Archive of Our Own ^beta

February 18th, 1851

James does not know why he takes a train to Greenhithe.

He is not without employment - the correspondence wants tending, there are calls to be made, the admiralty to visit, a new commission to select. And yet the moment he steps out of the door he can think of nothing but that he must go down to Greenhithe at once.

The town holds no special significance for him - none that comes to mind, anyway. But by midmorning he finds himself standing there upon the dock, watching the ships ride up and down upon the waters in port, wondering why there is such an anxious thundering in his chest, as if he has forgotten something. He checks again and again - he retains everything he had upon his person when he left the flat, he took no umbrella to have forgotten on the train, and yet -

“Alright there?”

James blinks.

A man stands before him - a navy man, if James is any judge of such things, though they’re both out of uniform.

“Yes, I - I believe so,” James shakes his head. “Terribly sorry.” The man shrugs, and something about it - the loose, disaffected manner, perhaps - quiets the terrified rabbit of James’ heart, and he can observe his new companion without the feeling of impending calamity hampering his powers of observation. He is older than James, stocky, with a hunch to his shoulders like a bulldog. He would never be deemed handsome, not in the traditional sense, but his light hair catches the sun, his wide, very blue eyes peer with something beyond polite curiosity, his eyebrow arches in question, and it all makes James a bit weak at the knees just the same.

“James Fitzjames,” he says, thrusting his hand between them, securing the introduction before the man can wander out of his sight just as soon as he’s appeared.

“Francis Crozier.” The man shakes his hand with a firm grip. Crozier? It sounds familiar, but James cannot place it.

“What brings you to Greenhithe?” James asks. Crozier merely shakes his head.

“I couldn't begin to say,” he says, with an uneasy lilt to his voice.

“It seems we find ourselves in similar circumstances, Mr. Crozier.”

“Captain,” Crozier corrects him.

“Forgive me.” The smile does not leave James’ face, and the weakness at his knees increases tenfold. “I did not realize I was in the presence of the great polar explorer.” Captain Crozier makes a sound that could almost be a laugh.

“The Antarctic was a very long time ago,” he says, shaking his head.

James deftly maneuvers them into an actual conversation and a stroll about the docks. He and Captain Crozier have a great deal in common, and though James burns to tell the man of his own exploits, the sniper in China, delivering the mail, he is strangely hesitant, preferring to allow Crozier to tell him of his Antarctic voyage, of the penguins, the winters in the ice.

“How I ramble on,” Crozier says, when the sun has long passed its zenith. “I am sure you have your own duties to be attending to, Commander. I am sorry to have kept you.”

“You have done nothing but afforded me the most delightful afternoon of your own time,” James replies. “Although I should be getting back to London soon.”

“We are in similar straits again. I should be heading back. Jim - Captain Ross - I’m staying with him and his family for a spell, until my next posting - they’ll be wondering what has kept me so long.”

There is nothing for it but that they head back on the train together, and if their knees knock together in their compartment, if James reaches across Captain Crozier’s broad chest to fiddle with the window, if Captain Crozier’s breath hitches as he does so, this is all part of the game, is it not? The push and pull, the sussing out of another man to see where his intentions lie.

“Shall we continue on together?” James suggests when they arrive back in London, faced with a line of carriages. He tries not to sound too desperate, but Francis only smiles.

“It’s a cold night.” He nods as he says it, as if confirming something for himself. “Of course.”

They reach James’ flat first, and James barely has to make any sort of eyes at all before Crozier accepts his invitation inside. This is easy, almost too easy, and he so had been looking forward to his usual trick of batting his lashes in a certain manner. But has not all of this been rather easier than usual? Their meeting, their little game in the train compartment - James cannot remember a time when drawing a man in was as simple as sitting beside him.

It continues to be easy, to sit beside Crozier on the sofa, to allow his hand to fall somewhere south of propriety. Then James is being pressed into the cushions and kissed like Crozier is determined he should be thrown off at any moment, and must prove himself better than his own expectations. (“Crozier!” A soft chuckle. “Call me Francis.”) James has no intentions of pushing him anywhere, and yet it is Francis who springs back, who stands and paces, and sets off alarm bells in James’ head at once. He stands too, gets ready to fight or flee should the situation require it, but Francis merely turns toward James with a face that wars between despair and confusion.

“I’m -” Francis begins. “There’s a woman.” James’ disappointment must show in his face, because Francis quickly grabs his hand.

“It’s not - I already proposed.”

“Oh.” James' disappointment morphs into confusion. Then why bring it up at all?

Francis seems to be wondering himself why he’s made such a fuss, shaking his head like he’s trying to jog a memory loose.

“She said no.”

“Oh.”

“Years ago.”

“O - What?”

“We’re friends, I think. I -” Francis shakes his head. “I think I make her rather sad, truth be told. She had an Uncle. He died up north. The Franklin Expedition, you know.”

The Franklin expedition? It sounds - it sounds like nothing he’s ever heard before, and yet the minute the words leave Francis’ mouth it opens up a yawning pit of dread inside of him. James is terrified of what will happen to him if he tumbles into it.

“James?”

“Kiss me, Francis.”

Francis does. He presses James back against the wall, and the hardness of the wood against his back grounds him as much as Francis opening his mouth under his own. There is a - a tenderness there that James did not expect, like Francis is holding himself back as he gently parts James’ lips with his tongue and delicately licks his way inside. Francis is holding him - not pawing at him, as James has been used to in the past. But holding him gently, tenderly, like James is something worth protecting, like James is worth something.

It is so much, too much, and so James drops to his knees and Francis sighs above him and something about it feels right and good and when James begins fumbling with Francis’ trousers, he is eager to blame the tears welling up in his eyes on the stretch of Francis’ cock.

February 14th, 1851

It happens at an admiralty dinner.

It has been three weeks since Francis left their flat, since he packed a bag and sent for his trunk and James wanted to throw all his hideous and outdated clothes straight into the street after him. Three weeks since James snuck a nightshirt out of the trunk before a porter came to take it away. Three weeks without their bickering, without that damned judgemental eyebrow on him at all times, without a warm body beside him in the night, sleeping in that shirt so that he might get a hint of Francis’ smell when he turns his head.

He’s doing fine, really.

But there is a dinner tonight, and James has secured the knowledge that Francis will be in attendance. Therefore he must look impeccable, like a man who never lost anything in the arctic, not his hair, not his teeth, not his hope.

Francis stands beside Sophia Cracroft, and James partakes of too much champagne before they have even been called in for dinner.

“Did you go to her the minute you left?” James asks Francis when they have a moment alone, in a light, easy manner that Francis should know is anything but. “Or did you wait a full day before resuming your courtship?”

Far from needled, Francis merely looks bemused.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” he says. “I believe you must have confused me with someone else.”

James is gaping at him like a fish - he knows he is, but before he can grab Francis by his shoulders and shake him because how dare how dare he pretend to not know him after all they have been through Sophia reappears at his elbow, and with nothing more than a quick, sharp nod at James, leads Francis into the dining room.

James is seated far away from him at dinner, and it does not escape him how Francis does not even look once in his direction.

He wishes Francis had hit him. Anything would be better than this - this forced estrangement, this refusal to even see him. He is loud and boisterous and charming for the remainder of the evening, and he does not look again at Captain Francis Crozier.

He cannot avoid Sophia’s gaze, which falls upon him in a strange mix of pity and sorrow that only infuriates him more.

“He wouldn’t even look at me, Dundy!” James exclaims when he reaches LeVesconte’s later that night, not fit for anyone’s company but seeking it nonetheless.

“Jas -”

“And he just sat there, letting that - that woman titter in his ear all night like she had never rejected him!”

“Jas -”

“I wish him well indeed, wish him many years of an unsatisfying marriage with a brood of squabbling children. He’ll come back in a year or so, mark my words, hoping to resume our arrangement and I’ll put him right back on the street.”

“James!” The tone in Dundy’s voice, one that he never employs except in cases of great distress, stays James’ rant. “I don’t -” He sighs. “I don’t quite know how to tell you this. Did you not receive a letter?”

“What letter?”

Dundy sighs again. He rises from his chair by the fire, and picks through his correspondence at the desk in the corner for a few minutes before producing a bright blue envelope.

“Here.” Henry will not look at him, and James takes the note from him with something like dread clawing up his spine.

“Dundy, what is this?” His voice is shaking - he cannot help it. He has rarely seen Henry look so adrift, and he knows that in this note is something truly terrible.

“Just - please read it, James. I’m sorry.”

And so James finds the answer to Francis’ aloofness, written in a note so terse and fine he wonders why anyone should bother to send it at all.

To whom it may concern

Captain Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier has had the entirety of the Franklin Expedition, with specific regard to Captain James Fitzjames, erased from his memory. We humbly request that they never be mentioned to him again. Thank you.

Interim Enterprises

The doctor is able to fit James in for his own procedure later that week.

It probably has something to do with the way James had barrelled into the office, abandoning all propriety and demanding to speak with the man in charge. What had he done to Francis, how dare he, and he must put it all to rights at once.

It was quite the uproar, but James was used to causing an uproar, used to flashing his eyes and tilting his head and getting his way.

“You ask the impossible,” the doctor says, when James has been calmed and persuaded to sit down. “Captain Crozier was very unhappy, and he sought a way to end that unhappiness. His memories of the expedition are gone. There is no way to retrieve them.”

James sits with this knowledge for a moment. He wants to shake the doctor, tell him he is wrong, he must be wrong because there is no way Francis would abandon him, would leave him alone to fend for himself.

But the doctor is not joking, and James is no scientist.

It is the easiest thing in the world to look the doctor in the eye, draw his shoulders back and say -

“I want the procedure as well.”

The doctor hesitates only a moment, asking if he’s sure. Of course James is sure, he knows what he’s asking. He saw the lack of recognition in Francis’ face and he swears he will be damned if he has to live through another night like the last one.

The doctor explains the procedure, though James hardly attends to any of the particulars. He has no idea how any of it works. Francis would know, or would ask the right questions - would be able to even formulate the right questions. But Francis is not here, and James is focused on the notion that it will all be gone - that this is all temporary, like a funny little dream from which he will wake up and then go about his day with only a little wrinkle in the back of his mind that there was something he lost upon waking.

“We run a very discreet operation here, Captain Fitzjames,” the doctor assures him. He’s been asked to write some sort of statement of what he hopes to forget. “We have provided our services to clients from every level of society, and not a word of what they wish to forget has passed through these walls. Our reputation depends upon our secrecy. I cannot stress enough that the accuracy of stating what exactly, or who exactly, you wish to forget, is paramount to this procedure, and I encourage you to be honest in your notations.” James looks at him for a long moment. He imagines Francis being given the same speech, imagines the sorts of things Francis would have written down. He wonders if he’s being given such a penetrating stare because of what Francis might have written down, and suddenly his hands itch to hold that statement in his own hands, to see in Francis’ own terrible spelling the precise ways in which he wasn’t worthy of remembering.

Pushing at his own wounds, seeing how deep the bullet had gone.

“Captain Fitzjames, go home,” the doctor says, when James has completed his statement in all its ugly glory. “Take this medicine when you’re ready to sleep. Our people will arrive during the night, run the machine and ensure that everything is in order during the process. When you wake up tomorrow, all of it will be gone.”

James goes home. He takes his medicine, he climbs into a cold, lonely bed and knows that when this night is over he won’t remember why that makes him so sad.

James trips through the door of their shared flat.

He’s lost for a moment, thinks it’s a dream until he the moment he stumbles into the sitting room and Francis rises to meet him wearing a face like a disapproving parson.

It’s a memory. The last one before that dreadful dinner -

What dreadful dinner? He cannot recall. It must already be gone. Good.

He turns to face Francis in this, their last night together, the last night they knew each other under the same roof.

The same shame that twisted his gut that night is there again, and he will be glad when this memory gone, when his shame is in a place where he can no longer reach it. Francis tuts and shakes his head and demands to know where he’s been, why he smells like sherry and cigars.

“I was enjoying myself Francis!” James’ voice has the same venom it did the first time. “You might try it some time!”

“We cannot keep doing this, James.” Francis says, with another shake of his head, and James feels ugly and stupid and small.

“You cannot keep doing this!” James nearly shrieks in reply. “You sit around this house in your melancholy, you have made our rooms into your own tomb! You will not come out and make merry with me or -”

“Make merry with you after all we have endured -”

“I am sick and tired of hearing about all we have endured!” James throws up his hands, knocking into the vase of flowers Francis purchased for him three weeks ago that have gone dead in the interim and sends it clattering to the floor. The vase shatters and the splinters fly the breadth of the room. “I don’t want to hear about it anymore. I want to live, Francis! We lived, do we not owe the dead that?”

It escalates, as so many of their fights did at the end. At the beginning too. They slice each other with words until they’re both bleeding out from invisible wounds and they sit slumped on opposite sides of the room, wrung out and exhausted.

“I’ll stay with the Rosses tonight.” Francis’ voice is sharp and quick. Punished as a boy.

“Stay with them the next night,” James says, and he is grabbing at Francis' coat, his shoes, throwing them in Francis’ direction and hoping to maybe hit him. “And the night after that one. Go.”

James does not want Francis to go. He does not want to sit here throwing things while Francis strides efficiently around their flat, packing things away into a bag. He wants to collapse crying on the floor, he wants Francis to hold him and tell him that it’s okay, he’s not angry, not really, and then they will sit together for a minute or an hour and then go to bed where they can curl around each other and try, try to rearrange the sharp, broken shards of themselves so that they don’t slice the other to bits. Not forever, James knows that, knows he could not have anything forever, but maybe for another little while longer.

But James does none of these things. He stands there and says nothing, just as he did the first time. He watches as Francis, with a grim, pained determination, nods at him.

“James -”

“Just go Francis,” James says. It is the last time he will have to say it. It is the last time he will have to watch Francis walk through the front door while feeling like there is a wild animal inside of his chest, tearing and tearing and tearing -

“You’ll be gone in the morning.” James says, suddenly. (He never said that. He did not say that at all.) “You’ve forgotten me and now I’m forgetting you.” The sharp, smug satisfaction doesn’t come. Francis’ face does not fall like he expects.

“Goodbye,” he says, like he did the first time, and he walks out the door and James sinks to the floor and then just like that, the memory is gone.

Another fight follows that one, just as bitter, the one where James had knocked over a dining chair and Francis told him he was a disgrace. James was glad to be rid of it, glad to feel it fade away into a hazy fog of nothing.

It’s only -

Well.

After that fight, James had crawled into their bed and cried himself hoarse until Francis got in beside him and wound his arms around him and pressed his cold irish nose into James’ neck and perhaps - perhaps he would have chosen to keep this, if there had been a choice.

The next memory on the chopping block is Francis tutting at him in disgust, and the old rage is back - a price must be paid for forgetting, and if sometimes they laid side by side with their skin pressed so close together that they might finally become more than the sum of their broken parts, well, that is the pound of flesh James is willing to give.

Yet later, when Francis grips his hand under the table in the middle of their court martial, James begins to doubt. He flexes his hand, certain that this - this small gesture, surely he can hold on to this - and then it is gone, and he is alone and he wonders what he was clinging to so desperately.

He loses them, one by one.

The press of a hand beneath a table in an admiralty court.

A sharp word and a late night on the sofa before the fire.

Rough thumbs wiping away tears on his cheeks.

A bouquet of daisies on the table.

A smile.

A kiss.

A song.

They are all gone.

All gone.

Gone.

The railing on Enterprise - a few months after they first set out from the land James was certain would be his final resting place, London almost in their sights, and with it all the terrors of society. James does not know how he will face it. He has been Francis’ shadow, or Francis his for so long he no longer knows how to bear it up alone. And that is what brings them to this conversation, isn’t it? The fear, James’ need to cast Francis off before he can be cast off himself -

But Francis stops him, as he has done so many times, stopped him from dying, stopped him from despair, stopped him from hating the very man whose opinion he now holds above all others.

Fool, James knows now. He was a fool to think it would be so easy, but then Francis turns to him with those bright honest blue eyes of his and James knows what he will say.

“James, stay with me,” Francis says, and this isn’t the first time he has said it, but James does not want to think about the others. “Stay with me. We can take a house in London, or in the country, only - ” James cannot help it - he grins, just as he did that day out on deck.

“Is this a proposal, Francis?” The words are barely a whisper, and yet they stay Francis’ pleas as surely as a slap.

“Do not - do not jest, James, how can you -”

“I am not. I ask again. Is this a proposal, Francis?”

“Would you like it to be?”

James sets one hand on the railing, his bare index finger just barely grazing Francis’ own.

“I think I should like that very much.”

Francis smiles, and he opens his mouth, and James knows, he knows that Francis said to him a proposal it is, then but what comes out now is garbled, discordant, like Francis is trying to shout at him through water and did he say anything in the first place because the ship is crumbling around them the boards of the deck are being ripped up and he’s shouting Francis Francis Francis –

“Francis?” James opens his eyes on Enterprise. Francis sits in a chair beside him, and at the sound of James’ voice starts like someone has fired a cannon next to his ear.

“James?” He hovers, afraid to touch, and James remembers why, remembers the wreck he had been those first few weeks at sea, too weak to rise from bed, a skeleton covered in thin flesh, his hair falling out, his teeth growing loose, passing in and out of consciousness and losing tracks of all the days.

The only constant then had been Francis. Francis seated by his bed, Francis begging him to eat, Francis watching as the Enterprise’s doctors dressed and checked his wounds.

“You’re alright,” Francis says - he said it so many times in those days. “You’re alright now, yes?” And James had repeated it -

“I’m alright,” he whispers in a voice that's growing stronger every day except this time it isn’t, and his alright gets weaker and weaker and Francis' gets more desperate until the ship falls away entirely, and he’s left with boundless blue and gray.

“Please, James, please.”

It is Francis. James opens his eyes.

No. No No No No No No, he does not want to be here. He does not want to open his eyes again and see cloth, feel the shale underneath the thin sack he sleeps upon.

“Francis?”

“James - stay with me. Please. Please stay with me.”

“Kiss me, Francis.” James thought it would be the last time, the only time. He had not pictured survival, had not dreamed of rescue or return or - had there been a flat? Had they lived together? It is faded, like a watercolor left out in the rain, colors running together and muddying. James only knows that he will die if he does not feel Francis' lips on his, and he reaches up with strength he knew he never had in that tent to bring Francis down to him.

Francis leans down, kisses him, and James knows in that moment that this - the erasing, the forgetting - is the worst decision he’s ever made in his life.

“Francis -” he mutters, and suddenly they are no longer in a tent, Francis is not crying above him - was he ever? Did he ever press his chapped lips to James’ in what James thought would be the first - the last - the only time?

They are out on the shale, hauling, and James remembers this day, he remembers the two of them sharing stories, Francis had spoken of his childhood, Bainbridge, and all of it, every word is going to be gone if he doesn’t -

“I don’t want this!” James screams up at the sky. The doctor is there, with his assistants, just beyond the edge of his awareness. “Wake me up! I want to stop it!”

There is no reply from the cruelly blue sky, and James shouts again - tries to wake himself up to no avail until someone shakes his arm.

“James?” Francis is wide-eyed beside him, more alert than he ever looked in that damn harness. “James, what's wrong?”

“Francis?” He’s just a memory, isn’t he? He can’t -

“James.” That damn fucking eyebrow again - but he knows it didn’t happen like this the first time - and he’s so relieved to see some kind of recognition that he rushes to embrace him right there on the shale in front of all the men.

“James what are you - they’ll all see -”

“It doesn’t matter, Francis,” James says. He doesn’t know how long he has to explain, how much time he will have in this memory before it all goes dark again. “This is just a memory - it’s all happened already.”

“What on earth - James, you’re shaking, what is it?” Francis has thrown propriety by the wayside, and is clutching at James’ arms, peering into his face. The men around them do not see them, they haul their boats like automatons, like dead men who don’t quite realize it yet.

“Francis, I don’t know how long we have -”

“There’s time, James -”

“You already said that - you did, but not yet - I mean I think you did, but it’s -” James takes a deep breath. “Francis, I'm erasing you.”

“Erasing me?” That fucking eyebrow, the wry little smile even all the way out here, even in hell. “What are you erasing me from, then?”

“My memories! This is a memory and I’m erasing you from it. From all of it.” James desperately wants Francis to believe him, and maybe because what he’s saying is so insane Francis doesn’t have a choice, or maybe because this Francis is a construct made of his shredding memories and held together with weak stitches, Francis’ face collapses in understanding, and he laughs.

“Knew it would only be a matter of time, didn’t I?” There it is, there’s that fucking famous self deprecation. “How long after we got home did you decide you’d abandon every memory of me?”

“Don’t even start, Francis, you know I can’t stand you when you’re like this.” James has no patience and he doesn’t know how long this memory will last. “You did it to me first!”

“I didn’t!” Francis looks honestly shocked. Good. If he couldn’t confront the real Francis, this is as good as he will get. “James I would -”

“You did! And I don’t want to keep doing it! I’m trying to stop it and I need you to help me!”

“How am I supposed to help?”

“I don’t know, you always understood the mechanics of things better than I ever did! There must be a way I can - awaken, or tell them to stop.”

“I don’t - I don’t know James!” And James knows he doesn’t, and it’s no fault of this Francis’. It’s James himself again, James who didn’t attend to what the doctor was saying, James who didn’t understand, who signed this death warrant without thinking twice. The sob clawing up his throat can no longer be contained, and it escapes as he buries his head in his hand. The men around them are blinking out, one by one, like candles being snuffed out at the end of an overly long dinner party.

“I - James, I’m sorry.” Francis’ face is pale, drawn. “I didn’t mean… I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“Then why? Why would you do it? Was I really so hopeless, was I really so intolerable that you would forget me, forget our crew, forget the dead we left behind?”

“It wasn’t about you,” Francis says, and his eyes dart away like they do when he’s about to say something that James will be very cross with.

“What was it about, Francis?”

“I mean - it was about you, I -”

“Don’t you dare -”

“I’d inflicted enough on you! I don’t know how to let go, how to just leave things be! But if I couldn’t remember, if I never knew you, then maybe you could -”

“You never understood, did you? You never believed me when I told you I loved you, when I told you I was happy -”

And then the boats are gone, and they’re standing near a cairn.

“I’m a fake, brother,” James finds himself saying, and throws his hands over his mouth before any more words can come out. “Not this, Francis,” he shakes his head, close to tears. “Why will they not let me keep this?”

The walk, their tenuous circling after Carnivale.

Carnivale.

Now this, maybe this he could have forgotten with no regrets, could have forgotten the heat, the screams, the smell, the guilt - overwhelming, choking him just as sure as the smoke did.

But then the smoke clears - James is looking up at Francis, newly recovered and still looking like he should be abed - and James remembers the hope, the tiny, brilliant spark of hope that had blazed in his chest when he believed, for just a moment, that things might turn out alright.

The memory slips through his fingers, sand running back up into the top of an hourglass. They’re in the belly of the ship now, arguing, there were so many arguments and so much wasted time.

Francis punches him in the face and grabs his face between his palms after, the light of recognition there again.

“I’m sorry, James, I’m sorry, you know - you know how sorry I am.”

“I know. You told me so many times. I know.”

“You never believed me.”

“I did. I did believe you.”

“Then what was it?”

“I didn’t… I thought I deserved it. I was the liar. I was the fraud. You were sick with a self-inflicted illness, to be sure, but I was the third in command of the expedition entire. I was the one with no experience, who outfitted the ships, who crewed them, who saw nothing and had no idea what he was doing and was too stupid to listen to you. I deserved that - that and more.”

“No - no, love,” Francis’ hands are shaking as he winds them around James’ shoulders - but it’s already gone, fading and blurring into dinners, dark nights, drunken floundering, biting words and rolled eyes. James wants to keep all of it, wants to press the image of each unkind twist of Francis’ mouth into a book and preserve it like pressed flowers, but each one flees as soon as its brothers.

“Please,” he begs as Francis snarls at him from across the table. “He hates me. He does not wish to know me! Surely I can hold on to this one? There is no joy in it.” But there was, was there not? Because there is James, and there is Francis, and the choice he has made is to forget.

He's being rushed to the start, the breadcrumbs he laid long ago darting back into his hand, back into the bag, back into bread into flour into wheat that grew in the summer sun and the dirt and water and promise it had been before that. He's losing something that never was, not to him, and why does he fight so hard to keep it? He cannot remember, he cannot think, he can only watch the man with the kind eyes slip further and further away from him, backing down a narrow ship's corridor into the darkness.

A sneer across the dinner table.

A scoff.

An eye, too quickly averted.

The wam press of a hand on his arm.

A look.

A word.

A glance - too fast to judge what sort of glance it was.

Gone.

Go.

Gone.

“Fitzjames! This is Captain Crozier.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance.” Captain Crozier bowed his head.

“Fitzjames.”

Sir John is speaking again, and James is trying to attend, only his words are mushing together and he cannot understand and then Captain Crozier looks at him and oh my god it’s Francis it’s Francis

“This is it,” James says “The last memory.”

“I suppose so.”

James laughs. This Francis, whoever he may be, this Francis is just as wondrously straightforward as the one he is leaving behind, has already left behind.

“You walked away when we met,” Francis says. It is not a condemnation. Merely a fact. “Your nose in the air.”

“Of course I did. I had to. With the way you looked at me -” James tries to turn away, but Francis gently slots his thumb under James’ chin, forcing his face back, forcing him to meet those clear blue eyes.

“What? How did I look at you then?”

“I knew you could see everything. I knew I wouldn’t be able to hide anything from you. You were going to - to flay me down to my bones one way or another, and I didn’t - I couldn’t -”

“You were afraid.” “I was.” Tears are flowing freely now. “I always was. I always - I always am. Afraid of not being enough, afraid that the moment I slip up it will all just - vanish. Like a puff of smoke and blown away by the wind. You - being with you…”

“Yes?”

“It made me feel… brave, sometimes. And now you’re gone and you’re… gone since I’ve - I’ve done this and I won’t even have the memories to remind me that -” James shuts his eyes.

“That what?”

“That sometimes, to someone, I was enough. Just - just me. Not the - darling of the royal navy, not the charmer of drawing rooms and balls, not the man who could do anything and everything. Just as me. Just as James.”

“Darling - no -” Francis frets about him, as if he is afraid of where to place his hands. James, unable to resist any longer, clasps one of Francis’ hands in both of his. Francis, finally understanding, folds James into his arms at once, and James allows himself this, allows himself permission to fall apart less quietly than he would in any other circumstances.

“I’m sorry, Francis,” James says into his shoulder.

“Remember me,” Francis says into James’ hair. “Try, James.”

“I don’t know if -”

“Hush. If anyone could do it, it’s you.”

“Alright.”

“Meet me where it all began. Meet me here, in Greenhithe.”

James is too overcome to speak, so he nods instead.

It’s an easy promise to make.

He won’t remember he has to keep it.

“Now, tell me goodbye,” Francis says, drawing back and keeping his arms braced against James’ shoulders “Let us have that, at least.”

“Goodbye, Francis.” James leans his forehead against Francis’, wondering if this, too, will be gone, hoping it won't, knowing it will. “I love you.”

“I love you. Goodbye, James.”

He tries to hold on to that last image of Francis, his earnest blue eyes, the set of his mouth, the strength that radiates out of him like a furnace. James had hoped he might be sheltered there for the rest of his days.

Maybe in another life. Maybe a slightly different James.

The memory is fading again, and he is too tired to see the gray shadows, too tired to hear the soft voices of the Interim Enterprises employees as they put away their apparati and slip out the door, their terrible work done.

James sleeps through all of it.

Then James Fitzjames wakes up.

And, for some strange reason, he takes the train to Greenhithe.

February 19th, 1851

James Fitzjames wakes to the sound of someone snoring beside him, warm breath on the back of his neck, a sturdy arm thrown over his chest.

Who is -?

Ah, yes. Captain Crozier.

Francis.

Francis had cleaned them up, afterwards. And as James laid there, feeling wrung out and warm and like his heart were an overwound clockwork he felt tears pricking at the corners of his eyes. It was mortifying, and he hoped Francis would have the decency to dress and depart but -

James had reached for him, and Francis had climbed into bed behind him.

What on earth had he been thinking? Allowing - nay - encouraging the man to stay the night? James cringes to think of the sounds he made last night, the way he had exposed his vulnerabilities for this man he doesn’t even know.

He doesn’t do these sorts of dalliances. Of arrangements. It’s not - It’s never been like that. It’s - parties, the opera, things like that, a meet and a fuck and a farewell. Not - not early mornings. Not a warm bed. Not this.

Instinct tells him that this is dangerous. He should shake Francis awake, dress, bid the man a firm farewell that gives no hope for a second meeting. The maid might come in before her time, or someone might see the man leaving too early to be decent, or -

But there is something else, something he does not remember knowing before waking up on this strange morning, something deeper even than instinct, an odd, calming little notion that whispers things James never thought before. Isn’t this nice? Do you not feel safe? Do you not want to push back against him, pull his arms tighter around you?

He does.

He does.

While James Fitzjames wonders at the man in his bed and his own unwillingness to bid him gone, there are machinations happening at Interim Enterprises, loves and hopes and dreams that are dashed just as quickly within as they are without, and a certain secretary does not think this process sparkles so brightly in her mind as it once did.

No one should be made to forget their love, even a love splintered on the rocks. For what are we if not a patchwork quilt of those we love and have loved, the things they have said, or done, the pieces of them that we stitch to ourselves without ever realizing it, the memories that hang on us - not like a shroud, but like a cloak, lined with gentle warmth to keep out the chill?

They dress - but not in silence, as James expected. They trade jokes and observations, handing each other articles of clothing strewn about the room. Francis stammers through an overture, wonders if they might meet again on a similar occasion, until James silences him and they have to dress all over again. (Of course, of course, are you free tonight?)

But when Francis arrives back at James’ flat later that night, he is carrying a letter in his hand and wears a face like stormclouds.

“What is this?” he asks, throwing the letter on the table in disgust. “Is this a jest? Was this all - was this all some sort of little game to you?”

“Is what a game?” James is taken aback by the venom in Francis’ tone. “What are you talking about?”

But Francis brandishes the letter and reads. “Why do I want to forget James Fitzjames? Because he’s already forgotten me, or he’s well on his way. And I don’t want to cling. I’ve made that mistake before. It’s better for all of us to have a clean break. I don’t know how to reach him. He’s plunged himself right back into society, like a preening peacock that never left the ball. You know he stands in front of the mirror for an hour and a half at a time, coiffing each individual hair to be ready to go see his friends. Would that he ever showed me the same courtesy. Would that I were one of his friends, then I might merit his attention -”

“Francis what on earth -”

“This was postmarked two days ago! Did you follow me? Copy my - my handwriting? Was this some kind of - of bet? A gamble with your boys from your club - I knew a man like you would never - not for a man like me.”

“Francis…”

“Don’t call me Francis! Not after what you’ve -” Francis freezes, his eyes fixed on the pile of James’ own letters, the ones he hasn’t gotten around to reading as yet.

“Francis, what is it?” James asks, gentler this time, for the man has gone white as a sheet.

“James -” With trembling fingers, Francis pulls a yellow envelope from the pile. It is particularly thick, and James had been avoiding it on purpose. “You’ve - there’s one for you, too.” James frowns and takes the missive, pausing at the origin, Interim Enterprises. It sparks no recognition, and James does not know what to expect when he tears open the letter, does not suspect for an instant why Francis has collapsed into one of the chairs by the fire and stares into the flames.

There is a bundle of pages tied together with twine, covered in what looks like his own handwriting. James sets this aside in favor of the small note, separate from the rest, that falls out of the envelope and flutters to the table like the feather of a bird.

Captain Fitzjames -

You will not remember me, but I once worked for a company you hired to have part of your memory erased. I no longer believe in this procedure, and I am returning your documents to you. You have had the Franklin Expedition erased from your memory, with special emphasis on your personal relationship with Captain Francis Crozier.

James looks up at Francis - but he still stares into the fire. He removes the twine from the pages, and begins to read.

It’s a story, told in his own writing, in his own way. He recognizes it instantly, and does not have the fear that Francis did, that this is a cruel jest, that someone has imitated his hand, his cadence. He knows himself too well for that. It is a story of an expedition full of failure, of himself, who was not enough (who is never enough), and of Francis, this man who stands before him, this man who he met only yesterday but this man with whom he has shared the better part of the last five years, who has been wonderful and wretched and who James loved (loves?) with every spark of the fire that burns beneath his skin. Had he not wondered at how easy it had been? How he had sank deeper into Francis’ arms not twelve hours ago, how it had felt familiar, like a homecoming.

If the mind forgets, does the body remember?

James flings the letter across the room, where, to his horror, Francis takes it up and begins to read. He chuckles, and when James tilts his head, Francis reads aloud.

“And that damned eyebrow of his. I always feel like he’s judging me, even when he isn’t.”

“I like your eyebrows,” James says, very quickly, in his defense. He does. They have character. Perhaps the man he was before all of this forgetting simply hadn’t seen what James sees now.

“I’m sorry, James,” Francis says, when he is done reading. “For - for whatever happened between us. For doubting you. But I think we both know what is to be done.” Francis rises with a sense of finality, and James knows that he’s going to get up and walk out the door and out of James’ life forever.

“No -” Fear sharp as a needle prick darts through him, and he reaches out a hand to stay him. “Francis please -”

Why does this man matter? James has never acted thus, never reached out, never clung, never begged a man to stay past their time. And yet something inside him howls like a wounded animal, crying that he cannot allow Francis to leave, that a disaster beyond anything James could imagine will occur should Francis set one foot beyond that threshold. Francis stares down at their shared hands - James has entwined them without thinking, and though he twitches as if to disentangle himself, he turns his palm upward and holds fast instead.

“Francis,” James says again, so unsure, all confidence splintered on the ground. All he knows is that Francis must stay, and he must find the words that will make it so. Is that not what James Fitzjames does best? Is he not a master of his words, in public and in private? Why then do they now escape him, now when he feels the significance of the moment pressing down upon him, each moment sees Francis slipping further and further from his grasp?

“What will happen, do you think?” Francis says in a desperate whisper. “It will all happen again. I’ll -” Francis’ voice breaks. “I’ll ask for too much too soon, become so scared of losing you that I’ll hold on too tightly. What will you do then? What did you do the first time? You’ll suffocate under the pressure, I’ll give up on myself to try and preserve you, and we’ll go under together -” Francis stops, because James is cupping Francis’ face in his broad hands. He leans his forehead against Francis’, and a wretched feeling, like a dream you can’t quite remember but it’s so important you told yourself it was important to hang onto, tries to claw out of his chest.

They stand there, with no noise but the sound of their breaths. They have synchronized, James realises - they’re breathing together without any conscious effort, and to stand here beside this man and to look into his clear blue eyes feels like the rightest thing James Fitzjames has ever done in his life.

“Alright,” says James, and he kisses Francis. Though they kissed this morning, and the night before, and apparently countless times before, it feels like the first time, like a rebirth, like James was thrown overboard and hauled up and stripped and warmed in front of a fire with a hot brandy pressed into his hand. He kisses Francis’ lips, his cheeks, his nose, and Francis groans and though James has never heard him sound so in their brief acquaintance, he knows it means Francis has given up the fight.

“Alright?” Francis repeats.

“Alright.” James nods, and kisses him again.

Alright.

Alright.

The body remembers, though the mind forgets. Love cannot be wished away - it’s no faucet to be turned off, no river to be shored up by a dam. It flows and it flows, and neither time nor memory can truly divert its course.

There was a man named James Fitzjames, and he loved a man named Francis Crozier. They broke on each other's rocky shores and eroded some sharp edges away and grew entwined to each other like two trees fighting for the same scrap of land.

Those men are gone.

There were two ships, frozen in ice, and they are gone too, and the men that sailed upon them, and try as he might James cannot fill in the blank spaces in his mind with the forms that once filled its rooms.

But there is more to memory, is there not? A smell, a piece of music, a laugh, the strange sensation that one has forgotten something, a smile, unbidden. What happens when the memory is gone? The body remembers, and sometimes brings James to the precipice of a vast cliff, where something should be, and it is not.

James stumbles across these instances, like he must have once stumbled across the shale in a land he cannot recall. On the first snow of the season, he stands at the window and stares out at the white expanse of London and it isn’t until Francis comes up behind him and tells him to breathe that he realises he is in the throes of panic, wide eyed, chest heaving.

Francis is not immune to these same little fogs, like skipped notes in a piece of music one knows well. James sees it in the way he refuses to drink, how he wakes from nightmares, crying and certain that James has died. James holds him well into the dark hours of the morning.

They are not the James and Francis who shattered each other and then tried with shaking hands to put the pieces back together.

James doesn’t know those men.

He does know himself, though, and he knows Francis. He knows how his eyes sparkle and the calluses of his hands, he knows how to make him blush, how to make him moan, how to fit their bodies together in a narrow bed that the warmth between them might permanently banish the chill.

They wonder if it will come, when it will come, the same unraveling that led them to leave those men behind. But they do not wait for it to come knocking.

Maybe it won’t.

Maybe it stays away.

When Francis looks at James and sees him, sees him like no one else ever has, James hopes it does.

Maybe that’s enough.