on him with reckless glee - though the impacts were padded, spread by something that was wrapped around the weapon, as well as by the layers of tent and bedding burying Francis.
He thought of the building collapse in Berlin, phantom pain - oh god, it was phantom, wasn't it? - lancing through his leg and hip. This was similar, but more like being caught in the collapse of a pillow fort as the fort itself tried to devour him whole. Some of the blows hit the remnants of the tent poles that lay over his body and he felt the impacts bruise, metal and bamboo driven against him with weight and pressure above them.
He had no idea how long they worked him over - they took the boombox with them when they were done, and his ears rang with the blows so he couldn't have said what the last song playing had been.
It was a struggle to breathe under the cover of the sleeping bag and the collapsed tent. The air was hot and tasted of blood. A downy feather, burst from the battered sleeping bag, clung to his lip, and when Francis fought to free himself he was introduced to the full extent of the damage they'd achieved.
There were broken ribs, that was certain. Francis groaned and gritted his teeth and tried to curl around the pain, but that movement hurt just as much. He tried to steady himself, his palm pressed to the groundsheet beneath him, touching the hard, uneven earth below. He felt like he was running out of oxygen, his own breath coming back to him, moist and hot beneath the covers.
He moved more carefully this time, one hand, trembling, fumbling the sleeping bag off him so that only the tent lay above his face. His fingers found a tear in the fabric and worked their way through, pushing, trying to stretch the hole.
To his astonishment, another set of fingers gripped his - he flinched and let out a cry of pain as the movement jarred his bruised and fractured body.
"Mr Crawford?!" The voice was a young girl's, breathless and afraid.
He let out an agonising sigh and an even more painful laugh of relief. "Philippa? Is that you?"
"Oh, Mr Crawford, I saw what they did! Are you ok?" She pulled at the tear in the fabric and Francis' hand was free, then his forearm, then he could squint up at her and spit the feather from his bloodied lip.
"I can honestly say that I've been better, Miss Somerville," he grinned for her. "But I can also honestly say that I've been worse."
Philippa's frown didn't ease, but she was ruthless about the tent and soon had him freed. Francis managed to make himself sit up amid the wreckage, though bands of fiery agony clasped his torso and breathing alone made the edges of his vision blur and blacken.
"What are you doing here, then?" he asked her, determined to make pleasant conversation rather than acknowledge the worry in her brown eyes.
Philippa bit her lip. "I snuck away. Mum's with Letty. But Letty told me... She told me something I thought you should know. I thought it might help you."
Francis blinked - the gesture doubled as genuine response and momentary pause to survey the pain that came in ceaseless waves over him. "Help me? Should I be the one asking if you are ok?"
Philippa's eyes went very large and round. She knelt demurely, sitting on her feet, her hands pressed between her knees and her lower lip getting ragged as she chewed it. "I've been...a bit unfair maybe. But this is serious. Letty lied to you - she said she was pregnant and she's not. But I heard Mr Gee...Swami Geetesh telling the men from St Marys that you killed the baby on purpose with the drugs."
Francis sighed and bowed his head. He reached out for one of Philippa's hands and she gave it to him hesitatingly. "Thank you, Philippa," he smiled at the pooled mess of fabric around him. "Thank you. I know she was lying. But perhaps you could tell me which men Swami Geetesh brought with him?"
She nodded, confused, but hopeful that she could still be of use.
"And then, I may need your assistance in reaching the stage - we will be due on very soon, I imagine."
"Oh, Mr Crawford, you can't - "
She stopped at a glance from him, his eyebrows raised and his cracked lip smiling patiently, sadly. "Will you help me? It might be the only time you are justified in doing so. I will not always have such a righteous cause, Philippa."
She stood and arranged the strap of her little cross-body bag like an adventurer preparing for an epic journey. "That's ok, I'm not prone to hero worship. I just believe in justice," Philippa said grandly, with unmistakeable shades of Gideon Somerville in her voice.
Francis' smile was no less melancholy, but he let her do what she could to aid him to stand, and he managed to limp through the darkening campsite with her help.
She told him what he had suspected to be true of the other men - they were techs and roadies who would claim themselves seduced by Joleta to varying degrees. White knights with no interest in helping the girl herself - unless it was to obtain drugs and booze for her - but who had been quite prepared to join Geetesh in avenging her honour against a tyrant. They would be cleared out of St Marys - just as the Rajneeshees and their parasitic power trip would be.
Francis washed the blood from his mouth in the uneven plastic mirror in the back of a portaloo door, using a bottle of sparkling mineral water Philippa had obtained from the concessions tent. There seemed to be precious little evidence of the beating otherwise visible on his body. There were a couple of bruises - long, tent-pole shaped shadows on his arms and back - but by and large the damage was internal, submerged beneath skin and tissue.
Philippa objected to the end - St Marys were already on stage, they'd already apologised for Francis, he had no need to go up there... But Francis had to show Geetesh that he wouldn't get his way that easily.
He took a look at the rider before going on stage and forced back about a third of a bottle of blended whisky. It was the quickest way to trick himself into not feeling the pain of his ribs with every movement. It was what he needed in order to be able to get the guitar strap over his head. In order to endure the feeling of its weight against his torso. He blinked and coughed - winced, took another mouthful of the spirit - and then thanked Philippa again before hauling himself up the stairs to the wing of the stage.
His Fender was out there, already prepared for him on its stand. Geetesh was leading a smooth version of one of the songs from the latest album, playing the Gibson Francis usually kept to a different tuning. Adam was bent over the keyboards, his hair flopping wildly as he hammered the notes out, Archie was sweating away on the drums, and Vadan was playing a bored, perfunctory bass part - filling in while the two first choice bassists languished in separate wards of Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Fergie twirled her own drumsticks with idle confidence between contributing on the drum pads, and Alec Guthrie moved his fingers meticulously, cleverly across the deck of his own synthesiser.
It was all fine, but the balance was off - Geetesh was trying to be two guitar parts in one, and Francis was sorely needed.
At first, Geetesh thought the swelling roar of the crowd was for him, and he beamed and let out a show-offy riff between verses. By the time he turned to see what had got the other band members' attention, Francis had managed to secure his guitar and was ready to join in.
He nodded calmly at Vadan and at Geetesh, and slipped into the stream of the music with ease, glad, at least, to have that to distract him from the excruciating pain in his body.
Geetesh merely cast him a condescending smirk and turned back to his mic, but Vadan continued to stare at Francis. He moved restlessly with his bass, sauntering across the stage, trailing its cable around his sandalled feet.
Francis thought, from a distance, that it was anger that was foremost in Vadan's dark eyes, but as he strolled closer, worry could be detected also.
"Where were you? Is something wrong?" Vadan leaned in to call the questions into Francis' ear.
Francis shook his head and concentrated on his guitar. "Later..." he told Vadan. "I'm fine."
The effort needed to force the words out with enough volume that Vadan could hear him almost undid the statement - Francis closed his eyes and swallowed down a rising tide of nausea at the lancing pain in his ribs.
Vadan was clearly not convinced, and mooched about the stage close by, pacing restlessly and apparently missing the wild effort Francis usually put into sharing solos with him.
Geetesh announced the next song and invited Francis to sing it, a cruel amusement lighting his eyes as he glanced back over the stage.
It could be done - more as a spoken word piece than was usually the case, but maybe the audience would feel gratified to be granted an exclusive live version of a track they already knew well. Francis managed it, his eyes screwed up, his teeth millimetres from the metal of the mic, his lips pressed to it like it was a life-giving source of sustenance. He was sweating with the effort and with the heat of the stage lights, and he was in no state to shuffle around the stage wielding his guitar like an axe as they segued into the instrumental part of the song.
Vadan and Geetesh were, of course, free to dance and play. They played back to back at first, Vadan grinning at the contact with his master, his bare brown chest shining under the multi-coloured spot lights. Then Geetesh moved away and stamped one foot and swung his guitar as he did. He repeated the gesture on the beat, moving gradually across the stage, followed by Vadan, who tried to keep up with his moves, his head down and his black hair wild around his face.
Too late, Francis appreciated Geetesh's intentions. Vadan never did.
Turning once he'd reached Francis' side of the stage, Geetesh once more swung the neck of his guitar up over his left shoulder as he played. Vadan had come too close, straightening up, ready to back towards Geetesh as he often did when playing with Francis. Francis was trapped behind the mic, mid-way through singing the bridge, when Geetesh swung the guitar in an arc around his torso so that the head if the instrument collided with Vadan's cheek and the body of the guitar slammed back against Francis' ribs.
Francis must have made a sound, but he couldn't have said what it was or how it might be interpreted within the tone of the song.
When he managed to peel his scrunched up eyes open he saw he was on his knees before the mic, his guitar still held in his lap.
Geetesh was still playing, gazing down at him with cool, appreciative pleasure. Play your solo then, he mouthed. On your knees.
Francis had to unlock the pain from his stiffened fingers and remind them what to do, but he managed to join in with the song again before the end, and watched Geetesh saunter back over to the other side of the stage and speak his thank yous to the audience.
While the crowds cheered - they'd always be more willing to believe in stagecraft and rock-'n'-roll than in disaster and real consequences - Vadan crouched by him.
Francis gasped to see the blood under his friend's nose, where Geetesh's guitar had caught him full in the face. Vadan didn't seem perturbed by it, and he swiped it away with the back of his wrist, leaving a red streak across his cheek.
"Francis, what happened? Can you play?" he asked urgently, thickly through the still-welling blood.
Francis looked out at the audience and looked over at Geetesh. Geetesh grinned viciously over his shoulder. "I think poor, dear Lymond may have to admit defeat on this one..." he told the audience.
They booed, and Francis tensed, trying to think about how he'd get to his feet.
Vadan's hand weighed his shoulder down though, and the man who used to be called Jerott Blyth shook his head. "Don't be stupid, you look like you're about to faint!"
"You see how reluctant he was to let you down," Geetesh told the audience in a mock-sympathetic voice, gesturing at Francis with an outflung arm. "But he's just too ill. Now, I'll give you all a word of advice, all you festival-goers..." the crowd hollared and heckled, but Geetesh didn't mind. He smiled and leaned into the mic, turning to eye up Francis as he did. "Beware of the falafel van..." he chuckled.
The Scottish crowd let out a delighted thunderclap of laughter, whistling and jeering their agreement.
Vadan assisted Francis in getting the guitar up over his head, and replaced it tenderly on its stand before returning to help him up too.
There was nothing for it - he had to accept the hand he was being offered, and Francis gripped Vadan's knuckles with all the strength of his fury as he rose to his shaking legs.
"Oh, Lymond, I dreamed of seeing you on your knees for me..." Geetesh couldn't resist adding as Francis stumbled to the side of the stage, one hand waving perfunctorily at the crowd.
Vadan stared at Geetesh in shock; Archie hastily passed a message over to Fergie; Geetesh announced the next song; and Francis let himself return to the ministrations of a worried teenager.
#whumptober2022#whumptober#every day i write the book#character: francis crawford#character: philippa somerville#character: graham reid malett#character: jerott blyth#characters: st marys#band au: disorderly knights
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Whumptober 2022 day 27
Muffled Screams | Stumbling | Magical Exhaustion
Gotta give credit to @stripedroseandsketchpads again because after I went in hard on day 1, she suggested the follow-up pain with Richard, Good shout at always, Kay! <3
CW: drink, drugs, so many cigarettes being smoked (Jerott calm down!). Canon-typical Dumbarton warnings: alludes to SA, dub-con, age difference, violence towards hotel furnishings and one another. Sibling disappointment.
Richard’s accent wanders a bit but it’s deliberate, I think you’d hear it more when he gets emotional.
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It wasn't quite the standard of comfort Richard was accustomed to, but he nevertheless had a solid night's sleep in the Dumbarton hotel room. In fact, he'd have had more of it if he'd been permitted, but he found the concierge knocking persistently on his door when the morning was still cool and the summer sun low.
The man was apologetic when Richard answered - but resolutely firm. Doubtless the disturbance concerned money.
"Yes?"
"Mr Crawford MP, sir," he wrung his hands and smiled obsequiously.
"The title is unnecessary, thank you," Richard said through his palm as he rubbed his face. It was one way of making a point without resorting to blackmail, he supposed.
"I am sorry to disturb ye, sir. However, I have a question concerning the gentlemen you were drinking with last night?"
Of course. Richard snorted at the description gentlemen.
He recalled the sight that had greeted him when he'd entered the hotel bar: a witches coven convening under clouds of smoke and noxious smells; the air thick with vicious language and cursing, intense with their plotting; the table littered with vessels of poison and unpleasant bits of animal (well, pork scratchings).
For once, Richard's little brother had not been acting the ringleader. That role been reserved for the man Richard was there to see, one Jock Thompson - a deeply unsavoury character whom local rumour named as the source of a pirate radio station which was becoming a thorn in the side of some of Richard's constituents. And right now, as if to simply compound the everyday, prosaic headache that was Richard's political work, Thompson appeared to be in cahoots with his brother.
Francis had met Thompson in New York, in his mob days - and Richard figured that there was therefore no way Thompson would have escaped the attentions of certain international agencies. With this in mind, Richard had resolved to talk to Tom Erskine, his friendly MI6 spook, in order to learn more about the rogue and about what, exactly, Thompson had been involved in Stateside.
But last night he had let Francis take the lead on dealing with the fast-talking Clydesbank huckster. Francis had been on his most charming form when Richard had arrived - smoking, unusually, and smiling, which also left Richard suspicious. There were even empty glasses in front of him, and a not-yet-empty one in his hand. Nevertheless, he had been in control of himself, silver-tongued, cryptic where he needed to be and direct when going in for the kills. He'd been the very model of responsibility and leadership, in fact - though in all honesty, Richard didn't know what they were talking about most of the time. Serial numbers and brand names were batted back and forth, drop-off locations suggested, quality of gear and modifications already in place ascertained and judged.
To one side of his brother sat the quiet keyboard player Richard had guessed was a junkie by his unhealthily skeletal frame. He rolled his cigarettes, neatly, steadfastly, constantly - there was a little collection in front of him, like the act of rolling was as comforting as smoking them. Occasionally, he leaned over and muttered technical specifications to Francis. On the other side, the only sober one at the table, was Francis' hippy friend in his customary pink and red clothing, who was smoking his packet of fags at a furious pace, trying to look disinterested in the negotiations even as his moody gaze kept being drawn back to Francis.
They'd kept going even after Richard had said his own piece to Thompson, finished off a modest portion of mince and skirlie and his pint of heavy and announced his departure around midnight.
Now, looking at the concierge, Richard worried just how late it had got - and how long his brother's composure had lasted.
"Aye," Richard said cautiously. "I did have a pint with them, you're not wrong."
The concierge smiled sympathetically. "Yes. Well, they had significantly more than one each. And the tab was in Mr Thompson's name, ye see and Mr Thompson has left without -"
"Without paying..." Richard finished for him with a groan. "Look, I appreciate that you trust me, but the others were with him for a lot longer - have you tried their rooms?"
"Yes sir. Messrs Blacklock and...uh...Vadan, it says here. Maybe a false name? They've left, too."
"And -" Richard hesitated, thinking of the headlines. The news would out anyway, though, it always bloody did, and Francis' name would be on the hotel register too. "And my brother?" he sighed.
"Left an exceedingly specific request not to be disturbed."
Specific and well-funded, no doubt, Richard thought, though he let his brows shoot up. "Which you obey despite the others thieving from you?"
"Well," the concierge conceded with a shrug. "I just thought I'd try you first, sir. What with ye being, as ye said yerself, trustworthy. A public servant, sir."
Richard nodded in understanding. "Let me go and speak with my brother. Here's my card, I'll come and pay you if he doesn't." Richard retrieved his wallet from the sideboard and handed his bank card to the concierge. He checked the man's expression carefully, ensuring that he wasn't also looking out for a bribe, and then nodded and shut the door.
It didn't take him long to dress - on the weekend, away from his office, away from Westminster, he was presentable in chinos (never red), a long point shirt left a little open without a tie, and a v-necked jumper (always red). He shaved quickly, listening to the beginning of the Today Programme on the wireless and muttering imprecations about the government. Then he pocketed his room key before going in search of Francis' door. As he went, he wondered what on earth could have led to Francis' bandmates leaving without him in the middle of the night. Had they needed to go and make their bargain with Thompson then and there? At least the hippy lad had been sober enough to drive, Richard thought ruefully.
His knock on Francis' door received no reply. He stood outside his room listening for a moment, thought he discerned some faint squeak of a mattress and sighed. Even Dumbarton had groupies, he supposed.
He went to check Blacklock's room and that of the lad in pink - he'd been called Jerott before the commune, Richard thought - just to be certain. No answer came, of course. Richard peered out of one of the large, single-glazed windows in the corridor and ascertained that the minibus they used for touring was gone. How on earth did Francis suppose he'd get back to his country estate? Was he hoping for a lift from Richard?
Richard marched back to his brother's door, knocked again, rattled the handle and even slammed his palm hard on the surface.
He took a step back, shocked, when he heard a muffled scream from behind the door - not Francis' voice, but a girl's.
"Francis! Stop playing Mick Jagger in there, I've got business with you, ye everloving playboy!"
Something banged against the door and there was a sound of scuffling - a woman growling in frustration, a man laughing - then a weighty thud.
Francis spoke from the other side of the wood, and his voice sounded high-pitched and strange, manic and unsteady with glee. "Morning, brother! Don't fret about me. The others are just running an errand and will be back to fetch me shortly," he paused like he was considering something and then stifled a snigger. "If Thompson hasn't paid the tab, would you sort it? We can square up later."
There was another crash as something impacted on the door near where Lymond's voice had been. Richard flinched away reflexively and glowered at the glossy white paint on the surface. "Aye, Francis. Aye sure - if ye survive yer guest," he grumbled drily. "Have the boys gone off wi' yer purse?"
Francis said nothing. Richard listened to the silence with nausea rising at his throat. The smell of breakfast was starting to waft through the hotel and it turned his stomach with its offer of domestic comfort, a poor filter over the dissolute things going on in that room.
Then he could hear a female voice, young and shrill, but rising in pitch until it was cut off by a resounding slap. The sound of it made Richard's teeth ache, like he could feel it in his own cheek. He rattled the metal handle again, wishing he couldn't hear the cruelty in his brother's voice through the door. Francis had never spoken like that to anyone, not in Richard's presence.
"Francis!" Richard barked again, hoping to remind him of himself. What the fuck had happened? He hadn't even seemed drunk last night.
At last there was the rattle of a key on the other side of the door, and Richard steeled himself.
Standing in the other side of it was a horror even he couldn't have anticipated: the sweet little sister of Francis' hippy associate Graham Reid Malett. Sixteen and thrilled to get her first taste of opportunity in the world. As pure as Eidelweiss from the Swiss mountains she'd descended from, as accomplished as a finishing school girl ought to be, as talented and passionate a musician as her generation had seen - that was how Richard had known her.
Francis, evidently, had chosen to trample that delicate mountain flower beneath the relentless marching boot of his ambition.
She stood there wrapped in a tartan throw that had been dragged from the bed, naked but for the itchy wool and the fresh injuries she bore. Her cheek was red from Francis' palm, her neck was bruised by his teeth and - Christ, Richard noted with horror - there was blood on her fingertips.
Francis, wearing only a flannel gown provided by the hotel, gestured in introduction to her, gave a little bow and turned away from Richard to walk through the wreckage with his bare feet, to pick up an open champagne bottle and swill back the remnants.
Richard stared at Joleta and her tear-stained cheeks. The tracks of mascara were blue on her skin and her face and eyes were puffy from the night she'd spent. Her pupils didn't look right to Richard either, like she was, or had been, high. He shook his head, his mouth crumpling in confusion and upset, and extended comforting arms to her, offering to catch her and hold her.
Joleta just let her bottom lip jut out miserably and said with a sob, "There's no helping it. I tried."
Tears spilled over her eyelids again and she took one stumbling step and then dropped to the carpet too quickly for Richard to do anything.
He bent over her weeping body and looked up at Francis' back, his mouth agape in distress.
"Hush, hush," he told the girl, looking down again, trying to put her woe before his numb fury. He sought to tidy her hair away from her sticky face and scooped up her body, blanket and all, with an ease that made him sway, his heart heavier than her wee frame was.
He lay the girl down on the ruined bed, leaving her in her delirium on a bare mattress patterned with gold and blue paisley. Her shining hair fanned out and mingled with the pattern on the fabric, her aquamarine eyes were a dull reflection of the satin below her.
Richard shut the door to the room and leaned heavily on it, feeling shock tangle inside him and drag on all his faculties. What could he say? The floor was covered with glass and the detritus that remained of the room's decor. There was cocaine on the sideboard, the stink of weed in the air, and who knew what else a thorough search would turn up.
"So this is it, Francis? The noble purpose of your music? The reason Tom did all that he did to help you out of your legal woes? The reason Gideon died and Chris was left too damaged to play her own damned material? This is the...output of a man who wants to position himself as a saviour of the arts and a patron of the unloved?"
Francis didn't turn. The back of his shining blond hair was dark with sweat, coiled and dirty-looking at the nape of his neck.
"I'd sooner have found you dead," Richard said softly. He was thinking of their little sister, who had disappeared when she was the age of the girl lying motionless on the bed. Who had taken a cocktail of drugs she'd only had access to through Francis, and stepped out into the abyss of the night, suffering from a fatal disappointment in life - in the brother that should have been taking care of her.
Richard stared at Francis' back as he let out a strained laugh, and he thought he understood now how Eloise must have felt.
#whumptober2022#whumptober#band au: disorderly knights#every day i write the book#character: francis crawford#character: richard crawford#character: jock thompson#character: joleta reid malett#character: adam blacklock#character: jerott blyth
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Whumptober 2022 days 12 + 13
“Mayday, mayday!” | Cave In | Rusty Nail
Fracture | Dislocation | “Are you here to break me out?”
Technically, we’re getting down to the duel at Zuara. But that manifests differently in the AU. With more...torture, basically.
CW for ummm where to start. Imprisonment, solitary confinement, darkness, torture, beatings, SA, psychological fuckery, drugging, restraint, psychiatric malpractice, personal data and privacy breaches, oh yes, limb dislocation, childbirth mention, allusions to rape and SA...😬 oh and cave ins! Flooding. Violent use of stationery. Blood. Homophobic slurs. Threats of the care system and the use of lobotomy. Can I just say CW Graham Reid Malett? It would save time.
It’s also about 7,500 words, I know tumblr isn’t the ideal platform for reading, it will go on ao3 at the end of the month with everything else.
So anyway, repeat after me: Whump Room! Whump Room! Whump Room!
I’m going to go and do penance for this now k bye. So much love to all my gremlins who want to read this! <3
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Notes: Vadan is Jerott’s old sannyasin name, as Geetesh is GRM’s name. Baron Morgan is the Aga Morat. Khaireddin is Kailam/Cai. Kiaya Çalışkan is Kiaya Khatún. If anything else needs explaining do ask!
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Francis wasn't certain how long he'd been in the tunnels below the ashram. His days began whenever he woke - or, more often, was woken - in darkness, and ended the same way. He had become Graham Reid Malett's latest living experiment, and as far as he knew, his life only mattered because it protected the lives of others.
Oonagh was alive, he had been told, though he hadn't seen her; her son - Francis' son - was alive. There was the boy Joleta had given birth to at an age it appalled Francis to even imagine; there was Philippa, supposing that her cover was safe as she worked with both children in the nursery; Archie and Salah, who would be looking for Francis, risking themselves the closer they came to discovering to the truth; Marthe, brought into all this against her will, seething at finding she couldn't just leave; and Onophrion, Gaultier, the boy Mikál who Philippa had formed a bond with...a whole community for Swami Geetesh to fuck with in the cause of keeping Francis compliant.
It had been made exquisitely clear to him that help was not coming. It would not be permitted to reach him, even if it were to be offered.
Since the first time he'd been brought rudely to consciousness, Swami Geetesh had let him believe that Jerott was already lost - an accident on the road as he had tried to escape and get help.
Francis couldn't say how many days ago it had been, but he recalled the sight of Geetesh's fascinated expression, lit in patterns of jagged contrast by the lone, caged bulb affixed to the wall. "He won't be bringing anyone back for you, my dear, do you understand that?"
It was impossible to process in the unreality of the world Francis had found himself in. It simply wasn't comprehensible that Jerott might not exist any longer - it seemed far more likely that Francis himself had ceased to be, and had found himself in some auto-purgatory, smothered by his own worst nightmares.
Before this, he had been helping Onophrion and another of the sannyasins clear brush in the woods; someone had offered him a sip of water from a flask and he'd grimaced at the bitter, metallic taste, supposing that the bottle was new and hadn't been cleaned well. He didn't remember losing consciousness, had merely woken to find himself pinned to a narrow bed with Geetesh sitting next to him. His hands had been cuffed to the steel frame and nausea had scoured his body from the tips of his toes to his scalp.
Geetesh had scowled at the sound of Francis retching. "Pull yourself together. The facilities in here are limited - if you ruin these clothes and this mattress I shan't be able to bring you replacements."
He'd had to force down another spasm of acidic rebellion as he contemplated spewing directly into that smug face, but logic clamped down on the temptation swiftly. He needed to know where he was, what was happening, what on earth Graham Reid Malett intended for him now.
That, of course, had all been information that Geetesh had delighted in spooling out over various indefinable moments of consciousness. When he visited, Francis always woke to find himself chained to the bed; when he left it was usually when Francis was on the brink of passing out for one reason or another, and in no fit state to fight Geetesh for the door key.
The room had a door at each end - they were sold, metal constructions. The floor was poured concrete and the walls and ceiling were bare rock. As well as the bed there was a stool and a heavy desk affixed to the floor, and a bare metal toilet bowl, like one would find in a prison, plumbed securely into the concrete. The light only came on when Geetesh arrived.
It emerged that Francis was being kept in this empty, soulless space in order to contribute to Geetesh's musical ambitions. Once Geetesh had explained his vision, he brought sound equipment down with him and set it up on the desk. The power source was outside the room, and a red extension cable trailed across the the desk from one of the doors, taking mixing decks, recording devices and other gadgets in its sockets. Sometimes it took Geetesh some time to set up the paraphernalia; sometimes all he did was press play on a battery powered cassette player and watch Francis' response. Once or twice he did not press play, but rather record, and those were the visits Francis resented most.
It turned out that Geetesh had been keeping archives of every one-to-one therapy or meditation session run out of the ashram, as well as recordings of the ambient trauma of collective samarpan sessions. He had some theories about human empathy, about the need some people felt to respond to the suffering shown by another.
"Listen to that," he might breathe, pausing the cassette after a pupil made a sound that weighed more than words - a sigh, a whimper, a groan of revelation. "What is it that makes us respond to music, Francis?
"The way the professional singer can channel feelings it isn't possible or desirable for us to express in our day to day lives. The kinds of feelings we may express instead in a closed therapy session. But it's always an act for the singer, isn't it, my lyrebird?
"You withold yourself, even when you are on stage. You perform. But what if your music was real? What if you let the audience have your real, authentic self? How much more cathartic might it be for all?"
When Geetesh depressed the button marked record, Francis knew it was time to be as silent as possible. Geetesh's approach varied - but never his goal of stripping Francis back to his 'authentic self'.
Sometimes he spoke to Francis like a psychiatrist might, leading him to the worst occasions in his life that Geetesh could summon: the year of slavery spent working for the New York mob, the disappearance of his young sister, the disaster in East Berlin, the night of misguided, narcotic-fuelled sex he'd shared with Geetesh's own sister. But, by and large, all these occasions that Geetesh knew about were a matter of public record already - and Francis had heard everything the world could throw at him regarding these moments. He didn't need Geetesh to tell him to regret his actions.
"And wouldn't you say that you enjoyed feeling important? Knowing that your music was worth killing over? You liked the idea of being a figurehead for freedom fighters...But a figurehead was all you were. Absolved of responsibility, merely a trinket for the serious men to display - free to deny it all...
"Of course, you let Eloise down. She trusted you, didn't she? She thought you could save her, offer her the life of luxury that would take her away from Gavin Crawford. But you're selfish, Francis. You didn't want to share. What if the world had loved her even more than you? You couldn't bear to let her in, so you drove her away. It's your fault she's never coming back.
"Those poor young things in Berlin - what a merry dance you led them on. Hope is the most dangerous weapon in a musician's arsenal, wouldn't you agree? To bring them the hope of acceptance - offering them the chance to be themselves even as you appeared in disguise - knowing that it would likely just get them killed...Was it worth it, for your career? How many times will you try the same trick - dying in order to boost your record sales?
"What you did to that girl is unconscionable. Unimaginable. She was nothing to you, was she? Just another little groupie you could teach a lesson to. Just a way of hurting me. But I bet you enjoyed it, didn't you, Francis? Having power over one so young. Testing the feeling of a nubile body beneath yours, showing her all the ways of the world she couldn't yet have experienced. You wanted to ruin her, and you got a thrill out of doing it."
These sessions left Francis calmly impassive. Geetesh was opening no new wounds, and when such accusations were thrown out only with the intention of getting a response from him, Francis was well-practised in acting indifferent. He already knew that the insinuations behind all Geetesh said could hurt him - but the pain was worst when Francis was the one carving blame into himself. And he had already hurt himself more deeply with those thoughts than Geetesh could possibly hope to do, lacking, as he was, the precise reasons why Francis already held himself fully accountable for the lives ruined and lost in the wake of their association with him.
So just as Francis declined to show any great emotion regarding his sordid past, Geetesh resolved to hide his own frustration at Francis' self-control.
This he managed some days better than others. Sometimes, the record button was pressed to catch the sounds of a clinical, thoughtfully-plotted beating - nothing serious enough to impede Francis' creative abilities, merely, as Geetesh called it, "A purgative. To help me to centre myself again. To remind me of the greater things that will be possible when you submit."
He would leave Francis with hidden bruises, scrupulous about wrapping his preferred implement in soft padding before the act. Afterwards, he might mix the new recording into a session taken from a group meditation and invite Francis to pick out his own grunts and cries among the screams of devotees letting loose.
Francis didn't know how many sessions of this he had endured when Geetesh decided to forcibly remind him of his obligations to those he loved.
He had already played dozens of tapes to Francis, narrating over other people's private confessions as though, by his intervention, he had collected the essence of each individual and contained it in a tidy arc: beginning, middle, end - and Geetesh's concluding moral. But on one occasion he woke Francis without preamble, leaving him in the darkness with only one track playing.
On it: a woman's voice - she had a Donegal accent - and the murmurs of a solicitous helper, someone with the disingenuous, soothing tones of a medical professional. Geetesh's own instructions, spoken too quietly to be heard precisely, and a bustle of activity and beeping monitors.
"You couldn't be there for the birth," Geetesh murmured from the darkness at the foot of Francis' bed. "So I thought I would preserve it for posterity."
Of course, this most precious of moments was accompanied by the pointed reminder that Geetesh expected some return for his generosity in sharing Kailam's first breaths - and that if Francis did not oblige him, he would make sure the relevant parties suffered.
It got him writing, at last. It forced him to compose, and it was, undeniably, inspirational.
Geetesh let Francis sit at the desk, uncuffed, and he lay on the bed, smiling, waiting for Francis to share what he had created.
Bitter, hopeless, and exasperated by the task, Francis finally exclaimed: "Don't you think the work might be more natural if I wrote about fatherhood from the perspective of one who is allowed to be a parent to their child?"
Geetesh stared at him dumbly for a moment, his brows raised and eyes wide. Then he rolled his head on the pillow and laughed uproariously at the ceiling. "You? Parent? I don't think so, little lyrebird. Besides, it's your pain that I want. That's what will sell best. The market for those sappy peans to parenthood is...limited."
Stupidly, after all the disdain and abuse that had fallen from his lips already, Francis found this got under his skin more than anything else had done His grip tightened on his pen, and he imagined driving it into Geetesh's eyeball.
No. Early on, Geetesh had told him that there was a pager hidden on site, rigged to sent an automatic message out if Geetesh did not override it within a number of hours. The message would ensure that Francis' family was scattered to the four winds: that Cai would vanish into the adoption system and Oonagh would be sectioned, and who knew what else would happen to the others. Any harm to Geetesh risked triggering this if Francis could not search thousands of acres of land and find the pager in time - or if he couldn't guarantee an escape for them all before then.
Francis had only one very dim hope regarding this. It hinged on circumstances that were, regrettably, beyond his control, but he had to believe that nature hated Graham Reid Malett as much as he did.
He had managed to escape the confines of his dingy cell just the once, when, having administered a beating, Geetesh had removed Francis' cuffs and wandered over to the desk to jot some things down in a soft-bound notepad. Francis' limbs had taken the brunt of it that day - his upper arms felt puffy and weak, his legs shook, and the soles of his feet were in agony. He lay curled on the concrete floor, his breath ragged and pained, and he noticed that one of the heavy metal doors hadn't been fully closed. There was a light seeping in that wasn't the same colour as the dim yellow of the bulb in the room - this light was cooler, perhaps more natural. Francis' hopes rose - maybe freedom was closer than he had thought.
He rolled over with a groan so that he was close to the door, and Geetesh turned to look at him.
"Good, lyrebird. That's material we can work with," he said smoothly.
Francis waited, prone against the cold, hard floor, until Geetesh had turned away again. Then, summoning the strength to stand - simply because he had to - Francis got up with the aid of the wall and the door jamb, grasped the edge of the heavy metal door with his fingertips and wrenched it open, and stumbled into fresher air.
He had found himself at the foot of a vertical shaft lined with metal rungs. It seemed to rise endlessly, to the source of the cool, white light he had detected. He grimaced at the distance, though he moved towards the rungs with the intention of climbing.
But the nerves in his fingers tingled from the blows that had been struck to his upper arms, and the pressure of one rung under the sole of his bare, whipped, foot was unbearable.
He had leaned his head against one of the cold metal bars and gasped back a sob of anguish, and then, even as Geetesh's steps casually approached from behind, he had noticed the water and minerals beading on the surface of the rock and he had recalled the maps he'd seen of the area.
Miles of unmapped tunnels and aquifers; cave systems that people disappeared into never to be seen again; unpredictable, changeable arroyos; old wells and sinkholes; a land that was as restless and vindictive under modern human occupation as an unbroken animal. When Francis had been removed to this cell, they had been approaching autumn and the rains. Was it too much to hope for, that this recently dug tunnel might not be able to withstand the forces of the seasons when they were unleashed?
Geetesh had wrapped his arms around Francis' biceps and torso and plucked him from the ladder like he was plucking a bug from a tree trunk. He had deposited Francis heavily on the bed, face first among sheets that already now smelled of Geetesh, and he had left immediately, taking his recording equipment and mixing deck with him, switching the light off and slamming the door.
But since then, Francis had thought often of the damp wall and what might be behind it. He didn't consider himself a man of faith, but he prayed to that wall and to the aquifer that lay behind it, and he willed it to break through and sweep both him and Geetesh away.
He tried not to let it work its way into the songs he wrote - this flood imagery and the potential of primordial power that lurked, always, in his subconscious. In this way, he found that he could write the miserable memoir Geetesh craved, while even so retaining his true feelings - his authentic self - from his tormentor.
It still wasn't easy to pluck what Geetesh desired from the knotted tangle of horrors that passed for emotions in that cell, and writing was a constantly draining task. Francis offered up his own self-loathing regarding the events Geetesh had questioned him about - he wrote confessions daily - or hourly - or at the very least every time consciousness arrived, wearing pink linens and a cruel smile on its face. But he did not preface them with forgive me, Father. He wrote for the impatient, seething morass that was the public court of opinion, knowing that no amount of sugar-coating with circumstance could absolve him.
The titles came and came, the confessions poured forth until there was almost an album's worth:
Galley Boy
The Sympathiser
Blood and Treason
The Tragic Moves
Strange Refuge
An Accident Happens
Distress is Not Released
The Lusty May
Flaming June
Pawn in Frankincense
Francis was at his lowest ebb. The tunnel he was in was deep enough below ground that he still had no inkling of the season. Wherever Geetesh arrived from, he never came direct from the outdoors, wet or bundled up against the cold. For all Francis knew they might have passed through winter and emerged again into spring.
But no - when Geetesh got close to him under the dim yellow bulb, Francis could see that his summer colour was absent. His skin was pale and his hair was a more muted gold. He smelled of wood smoke as much as patchouli, and the food he brought Francis was heartier, warming stuff.
He also seemed to sense that Francis' inspiration was beginning to wither, that his resources were running low, and that he could no longer push himself along only on the empty fumes of fear and stubbornness. He brought the tape player back in.
"I decided to share something special with you today, lyrebird," Geetesh told him. Settling at the foot of Francis' bed, cross-legged, his feet bare, he laid the tape player down between them like he was a teenager about to present a mixtape to their crush. "I'm sure you miss our foolhardy young friend almost as much as I do - and I thought you might like to hear his voice again."
Francis sat with his back to the headboard, frowning as he sought after Geetesh's meaning.
But then Geetesh pressed play, looked at Francis with mischief in his eyes and - to Francis' horror - pulled his linen top off. "It's one of my favourite sessions," he said by way of explanation. "I like to be comfortable when I listen to it. We made such a breakthrough! Ah, what might have been..."
He placed his large hands on his knees and drew an extravagantly deep breath that was designed to show off every muscle in his abdomen and chest - and the mastery which he had over them all. His wooden mala hung over his skin, and on it, the bearded face of Shree Rajneesh smirked at Francis on Geetesh's behalf.
Soon, two voices began to speak, and Francis closed his eyes when he recognised who Geetesh's patient - or pupil, or disciple, or whatever he called them - was in this session.
The accent was unmistakeable: Kelvingrove via Paris. Abrupt phrasing, heated and passionate one minute, stunned and defensive the next. A little younger, a little higher than it had been the last time Francis had spoken to him - cigarettes and booze had brought it down to something with rougher edges. But it was Jerott Blyth, and he was talking to Geetesh about a cassette he'd bought at a gas station.
The album he mentioned was Lymond's third, recorded with Will Scott, Christian Stewart and Turkey Mat. He seemed to have spent some time listening to it, to the point where Geetesh termed it an obsession and began to probe into how Jerott came to know the singer whose skill he praised so highly.
Francis, his eyes closed, remembered sleepless nights of innocent mischief in Carlisle. He remembered jamming at the youth hostel, swapping cassettes, raiding charity shop record bins, singing together, drinking together, singing together again and going back to the hostel to play guitar together again, and never wanting the month to end.
He still couldn't really fathom the thought that Jerott was truly gone - he had seemed indestructible, not least after surviving the fire and the cyanide and the delerium tremens. Not least in the wake of the betrayal he had felt when he'd discovered what Francis had done to keep them safe at Baron Morgan's Oasis, and the way he had pushed past that hurt in order to give the glorious, rousing, ecstatic performance he'd shared with Francis on their last night at the Oasis.
Francis had always supposed that Jerott, despite a propensity for finding trouble, would outlast him by a lifetime, would be the one to keep playing Francis' songs long after others forgot him. And now Francis found that the lack of him was an open wound that Geetesh had finally learned he could access.
On cue, Geetesh leaned forward and prodded Francis' leg. "Do you hear, my sweet? Did you know he thought that of you?"
The tape played, and Francis could not open his eyes as he heard the old conversation flow over him.
...
"Yet you say he's beautiful."
"Well, yes, but...so are...sunsets! I wouldn't have sex with a sunset."
"No. But a beautiful woman?"
"Yes. Obviously."
"Then why not a beautiful man?"
"Well it's. It's not right. It's perverted. Bhagwan says we need to be balanced. He says... that's unnatural, unbalanced. The people doing it have just got into bad habits."
Geetesh chuckles; indulgent.
"Is that what it was, when you came to me in Pune?"
"I... that was different." His throat sounds dry.
"Oh? You don't find me beautiful, Vadan?" Geetesh is smiling; it can be heard in his rich voice.
Jerott's laughter is nervous.
"No, I...that is...not...beautiful. Um. I just. I suppose I found myself thinking about it."
"It?"
"...Sex. I guess. With..."
"A man?"
"You."
Silence crackles on the tape before Jerott speaks again: "And I couldn't move beyond it, like Bhagwan instructs us to. So. I thought...um. Trying it would help me move beyond."
"Even though it's a perversion?"
"Well...I didn't think you would...judge me."
"I'm not judging you, Vadan. I would never, ever judge you - not least for such an...innocent curiosity."
"Yes - curiosity! That was all." He sounds so relieved.
"Yes. Now tell me, if this boy you knew came here, to the ashram. If you lived with him as you live with the others, and you felt that - curiosity - would you not act on it?"
"Um. I don't. I don't know..."
"Think about it, Vadan. How did he make you feel? What was it like being around him?"
"I don't...I only knew him for a few weeks, it's silly, really."
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"You're minimising it. You're belittling your own feelings instead of acknowledging them, instead of seeing them clearly. They may make you uncomfortable, Vadan, but they are true, and real, and you. Did you love him?"
"Um. Maybe? I don't know. I never knew anyone like that before. Never...never felt like that before."
"You didn't have girlfriends?"
"Yeah, yeah of course. But I didn't love them. It was just...that was just fun, you know?"
"I understand, yes."
"But I wouldn't want to spoil it. We were friends. Maybe it couldn't have lasted if...if anything else had happened."
"At least, I think, you understand why I rejected you in Pune, then?"
Jerott sighs.
"It's the same?"
"Only you can say, naujavaa."
"I mean...maybe, when I left, maybe he could have persuaded me to stay."
"He didn't try?"
"No. Yes. But...not hard enough."
"You wanted to stay, then? Deep down, you wanted to be with him, to be in his band, to give up your fiancée and your father and follow this musician?"
"I don't know. I don't remember. It was different, when my dad was alive. When I thought I had a plan."
"I think, Vadan..." Geetesh's voice turns ever so soft, like a hand extended to a frightened animal. "I think you have been waiting for instructions ever since that time. You have been following the orders of those around you. The first decision you truly made for yourself was to come with me. Before then, you were shackled to this moment, to the hope that this boy would persuade you, would tell you what to do. You put that decision in his hands, and he didn't help you make the choice you wanted. So you absolved yourself of all choosing. Is that not so?"
Jerott draws a breath: sharp and sudden."Yes?"
"You were letting him rule you, letting the time he didn't try hard enough to persuade you to stay be the root from which all your problems stemmed."
"Yeah..."
"Good, Vadan, good! We have really made some progress today. Now your journey will involve moving past this boy, this love. He has hampered you for too long. We will go beyond him, you and I, and you will find that new loves appear."
...
Francis felt water on his cheeks. He'd cried at the sounds of Oonagh giving birth to Cai, but at nothing else that Geetesh had played. He hadn't expected to be confronted with anything that might make him feel in a way to rival that moment.
This, though, was a fist inside his chest all over again, a hand squeezing on his heart every time it tried to pump. It wasn't that he longed to be with the person he heard - not like he had needed, physically felt the compulsion to be at Oonagh's side when he had heard her animal roar and heard Cai cry out - but he found that a regret had been articulated by this recording that he hadn't been allowing himself to feel. He hadn't formed a callus over this injury, because he hadn't had the chance to build one up with preparatory, introspective self-flagellation.
He hadn't even thought that Jerott had wanted to be persuaded by him that night in Carlisle after the Solway Battle of the Bands. He had thought that arguing with Jerott about that would have been to show disrespect to his family and their priorities and customs. And he had never been at all certain of Jerott's feelings in those days - maybe Jerott hadn't been sure himself until he had gone to the ashram in Pune and discovered new depths to his being.
But really, Francis thought he was crying for what he knew Geetesh had done to the boy in the recording. For the knowledge that the replacement love offered by Geetesh had been poison from the start, and all his psychiatric language and half-truths only concealed the fact that he had been Jerott's new master and manipulator, the real chooser of his destiny. Francis was only swallowing down bile and tasting salt on his lips because of the knowledge of what Jerott had offered to Geetesh in Pune before Geetesh took it forcibly in the basement studio at St Mary's. Right under the bones of Francis' home, and he hadn't done a thing to stop it.
Jerott's words at the Oasis rang in Francis' memory: You fucking faggot!
Francis let out a sigh.
"Exquisite," Geetesh gloated. "I knew you would appreciate it."
"Fuck you..." Francis said wearily.
Geetesh's lips curled in a sneer. "How coarse. I expect more eloquence from you, pet. But I suppose, as you evidently care so much about our mutual second, you would like to hear about how I helped him to go beyond the base desires that were limiting him?"
Francis let his expression suffice as an answer. His body ached in ways that he could no longer enumerate or define; he couldn't say whether the sleep he was getting was too much or too little, but it wasn't at all restorative. Meal times were sporadic, and he couldn't remember the intervals between them because he was sure it changed each time. Sometimes he would wake to find Geetesh above him, his body pinning Francis to the mattress, his grip tight on Francis' jaw, and a razor in his free hand. Time couldn't even be measured by beard growth, although Francis found that he was getting confused about that process anyway - didn't it need light to grow? In short, he was in no position to stop Geetesh from monologuing about his achievements, but he doubted that this approach could wring much more material from him. He could only write with his 'authentic self' if he remembered what that was, after all.
Geetesh wasn't to be put off, though. He fingered the beads of his mala and gave a self-satisfied chuckle. "He thought I just needed to see your genius, little lyrebird."
Francis said nothing.
Geetesh took the cassette from the deck and put a blank in. He depressed the record button.
"That's why he invited me back. He thought he needed to save me, that if I could just see what he saw - how wonderful you are - we could all be one happy family."
Francis leaned his head against the stone above his headboard and closed his eyes again, envisaging a cleansing wave sweeping them both away, slamming their bodies against the uneven, jagged walls.
"As if I couldn't already see your genius. As if I wasn't already better equipped to understand you than he could ever be. As if we were his to share. He grew arrogant around you. You let him think he had more to offer than he did, and it was up to me to remind him of his place."
His breathing grew louder - Francis heard the excitement build in his voice as he recounted, blow by blow, what he had done.
He was recording himself - Francis didn't make a sound, just sat there with his eyes closed and his fists clenched in his lap, trying not to flinch at the picturesque account Geetesh delivered.
All too well, Francis remembered the state Jerott had been in afterwards. He had never needed to hear any of this to know enough about what had happened.
"So you see," Geetesh said lovingly. "It was what he had asked me for. How could he overcome his obsession if he never experienced what he desired? Unfortunately, our dear Vadan was never as receptive as he ought to have been. I don't think he understood the gift I gave him."
Despite the outward appearance of calm, Francis' pulse had spiked. He was trying not to think of anything at all, trying to empty his mind like he'd done whenever Baron Morgan had taken him back to his cabin and demanded payment for their stay. He'd endured that, he reminded himself. He could endure this. And Jerott wasn't alive anymore - Geetesh couldn't hurt him anymore. These were just words, aimed at lighting the fuse on Francis' imagination, and so Francis could fight them by keeping his mind blank.
"He showed me that he had never understood Bhagwan's teachings. He was supposed to take that experience, learn something about himself, and move on - but he only grew more obsessed with you, didn't he?"
Francis' thoughts of collapsing cave walls were coming into conflict with the maintenance of his own defenses. Too much was clamouring at the edges of his mind, too many recent traumas that he hadn't been able to deal with - displaced onto the hurt that had been done to another instead of the hurt done to him, these memories grew more powerful. He saw again and again that he should have tried harder, done more, stopped things from reaching this point.
He thought of Baron Morgan leering: "I seen how he looks at you."
Marthe, with a cynical curl of her lip, implying that Morgan's attentions might, in fact, have been just what Jerott needed. And later, thinking she was alone with Jerott in the pool: "It's because you can't have Francis Crawford that you want me."
Again, Jerott swinging a blow at Francis' face - one that had real, savage intent behind it: "You fucking faggot!"
Jerott later that night, after the triumph of the gig, after the escape, after the wild motorbike ride through the desert, his arms clasped round Francis' body as they rode into Salina, his cheek resting against Francis' back, his thighs behind Francis' thighs. Murmuring Arabic from a poem he'd recited to Francis back in Carlisle - lines he didn't realise Francis had looked up and memorised, as he memorised all poems he encountered.
«My drink and my ride are sweet
and my beloved takes care of me.»
Geetesh shifted his weight and Francis' eyes snapped open - a response born purely of self-preservation.
He had moved the tape recorder aside and leaned forwards to peer at Francis' expression. One of his hands was down the front of his trousers, moving slowly, thoughtfully over the erection that showed beneath the fine fabric.
Francis drew a sharp breath and wedged his body back against the headboard, his fingers knotting with disgust in the sheets to either side of his hips.
"Were you never tempted by him yourself, Francis? Or was he supposed to follow you forever, receiving nothing in return?"
Francis just shook his head and tried to keep his eyes on Geetesh's face. There was a furious trembling inside his chest, fighting to radiate out through his body - but he wouldn't give Geetesh the satisfaction of seeing him shudder. He wouldn't.
Geetesh smiled. "I did at least spoil him for you, then, didn't I? I am pleased. At least the experiment wasn't a total failure."
He moved forwards again, one hand on himself, the other dropping to Francis' knee. His expression was terrible, unblinking, full of a wondering fascination with Francis' own repulsion. "But I think you're subtle enough to understand me better, Francis. And I understand you."
Francis went to remove Geetesh's touch from his knee, but Geetesh was quick as a snake striking. He pinned Francis' wrist down, and the hand that had been busy inside his own trousers emerged and gripped Francis' jaw with bruising, searing strength. Francis smelled the hidden parts of Geetesh's body on his fingers, savoury and musky. He gagged even as Geetesh tilted his head back against the top of the headboard and shifted to straddle him.
"Don't fight it, sweeting. I will have you. Not like that farmer in the desert had you - oh yes, I know all about Mr Morgan and how you debased yourself for him - not like that Cypriot courtesan who thinks her influence extends further than it does. Not like Margaret Douglas and her...plain, old-fashioned wants. I will have the real Francis Crawford, however I find him."
Francis' mind scrabbled for purchase on the information concealed in Geetesh's words. Some of this...some of this he shouldn't have known about. Who could have told him about Baron Morgan and about Kiaya Çalışkan? It was hard to think, though, when he felt the hardness of Geetesh's groin jammed up against his stomach, when the skin on his wrist felt raw and burnt from Geetesh's twisting, tight hold.
"It's ok if you're afraid, gentle bird," Geetesh murmured above his lips. "Let yourself be afraid. I want to see it all."
Francis' body juddered involuntarily. His eyes were screwed up and his jaw was clenched as he felt his cheeks squeezed against his teeth by Geetesh's thumb and forefinger. It took him a moment to realise that the tremor hadn't just occurred within his own limbs. The wall had rumbled, hadn't it?
Geetesh looked around the room with a scowl and then leaned over Francis' face again. "You and I will make the earth move another time, lyrebird. For now, I hope you find that you have enough material to finish your magnum opus."
He got off, picked up the tape player and stopped the recording, gathered the other cassette, his notebook and his shirt, and left.
The light went out and Francis remained in darkness, gasping, gulping, begging for air to reach his lungs as the panic he hadn't shown earlier flooded into his nervous system. If the tunnels and the room had caved in then and there he wasn't sure he'd have known the difference. Only when it ended, and the fear was gone at last, would he know he was free. He wished it would happen, and then pulled himself up short - he needed Geetesh to die with him. He needed to stop that man from doing any more to anyone else.
His hands were shaking, and Francis splayed them against the sheets, steadying himself, trying to find stillness.
Beneath one finger, he felt something unexpected: hard and plastic. A pen? A pen.
His heart thundered hard enough that it seemed to bruise itself with the effort. Geetesh had left him a weapon. And next time, pager or not, Francis was going to use it. He didn't care what he had to do to rescue Oonagh and Cai and the others. He'd run himself straight to jail if he had to, but he realised now that no amount of waiting would present him with an opportunity to defeat Geetesh without ending him.
Francis grasped the weapon in his fist, breathing hard. In the darkness of the cell he prepared himself to become a killer.
---
It was impossible, as ever, to know how long the interval between Geetesh's visits was. During this stretch of darkness Francis felt the ground shiver on a number of occasions, and the air emerging from the vent in the door seemed cooler and fresher.
He supposed this was connected to Geetesh's manner: when he next appeared his mood was sour. He switched the light on and slammed the door. His hands were already shaking with fury as he struggled to insert the key in the lock.
Francis had formed his plan, but he wasn't certain how it would go over with Geetesh in this temper. He waited, standing between the bed and the desk, the pen concealed in one hand.
Geetesh visibly imposed calm on himself before turning to the room, arranging a grim smile onto his features. He looked Francis up and down and raised a brow.
"You may sit," he said impatiently.
Francis glanced between the stool and the bed, and Geetesh snorted.
"What? Would you like me to just get it over with, my sorry, hungering slut?" He crossed the room with his long stride and grabbed Francis' wrists.
He didn't seem to have noticed what Francis held in one hand, but Francis couldn't do anything with the pen anyway, not when he was held in this furious, agonising grip.
Geetesh gazed down at him, and Francis realised he hadn't come with a schedule, as he usually did. He was deciding what to do only now, and Francis' anticipation that he would pick up where he'd left off had been what prompted his current inclination.
"You think you can make yourself into whatever anyone wants, don't you? A Protean whore, always aiming to please. You've remodelled yourself so often you don't even know who you are or what you want anymore. Would you like me to remind you, Francis?"
Francis bit the inside of his lip to distract from the pain in his wrists. He stared up into the mad periwinkle blue of Graham Reid Malett's eyes and begged his terrified animal body to have patience with him.
"You don't need to pretend for me," Geetesh hissed. He flung Francis down onto the mattress, and Francis landed messily, his head colliding with the back wall. He felt the pen lying concealed beneath his palm still, but his ears rang from the blow and he felt a cool spot on his scalp, as though blood was beginning to seep from a wound. Geetesh pulled his top off once more and reached a hand into his trousers, jerking quick and rough to get himself hard. He stepped forwards, leaned one knee on the mattress, and reached for Francis' waistband.
He was within striking distance, and Francis raised the pen and brought it down as hard as he could on that sturdy, muscled thigh. Geetesh's flesh was hard, the pen was blunt, but fear gave Francis strength beyond hope, and the nib pierced skin and burrowed into Geetesh's leg.
He roared, his breath hot on Francis' face, and he plunged a fist into Francis' solar plexus.
Francis just gripped the pen tighter, tried to force it deeper into the thigh, tried to tear the wound wider, seeking the deep artery however he could.
Geetesh didn't seem concerned with removing the weapon from his body though: just with getting his revenge, just with having Francis how he'd resolved to have him. He grappled with Francis, their bloodied hands tussling until Geetesh held both of Francis' wrists again. He hauled Francis towards him, slipping back off the bed's edge to bring them both to their feet - another bellow of rage was the only sign he gave that the item of stationary embedded in his thigh was causing him any discomfort.
He spun Francis round like a ballerina pirouetting with her hands above her head and then jerked and twisted one of Francis' arms as he pulled it down.
There was a wet, snapping pop. White hot agony exploded in Francis' shoulder and he yelled as loud as Geetesh had done. He thought he might have blacked out for a moment, because suddenly he found himself face first on the bed, his arm still held behind him at an improbable angle - dislocated, for sure - and Geetesh's hand was fumbling inexactly at the fastenings of Francis' trousers. His breathing was ragged and he seemed to be struggling with his coordination.
The room juddered and rumbled, and Francis knew that finally he had done enough, and they were both going to be buried there by the flood that had to come.
"Do you...do you think you've won, lyrebird?" Geetesh's voice rasped in his ear. "Your recordings are safe. They'll be released, one day. Your brood mare won't last long once she's separated from the child for good. Maybe they'll lobotomise her, maybe it will be the only way to pacify her. That boy won't last a month with any foster family. He'll be driven from pillar to post, cast out wherever he goes, never able to understand why no one loved him enough to want him, to keep him."
Francis screwed his eyes shut and a gasping sob escaped his clenched teeth. He'd had no choice. In the end, he'd had no choice. Graham Reid Malett had to be stopped.
It sounded like there was a thunderstorm behind the door and the room went dark - the bulb had put up no resistance. The bed rattled and its legs thrummed against the floor, and the door creaked and juddered. Pressure built, and then a vast body of water slammed into the room, throwing the door off its hinges and blasting it into the desk.
Their bodies were gathered up in the maelstrom, and Francis was lost in the black swirling current, battered against ceiling and wall.
He wasn't conscious and couldn't know that the water had had enough force to drive through the door at the other end of the room as well. After a few seconds in which a raging torrent scoured the cell, the water levels dropped, releasing two bodies as they did: Geetesh landed face-first on the soaked bed again, his bodyweight pressing the pen deeper into his thigh as he bled out; and Francis' sprawled messily on the floor, filthied by mud and soil and stones that had been dragged along by the water.
When he came to, he was in a tunnel, lit by the light of an electric torch. There was a brown-skinned, bearded man leaning over him, a wild look in his eyes. Fucking hell, thought Francis. That can't be right.
He remembered Geetesh's final words, the threat to his family, and he screwed his eyes shut against the realisation that, dead or alive, he had given them up in order to stop Graham Reid Malett.
"O mill, o mill...what hast thou ground..." he murmured lyrics from the compositions Geetesh had wrung from him, and the man leaning over him touched his face tentatively.
"Francis?"
Francis blinked his eyes open. That definitely couldn't be right. He must have been dead after all. It seemed unfair to be dead and still hurt so much, though.
"Francis...I think...I think he's...gone," Jerott Blyth was staring at something beyond Francis' head and his voice was quiet and fearful, but it was his voice behind the scruffy black beard, and it was the voice of someone who seemed, despite all previous information, to be very much alive.
#whumptober2022#whumptober#every day i write the book#band au: pawn in frankincense#character: graham reid malett#character: francis crawford#character: jerott blyth
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Whumptober 2022 day 10
Taser | Whipping | Waterboarding
This got waaay too long. Never let it be said that I am normal about Jerott Blyth at his worst.
Tekke scene equivalent, sort of.
CW: casual bigotry about Native Americans, drug use (mescaline), hallucinations, non-con touching and kissing, that is, SA, followed by use of an electric prod on another person.
Also big aaagh I don't have a sensitivity reader for this but it's late and I've got to sleep. Concrit will be accepted and acted upon.
---
Working for Professor Gilles reminded Jerott a lot of the early days of breaking ground on the ashram, only he couldn't do the physical labour with his wrist encased in its makeshift plaster cast. Instead he spent the days watching over the workforce Gilles had recruited to make sure no one was pocketing what they dug up. The workers were a dusty bunch of surly, silent men - mostly from the Moapa reservation on the other side of the I-93, though some had come up from Mexico and spoke exclusively in Spanish when on site. Gilles was uncharitable towards them at best, and he'd insisted on furnishing Jerott with a cattle-prod and a rusty old shotgun to maintain discipline. Nevertheless, Jerott hadn't had occasion to brandish either, and hadn't seen anything but hard work from the men on the archaeological site - even with a potent distraction present.
Toiling among them, Marthe was like a white peahen, elegant even in her cut-off shorts and baggy cheesecloth shirt, always ready with a comment that would make the men nod in approval, or a wry aside that brought forth a laughing response to Gilles' speeches and rules. As often as not, she spoke to them in her lilting, fluent Spanish.
She'd told Jerott that she'd come at Francis' behest, just to make sure that Jerott was alive. She'd said there was no need to hurry back - Salah had got out with the message Jerott hadn't managed to escape with, and soon Francis would have back-up. Other than this, she endeavoured not to speak to Jerott.
That was until late one evening as he smoked outside his tent, gazing across the darkening desert and wondering, miserably, what was going on back at the main part of the ashram and why Francis didn't consider Jerott a necessary part of the back-up.
Marthe stomped up to him in her heavy work boots and looked down her fine nose. Her arms were folded tight over her oversized shirt and her eyes were a narrow, unreadable squint. "You really want to go on a spiritual journey?"
Jerott looked wearily up at her. He met her eyes, recognised the contempt there, and dropped his gaze to her scuffed knees. He gave a shrug. "You know about spirituality, now?"
"My friends do."
He snorted. She sure made friends quickly when she chose to.
"Come on," Marthe said. "You might find it has more in common with what you were actually looking for than with what Graham Reid Malett offers."
Jerott sighed, but he stood up. He wasn't interested in receiving some lecture about colonialism from a stranger who knew nothing of Jerott's own background - but he was being invited by Marthe, and that still counted for something. He stamped his cigarette butt out and left it in the dirt, and Marthe's lip curled at the gesture, though she said nothing.
The Paiute men and the Mexicans nodded at Jerott as he joined them in the circle they'd formed away from the main camp. Marthe took a seat on a folded picnic blanket and murmured something in Spanish to the man next to her.
Jerott gazed indifferently around the circle and rolled his eyes. "Well? I thought you didn't show this stuff to foreigners."
"What stuff is that?" one man smirked at him. He was rolling a cigarette, but Jerott was frowning at the man next to him, who was stirring something in a kettle over the fire.
Jerott's brows twitched and he shook his head, unimpressed by this coyness. "All your mysterious rituals, of course…"
The Paiute man sniggered. "We're not doing any rituals for you, boy. This is just a social event."
Jerott looked at Marthe like this was some kind of gotcha moment, his brows up: I told you so. He laughed too, and scratched the black hair that was now thickening on his jaw. "Right. So you say it's for the rituals, but it's actually just because you all like getting high…" he flicked a finger at the kettle.
Some of the men shifted and Jerott sensed he had annoyed them - but not as much as he'd annoyed Marthe, who was staring at him with open dislike. He took out one of his own cigarettes - Gilles had called the supply Jerott's advance - and tilted his head to one side. "You're right, Marthe: that is like the Rajneeshees."
"Aren't you one of them?" one man asked him with a prickly tone.
Jerott snorted around the filter of his cigarette. As a gesture of goodwill he offered the packet around, and it came back nearly empty. "I was. Turns out…" he frowned at the fire. He remembered a bonfire he'd made on the shingle of St Mary's Loch. He'd burned his clothes. It had seemed really important to do so. Geetesh had given him a beating in order to teach him a lesson about humility, and that had been the end of Jerott's life as a sannyasin. "I made a mistake."
"Your mistake was following a white man, brother," one Mexican said to him, saluting with one of the cigarettes Jerott had just handed round.
He shook his head. "Rajneesh is Indian, pal," he looked around the group and added, with some uncertainty: "From India."
Marthe was watching him. She hadn't taken a cigarette, but sat with her knees drawn up and her arms around them, her heavy eyelids low, her mouth fixed into a nauseous kind of smirk.
There was a reasonably good-natured response to his clarification from the group, but the guy in charge of the kettle quirked an eyebrow. "You still followed that blasphemer in the mountains. They wear the face of a living man as though he was a god. How can anyone put another man above them like that?"
Jerott worked his jaw. The question needled him, finding a precise pressure point in between the defences he was more used to maintaining against others' criticism. He'd worn the mala himself, after all, with the photo of Rajneesh in it - he'd found it hardest to give up, of all the trappings from his years in the movement. "It's a way of reminding yourself that…structure is man-made…it's meant to be ridiculous." He muttered the old line he'd been given, and thought about how it - and everything else he remembered from Rajneesh's discourses - was so banal as to be meaningless. It was like astrology - you already had to believe in it, and then it could mean whatever you wanted it to mean.
"Ridiculous, but at the same time you are actually worshipping him?"
Jerott shook his head and laughed hollowly. "No, I never…we never worshipped Bhagw…" he stopped midway through calling Rajneesh by the title he had chosen for himself. It literally meant deity, after all. "Anyway, it wasn't a religion to begin with."
"They only became one for tax purposes," Marthe added, a mischievous glint in her eyes.
Jerott glared back at her.
The man with the kettle dipped a cup into it and swilled the liquid around. "Good job we kept our practices secret, or some guy might come along and make a whole new tax-dodge out of it."
"Keep the spiritual bit a secret, but share the drugs?" Jerott's gaze was drawn back and forth between Marthe and the cup. "No wonder people get the wrong idea about you, you never give them a reason to take you seriously."
Marthe let out a bark of laughter and said something drily in Spanish to the others.
"Está hablando de sí mismo."
"We share the drugs because it's fun, brother. You learn something about yourself when you sit and have a quiet smoke, huh? Think about the world, or empty your mind - it's all a form of meditation. Ritual." The first man who had spoken to Jerott gestured with his own roll-up. "You learn something about yourself when you have your first cup of coffee in the morning? When you reach the bottom of a bottle of whisky?"
Jerott swallowed. He longed for the taste of alcohol. He'd been able to get hold of weak beer on the ashram, but it barely did anything for him those days. He scratched his eyebrow with his thumb and laughed uncomfortably.
"You learn something about yourself with peyote, whether it's in church or out here, with your friends," the man added. "If you're open to it, you even learn something about the world."
"Your god would speak to me?" Jerott needled, annoyed by the man's arrogant tone.
Around the circle, the Paiute men laughed and muttered.
"Unlikely," the man with the roll-up shook his head, smiling as he took a drag. "But you'll hear something speak to you."
The man who had drawn the cup took a sip, frowned, and then took a deeper draught. He passed it to the man with the roll-up.
Jerott watched the vessel approach him, and when the smooth wooden cup was in his hands, he thought about all the other mouths that had touched the rim already and pulled a face.
"What does it do?"
The Mexican next to Marthe nudged her with an elbow and said something he seemed to think was unspeakably funny. Marthe quirked a brow, looking at Jerott, and nodded agreement, a wry smile moving her lips.
Annoyed all over again by what seemed to be a joke at his expense, Jerott knocked back the biggest mouthful of the liquid he could manage and gulped it down. It tasted bitter and green and it made his stomach flip unhappily, but he swallowed the reflux that followed and passed the cup along, trying to hide his grimace behind a drag from his cigarette.
The other men chatted amicably about the day and their finds, and Jerott listened with increasing interest. Gilles had plenty of wild theories about what was in the ground here, and the more Jerott heard of them, the less he understood how the man had gained his teaching position. Gilles believed in alien civilisations that linked the ziggurats to the pyramids; lizard men who brought knowledge of irrigation techniques; dinosaurs worshipped as saints - it wasn't worth engaging with any of it. But the Paiute actually knew what the site was, how it had been used, by whom and why.
It was lucky it was interesting, because the astringent flavour of the drink had left him feeling queasy and done nothing to alter his consciousness. He gritted his teeth together against the nausea and hoped the meal he'd had a couple of hours ago stayed down. A couple of others belched and spat, and Jerott wondered if they were all feeling it - had someone in the group passed on some fast-acting stomach bug via the rim of the cup? Or was the guy with the kettle having a joke at all their expense?
Marthe seemed to know a deal about the finds, too. As she talked, Jerott saw her take something from her pocket and turn it over between her long fingers. She was sitting on the other side of the low fire and he watched her through the flames, admiring the way her features were thrown into shapely contrast by the light, the way she looked with wonder and joy at the object she held. Oh, to be looked at like that by cornflower blue eyes.
While he watched her, Marthe seemed to look up and smile at him, a beautiful, curving come hither of a smile, and Jerott blinked in surprise.
No, she was still looking at the object in her hands. Had she taken it from the site? He was meant to stop that...
The cup of peyote tea came round again and Jerott took another drink. He turned to his neighbour. "It doesn't taste any good and it's not doing anything - what's the deal?"
His neighbour seemed, momentarily, to be wearing red robes, and Jerott looked around the others in startled bewilderment. They were all sannyasins! They'd been teasing him earlier - now he saw that they all wore malas of their own and linen kaftans the colour of the fire.
His neighbour said something in reply to Jerott's complaint, but it wasn't very clear. "Your Urdu's crap, buddy," Jerott shook his head.
But he smiled beatifically when one of the sannyasins got a guitar out and another produced a small drum that rested between his knees. Jerott's fingers itched and he longed for his own instrument, but he looked down at his stiff wrist and remembered that it was encased in a block of ice and he could do nothing about that. It was frustrating, but he would just have to enjoy what the others played instead.
The playing was solid, even if Jerott knew he could do better. Someone was singing a kind of low, droning chant like they used to do after discourses in Pune, and Jerott missed the way people had twirled and whirled together in the big tent as the music played. You could crash into people, stumble, or just take someone's hand and sway, and it was all a cause for joy and laughter. The body was never lonely on an ashram - touch was free and easy and undemanding.
Jerott closed his eyes and leaned to one side and he found Francis sitting next to him: shirtless, sweaty from a long set under hot stage lights, chuckling easily at Jerott's touch. He ruffled his hair and pushed him to take his own weight again, and Jerott sat up and sighed.
On the other side of Francis, Baron Morgan and Kiaya Çalışkan leaned forwards to grin at Jerott.
Francis extended a hand: "Don't let me turn you against me."
Jerott looked dumbly down at his own hand in its ice block and shook his head apologetically. Behind him, or somewhere nearby, he heard Geetesh laughing and spun around, trying to identify where it was coming from.
It echoed around him and then disappeared, and Jerott was distracted once more by the music. Some of the sannyasins round the fire had got up to dance, and at the sight of their joy, Jerott forgot about Geetesh. He laughed and slapped his knee. The dancers were hopping and stamping their feet, shaking their hips and pumping the air with their fists. It seemed like a sacred dance - what was that one he'd read about once, the Ghost Dance? They were dancing a new reality into being. Dancing a new ashram in the desert, dancing it without Geetesh this time. It was a worthy cause for celebration, and he thought he should join in - but he didn't want to dance without a partner! He stood up, swayed for a moment as he blinked down at his own rust-orange kaftan, and looked for Marthe.
She was standing too, fixed on the other side of the fire, and she seemed to Jerott to wear something of pure white that covered her from her neck to her ankles.
Like a wedding dress, he thought in amazement, his heart beating hard enough to make him wince.
"Marthe..." He stumbled around the fire towards her and noticed her eyes widen. They were so blue. Blue like nothing else, nothing natural.
"C'mon. C'm 'nd dance..." He reached for her hand.
She was reluctant at first, a dead weight, fixed muleishly to the spot.
"C'mon. Dance!" Jerott whinged, grinning and tugging at her.
To his surprise, she relented, and he stumbled back a couple of steps, dragging her with him, bringing her close to his body.
She was in his arms, in her white dress, soft and sweet as a marshmallow. The feeling of her warmth against his made him gasp, and he tangled his arms around her waist and nuzzled her hair, nuzzled her ear with his face. He couldn't quite follow the beat of the music anymore, but he didn't think he needed to: they could make their own rhythms.
He held her close, swaying, feeling the tentative weight of her hands on his shoulders, her cheek leaning against his. He ran one hand, the one not encased in ice, around her side and up her body, ruffling cloth like he was stroking a pelt the wrong way, pushing up and over one of her breasts until he reached her collar. He drew back to look at her, wanting to confirm the same need he felt in her expression, but her face was an alabaster mask, hard and trepidatious.
"I love you," Jerott heard his voice slur. He hooked his fingers in the high neck of her collar. There were pearl buttons down the front, rounded like drops of fresh dew, and he imagined them firing off in all directions, ejaculated from the cloth as he tugged the dress open down the seam.
Her throat was white silk and the dress was white silk - but what was underneath? He was hungry and he needed to know.
Jerott tightened his grip and gave a brief yank so that cloth opened up, revealing her throat and the ends of her collarbones. It was as he'd thought: pure white drifts of skin like vanilla ice cream. He bent his head to kiss the v at he base of her throat.
"I love you," he repeated. "Not...anybody else. Just you. Ok?"
Marthe's body was a knot of furious muscle now, not swaying with him in the dance, not reciprocating - barely breathing, despite all the ways he tried to show her he loved her. But she patted at the newly plunging neckline of her clothes and kept an arm around him. "Ok. Why don't we go back to your tent then?"
Jerott's brows rose and he pulled his head back to look at her. He had to blink a little to bring her expression into focus, but she looked sultry and inviting and bit her lip for good measure.
He led them away from the campfire, leaving behind the dancing and the music. At his tent he couldn't wait to get inside with her but, first, gave in to the building need for touch - to feel body heat and the softness of a woman beneath his hands. He pawed at the front of her clothes again and more buttons gave way. He could feel the cotton of her bra over her sternum, under his fingers. A small movement one way or the other brought him into contact with flesh that gave at his touch, plump and so very separate from his own physical existence. He moaned and kissed her neck.
"I don't love anyone else, do I, Marthe? Just you. D'you not love me?"
She pushed him back, down, and he shuffled awkwardly inside the tent, trusting that she would follow.
And follow she did, but as his hands reached for her and he sought to kiss her lips, and found himself arrested by a sharp pain in the ribs.
Jerott sat back on his own bedroll and grunted, looking at the stick being jabbed against him with confusion.
"Whass this?" he mumbled.
"It's your own toy, provided by Gilles," Marthe told him, though her voice sounded distant, like she was speaking from the other side of a thick membrane that lay between them.
He frowned and grasped the prod, intending to sweep it aside and drag her close again.
Instead, Marthe increased the pressure of the tip against his body and activated the current.
Jerott fell back like he'd been kicked by an elephant, his whole body suddenly thundering with pain. He twitched and juddered against the floor of the tent, his body as helpless as that of a landed catch on a riverbank. It felt like a hot drill against his side, where the prod was in contact with him, and he thought he smelled his clothes scorch. Marthe's hand was over his mouth, silencing his screams, and it took him a moment to realise when she'd removed the picana from his skin.
He blinked and felt liquid on his face - sweat, blood or tears, he didn't know which. His heart was racing now, and his vision was blurred. He wasn't certain it was Marthe...he flinched and took a swipe at the prod as he thought that maybe he'd been mistaken and it was Geetesh kneeing over him in his own bed, poised to strike another blow.
Marthe didn't let him knock the picana aside though, and she dipped it to his skin again, pressing the tip into the flesh just above Jerott's collarbone - close to the area where he'd been kissing her only a moment ago.
A choking sound escaped him before her palm slapped down over his mouth again, and he felt white hot pain in every bone of his body. The only thing it could be compared with was the shock and agony of trapping a fingertip in a heavy door - only it was his whole body that was trapped beneath the crackling demand barked by the picana, and this time Marthe wasn't going to let up until he lost consciousness.
It was easier, Jerott's exhausted body conceded, to do as she told him to.
#whumptober#whumptober2022#band au: pawn in frankincense#character: jerott blyth#character: marthe#character: pierre gilles#every day i write the book
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