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bitletsanddrabbles · 2 months ago

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[Fic] The Glory, the Shame

This is what happens when I try to come up with something to write at 7:00 am on Veteran's Day - you get Thomas and Peter sitting on @alex51324 's Island of the Gays philosophizing.

Not certain I'm going to include this one in the Island Sandbox, since it is now about twelve hours after I started, I am tired, and not at all certain it hits the right notes. But it's a thing and I wrote it, so here. Can be read as pre-relationship or just buddies, as you so feel moved.

Needless to say it is beta free. Also free of guppies, goldfish, loches, koi...okay, I'm going stop now before someone hurls a salmon at my head. On to the story instead.

Thomas sat on the bluff outside of town, a cigarette dangling in his fingers, watching the seagulls. A stiff wind was blowing, making his cheeks sting, but at least it wasn’t raining. Most of the village had decamped to the pub, intent on reducing Tully’s whisky supply to dregs. Thomas had thought about joining them, but his heart wasn’t quite in it.

A crunching noise alerted him to the fact he was about to have company. He looked up, half expecting it to be the herd of cattle they let roam the island south of the village, but it turned out to be Peter Fitzroy.

“Mind if I join you?” the one armed man asked.

“Sure,” Thomas replied. “The ground’s none too soft, though.”

“Probably better that way. Easier to dust off after.” Peter lowered himself to the ground with his usual easy cheer. “I take it the pub was a bit crowded for you?”

“Yeah.” Thomas took a drag off his cigarette. “Don’t get me wrong, I could use a pint or two about now. Maybe three or four, but there wasn’t even standing room in there.”

“I know what you mean.” Peter pulled out his own cigarettes and worked one out of the case. Even though he was perfectly capable of lighting it himself, Thomas lite it for him. Less hassle that way. For a minute the two of them just sat and smoked. Finally Peter said, “I thought it was a lovely service.”

“Yeah,” Thomas agreed. It touched on all of the key points without being soppy or condescending. Father Tim did a good job.” That was one problem with people who hadn’t actually been in the war. They could easily make it sound like they had been, like they knew exactly what the soldiers had been through when it was very clear they didn’t. It tended to lead to lofty proclamations about bravery and sacrifice that stank like the mud of the Somme, or sneering dismissal of the misery that had lead to missing limbs and haunting nightmares. Admittedly, Thomas had as little patience for the nightmares as the next person, but mostly because they interrupted his sleep and he did not like being woken up, thank you very much. He understood, but…well. His nightmares never disturbed anyone except himself.

“What did you think of the suggestion that we build our own war memorial, like villages are doing on the mainland?”

Thomas frowned at that one. “I’m not entirely certain. I wouldn’t fight it, of course. But I don’t know that it would help me any.”

The other man gave him a curious look at that. “Isn’t there anyone who’s gone that you want remembered?”

“Maybe.” Thomas took a slow drag and thought for a second before blowing out a long stream of smoke. There was Lord Flintshire’s valet, and a couple of other servants who had visited Downton frequently, but they’d been friends, not lovers. He didn’t know if anyone here would even know them. “I’m the one who didn’t know anyone in London, remember? Yeah, there were blokes I had it off with now and again, but never more than a couple of times. The people I’d really care about, well. They weren’t our sort. Seems a bit pointless to put them on there.”

“Hm. I suppose.” The other man allowed. “Then again, there are those of us who would want brothers on there, so I don’t know that it would have to be just our sort.”

“I still don’t know if any of my brothers made it through,” Thomas admitted. “I might be the last one standing.” He tried not to look at his gloved hand, but his eyes flickered to it involuntarily as he stretched his fingers.

Thankfully, the other man didn’t seem to notice. “Is there anyone you could write to find out? Or do you not want to?”

Thomas shrugged. “My sister, perhaps, if she’d write back to me. I don’t know that I’d bother, though. They might as well all be dead, as much as we pay attention to each other. Again, I don’t see that there’s anything to be gained by knowing.”

“That’s fair, I suppose.” The two of them lapsed into silence for a bit. Again, it was Peter who broke the silence. “What do you suppose Kit’s doing?”

“He planned on spending the day working on play bills for the theatre’s next production,” Thomas replied. “If he finishes that, he’ll probably read or something like that, I’d imagine. I’ve told him not to feel poorly about it, that he was well out of it, but. Well. No one likes to feel like they didn’t do their bit.”

“If they were clever they would.” Peter frowned, the expression out of place on his normally cheerful face. “I keep trying to tell Davy Hall that no one’s looking down on him for not serving, but you can tell he doesn’t believe it.”

“Davy?” Thomas looked askance at the other man. “You’re joking.” The other man shook his head. Thomas blinked, trying to wrap his head around it. “The man had rheumatic fever as a boy. The doctors expect him to drop dead of a hear attack or have his kidneys give out any day now, and he’s bemoaning the fact that he failed his physical and they wouldn’t let him go get shot at because his health might give out before the Germans got him?”

Peter gave a rueful sort of smile and a one sided shrug. “Apparently his brothers both died, so he really is the last one standing. And he’s here, so it’s not as if the line is going to continue. I think he feels as if, had he gone, one of his brothers might have survived.”

Thomas was aware of that sort of thinking, but he couldn’t imagine feeling that way about anything. He shook his head. “I’m sorry, even if I was expected to die young, I can not imagine feeling that suicidal.”

The comment earned him a sideways look that couldn’t decide whether to be fond or exasperated. “No, I can’t imagine you could. You’re too determined to live.”

His cigarette half way to his lips, Thomas froze. He slowly turned to look at the other man, gauging whether that comment had meant what he thought it did. When Peter lifted his eyebrows and shot a look at Thomas’s glove, that was a pretty clear answer. “Figured it out, have you?” Thomas replied, smiling tightly, trying to make a joke of it. He supposed if the other man was going to get him kicked off of the island, he’d have done it by now, and he didn’t seem like the sort for blackmail.

“Yeah.” Peter turned and crushed out his cigarette. “Several of us have. Me, Tully, Jessop, Rouse.”

“Dr R knows?” Thomas cringed. Oh, that couldn’t be good.

“He does.” The other man gave him a wan smile. “He doesn’t blame you, though. None of us do. If you get right down to it, you were the clever one, getting out of there rather than waiting for the Huns to drop a shell on your head.” He nodded to the glove and added, “Not to mention you could easily have died of infection. Difficult to call someone a coward when they’re doing something they know full well could kill them.”

“I wasn’t really thinking about that at the time,” Thomas admitted. It probably wasn’t the wisest thing he could do, but if Peter didn’t think poorly of him already, he doubted the truth would change that too much. “I just, I’d had it. I’d signed up to help save them that could be saved, not to die for a country that would just as soon kill me themselves. Or lock me away for two years and then let someone beat me to death when I got out, which is close enough.” He crushed out his own cigarette, then, after a moment’s thought, went to get another.

Peter shrugged. “You’re not wrong. And I still don’t blame you.” His eyebrows knit together and he asked, curiously, “Although, if I might ask, how did you manage it? It’s a difficult shot to manage yourself.”

“I didn’t manage it myself.” Thomas tucked his lighter away and blew smoke into the air. He would never understand how some people managed not to smoke. What did they do for their nerves? “I took myself out to a nice, quiet corner of the trench, lit m’self a cigarette, and then held my hand up over the wall. A German sniper took care of the rest for me.”

Oddly, that garnered a smile from the other man. “Well, that was nice of him. Did you send him a thank you note?”

“No,” Thomas scoffed, shaking his head. “I wasn’t exactly in any condition for it. Too much morphine. Who knows? By the time I was thinking clearly again, he was probably dead anyway.”

“Probably.”

They were quiet again, for a stretch. This time Thomas broke it. “How long have you known?”

“Several months now. We put it together about the time Gordon ran off.”

“Blimey.” Thomas blinked at that. “And it took this long for any of you to say something?”

Peter shrugged. “It didn’t seem important, really. After all, who decided it was cowardice? And who decided that cowardice was something to die over? A bunch of men who never left England, except on holiday? The men who wished they had the guts to do something like that?” He looked down at his own shoulder. “I may not have invited a German sniper to have a shot at me, but I wasn’t exactly crying when they told me I couldn’t carry a stretcher anymore.”

“I should think not.”

“We did our bit. Then we went home. It’s what we said we’d do.”

“Too right.”

“We’re just lucky we made it.” Peter gave a salute to the clouds. “To the Glorious Dead.”

“And the Inglorious Living,” Thomas added, giving his own salute.

The other man leaned in, resting the stump of his shoulder against Thomas’s. “Glorious or not, I’m just as glad to have you hear instead of lying under poppies in France.”

“Thanks.” Thomas smiled and looped an arm around the other mans’ back to help them both stabilise. “I could say the same.”

#downton abbey #thomas barrow #downton abbey fanfiction #writing #fanfiction #island of the gays #peter fitzroy #veteran's day #wwi

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bitletsanddrabbles · 28 days ago

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[Fic] Lightshow

It's 6:56 am and I've just finished this, not even read it over once, but it got me over the 65k line, so I'm just going to put it up here and revise it later!

This will be another year that @alex51324 and the Island saved my output levels. XD

Worth noting: I have never actually seen the northern lights. Like most such phenomenon, "They'll be visible in your area!" inevitably means "On the other side of the famous, Seattle overcast!" The only time I know they were actually visible was this past October, and since I had to go to work the next day and figured it would be a standard "oops! Haha! Weather interference!" situation, I slept through it. These descriptions were written based entirely on about an hour's worth of reading "what seeing the northern lights in person" articles and watching similar videos. Bless the guy who included a still of "How it looks to the naked eye when it first starts up" in his vid.

“Why are we out here?” Gordon groused, pulling his coat around himself and pressing up against Thomas. It was damn cold, so Thomas didn’t particularly mind the extra heat.

“Because Mr Braceridge and a couple of the new fellows insist that something special is going to happen tonight, and you wanted to try your hand at writing an article,” Thomas replied, shoving his hands in his pockets. He was wearing gloves, of course, but the cold worked through them. He was pretty certain his nose was going to be frost bitten by the time he got to bed. Why was it the clearer the sky, the colder it was? “So Kit gave you this one.”

Gordon gave a disgusted sigh. “A’right, I suppose that’s fair. But what’re you doing out here?”

Keeping you from running scared from the dark and taking notes, so if your article’s unusable, we’ll have a backup, Thomas thought, although he didn’t say it out loud. Gordon’s reading had got better over the last two years, as had his writing, but all of the Beacon’s older staff were a bit sceptical of his ability to pull off an article, to say the least. “Because I’m nice and thought you might like some company.”

There was no response to that, although the younger man did lean into him a bit more. Funny how his aversion to being touched was inversely proportionate to his desire to get warm. “Then why isn’t Kit out here?”

This time Thomas said exactly what he was thinking. “Because he’s a hypocritical little sod who will shove anything he doesn’t want to do off on other people.” It might have been a bit unfair to the paper’s other proprietor, but given that Kit was at home in bed while he and Gordon were freezing their arses off in the cow pasture waiting for something to happen in the sky, he wasn’t feeling overly charitable.

Admittedly, the sky was lovely. Even in the middle of rural Yorkshire Thomas didn’t think he’d ever seen as many stars. A few feet off, Mr Braceridge was giving a lecture on the constellations to some of the other people who had elected to come stand in the field staring at the sky. But it was also bloody cold and he was well aware that he could be asleep right then. Even Richard had declined on joining them.

“Wots this thing we’re supposed to be seeing anyway?” Gordon asked, craning his neck upward. They’d brought electric torches and a few lamps out with them so they didn’t get lost or break their neck in the dark, but those had all been turned off.

“They’re called the aurora borealis,” Thomas informed him. “Also known as the northern lights.”

“Wot are they, then?”

Thomas shrugged. “I dunno’. Some sort of…light in the sky. I don’t know why it happens at all, but I bet ol’ Braceridge could talk your ear off about it.”

Gordon didn’t seem at all inclined to go and ask the scout master anything. “You ever seen it, then?”

“No, but you hear about it.”

There was a moment of thoughtful silence and then. “How do they know we’re going to see them?”

“I’m not certain they do,” Thomas sighed, not exactly pleased with the answer. The doubt was strengthened by Kit’s absence. “From what I gather someone got an almanac, that’s a book that predicts the weather and growing seasons and such, and something in it made Braceridge think there was a good likelihood.”

“Wot do we do if we don’t see them?” the boy demanded, clearly as pleased by the notion of coming out to the pasture on a fool’s errand.

“That’s easy.” Thomas shrugged. His eyes had adjusted enough that he could see his breath in the starlight. “We murder Kit for sending us out here to freeze our arses off at bloody one am for no reason.”

Gordon gave an amused sort of snort, but didn’t say anything. They lapsed into silence again. After several minutes, the younger man asked, “When’s the sun come up, then?”

Thomas’s first response was to pull out his watch, but the moon was dark, so he’d have to turn on the torch to see it and he might get scolded. “Not for hours yet, I would imagine.”

“Then wot’s that then?”

“What’s what?” Thomas asked, looking around in confusion.

“That light, over there.” Gordon pushed on his shoulder to give direction.

Thomas turned and frowned. There was, in fact, a light on the horizon, much like the light of predawn. The only problem was that it was far too early for dawn, and it was in the wrong direction. He squinted. On second though, the thing looked sort of like a glowing cloud. “I’m not certain…” He puzzled a second, then called. “Hey, Braceridge! What’s that light over there? To the north?”

There was a sudden buzz of excitement from the assembly and a jubilant cry from the scout master. “It’s them! It’s starting! Oh, well spotted Mr Barrow!”

Thomas blinked, then stared at the light. “That’s…it? That’s what we came out here for?”

“I’m going to murder Kit!”

“Now, now, chaps,” a cultured voice from somewhere to their left chuckled. Thomas placed it with Captain Smythe, a former naval officer who’d arrived on the island not long after they’d finished the building the expansion. “I know it’s not much to look at yet, but it’s just getting going. With a bit of luck, we’ll get a good show.”

“Have you seen these things before?” Gordon demanded with his usual disregard for rank or class.

“Oh yes,” the Captain replied, completely unruffled. Thomas supposed that military was military, so the Captain was probably used to courser manners than a London street rat had. “I’ve done a few tours up north to the arctic. This might be all we get, bad luck if it is, but there are nights the entire crew just went out and stared at the sky for upward of ten minutes.”

If he meant to raise Gordon’s hopes, he failed. “It only lasts ten minutes?”

“Sometimes less than that, actually, but I promise you, a good aurora is worth coming out in the dark and the cold.”

Gordon’s only response was an unconvinced ‘hmph’.

Thomas watched the horizon. The pale wash of white was certainly nothing like the descriptions of the northern light’s he’d ever heard. It did seem to be moving, maybe, at least a little bit. Then again, that might have been his imagination.

Time dragged on. The group of men continued to simply stand in the field and stare. Thomas was beginning to feel like a priceless ass when he realised the light was doing something. It was happening so slowly and subtly that he’d missed it at first, but it was definitely moving now, back and forth like a snake. It also, unless he was imagining things again, coming closer to them.

He frowned and waited.

“Right then,” Mr Braceridge announced into the darkness. “We should be getting colour soon! Keep your eyes peeled!”

Thomas was sceptical right up until the green actually appeared. At first it was just a flicker here or there, but it slowly spread until the line of lights flashed green and white like fireworks. The waving became more pronounced too, and it steadily got brighter. Soon the whole ribbon was mostly green, although there was still some white in there. “Alright,” Thomas admitted. “That’s more impressive.”

Gordon grumbled. “Still don’t know if it was worth getting up f-oh!” Suddenly there was a flicker of purple amid the white and green. As soon as the first flicker appeared, there were more, and soon the entire sky was lit up by the ribbon of light. More ribbons appeared as well, not as bright, but little ghosts or echos of the main ribbon off to the sides.

Thomas had to remind himself to breathe.

A few minutes later, the sky was black again. Thomas stared into the darkness, wondering if he’d somehow imagined the whole thing.

“Wooee!” Someone whistled. “That was a show, weren’t it?” As if the exclamation were permission, the entire group broke out in excited chattering, like a group of insects on a summer night.

“Well, chaps, what did you think?” the Captain’s voice asked. “A bit better than the start promised, eh?”

“Much,” Thomas admitted, still awed. “Although I don’t think that was ten minutes.”

“No,” the other man agreed. “More like three, I’d say. But still, you don’t always get that much colour, so I’d call even a minute worth it.”

“Yeah.” Thomas shook his head, still trying to believe what he’d just seen. He suddenly realised Gordon hadn’t said anything. “Oi, Gordon. What’d you think?”

For a moment, there was no response. Finally, in an awed voice, the younger man said, “I will never question Mr Braceridge’s sanity again.”

Thomas laughed at that and ruffled Gordon’s hair. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

#downton abbey #thomas barrow #downton abbey fanfiction #fanfiction #island of the gays #aurora borealis #northern lights #terrance gordon

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