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Polar Explorer RPF - Prompt Post 1
This is for prompts for all things general Polar Explorer RPF.
If you've filled (or started filling) a prompt, please make sure to link it in the comments of the Fills Post. And if you would like to cross-post your fills on AO3, here is the collection!
Under this umbrella you can prompt:
Prompts in line with adaptations of Heroic Age stories can also fit here, for example if you want to specifically prompt Hugh Grant!Cherry from The Last Place On Earth getting wrecked (which someone really should).
No blorbo too obscure for this post! EXCEPT: NO PEARY ALLOWED. God I hate that guy.
Rules:
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If you've filled (or started filling) a prompt, please make sure to link it in the comments of the Fills Post. And if you would like to cross-post your fills on AO3, here is the collection!
Under this umbrella you can prompt:
- Historical versions of Franklin Expedition(-adjacent) guys (Rossier, Gore/McClure, etc)
- Madhouse at the End of the Earth/Belgica Expedition
- Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration - Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen, Mawson
- Andrée Expedition
- Karluk Expedition
- etc
Prompts in line with adaptations of Heroic Age stories can also fit here, for example if you want to specifically prompt Hugh Grant!Cherry from The Last Place On Earth getting wrecked (which someone really should).
No blorbo too obscure for this post! EXCEPT: NO PEARY ALLOWED. God I hate that guy.
Rules:
1. Be fucking nice. YKINMATO/KINKTOMATO at all times.
2. This meme is CNTW (Choose Not To Warn) but warnings are highly encouraged.
3. Prompts should use this format in the subject line: [SHIP], [DESCRIPTION]
e.g.
Mertz/Ninnis, sex crying
Solo gen can be prompted as well alongside (a) character name and description
e.g.
Gen, Emil Racovitza, discovering a crazy new fish
4. Fills should use this format in the subject line: FILL: [TITLE], [PAIRING], [RATING], [ANY WARNINGS]
e.g.
Fill: The Very Next Day, Cherry/Birdie, E, cw self-harm
5. One prompt per comment please.
6. Multiple fills for each prompt are welcome!
7. You don't have to be anon for your prompts or your fills but we do encourage it because of the vibe. You're also welcome to deanon your stuff by posting on AO3/Tumblr as you please!
8. Feedback on prompts and fills is AWESOME; please take longer conversations to the discussion post.
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Scott/Wilson - 5 times Scott and Wilson died together, + 1 time they lived together
(Anonymous) 2022-11-23 04:49 am (UTC)(link)FILL: We Both Go Down Together, Scott/Wilson, 5+1 fic, death, really sad Gen [1/2]
(Anonymous) 2023-09-24 11:00 pm (UTC)(link)Is this how it happens?
*******
30 December 1902, the southwest edge of the Great Ice Barrier
They set off on ski in a soup of fog. Shackleton stays behind, with tent and dogs. He watches as his companions morph first into silhouettes, then faded shadows of lightest grey, and finally, finally as they melt into white. They’ve been whispering, lately, the other two. Always after Wilson inspects everyone’s gums. Shackleton is not a fool. He is feeling better, and he wants to be out there.
A dog barks. Shackleton is surprised it’s found the energy. Attempting to allay his own restlessness, he picks up the Darwin and reads.
A mile south, Wilson’s left eye is still blurry from his latest attack of snow blindness. Given the fog, he only notices this when he looks at Scott, skiing next to and slightly ahead of him, swishing along with an enviable vengeance given the lack of anything life-giving in either of their bellies.
There is a strait ahead of them. Or an inlet? It is impossible to tell, and that is maddening. A glimpse of bare rock would let them fill in the map. Is this the end of the Barrier? Is this where it finally meets those mountains Scott described aloud in vivid detail during Wilson’s snow blindness, his voice rising as high as the loftiest peaks?
Scott calls a spell-oh, and Wilson thinks it must be for his sake. He smiles sweetly, asks “How much longer do you want to travel…Con?” It’s the first time he’s used that name; he’s been nervous to try it, and he monitors the Captain’s reaction closely.
Scott only grins, as if the familiar name from Wilson’s lips is as natural as anything. “A little further, Bill, if you’re feeling equal to it.”
Palpable relief washes over the doctor. “I am. We’ve not shot our bolt just yet.”
“Not yet, but nearly.” Scott, deaf to Wilson’s double meaning, peers into the nothingness as if sheer force of will can make the heavens draw back its curtain. “If only this blasted fog would clear!”
They do not fear getting lost, for their ski tracks will lead back to camp. But, thinking of the huge cracks of pressure radiating out from the cape they passed yesterday, the two men tie themselves together, a long stretch of alpine rope hanging in between.
An hour later, cold gnaws at his fingertips and hunger pangs in his core. But Wilson does not complain. There is little sound, just the Barrier Hush, and Scott, who is counting his steps again. The Captain thinks he does it under his breath. Wilson’s own mind wanders back to the time he foolishly refused a second helping at his sister’s birthday, then to the rack of lamb at the farewell dinner in London, then cool milk at the Crippetts, then Oriana cupping a juicy strawberry in her hands, dark red on white, dark red on white, stark shape in a sea of—
“Land ho!” Scott cries, and it is loud and ridiculous and Wilson joins in, not making words but only a strangled noise. Surely, surely anyone would forgive the two of them such deranged joy because above and before them in the clearing mist, a huge dark rock juts out of the ice. No—more precisely, it juts out of a glacier.
Coming up alongside his Captain, Wilson fumbles for his sketchpad. “That’s-”
“A nunatak!”
“A nunatak, which means this isn’t an inlet-
“It’s not the sea at all-”
“-it’s a glacier.” He scratches at the paper, almost snapping the graphite off the pencil in the frantic excitement of their breathless exchange.
Scott looks down on the scene forming on Wilson’s page, his coat brushing Wilson’s arm. “A glacier. Coming down from the same range of mountains we’ve been seeing all along…”
“…so they can’t be islands.
“They can’t be. They’re all connected.”
“Which means this is…” Wilson allows Scott to finish the sentence.
“A continent!”
The snow bridge collapses beneath them.
When Scott and Wilson don’t return, Shackleton, alarmed, takes the dogs and follows their tracks to the place where they disappear.
Months pass. Day turns to night turns to dawn as summer turns to winter turns to spring. Hundreds of miles north, officers from the Discovery find and unearth a lone tent, digging it up from the drifting snow. Inside, they find three diaries, and one body, frozen stiff.
*******
Is this how it happens?
*******
29 March 1912, 11 miles south of One Ton Depot
Wilson’s eyes are blue.
Scott cannot move. He lies curled in his bag, on his side, diary tucked under one arm against his chest. Birdie snores behind him, he can hear it over the howling wind, and in front of him Wilson’s eyes are open and Wilson’s eyes are blue. Any second now Scott will prop himself up, force his mouth to move, and speak. And Wilson will turn to him, and laugh, and tell him to buck up, old sport, we’re not played out yet!
Wilson’s eyes are blue.
He used to think how much he wanted to be like Wilson. Now he thinks how much he wants the boy to be like Wilson. Becoming a father changes one. He’ll never get the chance to really be a father, now, but he can still have hopes for his boy, can’t he?
When the last depot’s fuel can turned up short, again, Wilson had squeezed his shoulder and pointed up, where parhelia glittered round the fickle sun. His sob choked in his chest and died and instead he breathed out a question about the light, amazing even then, which Wilson answered.
Yesterday, Wilson massaged his blackened foot and he felt nothing. Nothing at all.
He tamps down a shiver. He cannot move. If he moves, the moment will stop. If he moves, he will realise how long it’s been since Wilson has blinked.
Wilson’s unblinking eyes are blue.
But Scott still must breathe, and he breathes out, and that’s when he hears it—between Birdie’s snores, despite the wind, he hears it—that murmur, that crackle almost beyond the reach of human hearing. That softest crepitation, that gentlest strangest sound that Wilson first pointed out to him all those years ago on the deck of the icebound Discovery. How is it possible he can hear such quiet? Isn’t there a blizzard outside?
The other officers didn’t believe it was real either, back on Discovery.
And he can bear this no longer. Slowly, heart working like the devil, he reaches his arm out—has it always been so heavy?—tearing through rotten reindeer flesh and fur—he pushes the lids down over those damnably blue eyes. Before they freeze.
He ought to rest as peaceful as Scott never could.
Scott’s arm slumps onto Wilson’s still-warm chest. He hasn’t the strength to return it, nor does he want to—it is home.
*******
Is this how it happens?
*******
27 May 1915, HMS Majestic, stationed off Cape Helles, Gallipoli
The soldiers are unimpressed, and Scott can hardly blame them. The flickering films of his exploits, far from being the morale-booster the Admiralty seems to think they are, ring hollow to this generation. A crevasse is as nothing to a mine; a killer whale is a friendly face next to a machine gun. They are simply nature acting as nature, and they hold no malice the way that man can. He knew this even back then, and these prematurely aged youths know it all too well now.
And, the black-dog mood inside him says, there is the fact he lost to a foreigner. The very thing that, no matter what, these lads must be sure not to do.
All told, Scott feels a useless, bloodless, atrophied appendage of the great and terrible Naval machine that night when Wilson shows up on the HMS Majestic. After some choice words to some choice admirals—thankfully closed-doors, for none would reflect well on him—Scott is, blessedly, finally on his way off the lecture circuit for command in the Grand Fleet. But he has made one last exception to visit Majestic. His old ship is supporting the troops at Helles, and Admiral Nicholson wants a famous old Majestic like him to inspire today’s young Majestics. Despite her refits and new mine-catching gear, beneath it all the ship looks the same as she always did—though whether her junior officers were so terribly baby-faced back in his day, Scott cannot say. He’s mucking his speech up as usual when a familiar figure appears at the back of the crowd. The way his heart leaps eagerly at the sight of Wilson’s long-legged slouch does nothing to improve his oratory prowess.
His old friend finds him after the painful smattering of polite applause dies out. “Evening, Commodore.”
“It’s Rear Admiral, actually. You can thank the war for that. Though why they call me an admiral when I’m doing less good here than a cadet, I can’t understand.” Scott snaps, mostly at himself. He immediately regrets it. I missed you, my dear chap. That’s what he meant.
Instead of words, Wilson takes Scott’s hand between his and gives it a firm shake, pouring what he can of himself into his old Captain. His gaze has the same steadying effect it always did, but in every other way it has changed. Scott catches his breath, forcing himself to meet that gaze. It is haunted, just like all the boys from the front: harder, sharper, hungrier somehow than it ever was while starving and sledging. Wilson has seen things no human should behold—not pristine plateaus of ice or revelations from le bon Dieu but boys crying for their mums in pits of mud, cradling severed limbs…probably. Scott has only heard the stories thus far.
He looks down, ashamed. For all that lies in Wilson’s gaze, what really arrests Scott is the state of his fingers. Beneath each nail is a half-circle of encrusted blood. He hasn’t cleaned them. He always cleaned them.
“I’m sorry, Bill.” He means it for so many things, but cannot make the words come, and so falls back on the old mainstay: attempts at humour. They are both entirely too good at being funny when the world around them is inconceivable. “I never thought I’d see you in a uniform.”
Last Scott had heard, Wilson was working at a military hospital in Cambridgeshire. Like his hands, Wilson’s uniform could use a wash. He looks down at it, sweeps out his arms in a broad gesture. The tip of his lip flicks up in a grin. “Ory says it suits me, though she jokes I ought to drink Maltine to fill it out.”
“You’re trimmer than in gabardine windproofs, to be sure.” Scott simply stares at the man in wonder. “However did you find me, old chap?”
And they talk, long into the night. Nicholson has lent Scott a cabin—a good deal roomier than his old accommodation as torpedo lieutenant—and Scott has a hearty dinner brought to it for Wilson. The latter is stationed ashore as a medic with the infantry, where he heard that he could find Scott on Majestic. Colour returns to his cheeks as he eats, yet there is a bitterness in his voice Scott has not heard since he was younger and less controlled. Scott does not need to ask why Wilson chose to serve. Of course there is no way he could sit idly. But if Wilson is angry with himself for having survived the Helles landing when so many in the Fusiliers did not, Scott is so grateful to Providence that he feels in that moment their respective trusts in God have flipped. He makes his appreciation known.
After his bath, Wilson wears Scott’s spare whites, his former immaculate appearance restored while Scott washes the dirty army uniform in the used bathwater. His back twinges a little in the effort of kneeling over the tub.
Night closes in, with muffled gunfire echoing in the distance. In the cosy nest of the cabin, they are as two old shipmates over a pint in a pub, discussing where all their old comrades have gone off to. A flurry of letters flit through the gun-smoke of Europe and the world, keeping the Antarctics in touch. They compare notes. Oates, now a Major, landed in France with his dragoons. Bowers went out at Heligoland Bight by all accounts in a blaze of glory, taking SMS Mainz with him. Pennell is newly married. Cherry is in Flanders. They do not speak of guilt. They speak little of death and dying.
And it is nice, to spend the night together. It is. Curled round each other in the too-small bunk, both find themselves filled with an odd yearning for a tent together on the Barrier. They sleep the best sleep they’ve slept in a long time.
Dawn brings with it a single torpedo, a lucky strike through the tangle of destroyers and defensive nets. When the bulkhead capsizes and the water rushes over them, they do not even have time to wake.
*******
Is this how it happens?
*******
31 May 1916, HMS Indefatigable, North Sea
15:48. Unmistakeable booms in the distance inform Wilson that the Germans have opened fire. A shudder through the hull tells him their aim is true. His surgery is in order—stretchers, tourniquets, bone saws, antiseptic dressings. He is ready for the first screams.
15:55. “Hold still,” he urges the wheezing young man. Blood gurgles with every wrenching twist and spasm from round the piece of metal jutting out of his throat. He’s beyond reason. Wilson is reminded of Scott’s description of Punch foundering in the killer-teeming icy water, of the first penguin Cherry tried to sacrifice to science, before he learned the painless pithing technique. There is no way this man will live. But he is not an animal, and Wilson sings lowly, hands never halting their futile work for an instant, sings so that singing has a chance at being the last thing this lad remembers. Wilson has seen many men die, but he has never shot anyone. He would sooner shoot himself than someone else—but equally he would sooner shoot himself than sit at home selfishly refusing to fight. Frankly, “conscientious objection” is the most immoral “moral” stance he has ever heard of. His brother Jim urged him to become a chaplain like himself, provide comfort without pain, but no, somehow that, too, rings selfish. It’s too tidy, too above-it-all. He cannot allow himself to be that way. But this, this is prayer, to him. He prays.
15:57. The young man has stopped moving. His heart still thuds, only just, each effort only pumping out more blood to places where blood shouldn’t go, only adding its sickly tang to the smoky pungent aroma of the surgery. There’s a call for a medic on deck, and Wilson takes a mobile kit from the surgeon who called him “a bit long in the tooth to join up so early” when he first came aboard. He rushes up the ladder as he feels the battlecruiser turn to starboard.
16:00. The deck is a chaos. Wilson has staunched what bloodflow he can aft and runs forward where, given the sounds, he must be needed. Amidships, he passes the commander of the Indefatigable—the reason he is on board. Wilson couldn’t stand the hospital, and it was Scott who got him out of there and properly joined up. Here he’s felt more of use, but even yet, the months of uneventful patrols take their toll on his need to be doing. Perhaps he will go to the trenches next. Yes. He will. He has not mentioned this idea to Scott. The two brush by each other in an instant. Weaving past a turret, they fail to correct their courses entirely and their arms bump each other, hard, though not clumsily enough for either to trip. Scott has come down from the bridge, running in the opposite direction, astern to where the rear turret just took a shelling. “Flood the magazine!” he is yelling, the first word directly in Wilson’s ear as they pass, but the doctor’s senses are long since deadened to loud noises and he doesn’t startle in the least. In the heat of the moment, neither looks back. They run apart. There is a crack! Wilson looks over the gunwale, sees Queen Mary in the distance. Pennell’s on board. He wrote such nice letters to Ory, when Wilson had to stay south an extra winter and she was left in the dark. Ory. He hasn’t told her he wants to go to France, either.
16:03. The forecastle is hit. Almost instantaneously, the armament explodes, and death is inevitable in the wall of fire. This time, they are merely two among one thousand.
Re: FILL: We Both Go Down Together, Scott/Wilson, 5+1 fic, death, really sad Gen [2/2]
(Anonymous) 2023-09-24 11:01 pm (UTC)(link)Is this how it happens?
*******
5 December 1918, London
“Daddy, look, look!”
Adrian waves a sheet of paper just below his nose, and with a groan, Scott pushes his stiff limbs up from where he was lying on the sitting-room floor, scribbling alongside his sons. He is tired today, but one cannot be tired around children.
“Oh, what do we have here?” He teases. “Is it…an elephant?”
“No-o-o!” Adrian shrieks in amusement, shaking the paper.
“It’s obviously you on a dreadnought, Daddy.” Peter says, not looking up from his own paper, where a somewhat more sophisticated war scene is also taking shape. Long gone are the days when all he would draw was penguins.
Scott wrinkles his nose, bemused, and turns back to his younger son. He takes the paper in hand, turning it sideways dramatically. He squints. “Is that so, Adrian? Well, I don’t have my spectacles, see-”
“Daddy, they’re on your head!”
“Ah! So they are!” Scott makes a show of pretending to find them. “Whatever would I do without you, dear boy?”
“You knew they were up there.” Peter’s exasperation cuts over Adrian’s giggles.
“Peter.” Scott warns. He tamps it down, but he feels rather at sea amidst the judgement of his own child—these antics used to delight Peter the way they do Adrian. In the weeks since Scott’s return from the war, he’s found it difficult to keep up with Peter’s rich new nine-year-old social world, so foreign from the grim death he’s left behind. The trouble is that he had allowed home to remain static in his mind. He keeps forgetting new details, saying the wrong thing. His pangs of guilt are made all the worse for the fact that though such instances provoke ire in Peter they seem not to dampen Adrian’s clamouring for attention at all.
Returning to the bit, Scott slides the glasses up his nose and smiles broadly down at Adrian’s dreadnought. The figure apparently representing Scott on the page has blond hair and twenty-odd fingers on each hand. “There we are, clear as crystal. And it’s rather better than the one I’ve done-” But the rest of the sentence is lost in a coughing fit.
Adrian stops his excited fidgeting, and his little face grows dark. “Daddy? Have you got Enza?”
“No-” Another cough. “What?”
“A bad bird.”
“Well, your brother’s the expert on birds, when Uncle Bill’s not around-”
“Enza’s not really a bird.” Peter says as if it is the most obvious thing in the world. “It’s from a song the kids sing at school.” And he sings, tunelessly “I had a little bird / it’s name was Enza / I opened the window / and in flew Enza!”
“Peter, no.” This time, Scott does not hold back his sternness, and the boy deflates under the weight of his words. “It’s not that. I feel just fine. Only my throat’s been a little ticklish this morning.”
But nightfall brings a fever, and the next morning Wilson comes up to see him—outside in the garden, because he has been working in the influenza ward at Aldershot since returning from the war himself. He confirms the diagnosis. The cool pressure of his hand on Scott’s burning forehead is an oasis in the desert, despite the latter’s ripping headache. “I’m sorry, Con. I’ll do my best to lower your fever, and we can try a vaporiser. Do you have some good reading material? The bookstores are all overrun just now.”
Scott is put up in the guest bedroom, bored to pieces staring out from the bed every day. Time blends together, punctuated occasionally by a concerned Adrian pushing drawing after drawing under the door. Kathleen tries to dissuade the boys going inside the sick room, making them wear cloths over their faces whenever they do. She takes no such precautions herself, even pecking her husband on his flushed cheek. He coughs and coughs and sneezes up what seems like endless foul-coloured sputum into a bowl.
In a relatively lucid moment of wakefulness, Scott opens his eyes to see Wilson lying in the bed next to him. At least, he thinks he does. He is so dizzy and his heartrate so fuzzy he does not quite trust his senses to tell him the truth.
“Am I dreaming?” he whispers out.
“She’s brought me here against my will.” Wilson winks, and coughs. He is stronger than Scott, perhaps because his lungs are acclimatised to such torture by past trial. “I haven’t a place to stay in the city besides the hospital, and your Lady wife thinks I will die in there. Ory is coming down from her sister’s.”
Between bouts of delusion, Scott is aware of Kathleen’s rough hands, her hands that have manufactured electric coils and rebuilt men’s war-gouged faces, forcing a trickle of soup down his throat. Peter brings him tea, and Scott feebly tousles the boy’s hair, wanting to take back his harsh tone from earlier but too hoarse to speak. He sleeps. He feels rather than sees Kathleen change the bedsheets. He hears Wilson hum, hears him and Kath discuss a bird seen out the window, sees a blurry Oriana looking down at him in concern.
It’s when he upsets the bedpan that Wilson decides to finally break them free of their prison, under pretence of getting some fresh air, but really because “I’d rather not die in there, would you?”. If in their minds the two are naughty schoolboys sneaking out past their commanding officer, to a passerby they must look a sad sight, two aging men barely able to walk and breathe without swaying, liable to fall over in the faintest breeze. A gargantuan effort and a haze of delirium sees them through to the garden, where the sun is so hot on Scott’s face it burns, despite it being December. Has everything always moved this much? Where are his snow goggles? Ah! There is the cairn. Wilson stumbles forward quickly, towards it. Scott coughs, and Wilson hushes him, “You’ll scare the snow petrel, Con,” and Admiral Egerton is there, and Scott hasn’t seen him since the war, or perhaps since the Victorious? Egerton asks would he like to go vagabonding in Greece, and Scott replies no, thank you, he is rather tired and would very much like to take a nap in the sun, but first would he like to see a charming drawing his son made and does he perhaps have a cup of cocoa handy?
Wondering when he will awaken from such an odd dream, Scott falls asleep next to Wilson, below the tree at the end of the garden, in a pile of frost and dead leaves.
*******
Is this how it happens?
*******
17 July 1948, Kirriemuir
Callum minds the counter, watching the two old men who have just entered the shop out of the corner of his eye. They seem perfectly harmless, but Da always told him to keep an eye on customers, especially strangers. They’re English. What brings them up here? They are chummy, laughing and debating the wares and pointing things out to one another. The shorter one walks with a cane, and the taller one hovers a hand by the small of his friend’s back, just where he can’t see it—but it’s there if needed. They remind Callum of his grandparents.
The taller one strides up to the counter, delicately releasing an armful of goods—a sausage, a loaf of bread, chutney, cheese, plums. His newly-freed arms rest on his hips, elbows out at jaunty angles. He wears a light-coloured suit, clean and practical, and a pair of Zeiss binoculars hangs around his neck. “Excuse me, young man,” the stranger beams down at Callum with a twinkle of mischief in his eye. “You wouldn’t happen to sell any chairs, would you? I’m afraid my friend’s knees are no longer up to sitting down on the grass for a picnic.”
The friend in question toddles up behind him, indignant at this accusation. “Since we’re asking, do you by chance sell any sunhats? I’m afraid my friend here used to be ginger and the weather today is decidedly un-Scottish.” This man is completely bald, and dressed a bit sharper than his companion. The frown lines in his face are just as deep as the smile ones. “There’s no need for a chair, really.”
“My goodness, Con, I’m not sure I have the strength to pick you up after a picnic anymore!” the first one says, with that unabashed candour characteristic of the very young and the very old alike.
“Ehm-” Callum starts, hesitantly, before he is subject to more old man retorts. “We don’t sell chairs, but I could go and ask my Da if we could loan you one if you’re just needing it for a picnic?”
“We don’t want to be any trouble.” The bald one says quickly, definitely. “Is Mrs Aitken’s shop still around the corner? She had chairs. We can ask her.”
“You knew Mrs Aitken?” Callum asks in surprise.
“‘Knew’?” The tall one raises his eyebrows.
“It was ’22 we last saw her, Bill. Just before you left for New Zealand.”
“She passed when I was five.” Callum says with the flat normalcy discussing death of one whose childhood spanned the Second World War. “Yous have visited Kirriemuir before?”
“Oh, yes. We’ve spent many a summer at Burnside with the Reginald Smiths.”
They must be rich friends of the Smiths, then. Old Mr Smith was always nice enough, Callum thinks, offering “I was sorry to hear about his passing.”
“I hope the new owners are looking after the place.” The bald one drums his fingers on the counter, lightly, as Callum starts to wrap up their purchases.
“They are, sir, from what I’ve seen.”
“Do you still get shrikes up in the meadow?” The taller one asks eagerly.
“Aye, shrikes and all sorts—are you off bird-watching?”
“What gave me away?” He holds up his binoculars suggestively. “You as well, son?”
“Oh aye, sir, I spent about a half hour watching a goshawk yesterday. Didn’t even hear Ma calling me in for supper.” Callum blushes slightly. He could gush about birds all day. Usually he holds it in, seeing as Ma disapproves, but a customer is a golden opportunity for conversation.
“Good lad!”
“Is this what you were like as a boy, Bill?” The crankier one cuts in.
“Certainly not! I always came in for supper. I rather think my mother failed to appreciate when my pet buzzard also came in for supper, however.”
As Callum rings them up, the taller one throws in a bouquet. “For Mrs. Aitken. We’ll call on her at the cemetery. I want to tell her one last time how darling her scones were.”
As they’re about to leave, Callum remembers what he forgot in the haze of birdwatching excitement. “Oh, sirs!”
They turn round.
“Your chair! You can borrow mine, I don’t need it at the counter. You’ll bring it back this afternoon, right?”
“Oh dear boy, there’s no need-” The bald one starts.
“I insist, sirs, from one birder to two others.”
“I’m afraid I’m a poor substitute for Bill’s favourite birding partner.” The bald man grins wryly, “Besides, we hardly want you in trouble with your father.”
But the taller one has other ideas. “We’ll pay to borrow it.” He sets some coins on the counter. “We’ll be back by half four.”
Callum walks the lightweight stool round the counter, and the taller man hoists it up, the other man carrying the picnic basket.
“Can I take your names, sirs? Just to tell my Da who to expect back later?”
“Of course.” The tall one waits as he gets out a pencil and paper. “This is Robert Scott, and I’m Edward Wilson.”
They’re common enough names, sure, but something about them—and them together in particular—itches at Callum’s memory. Has he read them in a book somewhere? He asks as much. A strange look passes over both the old men’s faces—the look of people becoming aware suddenly of the gulf of history. They exchange a glance, and the bald one—Robert Scott—answers.
“You may well have. We went to Antarctica a few times when we were young.”
“Wow!” Callum’s eyes grow huge. “Like Shackleton?”
“Yes,” Robert Scott answers, bemused. “Like Shackleton.”
Re: FILL: We Both Go Down Together, Scott/Wilson, 5+1 fic, death, really sad Gen [2/2]
(Anonymous) 2023-09-25 10:51 pm (UTC)(link)Re: FILL: We Both Go Down Together, Scott/Wilson, 5+1 fic, death, really sad Gen [2/2]
(Anonymous) 2024-08-16 02:52 am (UTC)(link)