#character: archie abernethy

[theartistknownaslymond]

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.

---

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

[notasapleasure]

Into the cockatrice den

[Jean Calvin: Gart der Gesundheit. Straßburg 1536]

Characters: Jerott Blyth, Danny Hislop, Jean Parisot de la Valette, Pierre Belon, Archie Abernethy, Francis Crawford, Philippa Somerville, assorted Crawford children, and one apparently unnamed mongoose

Relationships: Jerott & Danny, Jerott & Francis, Philippa/Francis

Rating: G (some description of battle aftermath and injuries)

Wordcount: 7,248

Set post-Checkmate, but I think it avoids spoilers.

The port of Palermo was much as Jerott Blyth remembered it. The blue of the sea and the sky were dazzling, blurring into the dry buff brown of the mountains surrounding the bay. The sun was warm on his closed eyelids and upturned face, and a fair breeze carried the scent of salt and tar, worked wood and the piquant notes of passing goods: fish and spices, raw silk and worked leather. If he emptied his mind of thoughts of the journey behind, and the one still ahead, he could almost recall what it felt like to be a man of not yet twenty years, thrilled to deep seriousness by the weight of his mission to become a knight.

He stood by the busy water's edge, stubborn enough that the stevedores and merchants moved around his planted feet and folded arms. He had not yet regained the uniform of the hospitallers, but his bearing was familiar to the dock workers. They let him wait where he chose while the ship's cargoes were exchanged for the final part of the voyage to Malta.

Jerott opened his eyes to smile at the twinkling sea and turned, intended to wring some compliment from the wry mouth of Danny Hislop.

His tall, sun-reddened travelling companion was still absent, however. Danny had not been to Palermo before, and had taken himself off to see more of the town. Jerott scowled at the streets overshadowed by Mount Pellegrino, at the gaps between classical columns and houses in the square, white-washed local style. No spruce of strawberry blond curls caught the breeze or the light above the darker-skinned crowds, no lilting, mocking Scots voice powered through the rumble of mercantile activity.

He would have closed his eyes again and turned his face back into the salty air, but his attention was arrested by a man in strange headgear and fine clothes, who was approaching him with a degree of intent. The man carried a woven willow receptacle and a well-travelled leather satchel. There was grime on his hands and a stern, piercing expression in his eyes, though his dress was expensive and its style spoke of vanity. He had a square and well-trimmed beard, red hose that matched the curious folds of the cap perched upon his head, and yet the cuffs of his sleeves were not as white as they might once have been, and revealed brown stains, the origin of which Jerott suddenly, with certainty, feared he could guess.

"Jerott Blyth?" The man gestured with the hand not holding the basket. "My name is Belon," he introduced himself in Latin, and Jerott's heart sank.

He shook the hand of Pierre Belon, who was undoubtedly a scholar, and undoubtedly involved in the dissection of any beast fool enough to allow him to capture it and reduce it to its constituent parts - to be rendered into academic Latin for the ready consumption of the intelligentsia.

Jerott took a breath and cut off Belon before he could explain his errand. "I told Gilles I was not interested. I was sorry to hear of his death, and I don't know what he told you of me, but I am not available for transcription."

Belon's dark brows arched and he fixed Jerott with a gaze as sharp as a scalpel. "I have no need of transcription, Mr Blyth," Belon emphasised Jerott's civilian title. "I am here on behalf of Antonio Gilles. He heard you were returning to this latitude and saw an opportunity to fulfill one of his uncle's more...personal requests." Belon smiled crookedly.

He reached for his satchel with a free hand and proffered the wicker basket to Jerott by its handle, his expression a wordless request for polite assistance.

Jerott took it and frowned at its weight. Before he could tell what was within, Belon retrieved a sealed packet from his satchel and handed it to Jerott, but he did not offer to take the basket back.

Belon ignored Jerott's glare and stared out at the sea, a predatory glint in his eye.

"The whales, do you see? They follow the fishermen in."

Jerott turned his head with reluctance. He assumed it was Gilles's seal on the letter, but opening it one-handed in the breeze was not simple.

Belon sighed. "I should like to examine one, though I have not yet come across a fresh enough specimen. Petrus taught me the importance of quick work," he glanced at Jerott and the letter expectantly. "So much has been lost, but Antonio and I will publish what we can in his honour. He saw many remarkable things."

This last part was spoken leadingly, as though Belon hoped that Jerott might describe to him the path that Gilles had found to the old Byzantine world beneath Stamboul's new glory. As though stories of its destruction by fire and by flood had been grossly exaggerated in order to protect the treasures hidden there. Jerott surveyed the academic twinkle in Belon's eye and elected to ignore it, snapping open the seal with his thumb instead.

To Jerott Blyth, my amanuensis in extremis -

I expect that by the time this letter reaches you, you will have seen that you chose poorly, and ought to have returned to Italy with me instead of attempting to tame the cockatrice.

When you live among the untrustworthy beasts you must value loyalty above all. He will remember you, and he will stand by you. He may live a decade beyond me, if you show him kindness and keep him from your wife.

I shall commend you to the Lord and ask that he aid you with your Latin.

Petrus Gyllius

Rome, June 1555

Jerott's throat tightened at the letter's tone. Gilles had died before Marthe, and would not have known that Jerott had all but left her by then in any case. But the flippant savagery still recalled the worst hurts she had done - and it mocked all of Jerott's attempts to forget the worst in the wake of her death. He read it again, and in that moment hated both of them, Gilles and Marthe, and what they had done to his life.

He wished Belon did not stare at him with such expectation. The man was not a servant or an errand boy, and Jerott felt disinclined to exchange pleasantries about a time that he still thought of with hurt and confusion. He shrugged at the letter.

"'He'? Who is he? You? Is this Gilles's idea of a joke?"

Belon blinked and patted the wicker cage. It wobbled unevenly as something shifted its weight within. "No joke, Mr Blyth. The letter refers to the creature inside the basket, not to me."

Belon stepped back. "My errand is done! Antonio will be so pleased to know you have taken him. I don't believe they ever saw eye to eye in the way he and Pierre did, but you are perhaps more on a level with him."

Jerott blinked at the stab of venom in the little man's voice and watched as Belon slipped away into the busy crowds.

He raised the basket to eye level and peered between its weave. A familiar, musky scent reached him and then the basket's weight shifted towards him and a pair of yellow eyes glinted. A wet black nose pressed against the wicker and long, fierce fangs were bared as the ichneumon sought to bite its way free of the cage.

-

"Go," Jerott crouched by the basket, its door open to the rat-infested back streets of Palermo.

The ichneumon's triangular face protruded, its ears flat to its silken fur. It glanced up at Jerott but it did not leave the basket.

"All right, then stay there," Jerott hissed at it, knowing the conversation was ridiculous, but driven to it by a growing anger at Gilles' gesture. He stood and glared down at the animal, reminded all over again of that nightmarish journey from Aleppo. If the creature did remember him - which he strongly doubted - it ought to remember that his sword was sharp and heavy, and he did not have the patience of the ichneumon's accustomed master. He had certainly told Gilles that he never again wanted to hear or smell the massacre of rodentia by his bedside in the night.

The ichneumon took a couple of steps out of the basket, still looking up at Jerott. Its fur rippled as it moved: grey and brown and black framing the devilish yellow eyes.

Jerott shooed it and it did not even blink at the gesture.

"Hullo Maeve, we're at the back alley transactions again already?"

Danny Hislop leaned his long form against the dwelling at the mouth of the alley and smiled angelically at Jerott and the ichneumon. "She's a fair one, but I think she's out of your budget, Jerott."

Jerott sighed, turned from the basket and the animal, and shouldered his way roughly past Danny.

"Why yes, apparently she - I'm sorry, sir - he thinks you still owe him something."

Turning amid the bustle of the docks, Jerott stared back at Danny. "What are you talking about?" His black brows were drawn in a furious frown, he shook his head in disgusted exasperation. The shallow reserves of his forbearance were already exhausted by the letter and the interaction with Belon, and Danny's playfully monotonous mind held no relief for him.

Danny, nonplussed, pointed at the ground between them.

The ichneumon had emerged from the alley, and paused with its nose to the air and its long, whip-like tail held up behind it. The preoccupied people who buffeted Jerott as they went past at their business did not look at their feet, and would not easily have spotted the dusty brown mongoose against the dusty brown ground.

It skipped a few paces this way and that to avoid heavy boots, the inquiring snouts of pigs passing by, and trundling, hand-pulled carts.

Jerott, despite all that he had seen of violence in his life, felt his stomach flip guiltily: he did not want to witness the creature be crushed before his very eyes. He took a step back in its direction and grunted as a man bent double beneath fathoms of folded cloth knocked into him.

"Hey!"

Jerott swore after the man and bent to the ichneumon, making shooing gestures. "Go on! Get out of here."

It danced aside as Jerott was buffeted again, and he extended a boot, thinking to nudge the creature in the direction of the quiet edge of the street. The ichneumon saw the gesture in a somewhat different light and accepted it readily, clambering up Jerott's foot and hose, hooking its claws in silk and wool and scaling him like he was a hawthorn tree.

Cursing and trying to avoid the people around him, Jerott struggled to return to Danny in the alley's mouth, with the ichneumon now precariously perched on one of his broad shoulders.

Danny was standing, fully supported by the wall, his arms tight across his chest, his eyes screwed shut and mouth wide with noiseless mirth. His cheeks were red from sun and laughter, and his curls shook on his freckled forehead.

"I don't know where you got that thing from, but you must keep it. For my sake," he gasped between gulping breaths.

Jerott reached for the ichneumon on his shoulder and it moved behind his head, coiling its tail around his throat. Its claws gripped his clothes ferociously and it stuck a curious nose into his hair. Any attempt to move it would result in ripping and scratching. Jerott sighed and instead tried to pluck its tail away from his chin. He succeeded only in making the ichneumon draw closer.

The ship ought to have been readied for the next leg of the journey, and they turned into the flow of people passing, not fighting it this time, but negotiating its currents until they came to the boarding ramp.

Jerott still declined to explain the creature, and the Captain did not ask, so Danny followed him on board with his customary aspect of jovial inquisition. The animal was a pretty little thing, he thought, and seemed the perfect outward expression of Jerott Blyth's farcically serious contradictions.

"The must-have Italian accessory," Danny stroked its fur speculatively with the back of one finger. "What are the sumptuary laws on Malta?"

"Irrelevant. It's staying on this ship or it's going in the sea," Jerott muttered, plucking again at the tail forming a choke-hold on his neck.

-

"So they swim? What did you say it was again?"

Jerott looked down at the bedraggled creature standing at his heel on the white stone of Birgu. The ichneumon shook itself and its particoloured fur stood up in dark spikes. It blinked round yellow eyes at him and then sat to groom itself while the rest of the party stood still about it.

"It's an ichneumon," Jerott said hollowly. "It belonged to a scientist called Gilles, who I met...I met in Aleppo."

Danny allowed a shadow of thoughtfulness to pass over his expression. "When you were searching for the child of our Sweet Commander?"

Jerott glared at him sourly. "Yes." The creature had swum from the boat and struggled up mossy steps. It seemed blithe, but its flanks moved quickly with its breath, and he supposed it must be hungry. He bent to scoop it up and, ignoring Danny's raised brows and delighted smile, tucked it into his satchel.

"So," Danny swung his arms as he walked and squinted up at the grim aspect of the fortified town. "The ichneumon follows you like we follow Francis. Are we mere beasts, or is the animal more noble of intent than we can possibly know?"

Beneath the familiar walls and towers Jerott was already caught in a swirl of nostalgia and nausea whipped together. He gripped Danny's arm and stopped him. "Please. Enough," his breathing was heavy and his hold on Danny was tight. He was confused by the smell of wet musk and the protectiveness he had not meant to feel towards the ichneumon in his bag. He was beset by memories of Gabriel and of Lymond, of his own grief on his first journey to the island, and of how strange and straightforward that mourning seemed to him now. "Please."

Danny reached across his own chest to cover Jerott's hand with his. His pale eyes, behind their near-white lashes, relented and showed some care. "Do you want to go on alone? I can find my way around the town and its walls myself, and meet you at the hostel later."

Jerott nodded, silent with gratitude and the hard lump of emotion at his throat. He turned and walked up the familiar angle of the slope, feeling his calves pull and his thighs work in ways they had once learned not to, when the road had been familiar. The bag at his side vibrated and shifted as the animal inside cleaned its fur and rubbed itself dry on his belongings. Jerott slipped a hand inside the satchel, stroked the ichneumon, and took comfort from the sensation.

-

The meeting with de la Valette had gone about as well as he could have hoped. The assumptions that had been made about him were put more delicately than they had been by Leone Strozzi, and Jerott had managed to assert that if he had sinned in thought or in deed he would openly and willingly unburden himself during confession. He had made no promises he did not think he could keep, and he had admitted his lack of imagination in returning to familiar haunts with as much good grace as de la Valette's sharp questions allowed him.

When the ichneumon had intruded, sniffing with interest at the sweetmeats and grapes on the Grand Master's desk, Jerott had been surprised to find the pressure of examination ease. De la Valette's ample brows rose and he stroked his moustache thoughtfully. "And you carry about your person the slayer of basiliks?"

Jerott gathered the wandering animal and tried to return it to his satchel. Failing, he settled with it held on his lap, his two hands wrapped gently around its small, shivering form. "I apologise. It was left to me by a friend. I intended to release it on the harbour front."

"Your friend left you a gift, and you would abandon it on the docks?"

Jerott looked at the ichneumon in bafflement, then up at the Grand Master's inscrutable expression. "It's just an animal."

"Why is it in your bag?"

He blinked, and tried to formulate a response that did not sound insane. "I left it on the ship, but it swam," Jerott swallowed when he looked up at de la Valette. He was empty of explanation.

The Grand Master let out a puff of breath, a French expression of equanimity on his poised lips. He instructed Jerott to keep the creature, as the rats had been emboldened since the tornado some summers past.

-

Jerott sat in the mottled shade behind a small and quiet hostel, feeding the ichneumon morsels from his plate, holding out grapes and dried fruit on his hand for the animal to take. It quivered nose to tail as it ate, its four black feet planted on the scrubbed table top.

What was he to do with this creature? He couldn't take de la Valette at his word, surely? Gilles may have imagined the ichneumon in a merchant-house in Lyons, getting under Marthe's feet and hunting mice in the stores, but Jerott was returning to a different life altogether. Ten years, Gilles had said! Jerott had no idea whether he himself would see ten more years fighting here.

Although he resented any duty of care towards it he found that watching it still made him smile. It reminded him of the fondness with which the old scientist had held him - despite Jerott's enduring foulness of mood at the time. And when it wasn't eating rats at his bedside it had a certain charm that he could not deny.

Without a shred of self-consciousness, he laughed at the feeling of the ichneumon's teeth grazing his skin and at the exaggerated manner of its chewing: its eyes screwed shut and its whiskers protruded at many angles. It licked his palm when it had consumed what he had held forth and then looked about it with the expectation of more.

Jerott stroked his hand down the animal's long back and felt its muscles move beneath, its small shoulders shrugging at the pressure. It licked its lips and gazed at Danny as he sat down, in a way that Danny pronounced to be thoroughly unnerving.

"Do you suppose it thinks I'm the next course?"

"I'd never call you a rat, Danny," Jerott folded his arms and leaned back in his seat. The ichneumon proceeded to filch the crumbs from the table and to lick Jerott's empty platter.

"And yet, I feel I have already been replaced in your affections by this beast," Danny sniffed. He unfurled a tentative arm and prodded the ichneumon with his fingertips. He retreated swiftly when it revealed its needle sharp teeth, but the threatening gesture turned into a wide yawn.

The ichneumon scratched its ear with a hind paw and hopped down from the table to examine the floor for additional leftovers.

"He does smell better than you."

"That is a vile slander," Danny gazed hopefully at the door of the hostel. "I wash my skin with rosewater and oil of lavender at least once a year. The madame of the finest bawdy house in the Lowlands said she'd never encountered a man of such angelic fragrance as myself. Look - are you going to call me some food or do I have to find my own?"

Jerott glanced at the ichneumon as it scuttled about in the shade, but stood and feigned indifference to its activities. "Maybe it will be gone by the time I'm back," he said in an uncertain tone as he pushed the door to the hostel and disappeared within.

-

The ichneumon became a fixture of his life before Jerott even knew what life on Malta was to him then. It would take time for the island to feel like home. For months he remained ill at ease within the city walls, expectant of meeting the imposing form of Graham Reid Malett in every street and building. He did not wear the uniform of a knight, having deferred his vows, and he boarded with Danny in civilian lodgings - the owner of the hostel was adamant that the ichneumon kept his house free of evil as well as lizards.

In the hostel, Jerott's cot was close to the window, and he had grown unused to the bright Mediterranean sky: it was filled with stars that would have been obscured by Scottish or French cloud. He lay awake, sometimes longing for wine, sometimes for Marthe, sometimes for other things he did not dare examine. Whatever kept him from relaxing, the ichneumon curled blissfully on his belly or against his shoulder and neck. It enjoyed the feeling of his hand running over and over its soft fur, his fingers absent-mindedly probing beneath the top layer to scratch at its under coat. It rolled against him, revealing its warm abdomen for him to ruffle or rubbing its chin against his chest in contentment.

It learned, through being shut out of the room on a number of nights, that midnight feasts were for the corridors - not for the underside of Jerott's bed.

With enough time, with enough sightings of the black-haired officer riding the streets of Birgu with his familiar, Jerott ceased to be known as the man who had been most under the sway of Graham Reid Malett. The knights stopped talking only in terms of the faithless romantic who had cast aside his vows in order to pursue a mercenary and his bastard child into the very jaws of the Turk. They no longer mentioned his marriage and the mercantile years spent in Lyons. Jerott Blyth was content to become simply le Chevalier au Mangouste.

Those who spent their lives between prayer and war were inclined to superstition and the adoption of mascots and heralds. The ichneumon was welcomed as their little warrior, to be put to use where snakes, mice or any other infestation needed to be rooted out. The ichneumon was neat and brave and loyal, just as a servant of the Lord ought to be. If it was guilty of the sin of gluttony, well, the knights were happy for it to gorge itself on the city's pests; if it succumbed to sloth, at least it was always charming, whether curled in a cross-patterned cloak or cradled in the unlaced front of Jerott's doublet.

It was not difficult to accommodate the ichneumon in his life. By and large it ate what he ate - and caught any supplements it desired. Jerott did not call it to his side, it simply chose to follow him and climb aboard his back and shoulders. He did not name it, he did not speak of it or to it. It did not care if he conversed with it or claimed it by a title: it was a mercenary beast, and in that he thought he recognised himself.

-

Danny Hislop walked gingerly down corridors lined with bodies - many of which were ominously still. The sound of the place was deafening, like a looming storm moaning in the ginnels and backstreets of a town; Aeolus trapped inside the sturdy square walls erected by the Order of St John.

Now and then he paused, and reminded himself that the floor was steady, it was only his legs that thought he was still at sea. The injured and the dying, borne away from the carnage off the coast of Djerba, seemed to him to cluster against the hospital walls like debris tossed on the foam. They smelled of the sea still, beneath the tang of iron and the sweet smoke from censers hung above the doorways.

Danny did not bother calling his friend's name. Some of the feverish, failing men at his feet would have answered to anything just to take a moment of comfort. Instead he followed the creature he had loosed into this maelstrom, which moved slowly, trotting in zigzags from body to body.

The ichneumon sniffed at blood and sweat, its ears pressed firmly back against its head and its tail held still and high. In quieter parts of the hospital it stopped and looked back at Danny, and Danny could not believe that he really saw accusation in its features - but he did believe he deserved to see it. It led him, inevitably, to the high-ceilinged main ward, where rows of soldiers lay on cots raised from the cold ground, their groaning and shouts of pain more urgent than that of the men in the corridors.

Danny grimaced at the entrance until a physician shoved him aside. The smell of blood was stronger, clearer in here: it did not smell like a battlefield at all to him because the underlying notes of dust and mud were missing, replaced by the false promise of astringent herbs and perfumed steam. He lost sight of the ichneumon as his eyes roved over injury after injury, white cloth stained every shade of red.

A ruckus began every few minutes, when a reluctant patient had to be relieved of a malignant limb, or an embedded piece of exploded ship or canon shot. It took Danny a while to notice that one disturbance was of a different nature: several monks shouted at once instead of the man on the bed they surrounded. Their arms raised to the air, one brandished a reddened blade.

"Begone, pestilential beast!"

Danny burst into their circle with hope on his face, shoving the physicians aside.

On the disordered and crumpled linen lay a man with a great deal of bandage on his thigh. Red, bright and clean as poppies, spotted the clean binding already, but all four of his limbs were still attached to his body. His hair was black on the pillow, dry from sea salt and invisibly stained by the soot that covered his brow and cheeks. His eyes were closed and his expression was not quite comfortable, but around his neck coiled the tail of an ichneumon, and its body lay by his head on the pillow so that it could groom his hairline fastidiously.

The ichneumon's long pink tongue lapped at the grime and sweat on Jerott's temple, and his pained expression warred with a smile, and his hand groped weakly for the animal's soft fur.

A monk reached for the creature, intending to remove it, and Danny swatted him back. He positioned himself at Jerott's bedside and gestured to the other men to return to their business.

"Reinforcements have arrived, lads. Go and see to someone who needs you more - the ichneumon and I have this under control."

Jerott cracked open one dark eye with painful effort. His laugh was dry and near-soundless, but it made Danny smile goofily in return.

"Good. I was worried you'd leave the bloody creature to me next."

"Other way around," Jerott croaked. "He'd be looking after you."

-

The high seas did not appear to agree with the ichneumon. Jerott had looked forward to the journey: the cold mist of the Atlantic had become a subject for nostalgia, and he felt spoiled by the lapis blue of the Mediterranean - a sea somehow less real than the iron-cold northern waters of his youth.

On board, he had remembered his reasons for travel, and had repented and cursed himself before they were even a day's sail from Gibraltar. There was no Danny to make him certain of his conviction to go back to Scotland, for Danny had travelled overland on business of his own (a matter of payment owed to a former mistress - Danny had left with an uncharacteristically chastened appearance). Instead there was just the wide grey sea and the autumnal mist, and an ichneumon that had lost its once prodigious appetite for ships' rats.

There was no one to admit it to, and he would not have done so anyway, but Jerott was both glad of the distraction from his own worries and deeply fearful for the creature that had been his companion - now for several long years. The ichneumon would not eat and so lacked energy. Its fur, usually soft as silk beneath the long, striped quills of its overcoat, grew brittle and its skin flaked drily when his fingers disturbed it. Its black shiny nose was dull and warm, and it wanted to do little other than sleep inside the unlaced front of Jerott's doublet.

It drank water from Jerott's fingertips, licking the drops without its usual completist precision, and, at some persuasion, he managed to see it take a few stringy pieces of cooked chicken, perhaps once a day.

The other men on the ship watched these activities with combined pity and awe, and a good measure of bemused merriment. To them, Jerott was strange and serious traveller with a quick temper towards other men, but seemingly endless patience for the sickly animal he carried - tested, he proved able to use both dagger and fists remarkably effectively, even with one hand protecting the bundle in his doublet and the stiffness of an old wound carried in his leg. The sailors and travellers on board understood then that this entertainment was too dear for their liking. They left the man and his mongoose to their own peace, and amused themselves instead by offering strange morsels of food to try and tempt the creature to eat.

Jerott watched familar coastlines drift past, and listened to the gulls and the endless, restless sea. He warmed one hand against the animal asleep in his clothes and his mind stumbled accidentally into the realisation of his gratitude to Gilles. The old man had recognised, on some level, what it was that Jerott needed and struggled for.

The ichneumon trusted him because it did not know not to. It made him responsible for its well-being because he would not be responsible for harm that came to it. He could not say its affection was unconditional - Jerott fed the creature and provided warmth on clear winter nights - but it was simple. Simply won and simply held, a balm for the soul provided by a creature that was not supposed to possess one.

-

"Is the leg still bad?" Archie Abernethy gestured to Jerott's careful movement as he took the pack he was handed from the ship's side.

Jerott disembarked with a shake of his head and peeled the open collar of his doublet back a little. "No. Yes - sometimes. It's this, though. If anyone in Scotland knows what's wrong with it, it must be you?"

Archie's beetle-black eyes glittered and his forehead furrowed as he leaned over to peer inside Jerott's clothing. His brows shot up and he gave Jerott a look of awed curiosity.

"Where did ye get that?"

Jerott's nose twitched and he grimaced with guilt. "It belonged to Gilles. He left it to me."

Archie nodded slowly. "Aye, did he? Pierre Gilles left you his ichneumon?"

"I suppose I did help him dissect a giraffe," Jerott shrugged apologetically.

"There's no call for boasting," Archie clucked and reached an enquiring hand out. Jerott drew the ichneumon from his doublet, its body coiled and shaking and much lighter than it had been.

Jerott tried not to flinch as he watched Archie's worn brown hands pull back the animal's lips, poke at its eyes and ears and pluck at its fur. He answered the questions he was asked, worrying about not providing enough, or the correct information - when ill or injured he knew his own body with absolute certainty, but what did he know of this animal's feeling?

The smile Archie gave him was encouraging, though. "It sounds to me like ye've been doing a fine job of nursing it yersel' or it wouldna have got this far. I've something I reckon might help the infection. Keep him where he was in the meantime."

Jerott replaced the ichneumon inside his clothes and mounted the horse Archie had brought him. It was a crisp, sunny day, the best of Scottish autumn and a perfect time for travelling. The low sun lent the hills and yellow-leaved trees the colours of precious metal, and the heady, comforting scent of wood-smoke travelled far on the breeze. Within Jerott's doublet, the ichneumon was, for the first time in days, roused to curiosity, and sampled the air with the tip of its nose.

-

Bemused by the chatter and the attention, distracted from the rich broth he had been given by the mug of heather beer he kept trying to sample, prevented from this by one questioning voice or another, Jerott had never felt more like a conquering hero than he did in the vaulted stone room at St Mary's.

Philippa Crawford, mistress of the house, sat at the table with him in intermittent bursts, her laughter quick, her interest lively, and her attention always simultaneously held in three other places. She was radiant in silks of russet and marigold, arrayed in rubies and amber that flashed reflections from the fire each time she moved. Frequently, mid-sentence (hers or Jerott's), she would spring to her feet and fuss with the hearth or the oven or one of the children arrayed at their feet.

The eldest, Diccon, had a book and a whistle in his lap and an expression thirsty with curiosity. A daughter, Sibyl, sat serious and silent with her own well-pawed tome, staring at Jerott in an uncertain manner, and the youngest, a dark-haired lad called Gideon, held himself on wobbling legs, his small hands securing him upright, one on the table's edge and the other on Jerott's knee.

The child's fist gripped the wool of Jerott's britches, but he did not dare to reach out to the animal lying so close. The ichneumon wore the aspect of one enjoying complete relaxation: it stretched long over Jerott's two thighs, its forepaws thrust before it to either side of its resting chin. It yawned often in the heat from the hearth and twitched its ears at the children's voices. Archie's cure had been quick to work, and though the animal was still lighter than it had been, it had recovered its gloss and its personality.

When the heavy oak door behind Jerott opened with a fresh gust of air, the room itself seemed to draw an expectant breath. Three young voices squealed with delight, and the ichneumon raised its head and fluffed up its considerable coat of fur. Jerott twisted in his chair and Philippa reddened with pleasure at the sight of her husband.

Francis Crawford was beaming from ear to ear, his cheeks spotted with a healthy pink the colour of dog roses, the ripe corn silk of his hair disarrayed by the cap he had just removed, and his blue eyes bestowing glee on all those they settled on.

Jerott's heart descended into his stomach then seemed to leap to his throat with equal rapidity. His legs tensed on the instinct to stand and the ichneumon dug its claws into him in anticipation of movement.

Francis's smile shifted from the general to the personal, and he laid a gloved hand on Jerott's shoulder as he stepped inside the room.

"Stay, stay. I would not disturb you or the valiant Herpestes."

Jerott gawped up at him, then stroked the ichneumon climbing to his shoulder out of absent-minded habit. "Herpestes?"

Of course Francis had remembered the bloody thing's name and Jerott had not, though Jerott had travelled alongside it for weeks and Francis had encountered it but once.

"Is that its name, Jerott?" Diccon asked, with every echo of his father's wit; with his mother's steady brown eyes, owlish beneath the perfect golden curls of his fringe.

Jerott stared at Francis, who shrugged as though to say this was a problem Jerott ought to have anticipated. He pulled his gloves off and set them down before hoisting Gideon into his arms and bending to bring his due kisses to Philippa's cheek and lips.

"It doesn't have a name," Jerott told Diccon. It might as well be true - he had not used Gilles's name for it over the past years and did not intend to begin doing so now. It made him feel uneasy, as though he would finally be sealing a contract with the old man - admitting to all of his mistakes and Marthe's.

Indeed, naming the beast anything at all felt like it would be an admission of what it had come to mean to him. Jerott was decidedly uncertain that he wanted to make such an admission.

But the boy's expression spoke of his distaste, his soft brow dimpling in a frown. Diccon did not articulate his judgement aloud and simply turned to his book.

His little brother had fewer compunctions. Gideon removed a sticky fist from his mouth and clamped it on his father's fine velvet doublet. "It must have a name!" he exclaimed.

"Must it?" Jerott winced.

Philippa smiled and offered him no reprieve. "Oh, absolutely. How else would you tell your ichneumon from all the others?"

Imperceptibly, with the return of Francis, Jerott felt that the tide of the conversation had turned. He was trapped on the shore, uncertain and cut off from safety.

"I don't believe they are as commonplace as cats..."

Diccon tutted and looked up from his book. "You must have a name for him!"

Francis hid his broadening smile in Gideon's hair, dandling him lightly in his arms. He glanced down at Philippa, whose own expression was as satisfied as that of a hearth cat.

Jerott was quite unused to being lectured to by the under tens, and met Diccon's eyes with helpless silence. At last, the little girl rose from her seat on the woven carpet. She checked something in her book, and Jerott realised with a strange thrill of horror that it was written in looping Arabic script.

Sibyl approached him with features he dimly remembered: she was the very image of Francis's little sister, Eloise. Her cornflower blue eyes sparkled as though she knew some private joke none of the others understood, and her smock was stained with ink and vermillion. She raised her hand to stroke the ichneumon, and Jerott brought it down from his shoulder for her to reach. It curled in his big hands, its long whip tail arcing around his forearm, and it sniffed at the air as her hand descended to it.

After a moment's contemplation, Sibyl leaned close to the creature with her hand cupped to her ear. She looked up at Jerott and said decisively: "He says his name is Bulukiya."

It was a name from one of the fireside legends they liked to tell along the Moorish coasts, in Berber huts and in opulent seraglios. Jerott had never expected it to be a name he heard on the lips of a Scottish child.

"I don't think..." He began, wary of the assertive tilt to Sibyl's chin.

"Now, children," Francis intervened smilingly, hoisting Gideon higher and pacing before the fire. "Have you forgotten the story of the cockatrice? What is the mongoose famous for?"

"Fighting the basilisk!"

"He should be called Herakles!"

"No, Fráech is the braver!"

Francis laughed at Gideon's protesting tone.

"Gluaiseas Fraoch, b’e fear an áigh

Bhuain a shnámh air an loch

Fhuair a’ phéist is i ’na suain

Is a ceann suas ris an dos."

"It doesn't have a happy ending though, does it, son?" He touched his nose to Gideon's before glancing down at Diccon and Sibyl.

"Children, have you not omitted the most evident of examples? Frustra fit per plura, quod potest fieri per pauciora."

Diccon turned his affronted frown on his father. "But Da, you said if the answer was simple enough that every man in the room reached for it, it was either a royal decree or full crafty conspiracion."

Philippa grinned at Francis's exaggerated expression of astonishment. "Treachery! My own flesh and blood! Quoting me at myself!"

"I should say the naming of an ichneumon requires a royal decree, or the nearest this household can get to one," Philippa, standing, took Gideon from Francis's arms and snuggled against him.

"Conspiracy it is, then," Francis shrugged at Jerott, who remained sitting at the centre of this linguistic whirlwind, the beast under discussion still wriggling in his hold as Sibyl stroked it and chuckled.

While Francis and Philippa questioned Diccon on which of the feats of Herakles was the best, Sibyl took a step closer to lean against Jerott's leg. She looked up at him and pinned him beneath all the gravity that a five-year-old could muster.

"Mr Blyth," she said very quietly. Jerott offered her a smile that he hoped was reassuring. "He should be called George. I think I misheard him when he told me it was Bulukiya earlier."

"George?" Jerott repeated, his smile turning crooked and broad. "Isn't that a bit English?"

Sibyl blinked regally and raised her chin. "Da's always meeting with the English, I don't see why that's a problem."

Jerott's laughter was immediate and delighted, and caught Francis's attention.

"What lies are these?"

Philippa released the struggling Gideon, who raced back to Jerott's side now that his sister had proved the ichneumon and its owner friendly. Philippa wrung her hands briefly in the silk folds of her skirts and looked as fondly worried as Kate Somerville had done over the wreckage of a precious sapphire brooch.

"Oh Sibyl, we must have a chat about the sacrosanctity of the secret services."

Sibyl paused to parse this and shook her head. "No, Mummy, he can't be a Saint, he's an ichneumon."

With determination, she pulled herself up into Jerott's lap and he moved the ichneumon back to his shoulder so that Gideon could sit on his other knee.

Sibyl curled against his chest without further preamble. "Unless you say he is, Mr Blyth?"

The ichneumon sniffed at the children's heads and settled against the back of Jerott's neck. Jerott gave the question a moment's more thought than he had meant to.

"I, no. After all, he's not a martyr, and he is definitely not an ascetic."

"George the ichneumon may prove to be a mystic of the highest order. Let's not rule it out," Francis smiled toothily down at Jerott, stroked the heads of George, Gideon and Sibyl, and even, given Jerott's full hands, got away with a gentle chuck beneath his friend's chin.

Jerott laughed.

"George. Gilles would hate it. But it suits him."

Francis let him rearrange the children on his knees and then handed Jerott the mug of ale that stood abandoned on the table. With a dull clink of pewter on pewter, he touched it with his own drink. "He is as he is because of you, Jerott. A credit to your pastoral care."

"I think," said Jerott carefully "That George has been the one to take care of me."

The look bestowed on him was one such as he had always craved: recognition and regard, pleasure and pride. Francis made a subtle sound of assent, and met Jerott's eyes with understanding.

#lymond #my fic #my writing #post-checkmate #fluff #otp: kindness for jerott blyth

[ao3feed-rumbelle]

The Treaty of Abernethy (Rumbelled)

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/3mDU5lq

by beastlycheese

A historical reconstruction of The Treaty of Abernethy 1072, Rumbelled.

This is a Rumbelle Secret Santa gift for @reolf

Words: 4218, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: Once Upon a Time (TV)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Categories: F/M, Multi

Characters: Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold, Belle (Once Upon a Time), Emma Swan, Baelfire | Neal Cassidy, Red Riding Hood | Ruby, Merida (Once Upon a Time), Jiminy Cricket | Archie Hopper

Relationships: Belle/Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold, Belle & Rumplestiltskin | Mr. Gold, Baelfire | Neal Cassidy/Emma Swan

Additional Tags: Rumbelle Secret Santa (Once Upon a Time)

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/3mDU5lq

#IFTTT #ao3feed #fanfic #rumbelle #Once Upon a Time #ouat #Rumplestiltskin #Belle #Mr. Gold

[theartistknownaslymond]

Whumptober 2022 day 9

Sleeping in Shifts | Tossing and Turning | Caught in a Storm

CW for suspected close family deaths. Drowning and passenger ferry sinking (based on the ro-ro (roll on roll off) ferry disaster off Zeebrugge in 1987), with Francis’ traumatic memories surrounding Richard Chancellor’s death in an oil rig explosion (based on the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster). So fire, drowning, explosions, etc. Plus references to being drunk and vomiting, and Francis’ background suicidal inclinations. Because Checkmate is laugh-a-minute.

Also please forgive typos/abrupt endings. It’s late and I spent all day playing board games with friends and ran out of time :’)

---

He'd wanted to drive because he knew he wouldn't be able to sleep, and if he had the road to concentrate on, he wouldn't be able to think about what had happened. Archie, however, had wisely insisted that - no matter how much of the alcohol Francis had consumed that night had since been vomited into the public fountain - he was still too drunk to be behind a wheel.

So it was Archie who drove them north from Paris, along empty roads awash with standing water. His sturdy brown hands gripped the wheel and he nodded along as though they were listening to his playlist of drum heroes and not to the World Service. The headlines hadn't changed since they'd set off, though: Disaster in the Channel. Number of casualties unconfirmed.

Perhaps he had been too drunk to drive, Francis thought. But people talked about sobering news, didn't they? And what could be more sobering than the news that one's mother and brother had been lost at sea, victims of another avoidable tragedy on a ro-ro ferry?

Francis lay back against the passenger seat of the car and glowered into the stormy night. According to the LED clock on the dashboard it was 4.48am, and they were still a long way from the twilight of dawn. The sky was louring black and blue like the mountains of hell and the road was shining like a path of coals. The sulphurous orange of the motorway lights turned the rain streaming along the sides of the car into small golden comets, but the view ahead was an endless, thundering barrage of spray and water battling against the windscreen wipers, raindrops shattering into kaleidoscopic shards of light and dark on impact with the glass.

Francis' eyelids drooped and his mouth turned down in misery. He could still taste the booze he'd been drinking, he could still smell vomit on his person even though he'd changed his shirt. His throat felt raw and his mouth was mossy and filled with stale air. None of this seemed even remotely real, though, because what could be real about a world without Sybilla and Richard?

He remembered the cold, clasping arms of the sea, and he just couldn't picture them in that place.

Last year it had been summer, off the coast of Aberdeen, and the fog had stayed low on the rig until late morning. Even when it had cleared, the day had remained grey and still - the enveloping silence of the foggy sea had seemed a blessing at the time, as he and Richard Chancellor worked on their recordings. But, with the narrative clarity of hindsight, it was ominous. The calm before the storm, as dangerous as dead air on the radio.

They'd worked through the dour day alongside the divers and the engineers, collecting the noise of industrial labour, the noise of the planet's pumping veins, the noise of extraction and exploitation; the soundtrack to economic progress. It had been thrilling and exhausting, and when the emergency alarms had begun to wail at ten at night, they'd already been asleep in their bunks.

Stumbling blearily to consciousness and finding themselves trapped on a burning island in the middle of the North Sea, they'd recognised that no one who had survived the initial explosion on deck was remotely qualified to deal with the clusterfuck they'd woken to. Between the supernova of destruction at the heart of the rig and the cold abyss of the sea, there had been little to choose from.

Francis stared blankly into the orange motorway lights and the pounding rainwater and remembered the heat of the fire on the oil rig. He remembered the way it had lit everyone in the same phosphorescent glow - distraught faces burning like flames in the dark, smudged with soot and grease from the black smoke that belched from the rig's wound.

In the car's windscreen he saw his own pale reflection and remembered young Christopher Chancellor's despair: a child confronted with the full majesty of death for the first time in his life, poised to absorb all of its radioactive horrors. Francis had done the only thing he could to save the boy - he'd taken him and he'd flung him bodily from the rig.

He didn't end up in the sea himself until it was nearly too late, until he had searched everywhere he could for Diccon amid the tumult onboard. Then he'd felt the decking lose integrity, and he had raced, stumbling with despair and exhaustion, to an edge of the decking, no longer even sure why it was so important to save himself.

Outside the car, the night sky was as liquid and bottomless as the air beyond the rig had felt. 53 meters, he'd been told later, but it had felt eternal - his nightwear billowed thinly against his body, the water glittered like the burning metal behind him, like the lights of the emergency vehicles circling in the sky. In the seconds it took to fall, he'd wished the surface beneath him was hard - and it had felt hard when he'd plunged into it like a knife, feet first.

How high were the sides of a ro-ro ferry?

He'd been on them often enough on family holidays: Gavin snarling at him to stop trying to see over the edge of the parking deck, Richard whispering a promise to lift him up later so he could get a proper look, and Sybilla ushering him and Eloise out onto the passenger deck so they could catch sight of the white cliffs of Dover disappearing into the blur of the horizon on a sparkling morning crossing.

Would Sybilla and Richard have tried to jump as the ferry yawed? Francis' heart thundered at the idea of Richard helping Sybilla to step up and over the metal railings - he saw her in her good woollen coat, her soft suede winklepickers, her handbag on her arm and her blow-dried hair catching in a breeze. She'd hold onto Richard's steady arm and step daintily, one foot at a time, one leg over the railing at a time. Then an elegant hop into the sea, where she would wait, buoyant, until a life boat came.

He couldn't think of her in a panic, leaving behind her bag, flopping over the railings on her belly, tilting so she fell in an ungainly sprawl, her hair in disarray - sinking as the sea filled that woollen coat and sucked her lower in the water. It was inconceivable. The woman in that scenario wasn't Sybilla. Sybilla never panicked, she was never seen out of control, out of place. And Richard wouldn't show fear - he would get her overboard and work to save others...

Again, Francis remembered how light Christopher Chancellor had felt to his adrenaline-tempered arms when he had flung the teenager from the rig. He imagined Richard bailing other passengers from the sinking ro-ro in the same way.

The headlines on the radio came round once more, and the news was unchanged. Francis wrapped his arms around his body and shuddered, blinking back the tears as he watched the rain weep over the side window of the car.

Disaster in the Channel. Number of casualties unconfirmed.

#whumptober2022 #whumptober #every day i write the book #band au: checkmate #character: francis crawford #character: archie abernethy #band au: ringed castle #character: diccon chancellor #character: sybilla semple #character: richard crawford #characters: crawford family

[theartistknownaslymond]

Whumptober 2022 day 28

Yes yes yes, I failed and fell behind again because I am too old for eight-hour late-night shifts on no food. Also the amount of wheels within wheels scheming going on in DK broke my brain when I tried to apply it to the AU - I just wanted to write the boys fighting!! I just wanted my intricate rituals!!

Anyway, after much whinging, I got there. Forever thanks to @stripedroseandsketchpads for encouragement and beta-reading :))

Anger Born of Worry | Punching the Wall | Headache

As Kay says: Jerott……….

And she’s not wrong! This was meant to be a gimme prompt because isn’t Jerott always worried!angry, but the scenes it would have fitted better were mostly beyond me to plot out in the AU (as this one nearly was), so instead we have Francis being worried!angry >:)

CW: references to GRM’s Crimes, and Joleta’s OD and SA. Jerott being a bit of an ass (he’s trying ok), Francis’s broken ribs don’t have a very nice time, there’s a little car chase and some references to racism in Jerott’s past (against him). But it’s mostly just Shenanigans.

---

Jerott waited until the sunlight shining on Archie's car winked out of sight. The vehicle rounded a bend beneath one of the Tweedsmuir hills, and with resolve, he pulled his helmet on over his long black hair and kicked the old motorbike into life. It was noisy, but no noisier than the clapped out old banger Archie drove, so Jerott was confident he'd be able to be subtle. He was determined that he wouldn't be left out of the pointless clash of egos between Francis and Geetesh any longer, and he was going to take the information he'd intercepted straight to Lymond himself - wherever he was holed up.  

He worried a few times that he'd lost track of the drummer, but the roads were quiet and there weren't that many options for Archie to have taken - he was clearly heading for Glasgow. Once they were in the city itself it was easy for Jerott to hide among the crowds of traffic, weaving and dodging between vehicles to keep something always between himself and Archie's mirrors. He wasn't cautious about inching up behind dirty lorries or buses - nothing about Glaswegian traffic could scare him since he'd learned to ride a moped amid the crowded chaos of Pune. Rather, it reminded him comfortingly of his teenage years learning the layout of the suburbs on his push-bike, out-riding gangs of thick-headed, unimaginative Paki-bashers - often with some adventurous girl from school riding pillion on his pannier rack and squealing if he took a corner sharply, using a toe to balance and push off the cracked tarmac.

He was enjoying the chase so much, in fact, that he had almost forgotten his anger by the time Archie stopped.

Jerott drove past the street Archie had taken and parked one over. He took off his helmet and reminded himself of why he was there, stoking, deliberately, the familiar well of anger inside him as he took a cigarette from the pocket of his leathers and placed it thoughtfully between his lips.

He waited on the corner of the road, leaning against smog-grubby brick and running through the events of the past fortnight. Everything he valued in his life seemed, since then, to have been coated in the same thick, clotting grime as the wall he leaned on. Everything concerning Geetesh and his promises and lessons, everything that Jerott had learned and contributed to since joining the Rajneeshees under Geetesh's aegis.

Still Jerott didn't want to believe his mentor was a bad man, evil or cruel. He'd retaliated with rage, as any brother might when worried for his sister after her overdose and miscarriage. He'd been unhelpful on the night Joleta's overdose had happened, yes, but fear did strange things to good people - surely that was a lesson from the ashram that Jerott could cling to?

Jerott unzipped the leather jacket he wore and fished inside it for his mala. He looked down at Rajneesh's smiling face and rubbed his thumb over the wooden beads, taking reassurance from the feeling of each one, warm and textured beneath his touch.

Forgiveness means touching the divine, for a moment. That's what Rajneesh said. What Geetesh said. Real forgiveness does not need to go through anger first, or judgement - it simply accepts the other for who they are.

Jerott had wanted to accept Geetesh like this practically since their first meeting. He'd basked in Geetesh's acknowledgement of him, of his confused sense of rage and frustration at the world. He'd been awed by Geetesh's generous charisma, his broad-minded, wide-questioning curiosity for life. Geetesh had shown him that all that was good and bad would exist whether or not he was angry at it - angry at his father's death, angry at the end of his engagement, angry at the lost opportunity to tour with his friend in a band - that it was better to accept this about the world and to focus on himself instead, and what might bring spiritual improvement to Jerott Blyth - or Swami Vadan, as he now was.

Anger did not need to be forgiven - unawareness did. And Jerott could imagine why Geetesh had been angry with Francis - imperfect, frustrating, mistrustful, selfish, hedonistic Francis. If Geetesh had dedicated his life to self-control, combined with an open, welcoming exploration of his fellow man, then Francis Crawford seemed by contrast to display the hypocrisy of one who lay down rules he didn't follow himself, who revelled in the isolation of his own ego and its creations.

But then again, did Jerott believe that Geetesh had been unaware of what he was doing when he had interfered with the attempts to resuscitate Joleta? Had be been unaware when he had beaten Francis until he could barely stand? It had not been done in some spur of the moment rage, Jerott had later learned, but as part of a coordinated and planned assault. Had Geetesh been unaware of what he was doing when he bribed a group of men to start a fight in a notorious nightclub? When the fight was fixed so as to kill or maim the one who stood between Geetesh's sister and a place in the touring band?  

Unfortunately, the spiritual lectures Geetesh had filled Jerott's heart with were not stacking up effectively against the facts, nor the sense of deepening betrayal he felt.  

Jerott stood on the street corner and tried to work out a way of saving the man he'd devoted the past three years of his life to. It seemed newly impossible with the information he'd learned Adam had been gathering though, and he hadn't come anywhere close to a plan by the time he recognised Alec Guthrie emerging from a door in one of the terraces. Still he didn't hesitate, and cast his cigarette aside, rushing forwards.

Guthrie's eyes widened when he saw Jerott. He raised a great paw of a hand, palm out, and shook his head.

"He doesna need ye here, young Swami..."

"Let me in," Jerott said more steadily than he felt, his voice a tone of warning.

"I don't think tha's -" Guthrie cut off with a curse as Jerott shoved past him with a violence the older man didn't expect from a wee hippy like him.

Jerott bounded through the doorway and up the stairs to the apartment inside. He let all the doors bang messily against the walls and muttered a cursory "Salām, brother," at Archie as he stormed past him in the open plan kitchen and went to wrench open the only closed door in the apartment.

"Jerott?" Francis wheeled from the notes he was making in one of a number of soft bound journals.

There wasn't much light in the little room - the window had its blackout curtains drawn and Francis sat close to a lamp with a low-wattage bulb in it. Even in this dim setting Jerott saw him turn pale. He sat very still, discomfort written in all the lines of his body.

"Vadan. I am sorry," he said carefully, though without specifying what for. It had been two weeks since they'd last shared a stage, after all, when Geetesh had driven Francis from it with what Jerott had not known was a coup de grace to his already broken ribs.

Jerott looked down at him wildly. "I picked up a call for you at St Marys. Thought I should deliver it myself."

Francis did not move.

"Adam's contacts tracked the guys from Bonkers. They say they can trace the bribes back to Geetesh. So you can add conspiracy to murder to your dossier," he cast a miserable gesture at the notes Francis was taking.

Francis swallowed, though it was barely visible in the deep shadows beneath his jaw. He held Jerott's gaze with a determination that bordered on something painful to witness. "Are those your words, or theirs?"

Jerott shrugged. "Does it matter?"

"I should like to know if you're here for the prosecution or the defence," Francis maintained caution, but there was a note of tartness in his voice now.

Jerott sighed and rolled his eyes extravagantly, awkwardly, shoving his hands in his pockets. "It... doesn't look good. I need to hear his side of it. I can't know until then. But...I saw how he was when Joleta...he didn't want me to revive her. I heard what Philippa saw from Adam. You could be pressing charges."

Francis' smile was grim. "So, it appears, could the Scotts."

"Will you?" Jerott's heart was running fast all of a sudden, and he told himself that he couldn't stomach the idea of Geetesh's strong, noble body restrained by cuffs and swarms of officers, by the smallness of a cell and a stand in the dock. These were places made for men without Geetesh's stature, without his greatness or potential. Geetesh had been on course, Jerott had thought, to change the world, one lost soul at a time - not to rot in some provincial jail for crimes borne of petty jealousy. Such things were below him, or so Jerott had thought.

Francis eyed him and then shook his head. "I am not at liberty to. Not at present."

Jerott didn't quite say Good out loud, though the thought was foremost in his mind. The police had none of the subtlety needed for dealing with a man like Geetesh. Not once, in any country he'd lived in - France, India, America or Scotland - had his experience with law enforcement corresponded to his understanding of justice.

Jerott nodded and licked his lips in relief. "Right, then I should tell you I've invited him to the studio to listen to the album. Mixing is nearly finished and I think, when he hears it, he'll realise his time here wasn't wasted. You should come too. Things don't have to end like this."

Francis stood up slowly, and Jerott lost the advantage of height - his friend had always had an inch of two on him, even without the extra lift of his wavy blond hair. "No, Vadan. He's not welcome at St Marys."

Desperately, Jerott sought for an argument that would work on him, that would make Francis see why this needed to happen. What would Geetesh say? That the beating had been salutary, a kind of catharsis for both of them? Jerott realised, on thinking this, that a fatal crack had opened up in the shell of his belief, and all the contrary, illogical things Geetesh had forged a kind of sense out of with his beautiful voice now oozed from the flaw, confronting Jerott with their unlovely truths.

But he couldn't, wouldn't believe this had all been deliberate, not in the way Francis wanted to think it was. Geetesh might still mend that crack - he might still reassure Jerott, as he had always reassured him, and things might be made right, piece by piece, if Geetesh could be shown to want to make them right.

Jerott met Francis' gaze unflinchingly. "I want to hear his account before you have him clapped in irons."

"I'm not about to have him clapped in irons, Jerott! Do you think I'd be scribbling in this damp little garret with the information I have if it was that simple?" Francis said sharply, and then winced and tried to hide it, stepping back with his hand poised over his ribs.

The gesture made Jerott's stomach flip unhappily - as though Francis had summoned a pang of pain on purpose, purely to remind Jerott what Geetesh had done to him.

"Oh, I see," Jerott shook his head bitterly and also looked away. "You're protecting yourself. If you go after him, he'll tell the whole world what you did to Joleta."

"There is more at stake than you realise, Jerott," Francis hissed. He seemed annoyed at the emotion he had just shown, and that just made Jerott's specific Francis Crawford-induced headache worse.

"Right," Jerott muttered, as though what was at stake to him personally - what this all meant for the relationship he'd thought he'd had with Geetesh, the goals he'd thought he'd been working towards - wasn't enough. "Well, I passed on the message about Bonkers. It doesn't make much sense to me that he'd do that and then be willing to let Joleta...to let that happen to her afterwards. But I'm sure you have your theories."

Jerott turned towards the door and Francis barked, "Wait!"

He turned, not at all sure what to expect from the command, but hoping for...something.

"I forbid you to invite Geetesh to St Marys again. It's my property and I will add trespass to the list against him."

Jerott's lip curled. "So everything else can stand, but trespass goes beyond, even for you?"

Francis stared at him until Jerott realised what he'd said and cursed even as Francis pointed out: "The very definition of trespass, wouldn't you say?"

"Piss off Francis, you always have to be such a smart-arse, don't you?" Jerott snarled, lunging back towards that impassive, carefully shadowed face again. "Do you think this is easy for me?"

His mouth flattened and Jerott supposed he was going to make some glib comment about how poorly Jerott's travails compared with those of Will Scott - as though the two experiences couldn't both be life-altering.

Before he could, however, the phone on his tiny desk began to ring.

Jerott shrugged and turned again, leaving Francis to get it - but instead, Francis lunged and put his arm across the doorway, mastering the pain the movement induced.

Jerott looked at the wiry limb with disdain. Muscled and taut, intricate with all the strength and memory his musicianship required of him, Jerott still knew it was attached to a weakened body.

"Don't, Vadan. I can't let you leave if that's really your plan."

"I don't think you can stop me," Jerott said coolly through the ringing of the phone.

Before Francis was tested on this, the voicemail cassette cut in. The recorded message wasn't in Francis' voice, and announced cryptically: Ye've reached the office of David Jones. Say yer piece an' he'll get back tae ye.

Jerott stepped closer to Francis' bare arm. He had no idea why Francis was using Bowie's real name as a pseudonym and nor did he want to know. "Go and answer it, David. You might still catch the caller - I'll see myself out."

Francis' knuckles whitened as he gripped the door frame. In the room beyond, Jerott saw Archie and Alec watching them with trepidation.

Jock Thompson's rollicking tones came through the speaker next: "Davey, I've got some people frae the ashram who remember someone o'the description ye gave me. I'll drop ye a call later and tell ye more."

Francis' jaw shifted slightly and he couldn't stop his gaze from snapping back to the phone.

Jerott just scoffed at what he heard. "Really? Digging into the ashram now? This isn't about justice, is it, Francis?" On top of all the persecution the Rajneeshees were facing - lawsuits, spurious claims and misleading documentaries - of course Francis Crawford had to find a way to get the boot in, too.

Francis just shook his head minutely. "It is - just not for me. I can't let you tell him about this, Vadan."

Jerott looked down in surprise to see Francis' fist poised at his side, readied to launch a punch, his knuckles adorned with dull brass.

His brows twitched and he thought about stepping back, but it would just give Francis more space to swing. Instead, Jerott grabbed Francis' wrist where he was blocking the exit, tightening his grip on bone and muscle with a warning of intent. Francis might get a punch in, and it wouldn't be pleasant, but Jerott could twist and wrench that arm in ways Francis would find equally unpleasant. Neither could say his training was conventional - Francis had learned a few dirty tricks from the mob, and Jerott knew from his Ayurvedic and yogic lessons about what the body was capable of and what it was not - but each understood that the other was strong, stubborn, and capable of causing damage.

Jerott locked eyes with him and squeezed his arm between his hands, moving minutely, threatening to twist and pull so that he saw Francis' elbow draw back in response. He'd survived group samarpan at the ashram, where the room howled and screamed, where fights could break out or any numbers of things could happen between bodies in a state of letting go. He'd learned to rise above the petty grievances he might once have been left with when one disciple shouted something foul at him or another singled him out with a punch or a kick. Everyone was simply driven by their own primal feelings, it was nothing personal.

Jerott drew a deep breath and stared into field of cornflower blue that had haunted his mind for longer than he'd care to admit. He tensed his body and then twisted like an eel and ducked under Francis' arm, moving too quickly for the punch that missed him, leaving Francis' limb unscathed and focussing only on reaching the door to the stairs.

Francis grabbed at the back of his leather jacket but his hand slipped on the smooth material.

"Stop him! Don't let him leave!" Francis cried, his voice thin with pain, and Jerott let out a grunt as Guthrie and Archie collided with him, two great stacks of muscle and beard that grappled with him even as he continued to wriggle and attempted to shoulder his way through the thicket of their arms.

They were surprised at the fight he put up, Jerott could tell, though he wasn't trying to hurt them, just evade them. He squirmed and twisted and feinted with his body-weight until he was able to slip free of his jacket and back out of the sleeves, escaping from their hold to be left breathing heavily in his rumpled red t-shirt, able to side-step the baffled Guthrie once more and head for the door...

Just as Francis slammed it and turned the key in the lock. He clutched the little Yale key in his fist and stood firm, his expression less an invitation to a challenge than a hard, blank wall.

Jerott just snorted and lunged at the hand with the key in it. Francis slipped away before Jerott could reach him, darting out into the room. Avoiding his ribs, Jerott grabbed for his wrists instead and managed to catch one, but Francis twisted and pulled free. Jerott pursued him, slapping after his clenched fists with dogged fervour.

Francis held his arms as wide as he was comfortable doing, away from his body, away from Jerott, jinking and dodging Jerott's attempts to snare the hand holding the key. He eventually backed himself into a corner though, and Jerott managed to get a grip on both of Francis' arms and wrestle him against the wall.

Archie and Alec gave them full reign for this elaborate scene, standing in the kitchen space with their arms folded and their expressions pitying and underwhelmed.

Francis was breathing hard, a wheeze of pain catching in his throat. There was a sheen of uncomfortable sweat on his skin and he looked pale and pained.

"Give me the key," Jerott said steadily. There was no anger in his voice anymore, he had far too much to concentrate on to be angry. A few inches away from him, Francis squirmed and tested his grip, and Jerott tightened his hold on those skinny wrists, pinning them to the textured wallpaper.

"I can't do that," Francis replied, almost as steadily.

Jerott had to release one hand to pry at the closed fist of the other, and when he did, of course Francis tugged his whole body away along the wall, aiming an open-handed chop at Jerott's elbow with his free arm.

Jerott saw what was coming before Francis did though, and released his wrist willingly, so that Francis stumbled away from Jerott further, faster than he'd expected, and collided side-on with a damp-warped piece of MDF furniture.

It wasn't solid enough to do new damage to his vulnerable ribs, but the impact was enough to make him blanch and force out a gasp of shock. Jerott saw his eyes widen before they scrunched shut and he collapsed against the wall, sliding down it with a groan.

The key fell from his hand and landed quietly on the lino floor. Francis didn't attempt to retrieve it - Jerott realised, a little guiltily, that he'd passed out.

He knelt to collect the key and frowned at Francis' expression, taking in anew the purple, bruised shadows sunk into his eye sockets, the chapped, feverish lips and high points of colour coming in blotches to his neck and ears.

Jerott looked up as Alec and Archie approached and sighed. "I didn't hit him."

"No, ye just waited fer a skaithed man tae exhaust himself," Guthrie folded his arms. Archie had bent to check Francis' pulse and temperature.

Jerott cast his friend another look of concern and stood swiftly, stepping away with his prize.

"Are you going to stop me?"

Archie cast Alec Guthrie a glance, his brow raised, his expression forbearing. "I make it a policy o'not gettin' involved in these kinds o'shenanigans..." Archie muttered.

Alec nodded. "Ye think the two o'us can kep ye? After such a...slee and canny struggle?"

Jerott tutted and tossed his hair out of his eyes, detecting sarcasm beyond Guthrie's thick burr. He picked up his leather jacket from the floor and dusted it off.

With one final glance back, he unlocked the door and left, annoyed that Francis has insisted on making things complicated.

#intricate rituals :)) aka a very grown up slap fight over a key #whumptober2022 #whumptober #every day i write the book #band au: disorderly knights #character: jerott blyth #character: francis crawford #character: archie abernethy #character: alec guthrie

[theartistknownaslymond]

Whumptober 2022 day 29

Still hanging on, still determined to finish the list!!

Sleep Deprivation | Defiance | “Better me than you.”

As per @stripedroseandsketchpads​ These all feel intensely Francis but idk how exactly 

They do and they are. I’m not sure this fic actually hits any of them directly, but I have confirmed with @erinaceina​ that these prompts are all bang on for the vibes of this particular scene. It’s Checkmate, Francis thinks Sybilla and Richard have drowned - then he thinks just Richard has. Sybilla just wants to know why he won’t come home.

It’s a bit of a direct scene re-write - the dialogue follows fairly closely to Dorothy. But I tried to give it as much of my own twist as possible. Not much in the way of CW, but Francis is tired and has been drinking, there’s reference to the ferry disaster, he thinks he’s lost his closest family and he’s got a pretty awkward relationship with them rn. Francis also has a bit of suicidal longing in the background, and some dissociation going on. Big emotional whump, rather than physical - that’s the intention, anyway.

 ---

The sky was still dark when Archie pulled up at the cordon. The world seemed upside down, lit from below by the flashing blue lights of emergency vehicles, by the torches held by gendarmes over rain-smudged passenger lists, by the brake lights of the cars of relatives parked higgledy-piggledy around as they tried to learn what had happened to their loved ones.

Archie tried to hand him an umbrella but Francis was already out of the door, not moving quickly, but with a steady, intractable purpose. He seemed to watch himself open the car door as though from the other side of a piece of foggy glass - like his life was continuing within a terrarium and he was standing, sleep-starved and numb, on the outside. Not even the heavy rain that began to soak his t-shirt seemed to really reach him as he strode towards the nearest gendarme.

He was recognised - the man's look of harassed concern flickered, and he smiled at the rock star Lymond, like this celebrity appearance had been just the relief he needed from his miserable work. No doubt he was familiar with Lymond's recent charitable exercises, and he suggested, "You're here to help with the handing out of the blankets, Monsieur?" He gestured towards a van with its back doors open, where a group of volunteers were marshalling blankets, umbrellas, warm drinks and food for anyone who didn't need to be bundled away to hospital immediately.

"Ah, non," Francis hesitated, hoping to recognise any of the huddled figures standing under huge golf umbrellas and sipping from steaming polystyrene cups. "J'ai...j'ai eu du famille à bord de lui. Je...je ne sais pas..."

He was surprised at how calm his voice sounded - like a recording, almost disinterested. But the gendarme blanched.

"Euh, mon dieu." The hand holding the pen above the clipboard flinched, as thought his reflex was to make the sign of the cross. He wiped futilely at the rain on his brow and straightened his shoulders in a belated aspect of professionalism. "Nom et prénom?"

Francis spoke the names of his mother and brother with robotic clarity, and watched the young officer grimace as he tried to peel apart the sheets of paper he held. They were turning to papier-mâché before their eyes, tearing in sad wadges of ink and wood pulp as the gendarme's wet fingers fumbled with them.

He tried to shake them apart and succeeded only in tearing the bottom clean off a number of sheets. He muttered a curse and poked at the part of the list he'd uncovered, and then looked up at Francis with round, excited eyes.

"Madame Semple? Elle vive!"

He could not find Richard's name, but Sybilla - Sybilla was alive. Francis swayed under the pressure of the rain and gasped. He felt like he'd taken a blow to the chest, or like a fault had opened down his sternum and the news of Sybilla's survival was pulling him apart in one direction as the absence of Richard wrenched him open in another. He managed, breathlessly, to thank the man and then turned to find Archie.

After stumbling through the the rain aimlessly for what seemed like an unforgivably long time, Francis finally discovered his friend - he was handing out blankets and hot chocolate, and he didn't hesitate to force a cup of the latter into Francis' freezing hands.

"She's at the hospital..." was all he could mumble in return, his lips numb, his stomach clenching rebelliously at the thought of sustenance of any kind.

Archie guided him back to the car. He leaned over and pulled Francis' seat belt across his chest, even as Francis sat there clutching the scalding hot cup of chocolate and rainwater, his blond curls dripping into it with each shiver of his body. Archie drove them safely but with efficiency to the hospital building and trusted Francis to make his own way from the drop-off point while he parked up.

No other friend would have shown such faith in him then, and Francis was relieved to be able to avoid the negotiations another might have insisted upon. He dropped the untouched cup of chocolate into a bin and walked to the desk.

The receptionist stared at him as though he'd crawled from the Channel himself, but she apologised and said that Mme. Semple had been discharged and had gone to her hotel.

There were only so many options, but Francis' first guess was correct. He knew her tastes and her budget, he knew something of her memories for the career she'd had, and Archie helped him make it to her room when dawn was still yet to break.

He'd supposed that she would be resting, but the concierge was adamant that she had just called for coffee to be brought up to her and that she would welcome a visit from her dear son.

Her only son, Francis thought, standing outside the door to her suite. Her only child. Eloise had dissipated into a winter's night and now Richard had been snatched by the storm. And no matter how he'd tried, how near he'd come and how many maelstroms he'd been drawn into, Francis was still here. Still standing outside his mother's door knowing that while she wouldn't be disappointed to see him she really ought to have been.

She opened the door shortly after his knock and he was surprised to see her dressed and put together. The clothes were as immaculate as ever: black cashmere skirt and black silk blouse; black court heels and black scarf tied in a pussy-bow at her throat; sapphires and mother-of-pearl and the scent of home and safety.

She did not say anything, and she did not smile. Her skin was nearly as pale as her pristine white hair and her blue eyes looked faded in contrast with her black eyeliner. The last time they had met, Francis had refused to say a word to her, and now she exercised her prerogative to do the same, keeping her lips tight and her expression unreadable.

"I'm sorry, you didn't need to see me," Francis said, and the control he'd had over his voice earlier was gone. He observed this with the same detachment as he'd done before, but the barrier between life and the observation of it had grown weak, and he felt on the precipice of falling in.

"Nonsense," Sybilla beckoned him inside with a muted gesture.

He didn't seek a hug so neither did she. He stared savagely at the floor as he passed her and ran a hand through his sodden hair. He looked at the little coffee tray on the low table by the window and wondered at the hotel's callousness in sending up a set for two. He felt himself shudder, felt his limbs weaken - it was as if he was being drawn back into his own self despite every attempt to resist it.

Finally, he had to look at her again, feeling his eyes wide and his breathing heavy. "I'm so sorry. Richard - he didn't...?"

Sybilla's back was to him as she eased the door closed. She turned, tossing the white waves of hair over her shoulder, and she sniffed back some emotion and rubbed at her pink nose with a tissue. "Where did you hear it?"

Francis told her about the gendarme. There was a slight gap in the drawn curtains and he stared through it at the corpse-grey light of day-break. "I'm here to help with anything you need. Were you travelling with any of his staff?"

"Sit down, Francis. Look, take some coffee. For heaven's sake - a towel," Sybilla stepped into the ensuite and emerged with a folded, fluffy bath sheet.

He looked at the chair she offered but did not take it - he was soaked through, so he accepted the towel instead and merely hugged it to his chest beneath folded arms.

Sybilla took her seat and poured the coffee out. "He had two advisors with him. Jonty and Mac. There's been no news of either. I've called their families."

She looked up at him, the sugar-tongs poised over his cup. "How many is it, these days?"

Francis shook his head. "None. Black will do. Do you want me to arrange transport for their bodies when they're found? I...I had the experience last year, with Diccon. I'll do the same for Richard."

Her hand quivered, and a cube of sugar dropped into the cup anyway. "Yes...yes, quite so..."

"Does Mariotta know?"

"I've spoken to her, yes," Sybilla disguised the tremor in her voice beneath the clink of tea-spoon on china.

Francis squeezed the folded towel tight to his body and stared down into the whirling black coffee. "I need to finish the album. I have obligations here. But afterwards - if it's necessary - if there's use for me - "

Sybilla watched him carefully without prompting him to continue. She placed the sugared coffee on the side of the table nearer the empty chair, and then began to prepare her own.

"Honestly - you would tell me, if I could be of use?"

She glanced up again and then tasted her drink. She pulled a face and added a drop more cream. "Honestly? It isn't my place. Mariotta must decide what she can manage and what she cannot."

He felt the towel in his arms growing damp as it absorbed some of the rainwater from his t-shirt, but still he just stood by her table, staring down at the coffee set like it was an elaborate chess-board, laid out mid-game. "Well, I owe her family a debt."

His mother's expression was hidden again as she bent over her coffee. She didn't raise her face this time, but studied the same pieces he did on the table in front of her. "If you put it to her like that, of course she will summon you - likely to care for me, as anything else. Then what will you do?"

Francis at last blinked. He placed the folded towel on top of the empty seat and perched himself on it, leaning forwards with his long fingers laced, his elbows on his knees, the leather cuffs he wore on each wrist growing stiff and uncomfortable from the damp. "Honestly? I don't know. It depends what condition I find the place in. It depends what care I find is needed. But I had hoped to return to the USSR."

Sybilla met his eyes and hers narrowed. She tilted her head a little and studied him curiously before asking, with less tact that was customary, "Is this about that new record agent? You're going back for Ms Çalışkan?"

Francis pursed his lips and his brows pinched together. He took a sip of thick, dark coffee and ground his teeth at the taste. On top of stale wine and hours-old stomach acid it was bitter and vile, even with the unasked-for sugar. "I'd go back whether or not my agent was based there," he answered.

Sybilla turned a knowing look on him. "Now, I may not deserve your trust, but I should still like to know: she remains your agent?"

Francis smiled mirthlessly. "Yes. I find it so much simpler to keep all the essentials in one place."

Sybilla's expression did not alter at his tone. "But you would go back to that...dour, repressive country, whether or not she was there?"

"I would."

She sat back, her elegant hands draped over each arm of the chair, her rings catching a weak ray of sunlight that had mistakenly found its way past both clouds and curtains. "What if I were no longer in Scotland? Would you come home then?"

Francis blinked and shook his head. "It would make no difference," he answered. Small, perplexed divots had appeared between his brows and by the corner of his lips.

"So you will return to Russia unless Mariotta asks otherwise? Even if I died or joined the retirees on the Costa del Sol?"

His eyes narrowed as hers had done, and he worked his jaw, well aware of how she had led him through all the hoops she'd set out. "You don't imagine I wish you dead, or exiled among the living dead and those in hiding from Interpol? Scotland is your home. I have lived there barely half of my life."

"You think I have nothing to hide from Interpol?" Sybilla twitched a brow and took a sip of coffee. "In any case, I might have died today, whether it was wished for or not. And even then, you really would have resisted going back? Does the Soviet cause really mean more to you?"

"No," he said easily and honestly.

She almost hid her smile behind her cup, but then she had to place it down as gratified tears spilled over her lower lashes. She dabbed at them with her tissue, satisfied at this achievement - like when, as a child, he had asked some simple question (why?) that threatened a complex answer, and Gavin had driven him away, telling him to find out for himself if he cared so much, and he had returned, hours later, dust from the family encyclopedias on his fingers and more detail in his research than even Sybilla had expected of him.

"Drink your coffee, Francis," she said decisively.

He picked up two more sugar cubes and dropped them into it, then filled the vessel with cream. It disguised the bitterness so that he was able to keep it down on his roiling stomach, and he twitched the curtain open with a pair of fingers so that he could see the anaemic winter sun splitting the storm clouds like kintsugi in the body of a broken pot.

The weather had not fully cleared - rain spat at the window-panes in sporadic bursts, the telephone wires outside wailed and moaned in the wind, and even the comfortable architecture of the hotel had its draughts. The door dividing Sybilla's suite from the next room juddered and the lock rattled in its cradle.

"All this work you're doing - you don't imagine it can be done as effectively there, as it could be with the freedoms you have at St Marys?" Sybilla watched him staring outside, taking in the lines of care at his eyes and brow, the scrawny, sinewey look of his neck and cheeks, and the bruises borne of sleeplessness below his eyes. "If you cannot be my neighbour then I will leave. I have the gîte. I can go directly there."

He turned to her, his expression so strange that she might almost think he was offended by the suggestion. "I'd have the Edinburgh ladies' art society turn up with torches and pitchforks," he said in a voice that seemed quite unlike his own. "I'd be condemned as the Duke of Sutherland."

Sybilla's tone was severe as she batted his objections aside with a hand. "The Edinburgh ladies can holiday in the Camargue and discover the art beyond their own doorsteps. No one can stop me from moving if I choose."

Francis cradled his cup between his two hands and made the smallest of gestures to contradict her. "I meant it," he said quietly. "There are other reasons I won't go. Whether you're two hours away or two days away, it makes little difference."

He saw the fierceness of her intellect latch on to that one small change in his phrasing: little difference. Not none. Her fingers tightened on her own mug and she sat forwards a little on her chair, her gaze dogged. "So tell me, Francis. What other reasons? What can possibly stand between you and coming home?"

A voice from behind, accompanied by the draught of a door opening, said in a granite-firm tone: "My right hook will stand between him and setting foot anywhere north of Watford! And your grandson and I will certainly stand between you and some demented exile to the gîte." Richard stood in the doorway to the adjoining suite in shirt sleeves and unknotted black tie, his cuff-links loose and his face red. "Apologies, brother - had I spent another minute in the shower you might have been made sole inheritor to the family estate."

Sybilla was on her feet, her cheeks ashen and her eyes bright. "Good lord, Richard!"

Francis felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, the skin of his arms prickle and his chest grow warm. He turned but didn't stand, and stared at the brother who had disowned him last summer, after one defection too many.

He wasn't green-cheeked and swathed in kelp; not bloated and gnawed on by fishes; he bore no injury and no sign of pain. He was as vital and robust as he'd always been: the steady hands offering a boost up to the big tree - or to the biscuit jar on the high shelf - the athlete whose weekend activities were cheered on through the muddiest seasons of the year, the school prefect and debating champion whose speeches Francis had listened to in awe as he paced his room in practice. The beloved performer of the songs the adults wanted to hear: steady, soothing piano and inconspicuous ballads on the guitar.

He was alive and he was standing a few paces from Francis, giving off a smell of sage and citrus from the hotel shower gel, his hands curled into fists and his jaw locked in fury.

Francis turned back, slowly, to his mother and played her exclamation over again in his mind.

Anger. Her voice had been raised in anger.

She was angry, as angry as Richard was - she wasn't surprised for a moment to see him there, on his feet, fresh and ready for anything.

There had been two cups.

He'd not seen Richard's name on the list because the list had fallen apart in the gendarme's hands.

Francis looked up at his mother and understood then the trick she had played.

---

Note: Duke of Sutherland, responsible for a big tranche of the Highland clearances. Not popular in vast parts of Scotland.

#whumptober2022 #whumptober #band au: checkmate #every day i write the book #character: francis crawford #character: archie abernethy #character: sybilla semple #character: richard crawford

[theartistknownaslymond]

Oh other playlist ask: punk Archie playlist?

By Some Alchemy - a band AU playlist for Archie Abernethy (click for Spotify playlist)

Steppenwolf - Born to Be Wild *** Pal Singh Pal - Maane Mera Sajan Miladay *** Lulu - Shout *** Jimi Hendrix - Fire *** Pentangle - Moon Dog *** Sandy Nelson - Let There Be Drums *** James Brown - Funky Drummer *** The Who - My Generation *** Little Richard - Tutti Frutti *** The Troggs - Wild Thing *** Munawar Sultana and Iqbal Bano - Dholak Geet *** Santana - Soul Sacrifice *** Queen - Modern Times Rock'n'Roll *** Led Zeppelin - Moby Dick *** Pappu Sain & Joora Sain - Dhol *** The Sensational Alex Harvey Band - Hammer Song *** Jimi Hendrix - Johnny B. Goode

Comments under the cut:

No lyrics with this because Archie's not really fussed about lyrics, Archie wants to know if there's scope for MAD DRUM SKILLZ and if there is then he's into it. And don't be fooled by the serious Ben Kingsley faceclaim, Archie is mostly a goof, it's just a bit of a nightmare finding good fcs for him.

The ironic thing about the Punjabi punks of Paisley, Archie and (Turkey) Mat Abernethy, is that they didn't become punks until they were in their thirties, because punk hadn't been invented before then. They ended up in the Glasgow care system very young but were lucky enough to be adopted by a couple in the wake of WW2. They were encouraged to be curious about all kinds of music, and I'm going to say maybe their adopted dad had suffered some hearing loss during the war and had other care requirements, so from a young age they were encouraged to be both noisy and caring. Mat went off to America quite young (details tbd), maybe he has an unexpected past as a jazz session musician before punk emerged in the '70s. But that's a whole other playlist.

Archie stayed back in Scotland, caring for their parents, playing the dhol (which Mat never did), and working at the zoo to pay the bills (Archie are you singing Wild Thing to the tigers?). The Punjabi folk he has access to is pretty classical stuff from the '20s and '30s that he gets from people at the Gurdwara, which opened in the 1950s, probably a bit late for Mat to be interested, Mat's a bit wilder, but it's a place Archie attends for the language lessons and musical connections in particular. It's in a tenement flat in Gorbals and he gets the train in from Paisley. But he and his big brother love their local acts, too, they're there cheering local girl Lulu along with everyone else when she performs in Glasgow after having her first big hit with Shout (1964) - Mat even makes the trip back for it. Later on, when mosh pits have been invented, you'll find that Archie and Mat can get a mosh pit going for Lulu.

Other local acts are Bert Jansch (folk hero involved in Pentangle. Archie thinks Moon Dog is kind of hilarious but he likes playing it and pretending to be a Beatnik. In reality he's not cynical enough for the Beats though), and The Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Archie and Mat grew up seeing Alex Harvey perform all round Glasgow with his various jazz and skiffle outfits (yes, they saw a very early version of the Beatles supporting them) and when he goes glam in the '70s Archie's well into it. For a man who goes bald quite young (and never really gets into fully into practicing Sikhism), Archie does love him some hair metal and glam.

In all, Archie gets into punk even later than his brother, so mostly this playlist is about the drums and about Archie's influences - he's a fan of early rock'n'roll, he knows who its real founders are, and basically he's here to have fun and hit things hard so that people dance. He came of age in the era of the drum solo, and it speaks to his soul, but he knows that the main thing about the drummer is to be the person keeping things on the level, maintaining the beat when all the egos of singers and guitarists are veering all over the place around you. Archie knows that the true meaning of punk is radical kindness. And drumming really, really fast.

#character: archie abernethy #the punjabi punks of paisley #playlists: period appropriate #it's always the drummer

[theartistknownaslymond]

#character: archie abernethy #suresh singh #spizzenergi #the punjabi punks of paisley