Wheat Kings and Pretty Things

Finally, she drew her thumb around the tip and that did it. Blood rushed from his head. She sat back, spread her knees, pulling him with her, hands behind his ass. It was so fucking muggy in here. Alfred awkwardly drew his sleeves up over his elbows and she began to thrust. She had been more eager than him from the start. Alfred put in the bare minimum and tried to focus on the hot pool of reluctant heat at the crux of his thighs. He failed, tried to find somewhere to touch or kiss or something — but she turned her face away when he kissed her and thrust harder. Trust the French to kiss when they said good day, but not for a fuck. Alfred was about had enough when he moaned and gripped the tile walls —

"Goodness, there's a sight no father should witness."

That fucking — no, it couldn't — the blood abandoned his cock and flooded to his face. The girl shoved him away, shrieked and said something rapid and accusing in French, pointing madly at him and throwing her skirts down. Alfred fell away against the wall, and oh God, why couldn't she have just slammed his head into the tile and killed him.

And there was his father, in slippers and a dressing gown, a newspaper under one arm and a gilt teacup in the other hand. He could hear footsteps coming now — men's feet, witnesses to his fornication. It felt like he'd just had a cannon dropped on him.

There was a rush of people: stiff men in crisp white uniforms, women rushing about the girl he'd only just exited, a clamor of accusation. The girl was wailing, Alfred was backpedaling, shoving himself into the corner with shock and confusion. He watched his father roll his eyes, take a sip of tea, shove the cup into the hands of some servant, and say something rather loud in French. Had his French gotten so out of date he couldn't remember anything, or had he just gone deaf?

"Alfred, you will join me for a bit of refreshment that isn't horizontal."

"What?" Alfred said, because he heard the words but they didn't register.

His father was tugging him by the forearm out of the hot rooms and through a pair of arched French doors onto a veranda of sorts. It was still winter in France — all the perfectly coiffed gardens of spring still weeks away, the hardier ones still buried under brown burlap frosted with snow. He inhaled as the sweat on him cooled and shuddered.

"Better?" Arthur said. He'd lowered himself into a chair just inside the glass doors, which had to be freezing in this weather. Father looked just a touch too casual, one pasty ankle resting on the other knee, the newspaper opened in front of him, blocking the world from view.

"Yes," Alfred said shortly, scratching at his hairline where the breeze — or stress, or the fuck — had mussed his hair. He still felt woozy, but much clearer than before.

"Good," his father said in a pointedly crisp tone of disapproval. "Now, would you be so kind as to cover yourself before you catch cold? You are rather grown for me to be doing it."

Alfred looked down. His suit pants, complete with drawers and suspenders, were hanging loose around his feet. Oh, Lord have mercy. He scrambled to dress himself. The snap of the suspenders on his shoulders hurt his head, but he sat down across from his father, closing the doors behind him when he was finished. Arthur folded his newspaper.

"Fancy meeting you here," he said. It was sarcastic and biting. "I would have thought you'd be in Ottawa with your brother. Celebrating his independence."

Alfred snorted. Shiny new shackles with a fancy name were still shackles. Arthur looked at him, one eyebrow raised in that dry sort of way that meant annoyance. Alfred sidestepped the argument.

"And a French sanatorium of all places!"

"I'm supposed to be dodging you, actually."

Arthur snorted heartily. "Mucked that up, didn't you, lad?"

"Obviously," Alfred muttered bitterly.

"Come to take the waters, have you? Is the war still lingering, then?"

"None of your fucking business."

"My goodness, you are hostile. I suppose you're right. Though your arse is none of my business either, and yet I've seen more of it on this fine morning than I have since before you were breeched."

Alfred could feel his face turning red — his face hot and the rest of him impossibly cold. He had no comeback.

"Tea?" his father said coolly.

"No."

"Really? You look rather chilled."

"I'm fine. I'm just going to sit here until they've gone."

"That's likely to be a while. Didn't you hear the chatter? She's claiming to have been seduced by a slick rake from America. And there are rather few of those in these parts. Really, Alfred! Fornication is one thing. Fornication with a stranger? God's own blood, lad! What did I tell you about sex!"

"That I'd go blind if I masturbated? She came on to me while I was having my breakfast. It's not my fault."

"Well, all we saw was you certainly coming into her," Arthur said, smirking. He was enjoying this far too much, but he cleared his face and took up the teapot and poured himself a cup. "Sure you won't have any?"

"I hate tea."

"I'm well aware. Unfortunately for you, I haven't ordered coffee. But lucky for me, the nearest harbor is miles away — even if you were tempted." He poured out a second cup on the fussy saucers, dumped a stupid amount of sugar in it, stirred, and pushed it at Alfred, looking smugly benevolent. The bastard had always taken advantage of his sweet tooth, using it to bribe him since birth. Steam rose invitingly, wavering the air just above the cup.

Alfred clenched his hands and shoved them under his thighs to stop himself — but a moment later he was picking it up, holding it against his aching chest and breathing in the steam. The taste was something he'd never liked, but it was sweet and smoothed over the rough edges in his mouth and down his throat, filled his belly and eased something in his chest that had hurt since he marched through the burning cotton fields with Sherman. The march to the sea. He must have made some sort of noise, because Arthur glanced up from his paper on the table, then looked firmly back down — and Alfred half felt like he'd just caught a voyeur staring at him naked from a tree outside the window.

"You look dreadful," Arthur said, and it was a voice Alfred only half remembered from boyhood. Kindness without threat behind it. Soft. It sounded like flickering fire and rain on a roof and a table creaking under the weight of food and a small happy family of three. It felt warm. Good.

Then the switch flipped.

That voice had been the same one to say: "Don't talk to strangers. Don't trust anyone except me."

And Alfred hadn't trusted him in nearly a century.

The transformation wasn't even conscious. Not really. He grinned, leaned back in the chair, kicked his feet up on the table, and gave Arthur a mocking toast with the teacup.

"But that debutante was making eyes at me! When was the last time a girl like that gave you the eye, old man?"

He saw the flicker of something fail in his father's face, and it almost felt as good as shooting his fucking jaw off at Yorktown had, eighty-six years earlier.

There was a half-hearted harrumph, but the flash was gone. Father was gone, and the British Empire was back.

"You make it sound as if mounting a Frenchman is some sort of difficulty. Unless something remarkable happened, I've always found the reverse to be true. Ah — you never did like listening to anything you didn't want to hear. But it's a touch like bridge, son. If you don't have a good partner, you'd best have a good hand."

Alfred choked on his tea.

"You might find Michigan gives your knob a polish better than engaged French heiresses."

With half-scalding liquid in his nose, Alfred coughed and spluttered. "Engaged?"

"Oh, didn't you know? To a rifle manufacturer. Quite the captain of industry."

Alfred's smile fell off his face. Now Arthur was satiated.

“Get out!” He bellowed. He shoved the nearest red tab and stuffed him out the tent flap and kicked another one on the arse to follow besides. “Get out! Get away from her!” Dad looked up, bewildered but didn’t need any explaination to start ordering the same, the old lion roaring that he’d kill them all if they didn’t move, didn’t get out, didn’t leave them be. He gives Jack a look as if to ask permission for something.

He’s not sure he loves his father, since Gallipoli but they love her. Jack practically throws people out of his way and Zee is arms out, sobbing, crushing the distance of the Tasman before he can even open his arms to hold her. Dad gives one last look and Jack knows he'll be outside with Matt, prowling and protecting them but the last glance he gives is sad and Jack is glad. Maybe he'll see what he's done, letting high spirits, including Jack's own, throw them into a war without a way out. Zee turns, trying to get more contact and he can see a bruise on her shoulder.

“What happened?” He demanded. “What did they do?”

“Ludwig— He—” She made a wretched sound and his heart hurt so much for her.

“Did he hurt you?” He rested his cheek on her head and held her tighter trying so much just to not melt down just hearing the fear in her. "If he touched you—"

“No!" Zee said. "No, not like that. It's Ludwig he's never even looked at a girl. He jumped me behind the lines to make sure I knew he could. I fought—"

"Course you did!" Jack agreed. "I'm sure you put the fear of God into him!"

"I took a chunk out of him." She said and he could still see a smudge of blood on her cheek to prove it. "And I could have thrown them all out just now too!"

She cried. And he almost laughs, because of course she could. She could howl down the roof of the world with those geysers of hers and the windpipe to match.

“I know.” He said. “But its not like Dads good for much these days. Good to let him feel useful. Proper kind of you.”

She barked out a laugh but a sob came so quickly on its heels he started up with her, blinking down tears.

"What do you need?" He said.

The crying started again and his shirt was getting damp.

"I won't be Aunt Brighid!" She blurted. "I won't spend my fucking life one step ahead of armies waiting for the sack."

"Not as long as I'm breathing!" He said. Because that's the easy part. It's the quiet part, the reassuring and God awful stillness of it that's harder.

He doesn’t have time to say before she's pulling away from him, not far enough she has to let go of his hand but far enough to look at him and look at him hard.

"Take Matt and hunt him down and make sure he knows there are consequences! You tell him if he touches any of us, he and the Prussian bastard will pay for it! I am not some fucking piece on the board to be terrified and played this way or that. Do you hear me? I won't! I won't be tossed around like that ever again. And then you come back in one piece because I'm going to need another hug."

"He won't dare." Jack said, and kissed her hair, meaning it more than anything. "If he's not already terrified of you he will be. And I'll be quick."

"Don't kill him." Zee said. "He doesn't deserve it."

_______

"Give me your bayonet and back off," Matt commands in that low tone of voice that reverberates through the trees, through the fog and the smoke and the night, driving deep into Jack's belly where fear should be. But there is little there since Gallipoli, and even less since Zee stumbled off the line with her collar torn and her eyes wild. He hands over the bayonet.

Matt has shucked his helmet. His hair is shorn, and his face is dark like a thunderstorm above the outback, the kind that threatens to shatter Jack's entire continent asunder. Ludwig is pinned to the fake tree that Matt himself had occupied only moments before, lying in wait like a wolf spider until the right German, Germany himself, had stumbled across the mud. Matt had sprung the trap, and Ludwig had fallen. He stands now, pinned to the tree with bayonets spiked through his wrists, Christlike.

"You don't deserve to be martyred," Matt snarls as he hammers the third bayonet into the thin slice of muscle and clothing just next to the groin. Jack clenches as he sees how near the crux of Ludwig's thighs it lands. Matt draws in close.

"If you ever touch them again, I will find you. And I won't miss. Are we understood?"

There's a sluggish nod as piss and blood mix and trail down the grey trousers. Jack can't really look at Ludwig's face. Their enemy—wire-thin, half-starved—stands there. Matt has no guilt, but Jack—wracking guilt is worse than the medieval torture rack, the way it floods, hot and bile-like through Jack's veins, replacing his blood and his brain and his sense and his sincerity. Matt's knife comes out, the long wicked thing he had carved Jack a tiny lopsided koala with when he'd been tiny and miserable in London that first Christmas more than a century before. Jack wants to vomit. The knife comes up, swinging horribly accurate in Matt's hands, blurring in the dark with a glint that shines like a sparking telegraph wire strung between his brother's hand and Germany's sternum. Jack's hand lifts and stays Matt's hand.

"Enough!" he says before he can stop himself. "That's enough! He gets the picture!"

"He hurt her. This was her idea."

"He scared her. It's war. And you've scared him and more. Fucking hell Matt, look at him. We're supposed to be the good side, and this—this isn't good!"

"I don't care," Matt snarls, turning the same tone on Jack that he had just used on Ludwig. "Crawl back and hide behind Zee's skirts if you want! I'm finishing this."

"Finishing what? The war? Does your entire country collapse when they kill you? No! Stop it! Walk away before you lose yourself, Matt!"

Matt's eyes flicker up. Even the rich blue of them has dissolved into the mud with the last of his decency, or maybe the gas since he healed from the chlorine, leaving pale irises to blend into the whites. Jack thinks it might be too late. Matt's humanity might be gone, dissolved into France the way it had come into being.

"This isn't what Zee wants," he says instead. "She doesn't want it to happen like this. She doesn't want this. And it's her who's hurt that matters here. Not yours. This is not about the gas, Matt. Do you hear me? You will be walking over her wants her as much as he did if you continue. This is not what she wants!"

Her shaking, Aunt Brighid's screams. He puts more pressure on Matt's knife hand and stares him down.

Matt's face doesn't change. Ludwig, who has been silent this long, looks at Jack like Jack gives a shit about what happens to him, and not the dozen times Zee has made the choice to be a human being. The dozens more he has for her sake and his own. Not this piece of shits. The knife draws up and Jack thinks for one horrendous moment Matt will slit another throat in front of him but he doesn't lose his grip on Matt's wrist, and after a long moment, Matt looks at him, really looks at him.

His face gives nothing, but he plucks up the bayonets, stepping back with a look of mild disgust when Ludwig's blood stains his sleeves. Not guilt, not even regret. Jack feels something horrendously like fear then.

"I will hunt you down and put you down like a rabid dog if you touch my family again. I don't care what agreement exists between your brother and my father. I will hang the pieces of your body where every German will see, where your brother will find you, part by part. Do you understand? Speak you understand or I'll do it right now. As long as I'm breathing they are as untouchable as Alfred. Do you understand?"

He wondered which sailor has been tossed in as ropes are gathered. Gloves off because he needed all his dexterity, his hands hurt something fierce as he got a dock line into his grip. Arthur’s hand bled in moments, not from rope burn but from the ice melting and refreezing and tearing his bare palm as he swung a coil of the rope twice to build momentum and let it loose. The loop of rope flew over the gunwale in a gliding arc and Arthur nodded as it landed within a yard. The seaman should be able to hang on to that long enough to circle the ship in and pull him out. The sailor thrashed and Arthur wanted to curse him for wasting his energy on panic before the thrashing turned into a smooth breaststroke and the figure was racing toward the rope. An impressive feat of coolheaded strength.

"Hang on!" Arthur cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted. "We'll have you out in a tick!"

There's a high little gasp of a scream, but nothing so loud as a scream. Poor lad's voice hasn't even dropped, Arthur grimaces to himself and again wonder's which it is. It's a ship's boy, one of the young cadets that follow around the officers and ship's engineers and ice masters like puppies, trying to learn all they can. All the men are issued the same layers of wool with the waterproof greatcoat on top, pale grey as the ice with bulbous upper gloves and Welsh-style watch caps pulled low over their foreheads. But each man wore theirs differently, with long colourful scarves wrapped around their necks and heads until only the tips of noses are visible or when the outer navy-issue mittens came off, a pair of fingerless mitts lovingly knit by a mother or wife. Boys who haven't their own mothers have friends who wrote to their own for a Christmas present for their mates.

As whoever it was struggled with their coat, trying to free themselves of the dragging layers, Arthur can't see any distinguishing cap or belt or mitts. At least it wasn't Matthew... he'd or Rhys had knit the lad a set himself years ago. There was a gash at the temple, unbelievably bloody against the bleak grey skin and a bare column of the exposed throat. Vaguely, Arthur wondered what kind of lonely soul exists onboard a ship like this without family or friends willing to lend a scarf or write home for one as he's heaving rope over the side demanding room, demanding all eyes on the man. Arthur's body is half over the railing, urging the sailor on when big blue eyes lock on him and he almost falls in himself.

“Father!" The single word rang out like the shot of canon and hit him in the chest.

Arthur's heartbeat sounds like more gunfire in his ears.

"Come on, lad!" Arthur screamed down, punctuating his words with strikes of his bare hands on the remaining. The rope was just there, any man could just reach out and tie it about himself and they'd heave him out. But the ship was still moving, not quite at full speed but close enough that the rope was already further away than it was when Arthur threw it. He waited a moment as Matthew fumbled and thrashed, slapping at the water in a clumsy imitation of his usual grace in the water. The boy could swim and well and Arthur didn't understand why he wasn't now.

"Come on, come on," He muttered. All Matthew had to do was tie it about himself. Any man could do it. Any man at all. Waters that cold killed quickly, but it robs men of their senses faster. And with a roll of horror in his belly, the obvious occurred to him. Matthew is not yet a man. He is a boy. And not a boy like Alfred who was always as dense, sturdy, and always strong but the dear wee slender thing with little muscle or flesh at all to resist the cold between his bones and the bottom of a frozen sea. It's only the unnatural resistance to the cold that's kept him this far. Having exhaled all the air from his lungs, the lad is sinking. The boy is drowning. Matthew is a boy. A boy. His boy. With a shock of horror like lightning to the spine and his mind all in a whirl, Arthur cursed violently. The lad was freezing to death too quickly to drag himself out via the rope. Being thrashed about by the waves, even swimming as hard as he could, his soaked navy issue wool clothes are now impossibly heavy, breaking down his resistance and tugging him into the black belly of the sea. A man could paddle after and hold the rope, Arthur thinks numbly again, as he realized the boy is drowning before his thoughts break open once more.

Arthur has to get him out. Hair the color of winter wheat is already freezing around his face. He'd never get himself out at this rate and they'd be hauling his boy’s frozen corpse out if they managed to ever find it. If not, Matthew would be reviving, freezing, reviving, and freezing for god knows how long before he hit the shore. Arthur has done it exactly once in all his centuries and the thought of Matthew’s sweet face being pecked at by seabirds makes him move faster than he’d have thought possible in the cold. Finding rope tied tightly to a mooring cleat, Arthur whipped off his coat and had knocked off his cap when fists closed around his shirt sleeves and he was yanked back.

"Sir, no!" A sailor cried out too close to his ears and Arthur only just registered a limp sort of horror on Matthew's face as he disappeared from view as the angle to see down

"Have you lost your fucking mind? Release me," Arthur barked. He’d hardly gotten one arm free when someone else had the other.

"Absolutely not, all you’ll do is get yourself killed! That seaman is already as good as dead!"

"That boy is my ward and responsibility!" His responsibility and his only son. His only boy because the other has fucked off into the lonely ether of independence. He has one child to give him the title of father and he's drowning and will be dragged into the wake of the ship and lost, lost, _lost._ Damned to the deeps until he washed up some godforsaken place.

“And your safe passage to England is mine!” The Captain roared back. In a more rational moment, a less desperate moment, Arthur might have understood the Captain’s logic. All he knows of Arthur is a made-up series of titles and order’s from the admiralty to facilitate his prompt arrival home to London. For men, for mortal men without entire islands hammering away in their chest, it's a fool’s errand to try to fish the boy out. As ill-advised as Lot looking back at his wife. But Arthur has never been married, not properly. There was no mother who gave him his boys, save maybe Good Queen Bess. All he has ever had in this world are his siblings with their relationship broken by ages and ages of conflict and his sons. One son, now. Surprise and sorrow now. Matthew has addressed him as ‘Father’ and the word ‘son’ is stuck in Arthur’s head. With all the authority he could muster, he shouted at them with the voice of a skipper who needed to be heard through a hurricane. His boy. He roared in frustration, struggling.

"You let me go or I'll get loose and when I get back on this deck I will hang by your bollocks from the bow myself. If he dies, keelhauling you cocks first will be my mercy."

The words reverberate and the nation shouting at them has done enough to loosen their grip. Before the Captain could shout again, Arthur was twisting his own arms violently. He wrenched someone’s wrist past its natural angles and when another midshipman pulled him back and hooked an elbow around his neck, Arthur dropped to the ground and rolled his shoulders hard enough to buck off the arms. Riding the momentum, he rose to his feet once more. As his fist connected with a jaw, he cursed God Almighty and in the same breath thanked Him when the rope was just where it’d dropped. It’s only another moment before he's over the gunwale and falling.

As old of a sailor as he is, even if it hardly looks like he’s approaching thirty, he has the line around himself and the knot is tight as he drew a deep breath and threw his arms up over his head and dove. He’d forgotten how painful water that cold was. It somehow burned like hellfire, replacing the hair on his arms with the tips of knives. The breath snapped from his mouth in silvery bubbles but he broke the surface in another moment. Scrubbing his fringe back and gasping in the cold, he contorted his whole body in a corkscrew until he had spun far enough to get the boy in his sights. Ha! There Matthew’s damnably small form was, bobbing face down in the rough water.

Arthur swam hard, and in three kicks, had his arms around the boy and was turning him over, aiming his grey face to the blue sky and swearing at him to breathe. Matthew is senseless, too fucking stiff and cold to even shiver anymore and the high points of the lad's grey face are blue. Arthur hammered his fist into the boy's back, just left of his spine as he had done a thousand times to drowning men. His aim was good and Matthew gave one violent inhale and heaved up water.

“You’re all right,”

"Holy— Father???" He gasped before breaking into an explosion of coughing that made his body jerk. The single word did not give Arthur enough to decide if Matthew is surprised it's him or if his boy is praying but for the moment it didn’t matter. Arthur fumbled for the rope, trying to see if there was any way to tie Matthew to him because he isn’t quite sure his strength will hold, but sailors are already dragging them through the water and the rope is taut. The ship siding hulked above their heads got closer. The captain was bellowing and sailors were heaving.

“Be still, lad,” Arthur said and somehow, Matthew’s coughing came down to a ragged wheezing Arthur could hardly hear over the waves. Fingers disobedient because he was shivering so hard, Arthur hefted Matthew up a bit so he could get as best a hold he could and moved the boy’s hands to where he could get the strongest grip and made him hold tight around his neck.

“Don’t let go,” Arthur as they began to lift out of the water.

There were far better ways to tie a rope for such things, and for one panicked moment as hemp bit deep into the skin of his belly, he thought his knots might give. But he was more sailor than man and they didn’t and the rope stopped its sliding at Arthur’s ribs. The pain built to an uncomfortable height. His floating ribs creaked as father and son lifted free from the sea and all their combined weight and that of their waterlogged clothes rested on the rope. It felt like it might snap Arthur clean in half at the waist but Matthew made a nervous noise and it was forgotten.