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“People ask me: “Why don’t you take photos in color? In color!”
But Chernobyl: literally it means black event. There are no other colors there.”
― Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
There is a time when James runs out of words.
The stories dry up, the tales. His journals are abandoned by his pen, if not by himself. Barren and blank on his desk, as empty as an accusation. White pages. White ice. White spots on his nails. White spots in his eyes. It’s strange up here, in this severe corner of the Earth, where the colors fade away. When he sleeps, it’s in a white shirt and white sheets, his face pushed into a white pillow. When he prays, it’s to a God with a white beard and angels on white clouds above.
A sailor usually chokes on blue. Not here. Not in the sharp north. Blue keeps him steady. Each day, with shaking hands pulling on the same navy wool. His steward, John Bridgens, smooths the fabric over his broad shoulders, doing up the gold buttons, setting his gilded front to rights. James wants to tell him not to bother, to keep to his own needs. To look after the pale-eyed man who ducks into his own berth, a book tucked into the crook of his arm.
But the words aren’t there. There’s no story in the space between what they had meant to be and where they are now. How do you build bridges from sentences across this wide nothingness? How do you string a tale back and forth across the gap, words like spiderwebs, closing the distance between the real and the remembered?
He doesn’t know.
“You’re quiet,” Francis says, glancing at him sidelong across the wardroom's table. James bites the inside of his mouth, absently nodding. The china is white with a blue pattern of delicate willows.
“I’m afraid I am too much in my own head.”
“Don’t fret, James. There’ll be time enough for that whilst we walk.”
He washes in the basin. The water is cold on his face, his nose, his hands. It stings; everything stings now. The skin at the edges of his nails have begun ribboning, the cell bonds dissolving the collagen between them. Death by a thousand paper-cuts. Death by the hole in his arm. Death by the hole in his belly, once sewn up.
At least the blood is red. Red for blood, red for the wool of the marines. Red for the look of a man’s tongue torn out. Red for the Goldner’s cans, soldered shut with lead.
James runs a cautious hand over his side, feeling the ache in his scar. Every sailor knows the ravages of scurvy, he does not need to ask what waits for him. Already blood seeps from his capillaries, dotting his hairline like sweat. Already his old wounds are coming undone, the scar tissue disappearing. The wounds will reopen, taking him with them at last.
How long has it been since that bullet? It was seven years ago that it had slung through his side. A single musket ball, the size of a cherry. James had laid on the surgeon’s table, a bit of leather between his teeth, praying that he might not die. Praying that maybe, just once, he might get to feel love.
It was nine years ago, nearly ten, when James had met Francis Crozier in the marbled hall of the British Admiralty building. It is this first memory of Francis that James will keep with him to the end, a man who had turned without ceremony to meet him with a frank blue eye. His skin ruddy and already ruined by pockmarks and scars. Fair-haired and broad-handed, James could not help but feel young and gangly next to him. Like a child in his father’s boots, playing at being soldiers. Francis’ eye had been bright, sharp and acidic, and James had known then, as he knows now, that this is a man you might follow to the end of the world.
He thinks about it often.
“James would have you for the expedition south, I hear,” Francis had said, mild and awkward.
“I’m to be committed to the Ganges instead. East.”
“Ah. Of course.”
There’s a certain kind of man who allows his gaze to linger on another. The shape of a man’s back, his lean spine, the powerful bend of his legs. There’s a certain kind of man who sees this and turns into the light to show himself off best. James had shifted, looking back. Francis had jumped and scowled, his brows drawing together hastily in a strange fury, and left the room without another word.
James had stood in the hall until the shadows were long, flushed and mortified. Feeling scolded and lashed.
He must have imagined wrong.
Without a story, you can still speak. You can say something else entirely, twist your tongue to an inflection, bend your brow to a new meaning. James has liked to lean back at their oak table, volleying teases and insults to Francis like juggling fruit. Here, he thinks, tossing a jab like a peach. Catch.
He had never expected to be one of those same upended things, waiting to be caught.
“There are four-hundred miles to go. Francis, look at me. You know it as well as I do. I shan’t make it.”
“Don’t give up just because you cannot see the end. You must hold on.”
“To what? There’s nothing.”
“Then hold on to me. I’ll get us there.”
“You know, Francis, I never imagined I might ever say this, but your optimism is grating.”
“I’ll chalk that up as a compliment,” Francis says, smiling.
They had begun in separate tents at the start of the walk. Once James had fallen, shivering and staining the shale red, Francis had refused to leave his side. He had slept curled up around James, his chest to James’ back, his heart beating a comforting rhythm against James’ own.
Marco, James’ heart called.
And there was always a Polo.
When James had kissed Francis, expecting to die in the coming days, Francis had kissed back.
When they take rooms together, James paints every wall in the house. Covers every surface with color and wallpaper.
“At this rate, we’ll not have a speck of white in the whole place,” Francis had said, amusement on his lips and his newspaper in his lap. James doesn’t say much, only a slight nod. Something noncommittal. But Francis has always been good at reading between the lines.
“Shhh, dove,” Francis murmurs, pushing the paper to the floor and instead pulling James to his lap. “I’ve got you.”
Possess me, James wants to say. There’s an emptiness inside of him where the words had been once. There’s an emptiness inside of him, coming undone. Possess me, fill me up. He has lost the map of his own body. Francis can never be deep enough, can never fill him enough, until he has come to the very boundaries of James’ skin. How had Plato spoken of it? The children of the sun and their single-bodied love, never being incomplete. Never feeling partial or broken. Francis holds him, digging his hands into James’ muscle and sinew until fat purpled bruises are left behind. A trail of possession. James likes this, the colors of love. Alone, he is too pale and drawn. His hair dark, eyes dark. There is little variance from the chiaroscuro nightmare of day and night.
Francis has blue eyes and hair the color of a chalice. The color of buttons done up and epaulettes. After James is kissed, his mouth is flushed red, as if he had just bitten down on pomegranate seeds or torn a blood orange apart with his teeth. After James is touched, he is covered with wanted bruises, his skin marked and done up in plums and purples. One blooms a deep violet at the base of his throat, touched by blue. It looks like twilight. James runs a finger along it, gently treasuring the signature of Francis on his skin. In the morning, when Francis is out, either at the shops or calling on Ross, when James begins to panic again that this isn’t real, that he is still somewhere on the shale, he will pull his shirt away from his throat and stare at the bruise again. He’ll push down on the healthy ache of a healing bruise while wrapping his fist around himself and pulling himself off in the mirror, knowing he is loved and kept.
“A fine purple,” Francis says, dragging his teeth across it and canting his hips against James. “The color of royalty.”
“Our James always wanted to be a hero,” his brother had said, smiling. His pregnant wife standing at his side. “And look at you now. James Fitzjames, hero of the Arctic.”
What do you want to be when you grow up, James? What do you want to be when you’re a man? He had laughed and thrust an iron fireprod like a rapier, imagining that the chairs and tables he had tied up were loathsome pirates and that he alone had saved the seven seas. A hero, he’d said. I want to be a hero. Now he knows there’s a price for heroism. Name one hero for me who has lived a happy life. Tell me one hero who sleeps soundly through the night, never waking with shivers and sweats.
He tells his stories so that he might seal the tale back up, sew his own wounds shut. Language as a bandage, as clay to set the fracture.
Yet each time he speaks, he leaves something behind. It’s like spitting out your own teeth, telling stories. There’s always a little left of you after.
Always a little less of you.
After.
“James,” Francis murmurs, brushing against him, pressing his thumb into the nest of veins beneath James’ wrist. “I’ve got you.”
And later, later still, in the bedroom which is Francis’ by day but by night their own, Francis still doesn’t let go. Whether over him or under, bent to whatever angle, the pine-green sheets twisted about them like a fishing net, Francis keeps a firm, steady grip on him.
“Francis, I’m - I’m sorry,” James might gasp, not meaning to say anything at all. I'm sorry for all this, this racket. For morbing about. You should be celebrating.
“You’ve nothing to be sorry for,” Francis would say, his mouth pressed to the bend of James’ ear, tucking the words in so that they might not be lost. “Nothing. Do you hear me now?”
“Yes,” he’ll whisper. And that will be that. He might not believe it yet, that he doesn’t need to apologize for being less than what he once was, for bringing something damaged and imperfect to love, but Francis is patient and tells him over and over and over again. Never in so many words. In a cup of tea with milk and sugar, just the way James takes it. In an arm offered in St. James’ Park, pausing to admire the mulberry trees. In the way Francis doesn’t ask but only quietly has his room redone from cream walls to goldenrod, so that each time James might open the door, he finds only an explosion of sunlight and warmth.
James watches how the walls are sanded down before the wallpaper is applied. Curiosity killed the cat and he knows no better.
“It helps the application,” Francis says placidly, following his sight. He still keeps the habit of holding one arm behind his back. Sailors are habitual creatures. “Nothing sticks all too well to a perfect surface.”
When Francis is above him that night, his chest pressed to James’ own, their hands entangled and sweat dripping from Francis’ brow and James’ throat, James wonders if that might be true for he as well. There had been no love when men were complete and whole, before being torn apart by Zeus and his shears. James had played at a perfect surface.
One cannot love an ideal. Love is in the cracks.
“I love you.”
It is not the first time Francis has said it. Francis kisses the words into James’ clavicles, his breastbone, the bend of his elbow and dip of his hips. He presses his mouth to James’ wrists, at the veins and tendons, as if his love might pass through the skin and be wicked up into the hot blood and borne directly to the heart.
James clutches at him tightly, his eyes wild and breathing desperate. He doesn’t say anything. There is a fear buried, deep, deep within, that if he ever does unstick these words, this I love you, then it’ll unplug the holes in him and he’ll bleed out again. Did he die already? Once upon a time, while a bullet was in his side and a surgeon cutting it free? Did he die there, in a whitewashed sick bay, biting through the leather and with gin in his belly? He has been granted a stay of execution until he might feel love.
What happens after he says it? None of the stories talk about this. The happily ever after. Those are the edges of the map left dark. White. Blank.
White again. He is tired of white.
He holds Francis’ face in his long-fingered hands, his eyes bright and searching even in the dark. Please understand, he begs. Please please please.
When James was young and still among green things, growing things, he had liked to pick flowers for his aunt. She had kept them in her vases and, when she had run out of vases, put them in milk jugs and glass jars instead.
“Like Sleeping Beauty’s castle,” she had said to him, ruffling his hair. He had felt like sunlight and brought her more. More and more and more, until they covered every surface at Rose Hill and his aunt grew tired to see them.
“That’s enough, James."
To her, perhaps they were only flowers. To him, it was I love you. Being told to stop is hard to hear. It’s later, cupped in Francis’ arms that James will feel guilty. These flowers had lived their entire lives in the air and sunlight, grazing on the wind, just to be cut down by his own hand. Just so that he might skip the words.
“Careful,” Francis says, holding out one arm. Ice covers the stone steps to their home. The salt has not yet been put down.
James breathes heavily. Careful. Careful? How does careful creep back in, after consigning your life to have already ended? Fear creeps in only after you’ve gutted through the worst of it. The dying are too tired to fear. How tired? Ready to pull the covers up and creep down into the cellar, find a dark spot, quiet enough to die.
But those who live must reckon with their own survival. I could have died, they realize. James thinks of his own body, exhausted and drawn out, pale with bloodloss and shivering with hypovolemic shock. He could have died. It had been welcome then.
It’s terrifying to want to live.
Terrifying to want anything at all, really.
After you’ve been locked in, staring out only through thick glass windows, the world seems too large to bear. I have lived, you might say, stepping out from this safe house, this bunker. Perhaps the walls had been thick English oak, heated through by a network of lead-lined pipes and a constantly-working stove.
Then you get hit by a car.
It could happen. You can never be careful enough.
James fumes. After all that time, living carefully and surviving faithfully, shouldn’t there be a reprieve? One day without worry. Just one. That’s all he asks.
“Is it too much?” He asks, frowning at the walls.
“Pardon?” Francis doesn’t look up from his paper, idly stirring a cup of tea. It isn’t surprising to find that Francis, as much on land as at sea, is a creature of habit. Each morning he lingers over the paper in the sitting room for an hour or two, admiring the sunrise through the tall windows. He favors a rust-colored waistcoat. They, neither of them, wear blue.
Nor white.
“The paint and wallpaper.” James chews his lip, mulling over the colors. Too much, perhaps. Too much contrast. Too much clashing. Too many colors. "Just, it's a bit butter upon bacon, don't you suppose?"
A moment passes and James doesn’t have to turn around to know Francis has settled the paper down on the table and is looking not at the walls but at James himself. “It’s lovely, James. I wouldn’t want anything else.”
“You might tire of it.”
“I severely doubt that.”
“But you don’t know. You cannot know the future.”
“I would love it if I were blind. I’m an old man, James, and set in my ways. More like you’ll tire before I.”
He shakes his head. “Impossible.”
“Then,” Francis says with a wry smile. “If you might sustain your amusement with this and my cat-lap, I suppose we’ll just live in our colors for the rest of our years.”
Sometimes when they make love, Francis likes to wrap James’ hair around his fist and marvel in the rich color of it.
“Like oak,” he murmurs. “Mahogany.” The color of Francis’ desk, still on a ship half a world away. Is it still there, frozen in the ice? Perhaps crushed now, wood and steel beams warped into something unrecognizable, like a piece of paper crumpled in a fist? Or has Terror sunk to the bottom of the ocean, in the cold black of the seafloor, where no light ever visits?
“Francis,” James begs.
“I thought of you daily, you know.”
“Did you? Tell me how.”
“From the start, wanted you spread out and left to my mercy, this hair across my desk. My pillow. Wanted to shut your damnable mouth by stuffing it full.”
“Christ. Please.” James shivers at the thought. Spread out and spread eagle, like a meal to be tucked into. Francis might have feasted on him then, trussed up and tied like a roast duck. He would have said yes. His absurd mouth, all those fucking words just dribbling out, one after another after another before he could ever stop them. Francis might have put the rough pad of his fingertip on James’ lower lip and opened his mouth, filling him with his cock instead.
“You can shut me up now.”
Francis runs a finger along his mouth. It’s soft. He doesn’t say but you’re quiet now and I’d hear you speak more but James hears it all the same.
Francis doesn’t kiss him to shut him up; he kisses James to open his mouth.
“You would be content to live colorlessly,” James laughs. He laughs now, more and more. Sometimes when he laughs, there is guilt at the back door, remembering those who no longer might. Those left behind.
Time passes over us, the greatest healer of all.
Francis looks around the bedroom. The warm yellow walls, the mossy shade of his bedlinens.
“Content and happy,” Francis muses, “Are not the same thing, I think.”
James thinks he might know what he means. He knows how to encourage Francis’ tongue. He knows now that Francis only ever half-speaks, at least to start, expecting the door to be shut in his face. But instead, James wraps his hand over Francis’ own and rests his head against one sturdy shoulder.
“I would have left the walls white,” Francis says softly. “And the sheets white. Or grey. And gone to bed with the same ice and shale I’d lost you in. I would have left the door unlocked, in case somehow you’d come back. Salted the walkway, just in case you might slip. Stayed home each day, in case somehow I might miss you.”
Something is thick in James’ throat. He swallows. Francis squeezes his hand.
“There are many things I would have done were you not with me, James. But I would not have been happy.”
Remember that ghosts are pale and white. Insubstantial. Something like clouds, unable to be touched. Something like ice, cold as we brush against them.
“I love you, I love you, I love you,” Francis cries, buried deep in James’ body. There’s a sharp burn to it, how he opens to Francis. James likes the ache, the heat, the pain. It’s the sort of pain you might only feel if alive. Francis’ breath is warm and hot against his chest. A pretty flush flirts with Francis’ neck and cheeks. Pink as a rose.
Francis kisses him. There’s a fury to it. There’s always been a fury to the two of them, he’d just never understood how they walked that line.
“Francis - “ he whispers. There’s I love you behind it. He can’t say it, not when his scars are still pink. Not when he still remembers the look of his torn open skin, the muscles laid pink and bare. What if these last words are the only things keeping him sewn up? The last stitches, the last stopper? If he lets them go, out into the world, what is stopping him from bleeding out?
Francis kisses him and sinks his mouth onto James’ twitching cock and James is forgiven.
When Francis puts a ring on his finger, it is gold. The embers in the grate catch on the metal, lighting it up in a cacophony of orange and yellow. Somewhere, on the edges, is red.
Paper is white. Ink is black. James hates both colors. Paper and ink have only spelled ruin, he has learned to commit himself to nothing and no one. Paper and ink for his baptism, his name made-up by two people who never existed before and never would again. Paper and ink for the first time he goes to sea, leaving his family and the green hills of England behind. Paper and ink for the muster books of HMS Terror and Erebus. Paper and ink for his obituary, yet unprinted (waiting).
But Francis draws up a marriage certificate with just their names. There is nothing official of it, not by Queen and country, but there it is in white and black. Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier and James Fitzjames.
This time he doesn’t mind.
“Harder,” James hisses, wrapping his legs around Francis’ hips. “Please, Francis. Fuck me.” Fuck me clean, fuck it out of me. The worry, the hurt. It’s there, stuck like spiderwebs. Shake it out of me with your hands, your body, your arms, your cock. Fuck it out. Make me forget what I brought here. All this worry. Put more of yourself in me so I’ll have to set the ache down.
Francis drives harder into him, his sweat dripping onto James’ face. He likes the feel of it, the salt. The dead don’t sweat. The dead don’t feel this warm. They must be living. Francis shifts on the bed, sitting up against the wooden headboard. “Like this,” he murmurs. “Come here, love.” James flushes at the endearment, somehow more self-conscious of this than of his own long dick slapping wetly against his inner thigh. He climbs onto Francis’ lap, his back to Francis’ chest.
He has been held like this before, surrounded by Francis’ body, while they were walking across the shale. Francis had had a steady heartbeat and loved him then, spitting out teeth and losing blood. Francis loves him now, sewn up and healed once more. That cock, thick as a whale, pokes up proudly from Francis’ lap and James digs his teeth into his lip as he impales himself upon it once more, swallowing a moan. It’s good. God, it’s good. He forgets how incomplete he is until just now, like this, once more made whole.
“Jesus Christ,” Francis hisses. As if it were the first time again. Every time. “God, you feel so damn good.”
James likes to set the pace, to work his body up and down, sliding along Francis. Francis’ fingers wrap around James’ own cock as he does, running a steady commentary of pleasure along the length of him.
“Oh hell.”
“That’s it, lad. Keep going. You do love to fuck yourself on me, don’t you?”
“Y - yes, god, Francis. And you love it.”
“Aye,” Francis murmurs, turning his head to nip at James’ ear. His breath is wet and hot. “That I do. Love it. And you, you teasing menace.”
“I never tease,” James says, mock-offended. His hands dig into the meat of Francis’ thighs, as thick and sturdy as a column’s pedestal. “I make promises.”
“Oh? All these years then, you driving me to utter distraction - were those promises, James?”
He rises and falls again, fucking a groan out of both of them, clenching down upon Francis within him. “I wanted - I wanted - “
“Shhh.”
“I would have had you anytime,” James says, half-lost. Half-babble. “Anytime, god, how I wanted you, you were so - “
“I’ve got you now. It’s alright.” Francis wraps an arm around James, spreading his palm flat on James’ chest. The metal of his ring band is steady and warm against James’ skin.
“Francis.” He might sob. He might, god, he might. Francis is hot and thick within him and the tension of his own climax sparkles along his crown and spine, just waiting waiting waiting. Everything there, packed up like tinder, ready to burn. It’s all there, the blue of Francis’ eyes, the pink of his blush. The gold of their walls, their twinned rings. The rich brown of their armoire. The green of their linens. The green of the grass outside, just beyond their home, in the garden and trees beyond. Red is for the apples in their fruit bowl and not for blood. Orange is for apricots and nothing of a tent on fire.
He closes his eyes and it is black. But this is not the black of death but only this, the comfort of a dark room, held in the arms of a lover. Black as ink, with two names written together, joined on a document that will last past their own lives. Black as a truth self-evident. Once, James Fitzjames lived. Once, Francis Crozier lived.
Once, they loved.
“God, I love you,” he cries. For the first time and never the last.
When he comes, the world turns white. His eyes spark in a cacophony of white. White light and endless white heat, pulsing at the seams of his body. He is more than his body, overflowing at the seams of himself, but Francis has him in two steady arms, still deep within him, grounding him to the earth. He will not bleed out. His come pulses hot and wet and white over Francis' hand, soaking their sheets with sweat and spill. Everything is white as a star and James falls sobbing against Francis’ chest, clutching and blinking the wet away.
“I’ve got you,” Francis murmurs, thumb stroking James’ cheek, against the lines that tears might have carved.
There is a time when James takes up his pen. He favors a cream paper, nearly cardstock for the thickness of it. Francis shakes his head and laughs.
“You’re too extravagant,” he mutters, content with his paper like newsprint.
“You like it, I think,” James says, dipping his pen into a dark India ink, as black as the endless space of night. He writes tales. Swashbuckling adventures for children, epic poems of sailor’s delights for adults. Perhaps a little of the erotic or a poem or two, just to keep everyone on their toes. (None of it, should we look, is particularly good.)
But he writes. And this story, the one he tells now, begins with a sailor with eyes as blue as the quiet sea.