foolish_m0rtal | Fic: The White Whale

Title: The White Whale
Fandom: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Characters, Pairings: Professor Aronnax/Captain Nemo
Summary: We were dismayed that Paris had not changed much in our absence, but after all, she rarely changed for anyone.
Notes: This was one of my favourite classic books when I was younger, and I still reread it now. I think this book is what really got me interested in science and PBS shows about animals and nature and technology. Yes, Jules Verne made me an engineer. (And I thank him by slashing his characters?)

It was fun writing in an older style of voice so I could match the story more closely. People who are used to my regular 'writing voice' might be creeped out a little. But I kept reading the story till I began writing like him, talking like him. THAT was when it got creepy.

Our return to France was uneventful. In late Norwegian spring when the thaw had welcomed back the shipping trade, we finally flagged down a steamboat that agreed to take us as far as Dunkerque, and the three of us travelled on foot (and railway and vegetable cart and whatever other method of transport we could secure for ourselves) back to Paris. We were dismayed that Paris had not changed much in our absence, but after all, she rarely changed for anyone.

As I had expected, our miraculous resurrection from the dead created a considerable uproar. I claimed we had somehow survived clinging to the wreckage of the Abraham Lincoln, and a primitive coastal village had sheltered us until we had found a way back home. It was mostly true, and Conseil and Land said nothing to contradict me. I am sure they feared we would be taken for madmen if we told them about the Nautilus and Captain Nemo, but I feared more that they would believe us and set out to destroy Nemo for good.

I offered up my flat in Paris for a few weeks after our ordeal, and the three of us spent the time sleeping as much as we could; I do not think we realised how tired we had become in ten months aboard the Nautilus till we had the chance to rest. Conseil and Ned Land began eating their weight in red meat, bread, and wine once they got back onto solid land, perhaps to compensate for months without it. I confess I had forgotten the taste of a fresh baked baguette or a glass of evening sherry but didn't gorge myself like them. Indeed, the more I ate the more I was put off by land food and found myself missing the sour bite I had grown accustomed to in all of Nemo’s fare. I could tell the housekeeper was growing worried (and as extension of her, Conseil) as my portions at dinner and the list of groceries for the market shrank. I suppose I should have been worried as well, but on the contrary, I felt an odd sense of detachment as I sent in my trousers to bring in the waists and began drowning in the folds of my undershirts.

“Think I’ll go back to Canada,” Ned Land declared at dinner one day. “Or New York. No offence, Professor, but I don’t think Paris and I get along too well.”

I privately agreed- New York really was much better suited to a man like Ned though I admit I was sorry to see him go; now the only other person on this side of the ocean that shared our secret would be Conseil.

“Mm,” I said and discreetly scratched under my shirt collar. I missed the soft warmth of the mussel tissue clothes we had been forced to dispose of before we rejoined civilization, and my old clothes were now uncomfortable- too heavy and prickly and cold. “None taken, Ned. It’s good to see you haven’t lost your sense of adventure.”

He stopped chewing. “And you have, if you don’t mind me asking?”

I could feel his and Conseil’s eyes on me, and I put down my fork. “I do not believe I feel safe on the ocean anymore.” I could not tell them how I hoped and feared the Nautilus would rise back out of the waves to reclaim us all like the Devil had come for Faust.

Conseil spoke up. “If Master has been reading the paper, he must know that the giant sea monster has not been spotted since the sinking of the Terpsichore in August of last year.”

“Last year!” What did it mean? Had Nemo finally quieted the vengeance in his heart or had he simply learned subtlety?

“So you see,” Ned grinned. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

I picked up my fork again. My cook Ines had realised I would eat more if she made fish every day, so while Conseil and Ned were busy with their dressed venison on one side of the table, I had my poached salmon on the other. It wasn’t the same. It didn’t have the crisp freshness of the fish we’d caught below the ocean surface, but Ines, bless her, did what she could. “Yes, but I wonder if Captain Nemo-”

Ned swore and put down his knife with a crash. “Damnation, Professor! I would like to talk to you once and not have to hear about that son of a-”

“Ned!” Conseil interrupted.

“But you agree with me, don’t you?” Ned shot back. Conseil had to look away, and I understood that no matter his feelings, he would never say a word against me. Ned must have seen it too, because he hurled down his napkin and stormed out. I knew he would return and wondered dispassionately if all Canadians were so hot-blooded.

Conseil remained looking down at his plate and said nothing. I toyed with my wineglass and thought that a man of taste such as Captain Nemo must have enjoyed the taste of wine when he had been, as he had said, a resident of the Earth’s continents. He had told me he had studied in Paris, and I wondered now if he’d ever spent the afternoon in a cafe with a bottle of fine Chateau Latour with his face turned toward the sun. Perhaps as a peace offering to Ned, I served myself a slice of the venison from the other side of the table.

“Master must miss him,” Conseil murmured, and I understood in a flash as he refused to lift his eyes to me, for Conseil had once stopped by with his spare key in the late evening for a forgotten umbrella and had stumbled across one of my little indiscretions. A mortifying moment for the both of us, but he had never mentioned it again, for which I was indescribably grateful. Society might have been forgiving of my perpetual bachelorhood in view of my single-minded immersion in the fairer sciences, but I doubt they would have condoned the reasons.

“I sometimes miss that life,” I admitted and dared to take a bite of the venison. It tasted flat and stringy in my mouth, and I drained my wineglass. “The wonders we saw, Conseil! It is difficult to readjust to a more ordinary life.”

The subject was dropped as Ned Land returned to the table and sat down with his shoulders slumped. “Sorry, Professor. You have been nothing but good to me, and I shouldn’t have...” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I thought you hated the devil as much as the rest of us. I didn’t mean to force you off the Nautilus when you-”

“No!” It was out of my mouth before I could even think. “No, Ned, I could not have stayed. I wanted to escape as much as you. I could not have stood by and watched him murder innocents in his thirst for revenge.”

“But now he’s stopped,” Ned said, and his gaze was intent.

I looked away. “I do not know. Perhaps he is merely quieter about his exploits.”

“But you’d like to think he has.”

I swallowed the rest of the venison without tasting it. “Yes, if only for the sake of the other frigates crossing the oceans.”

“Uh huh.” Ned picked up another bread roll and tore into it. “You know, after Kate Tender married somebody else, I was torn up. Stayed inside, drank all the time.”

Conseil’s mouth tightened. “Ned, I believe Master does not-”

I held up a hand. “No, Conseil, let it be. Go on, Ned.”

Ned hesitated. “Well, I suppose that’s what seeing the ocean meant to you,” he said. Conseil looked relieved, and I felt my own apprehension leave me. “I went back to work, occupied myself. It’s good to have something to keep your mind off.”

Ned, the poor simpleton, thought I missed the Nautilus. It was only as I was opening my mouth to laugh that I realised I truly didn’t. Not at all.

I had never become completely accustomed to the casual opulence Nemo’s wonderful submarine had provided- indeed the enormity of it had embarrassed me sometimes. It was similar to the feeling I’d had when I’d held one of the coconut-sized pearls from the underwater oyster beds. It had become unremarkable in a room full of its brothers and sisters.

No, that wasn’t it.

Perhaps it was more that petty human emotions like greed and avarice did not exist in the dark secret places of the ocean. I remembered feeling only a mild sense of scientific curiosity, much like Nemo’s sentiments toward us. Yes, that was part of it- I had tried to neutralise myself as much as possible around Nemo, and admiring a simple pearl for its pecuniary beauty seemed like a decidedly surface-dweller thing to do. And I wondered how much my time on the Nautilus had inured me to such things that I now considered a ₣500,000 pearl the size of my head a simple thing. If thou beest born to strange sights, indeed.

“I’m sorry, Professor, I didn’t mean to-”

I looked up and realised Ned had taken my silence as anger. “No, Ned. You are right. Perhaps I should return to the work I have been neglecting.” I pushed my plate away and touched my napkin to my mouth. “Thank you.”

That evening, I opened my copy of The Mysteries of the Great Ocean Depths for the first time since I’d returned and spent much of the night and early morning making annotations and corrections drawn from my adventures on the Nautilus. Of course, the rest of the scientific community could never see it, for they would inevitably question how I came upon such information, but I felt a new sense of serenity as I put down my pen.

Ned Land left us a few weeks later for England, where he would stay with a friend before sailing back to Canada. I marvelled at his bravery, for I would not have been able to return to the ocean so soon. Even as I thought of it, the only feelings I could conjure up were wonder and fear. And guilt. I wondered how long it had taken Captain Nemo to discover we were gone.

I went back to my office in the Botanical Gardens and began so many new projects that the curator did not know what to do with me. I even helped with the dull odious tasks like labelling and cataloguing that usually went to the undergraduates. I arrived home past dinnertime every day and developed a terrible habit for street food, which I hadn't eaten since I was a student. It was easier to dislike the worst of Parisian cuisine rather than its best.

It wasn’t enough- I was becoming restless in Paris, a feeling I was singularly unacquainted with. I, who’d once been content to putter about in my office and go out to lunch at precisely eleven-fifty every day, was becoming tired of studying the mutations of cuttlefish in still tanks and meeting familiar faces in cafes.

I began travelling again, applying to places further and further from France. Britain, then Italy, the shores of Morocco, and back to America to sort out the work I’d abandoned when I’d been called to the Abraham Lincoln. Setting foot back on a ship was odd but not as frightening as I’d imagined. There was even a sense of relief, an eerie and powerful sense of homecoming that alarmed me. And with it, a sense of perverse satisfaction. I was not sure if I was taunting Nemo or showing him that I was not afraid to return to the oceans he had so clearly marked as his domain. He had already broken Conseil, who bundled himself into motorcars and cast-iron locomotives wherever he could not go by foot or bicycle. In the matter of poor dear Conseil, I felt guilty for arranging these expeditions and pitting his sense of duty to follow at my heels against his deep-seated instinct to never go back to the ocean again. But I feared he would have to forgive me, because I now found I was unable to remain at home in Paris for any more than a week before I wished to leave again.

I was foolish. It took me three months of sea storms and insomnia and terrible preserved food to realise it was more the means than the destination that drew me. I enjoyed the soft rocking of the ocean and the crisp salt air far more than my work in dark musty museums and libraries. Somewhere between being stranded in Norway and booking my first ticket on the SS Desmarais, I had got it into my head to find him again.

Which was foolish, utterly foolish and reckless and the only thing I could have ever done after leaving such a place. The world seemed dim and flat now that I knew the secrets it kept under the seas, and people seemed uninteresting now that I’d met a man like Nemo. I remember I’d said before that he would never forgive us if we escaped, and I believe I was right. Though Nemo’s heart was with the sea, I believe his temper was like the volcanoes of the Pacific islands- hot and unrelenting, only gaining greater form and substance with the cool hiss of the ocean. I did not know why I wished to return to him.

I do not believe in luck or God or the Devil. A life in science has erased these superstitions from my life. I do not condemn them with the spirit of an atheist, because even that suggests some introspection and philosophy. I am simply too busy to grant such things any serious thought. I do not intone God’s name to pray or blaspheme, and on Sunday mornings I sleep through the ringing of church bells.

But it could have only been my luck or the Devil’s work that made the sound of the SS Barkley’s bell jerk me out of bed one cold dark night when I was sailing to Australia. The first thing I heard as I tore out of my tiny bunk was a young sailor hardly older than Conseil shouting that the ship was taking on water too fast for them to stop it. That reminded me of Conseil and how grateful I was that a sudden bout of flu had prevented him from accompanying me on this particular voyage.

The ship lurched to one side without warning, and I was thrown violently against the rail. Nemo, I thought at once and scanned the horizon, but didn’t see the familiar electric light or a waterspout breaking the surface of the water.

The captain shouted for lifeboats, and there was a mad scramble to the side of the ship. It was all too familiar, and I was absorbed with looking for the old grey-bearded gunner on the Abraham Lincoln or the clean lines of Ned preparing to throw a harpoon. I was remembering the crowds of ant-like passengers on the sinking mast of a nameless man-of-war ship in some forgotten part of the Atlantic. The murky accusing eyes of a woman and two children staring out of a drowning portrait.

Someone shouted that their boat could take one more passenger, so hasty hands grabbed me under the arms and tossed me over the side.

I saw the boat come up to meet me quite clearly, and in that moment I knew the toss had been too careless or that I had been too distracted with morbid thoughts of ghost ships in their last throes reaching up to claim the living. In the next moment I felt a dull spike of pain at my forehead and the scrape of the lifeboat hull against my fingertips before I was plunging into the sea with no Conseil to save me. The impact and sudden rush of icy waves were enough to drive the breath from my lungs, and I slipped beneath the surface.

I had become quite a strong swimmer during my stay on the Nautilus, but months of undernourishment had made my muscles weak, and my head injury was making my movements sluggish. I fought the waves with wild ineffective movements that only made me sink deeper. The dark blot of the ship on the surface seemed very far away, and salt burned my eyes till I could not keep them open. A coral death, I thought. A tranquil one. And I remembered that day Nemo had given me the tin box with Louis XVI’s last orders to the Compass and the Astrolabe. I only hoped I would sleep as gently and as deep as La Perouse had. As Nemo would, someday.

I must have hit my head harder than I realised. The water around my eyes was a dark bubble of my own blood in an eerie mimicry of the diving suit helmets I had worn countless times when Nemo and I had hiked the slopes of dormant volcanos and explored the ponderous underwater forests of Crespo. It was my last thought before I lost consciousness.

When I opened my eyes again I was dressed in clean dry clothes and lying on a bed in a dark room. I wondered if the Barkley’s crew saved me from the sea and then heard the dull roaring of machinery and the metallic echoing of boots through the walls.

But no, that could not be. I knew this, I’d dreamt of this. Not anything vivid, just the hiss of turbines and the low murmur of water being displaced around something too swift and silent to be a whale. As I lay in bed and stared up at the fuzzy ceiling, I felt my mind sliding sideways into a space I thought I would never occupy again. And then I noticed a long dark shadow of a figure standing in the doorway, its features blotted out by strong electric lights as it crossed the room.

I stared at the mysterious silhouette as it loomed over my bed, and then unexpectedly, it took my hand. “Professor Aronnax. I have missed our talks.” And then, in a softer voice. “Was death worth this, professor? What would you have done if I had not been there to rescue you?”

“Nemo!” I clasped the hand in shock. The ocean was a vast uncharted place, and it was impossible that my luck had brought him to the Berkely in time to save me. “How?”

Nemo rubbed his eyes. “You are a singularly difficult man to track down, Professor Aronnax. I have been trying to find you on the sea for months.”

I stared at him, wondering if all along in my journey it had been Nemo chasing me and not vice versa.“You…you have been looking for me?”

His eyes widened and snapped away. They swept over me in a clinical fashion, lingering at my gaunt cheeks and loose fitting jacket. “We must restore you to your good health, Professor Aronnax, so you may fit into your old suit of clothes once more.”

I was touched that he’d saved my mussel tissue clothes, which I’d missed dearly once I had returned to Paris and slipped back into my cotton and wool. Then I took my eyes off him to look around for the first time and realised why the sounds surrounding me were so familiar. He had put me in my old room, in my old bed.

I looked back and found him watching me. “Nemo, I…was the Barkley-”

“None of my own doing,” Nemo said. “Merely human fallibility. Poor handiwork. I had expected you to choose a better ship.”

“I see.” I studied the ceiling lamp above his left ear. “It is good of you to take me in after I…”

“After you deserted the Nautilus,” Nemo said coolly.

I closed my eyes, knowing we would speak of it eventually but dreading its arrival. “Yes. You must understand I could not stay.”

“Yes,” Nemo replied. And then, cryptically, “You have always been one to stand by your own morals, regardless of circumstance.”

I hesitated. “If you mean…my silence about the Nautilus after we returned to Paris, Nemo, I would never compromise your ship.” And then I made a mistake- I fell back into the comfortable rhythm I’d once shared with him. “I thought of you in Paris- I thought perhaps you had once studied at the-”

Nemo’s hand slammed down on my bedside table, and I jumped. “Do not misunderstand my silence for forgiveness, Professor! You deserted my ship! You deserted me!” He stared at me with those great dark eyes. “How could you? I, who had only shown you courtesy and respect. How could you?”

“You said it before,” I said with great care. “I could not in good conscious stay while you carried out your…attacks.”

He glowered. “It is incomprehensible to me how you throw in your sympathies with the people who would so readily set themselves against you. I would not care if I sank every last one of them.”

I opened my mouth and nothing came out. He could not suspect. No, he could not. I had told him nothing. I had been judicious with both my words and actions, and I trusted Conseil's silence in the matter implicitly. But even if he did suspect, he had not turned me away- Nemo was a scrupulous man in that respect. Or perhaps he merely did not care to adopt the petty prejudices of short-lived men, of people that were as foreign to him as the continents he had abandoned long ago.

“But you have stopped,” I replied, feeling oddly peaceful under the full force of an expression that might have chilled me to the bone before. “Sinking frigates.”

“I have had other business to take care of,” Nemo thundered as if it were my fault he had gone chasing after me across the oceans.

I coloured in spite of myself. “I did not expect you to follow me.”

“I did not expect I would have to!” But then curiosity won over anger. He had always possessed the brain of a scientist. “Why did you come back? If you had so wished, you could have shut yourself up in some land-bound country and never seen me again.”

“I. I cannot say.” Though I knew, I knew far too well. It had only taken a shift of light across his face and a single word from his lips, and I was realising in a sudden visceral rush exactly why I had come back, and why my campaign had been hopeless from the beginning.

“No?” Nemo looked surprised and then thoughtful. “I told you once that there would be no secrets between men who would never leave each other, but it seems circumstance has proven me wrong on both accounts.”

“No.” I shook my head. “I have returned, Captain, and do not intend on leaving again.”

“Good,” Nemo murmured. “I do not think I could watch you escape a second time.” I must have made a startled sound. “Yes, I knew you and your companions were leaving the Nautilus that day. I hold you in the highest esteem, Professor, and I could not stop you if you did not wish to remain on my ship.” He raised his eyebrows. "And as for our secrets-"

I swallowed. Master must miss him, Conseil had remarked. “I do not believe telling you mine will do either of us service, and you have a right to keep yours.”

Nemo frowned. “That is hardly the resolution I was expecting.”

But regretfully, it was the only one I could give him. “I am quite adamant about this, Captain.”

“Of course you are,” Nemo replied, and his tone was dry and almost...fond. We both started as the electric clock on the main deck began booming throughout the ship, and I realised I had been keeping him from his duties.

I put one of my feet out of the blankets even as my head throbbed. “I am sorry, Captain Nemo-”

“No.” He pushed me back down. “Rest. You have not had much of it these past months if all my travelling across the oceans after you is any judge.”

And as he said it, I began to feel drowsy again and I closed my eyes with the feel of his warm hand upon my chest and the sound of ringing echoing through my room.

I had strange dreams filled with the ticking of clocks and the soft sigh of the ocean. Images of Ned and Conseil as I’d first seen them after we’d washed atop the Nautilus from the wreckage of the Lincoln. Poor Conseil! What would he do now? Take over my work at the museum, set up in my old office in the Botanical Gardens? My life on land would never be in more capable hands.

It was only as I was thinking of him that I realised my old life was no longer mine, and I truly grasped the finality of my decision to throw in my lot with Nemo and become a part of his crew of non-existent men. I would never feel the sun in Parisian streets or touch the delicate stalks of plants in the open-air gardens. I would never attend another conference in the bustle of New York or read the newspaper early in the mornings over a cup of coffee and a pastry. But I wondered if I truly missed it as much as I should have or if I had renounced it long before. I carried the few posessions I still held dear on my person at all times, and my flat in Paris was as untouched as a museum. I had cleared all my debts and asked my banker to deposit Ines and Conseil's salary into their accounts every month. At the time I had called it practical because I was so rarely in the country, but I realised now that I had been living like a man that had been planning to leave. Or perhaps planning to die. I was a dead man in Paris now, a great deal more so than I had been when I had waited for the spring in Norway. I had to quell a rise of panic at the thought and shut my eyes to sleep, though my temples were beginning to ache.

When I opened my eyes again, it was to the familiar chords of an organ playing late at night in the slumbering depths of the Nautilus. I had often heard Nemo's music during my previous stay, discordant funereal Bruckner and sometimes strange sweeping pieces in minor chords that I suspected he’d written himself. I remember he had only ever touched the black keys in my presence. Nemo was quite accomplished, and I had enjoyed his playing, though many times it had been too melancholy to tolerate for long. But now it sounded different, lighter.

I rose to put on my dressing gown and my soft sturdy slippers. There was a glass of fortifying juice on the table that I drank down with enthusiasm. I did not know its taste- perhaps some fruit from an island only Nemo knew.

I still knew my way around the submarine- the engine room, the main deck, the beautiful dining room. I saw some familiar faces in the night watch crew, but they only nodded as I passed. They were not surprised to see me, and I wondered how much Nemo had told them of his plans to follow me across the oceans. I nodded back to them, unsure of what to say.

I stopped before the music room door with my hand on the knob. I had passed through this room last when I had stolen out of the Nautilus and left her to be swallowed up by the Maelstrom. Enough, Nemo had cried, and I had not known what it meant.

I turned the knob.

The music stopped as I entered the drawing room, and I knew that somehow Nemo had felt my presence. “Did you sleep well, Professor Aronnax?” he said without turning around.

“Quite well,” I replied and as I advanced, I saw that his fingers were touching the white keys of the organ. "This sounds like Vivaldi."

"It is." He shifted back so I could see the score lying open in front of him.

As I leaned forward to inspect his music, the folds of my dressing gown fell against each other with a soft shh-shh. I ran a finger against the cloth and felt compelled to be honest with him- perhaps his sheer presence commanded it, for his crew was fiercely loyal to him and every person he had ever encountered from Ned Land to me to the pearl diver in the Gulf of Manaar could not help being drawn into his orbit like moths to a light. “Thank you for my clothes- I missed them. And I missed your singular company…and a great deal many other things. Perhaps that was why I came back.”

“I see,” Nemo said in an indecipherable voice. He cleared his throat. “But I am sure you did not miss the storms. We are due for one very soon- of course we will only dive deeper till it abates, but I thought to keep you informed.”

“Thank you,” I said, sensing I should have said more but not knowing what. “That is very kind of you.”

“I love the sea,” Nemo said to the keyboard, and the non sequitur threw me. “And sometimes I forget she has her own whims. I assume I understand everything about her and become...dismayed when she acts in ways I do not expect. It is very childish of me, I suppose.” He raised his eyes to me. “Do you understand, Professor?”

It was by far the strangest and yet the most straightforward declaration of intent I had ever heard, and for a moment all I could do was stare. Nemo was wearing the most curious expression on his face, and it took me a long while to realise he was embarrassed- it was such a rare and ill-fitting emotion on him that I did not know whether to commit it to my memory or look away and let him salvage his dignity.

I finally looked away, but more to consider my own thoughts rather than let him gather his. I knew I would always come second to the sea in his heart with no chance of displacing her for as long as I lived. I was the mistress, the interloper, and the sea his natural wife. But I found I was content with that, because I also knew being second in Nemo’s affections still meant I would be cherished more than most land-dwellers could ever hope.

And I realised I would be loved, that I was loved. That it had been inevitable from the moment I set eyes upon him after he rescued us from the Lincoln, and any amount of running away and hiding in Paris had merely prolonged this meeting rather than prevented it. And perhaps the inevitability of it had been what had driven me from the Nautilus from the beginning; perhaps I had known that if I’d stayed aboard Nemo’s ship long enough I would have been content to relinquish my life on the continents and continue travelling the oceans with him forever. It was a terrifying thought for any sane man.

I looked up and forced myself to look him in the eye. “If I am to stay here for the rest of my natural life, I think you may call me Pierre.”

He ducked his head, and I thought I saw a small smile. “Then I am Armitage.”

“Armitage,” I repeated. As many times as the ocean astonished me, Nemo always managed to astonish me more.

I knew it would not be easy living here with him. We were both quite wilful creatures in our own right and much too certain of our own intelligence in some respects. I knew I could speak with him for hours without boredom, and he had a strange wonderful kindness that he was loathe to show in front of me but that I had seen often during my stay. I knew I could be happy and was beginning to see I made him happy, which was something I had never imagined, because I had always believed Nemo derived neither joy nor revulsion from human company. And I knew there would be other times we would quarrel and shout and not speak to each other. When we would sequester ourselves at opposite ends of the Nautilus, ignore each other over breakfast, and repeat rash foolish mistakes because we did not know how to make amends.

But I also knew there was no other place I could ever imagine living.

He turned to the organ, and I put a hand on his shoulder, amazed at my own audacity. “Will you play something for me? Brahms or Mozart?”

“No.” He reached back, and I felt the slightest touch of his fingers against the back of my hand before he put them back to the organ. “I will play you Pachebel’s sonata. And his Chaconne in F. And then we shall have dinner. I have arranged for a bowl of the sea anemone marmalade as I remember it was a special favourite of yours. And there is a bottle of very good blue star fish wine that has been waiting for you for quite a while.

By waiting for me, I inferred he meant he’d made it long ago in my honour for a dinner, and it had only been the Maelstrom and my sudden desertion that had postponed its debut till now. His mouth turned up at the surprise on my face. “Come, Pierre, you are French. Though you were not like Mr. Land, who quickly grew tired of our seafood diet, I suspected your mouth still missed the taste of the Bordeaux and Chardonnay you were accustomed to back home.”

I thought I might never cease being struck by the quiet careful thought Armitage put into my well being, whatever his gruff words. “And after dinner." I hesitated, for I thought he might still be angry with me for all the trouble I had caused him. “Perhaps you know Raison?”

He laughed at that. Laughed, a low deep rumbling sound, and this time he put his hand on top of mine and squeezed it without reserve. “My dear professor, I will play you more Raison than you can stand.”

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Fic: The White Whale

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