Archive of Our Own

Even after three years of the bustling streets, and the staccato of the horses’ hooves as they strike the cobblestones, and the loud, slurred renditions of some bawdy tune or another which spill out from the taverns late at night, humanity and its trappings still feel like some other animal’s skin loosely settled on top of Solomon Tozer’s own. But even if Boston, now, doesn’t feel right, what came before it doesn’t, either—sometimes, he finds himself mystified when does something that he’d learned how to do before, like tying a bowline knot neat, or judging the time by where the sun sits in the sky, clumsily sewing a button back onto a shirt. Evidence that someone else had been here once, in this body of his.

So mostly, he feels out of time. And the reason that he likes to box is simple: all of that goes, the world working itself down to a handful of essentials. He has thirty seconds to retire to his corner, and then eight more to come back to the scratch line for the next round. If he can’t come up to scratch, he’ll lose the match. If he wins, the referee will hold his hand up and he’ll shout, dizzied and happy, just for half a second. 

And if he wins, he’ll get his pay, and he’ll take it back to the little room in the lodging house that he shares with the man who still calls himself Hickey, climbing up the narrow, rickety stairs that creak and protest under his weight, and underneath that, he’ll hear all that life that’s crammed into that narrow building; babies whimpering, a dog howling, a woman crying, an argument kicking off.

Like he hears tonight. Whistling, he fishes his key out of his pocket and slots it into the lock, pushes the door open to find that Hickey is here tonight, hunched and leaning half out the window to smoke, the second part of which is something of a surprise. He doesn’t usually bother when Tozer’s not around; it had taken some grousing to get him to bother at all. But Tozer’s been trying to cut down lately—he’s found that it leaves him easily winded when he fights, and the smell always makes him want a drag. 

Tozer sits down heavy on the little bed in the corner, and bends down to unlace his boots, half looking at Hickey there, the line of his body against the wall. He looks nearly the same as he did before, barring a bit of grooming. Even if he’s now a little bit softer, he still looks just as hungry. Tozer doesn’t know how that works. 

Tozer, in comparison, has thickened again with muscle. He’s shaved off his beard; he’s trimmed his hair. Logically, he knows he looks like he did before, but he can’t remember any of that. He remembers, sometimes, his red coat.

“I won,” he offers up finally, when Hickey still hasn’t said anything, or bothered to look over at him, really, at all. “Just if you’ve been wondering.”

Hickey flicks his cigarette out the window. “I know you won,” he says. “You come back whistling when you win.”

Tozer hadn’t noticed that, and he feels, for a moment, uncomfortably studied, even if Hickey hasn’t looked at him yet. He wishes that Hickey hadn’t tossed his cigarette out; he could use one now. He’ll start another one in another few minutes, he hopes, but just as he thinks it, Hickey shuts the window, and dusts off his hands, slimming those particular prospects into nothing. 

“Or if it suits you better,” Hickey continues lightly, coming to settle at Tozer’s feet. “Perhaps I just have that much faith in you, Sol. Perhaps I expect you to win.” 

He looks up at him then and smiles, even when Tozer is unimpressed by that sort of cloying sweetness.  

“Where have you been?” Tozer asks, after a pause. He’d seen him Tuesday, last—two days ago. Not unusually, but he always wonders, even so. 

“Getting us some work,” Hickey says, half-distracted. He tugs at Tozer’s boot, catching hold of his calf for leverage. Suddenly, this makes sense. 

“Us,” Tozer echoes flatly, suddenly horribly unsurprised by all this careful attention. Hickey forges on like he hadn’t heard it. 

“Don’t fight tomorrow,” he says. “I need you presentable.”

A funny thing for Hickey to say, Tozer thinks, mutinous: I need you. Whatever’s keeping Hickey tethered here on this plane of existence, or perhaps just here in Boston, it’s not Solomon Tozer. What it is, precisely, Tozer doesn’t know. All he knows is that he’s never met anyone so desperately needy for nothing he wants.

“I might have other engagements,” Tozer says flatly. “Have you considered that?”

The earnestness melts from Hickey’s face; now, he looks sulky. “You act like you hate it,” he says, abandoning his work, leaving him with one boot unshod so that he can rest his folded arms in Tozer’s lap and peer up at him. 

He’s only touchy like this when he wants something, Tozer’s learned, much too late to make much of any use of that bit of information. Sometimes he thinks of the butcher’s ginger cat, back home—how affronted she’d get when he’d go out of his way to brush his knuckles against her side, swatting at his hand and running off, until she’d reappear to wind around his feet later, usually when he was carrying something heavy. 

“It’s talking and drinking,” Hickey continues. “You like both of those things.”

Tozer heaves a sigh. “It’s not honest work, is it,” he says, which is a line in an argument they’ve had at least six times before, which is probably why Hickey ignores it entirely.

“I heard something today,” he says, scratching at his chin. “About California. An acquaintance of mine has returned.” He pauses — for dramatic effect, Tozer suspects. “He says you can hardly walk there for tripping on gold. All anyone’s got to do is get there and take it.” 

Hickey looks delighted at even the thought. It feels like the four thousandth time that they’ve had this discussion, too, and it’s as tiresome as it had been the first time he’d mentioned it. California, California, California. “Why’s he come back then?” Tozer points out listlessly, and Hickey’s face falls into a frown. 

Sometimes Hickey is remarkably keen-eyed; sometimes he slips into the sort of idealistic naivety that Tozer would expect from a child. When Hickey had started bringing that up—his dreams of the West, as he’s imagined it—Tozer had begun to expect, with a strange, confusing sort of anxiety, that he’d return to their room one evening to find that Hickey had absented himself entirely, and taken Tozer’s nicest things with him, probably, to boot. 

But it’s been a year since he first mentioned it, and he’s stayed in place, in that little room, sleeping in that little bed next to Tozer, nearly every night. Tozer doesn’t understand it.  

“Perhaps you ought to accompany him on his inevitable return,” he says gruffly. “This acquaintance of yours.”

A smile twitches across Hickey’s face. “You’d like it there,” he says.

“I wouldn’t. I’ve told you, I won’t go, Cornelius.” 

Thirteen years a Royal Marine, Tozer thinks, sometimes, and then that handful of them in the business of whatever it is that he’s become just blotted them out, or maybe spirited them off entirely like ash in the wind. Someone could be a marine for forty years or four thousand and it would all be as good as gone, with what they’d done, dragged out of him like that thing drew Henry Collins’s spirit in, so that he’d come to rest hollowed-out with a liar, a murderer, and a caulker’s mate, and not a very good one at that. 

Hickey’s thumb skates across Tozer’s hands in his lap, worrying at the second knuckle when he comes to it, split and healed wrong four months ago. It aches when it rains. 

“You’ve never seen me box,” Tozer finally says. 

Hickey looks baffled at that. For a second that’s satisfying enough to make Tozer feel like less of an idiot for saying it, but not entirely. “I have,” he says finally—a reflexive lie. Tozer exhales, exasperated. 

“You haven’t. I’d have seen you.”

Hickey mulls this over, and then as he does, by nature, selects the worst thing to pick at. He cocks his head, a little bit coy. “You’ve looked for me?”

“Half the time I know you’re just here, lying about,” Tozer continues, ignoring him, although he can feel his face starting to go hot with embarrassment. He reaches up, rubs at the back of his neck, tacky with dried sweat. “I just—you know where I do it. I’ve told you. But you’ve never…”

“So this is what’s got you vexed?” Hickey murmurs, ducking his head to keep his eye contact with Tozer steady, eyes dark in the half-light. “Is that it?”

“No,” Tozer says, annoyed, and unfortunately, vexed. Hickey huffs out a laugh. 

“Why’s it matter?” he asks, already winding his way up into Tozer’s lap, leaving the one boot he’d got off of him abandoned on the floor, until he’s looking down at him, holding Tozer’s face pressed between his palms. The light that the candle throws off catches his face in half shadow. He’s down to his shirt and trousers, and he smells like cigarettes

Automatically, Tozer reaches up to settle a hand on his waist, just at his hip. He remembers when he used to be able to feel his bones that way.

“I know you’ll do us well,” Hickey continues. “I don’t need to watch you to know it.”

It’s so far from what he means that Tozer jerks his head back reflexively.  “That’s not—“ he begins, frustrated, and cuts himself off, dropping his hand. Maybe he’s wording it all wrong. He regrets, suddenly, mentioning this at all. “Why?” he settles on. “I just want to know. Why.”

Hickey looks at him, but he doesn’t answer. He smooths Tozer’s hair back instead, and Tozer lets himself fall for it, just for a second, leaning into his touch. His eyes slip shut, and Hickey keeps quiet, a regular enigma, per usual. 

And as the seconds pass, it becomes apparent that the question has dragged Hickey back into his own head; beyond Tozer’s reach. It makes his irritation dogs at his heels again, even with Hickey’s hands on him, enough to make him open his eyes and push Hickey off of him, not ungently.

Hickey, now sprawled on the bed, watches with a frown as Tozer bends to retrieve his abandoned boot. 

“I’m going out,” Tozer tells him shortly. 

“And where are you off to, then?” Hickey asks, now matching him for irritation, the spell broken. 

“Wouldn’t you like to bloody know,” Tozer says petulantly, just to see if he likes it for a change, a bit of mystery, as though Hickey couldn’t guess. Hickey scowls. 

“I meant what I said,” he insists. “Tomorrow—“

“Heard you the first time you said it,” Tozer grunts, hopping to stuff his foot back into his boot, now that he’s ceded the territory of the bed to Hickey, who watches, frowning.

“Sol,” he says finally.

“I’ll be back late,” Tozer says, turning from him. He goes through the door and leaves without looking again.

❖❖❖

The tavern—the Cat and Finch, or usually, just the Cat, sits just around the corner from the building that they’ve lived in for the past two years, which is a happy coincidence. It’s his sort of place; not Hickey’s, who, in Tozer’s experience, only sets foot in places to drink far nicer than these to get some business together—never drinking a drop, so far as he can help it, unless it’s foisted on him. Tozer’s only accompanied him once or twice, which had been enough for his tastes. He doesn’t like watching how he gets, equal parts coy and cloying, any more than he has to. 

Tozer had dragged him here twice, before he’d accepted that it didn’t suit him. Now, he doesn’t mind coming here alone, not really. Without Hickey, he’s the only person in the room who remembers who he was once, and once he’s had enough to drink, it feels more like keeping a secret, and less like hiding. 

Here, it’s friendly, warm, and crowded—unfussy, stinking of spilled ale, and like most places to drink on Ann Street, open on Sundays, even though it’s not strictly supposed to be. There are girls with rooms upstairs who drift in and out, under the employ of some madam he’s never seen, but he’s been enough of a tough sell for long enough that they’ve nearly all stopped vying for his attention.

Tozer is sandwiched in next to one of them tonight. He’s not seen her here before—long dark hair, a sharp, ferrety sort of face, blue eyes. She’s got a scar on her cheek, and he feels her eyes on him, intent, as he calls for a drink. 

“One of my countrymen,” she says finally, when he’s taking a swallow. He glances over at her. 

“Sounds like it.” 

“Norwich.” She rests her chin on her hand, studying him. “You?”

When they’d first gotten here, those sorts of questions had paralyzed him. He’d been convinced that anyone who’d bothered to ask him anything, from the time to if he’d prefer whiskey or gin, had done so to draw a line straight back to Solomon Tozer and what he’d done. But the more he’s lied, the more it’s gotten easier, even if he’s not nearly as practiced as Hickey. 

“There and around,” he says now, shrugging. “Blackpool, mostly.” 

She nods, and then hesitates, and then looks, very much, like she’s thinking of something else to say—something more interesting. After a few seconds of this, Tozer takes pity on her. 

“Do you want a drink?” he asks. 

Relieved, she rests her arms on the bar. “Just for being English?”

He’s signaling to the barman already, luxuriating in Hickey’s sulky admonition in his head; that he’s spending their coin on other people. A woman whose name he doesn’t know—although he spends plenty on Hickey, and he doesn’t know his, either.

 “If you’d like,” he says dryly. “There are plenty of those here, though, and I’ve only got so much in my pocket, so I’d rather you not advertise it. But I’ll drink it if you won’t.”

It’s not their money either, really, he reasons, far more defiant in his head than he ever is when they argue over precisely this issue. What he’s got in his pocket he got for knocking out John Mace in two rounds, finishing with a nasty jab to the jaw. Hickey had nothing to do with it. He hadn’t even been there to watch. 

“I’ll drink it,” the woman tells him, dragging him from his head. She smiles at him, and he can’t help but smile back as they wait.

For a moment, Tozer wills himself into thinking that he’s somewhere else, or perhaps that he’s still here and different things had led up to this, waiting for a drink in America with a pretty stranger in a bar. Sometimes he wonders what he’d have done if they’d all made it back, if he’d been married by now, if they’d have dragged him out to sea again. 

And sometimes he wonders what would have become of Hickey—how long he’d have lasted in Oahu until he’d worked out that he’d have to submit himself to someone else’s command even there, if he’d wanted to eat. 

“So,” he says, as she drinks. “Is this your place of business?”

She wrinkles her nose, half offended, half amused, and swallows. “You’ve just met me,” she says. “And you’re inquiring as to whether or not I’m a whore?” She smiles. It’s a rhetorical question—rarely are there women who come here who aren’t.

“Then I’ll ask you something else,” he says. “If you’ve got any suggestions.”

“No,” she decides. “I’ll ask you something.” She traces the lip of her glass with a finger, deep in thought, before she comes out with it. “What brought you here?”

These are the sorts of questions and answers that Tozer has drummed into his head. Sometimes he thinks of Hickey on that long voyage over, wonders how long it took for it to come this easy to him, or if it had already settled into place by the time he’d set foot on that ship. 

“Wanted a change, I suppose,” he says.

“Do you miss it?” she ventures, half smiling, a little shy. He shakes his head. 

“No. Do you?”

“No.” But from the look on her face, that’s not quite right. She pauses, thinks. “Well. Only when I think about how far it is,” she admits. “You know? An ocean away. All of it. Out there, right now, in the dark.”

Tozer thinks of that great black sea, out there in the dark, such as she says, and then thinks past it, and further, and further still, far beyond where any of the men he’s known should ever go. He thinks of the slumping mass of canvas tents tipped over by the wind, the rusted red tins, bones, bleached by the sun, there in this same world as the bar, this happy crowd of people, just further off. He feels, suddenly, as out of place here in this room as he had standing out there on the shale—so lonely that it cuts through him. 

He hadn’t realized that he’d gone quiet until she slips a hand over across the bar and brushes the back of her hand against his knuckles. He looks over at her, meets her eyes.

“What you asked me before,” she says, a little bit determinedly. “It’s my first night. So…if you’d like…”

She trails off at that, tilting her head, and he smiles. 

“You’ve given me enough company for tonight,” he tells her gently. “I’d rather not waste your time.” 

She draws her hand back. “Oh.”

“You’re lovely,” he’s hasty to add. “You are. Just—only came here for a drink tonight. Is all.” He peers into his glass—nearly through already. “A few drinks, probably,” he clarifies sheepishly. 

She looks at him—studying him for a second—and then her mouth twists into a smile. “Well, thanks for the one,” she says, recovering neatly, getting her glass in her hand and bringing it to her lips, although she tips it in Tozer’s general direction before she does. “Cheers.”

“To our ships at sea,” Tozer says belatedly, and drinks, too, ignoring the confusion that flickers across her face. When he swallows, the whisky burns its way down to his belly. 

It’s not that he hasn’t been to see women here at the Cat, but he hasn’t in a long while, and only a scant few times at that, usually during some spat with Hickey. He’d come to learn that any sort of good feeling that he’d wrung out of the experiences would fade fast, and in a manner that would leave him feeling worse off than before, through no fault of the women in question. You’re so good to me, the ladies would sigh, or something like it, and he’d want to explain to them everything that he’d ever done, in all of his life, in order. 

He drinks some more. The sharp-faced woman eventually absents herself, off to make her money for the night, although they part on good terms. He sees a man he knows from the ring; they talk about Gallagher. He’s going to fight Gallagher on the day after the next, not tomorrow, because he’s aiming to keep his face in good condition for Hickey’s business, although he doesn’t say that to the man he knows from the ring, because the man from the ring doesn’t know Hickey, because Hickey’s never come to see him box. Sometimes, he thinks that Hickey will be off west before anyone in this bar would ever know him, or anyone in Boston, really, by the name Hickey, at least. It’s only a matter of time. There’s nothing keeping him here. 

By the time he stumbles outside, he’s pleasantly drunk, enough so that he’d decided to forget about the dispute with Hickey that had led him here. He’d missed the rain starting up, at some point—heavy, too, enough so that he has to squint and blink it from his eyelashes in order to see the way home. He hurries, shoulders hunched, collar turned up and hands thrust into his pockets, ducking under awnings and cutting through the alleyways he knows will take him where he wants to go. 

And when he gets there, he’s soaked through. When he gets to their door, he worries that he’ll find it empty, but the feeling is fleeting, because when he unlocks it and pushes it open to find everything mostly as he left it; candle snuffed out, smelling faintly of Hickey’s cigarette from before. The moon spills in from the window, across the basin Hickey’s moved to the floor to collect the rain drumming down from the leaky spot in the roof, coming to its end across the shape of Hickey in bed. 

He toes off his boots, sheds his coat, and peels off his socks, one at a time, hopping as he goes, but doesn’t bother with any of the rest, coming to collapse half on top of Hickey in the bed, who stiffens to wakefulness indignantly.

“You’re wet,” he hisses, jabbing an elbow back blindly at him, violence which Tozer endures stoically, even when Hickey twists and wriggles underneath him like an eel. His voice is thick with sleep. He’s always prickly when awakened suddenly, Tozer’s learned; like he knows he hasn’t quite gotten his armor on yet. 

Tozer turns himself into deadweight, and slings an arm over him, tucking his face against Hickey’s neck so that he can rub against it, even when Hickey pushes at him half-heartedly. He smells like soap; he is, Tozer’s learned, neurotically fastidious, when he has the choice.  

“If you’re going to come home like this, stinking of whisky, you’re going to sleep on the floor,” Hickey announces, somewhat optimistically. Tozer laughs. 

“And how exactly do you mean to arrange that, Mr. Hickey?” he inquires against his skin, gratified by the exasperated sound it draws from him. 

They’d been fighting about something before he’d left, but now, even mostly sober, it’s slipped from his mind entirely. If he angles his head just so, he can feel Hickey’s heart thump—there, and again, and again, as hearts do, in the bodies of living and mortal men. When had Hickey slipped that back on? Is that what had been returned to him in exchange for those two fingers on his right hand? Perhaps it had it come back on its own, trailing after him like that beast had, closer and closer as they’d made that long, miserable journey back, until he was tired and hungry and aching enough that he couldn’t fend it off anymore. 

Or maybe he’d left that on the ice. Tozer’s never asked—because how could he? Are you a god, or a man? Hickey wouldn’t answer, so there’s no use in trying it. 

Tozer tucks his hand underneath the blanket so that he can settle it on Hickey’s waist, feels the warmth bloom into his palm through his nightshirt. The world, gradually, narrows itself down into a point; a little set of tactile sensations. Whisky in his mouth. The smell of Hickey’s skin. The damp that had followed him in from outside. The sound of the rain plunking into the basin on the floor. 

“Your clothes,” Hickey mumbles, half annoyed and half awake, but he reaches up to rake his fingers through Tozer’s hair anyway, and Tozer bumps his head into his touch, blissful. 

“It’s raining,” Tozer points out, and doesn’t move, reluctant to pull back from the warm shape of him underneath him—Hickey runs cold usually, but the bed has insulated him. He pauses. “Should I take them off, then?”

He’s aimed for casual and missed, landing on hopeful, and the question hangs between them. Hickey tilts his head back to get a better look at him.

“Suppose,” he says finally, betraying nothing. 

But when Tozer peels himself off of him and gets up again, a little bit unsteadily, Hickey keeps watching, which betrays plenty. He’s sprawled back against the pillow; as Tozer strips down, Tozer can make out half his face in the moonlight, just enough for him to see that his eyes are bright and awake and on him. 

Tozer has filled out since the expedition, not just from fat, but from muscle, too. He’s not sure if Hickey likes it, but he suspects that he doesn’t have a preference—he catches him looking just as much as he had back then, like he is now, hungry. 

“Come here,” says Hickey, and Tozer obeys, but just as he gets back on top of him, Hickey draws his knee up so that Tozer’s forced to pull back, sinking back onto his thighs when Hickey catches his chest with his bare heel, guiding him down and away. 

“Which is it,” Tozer says, annoyed, and Hickey grins, letting his foot dip down, continuing in its progress until it settles to a rest where the blankets are bunched between Tozer’s thighs. 

“You’d beg me for it, I think,” Hickey says matter-of-factly, folding an arm behind his head. 

“Hickey,” Tozer says, ostensibly in irritation, but much to his humiliation it comes out instead as some sort of embarrassing, gravelly affirmation of what he’d just said, especially when Hickey grinds his heel against him, not enough to hurt, just enough to make Tozer suck in a breath through his teeth and ease up into the contact, not hard yet, but getting there. 

Hickey settles a hand on his abdomen, watching him, eyes half-lidded. “Go on, then,” he says.

He’s playing at nonchalance, but there’s something else on his face. Hickey likes to wrap himself up in mysteries—likes to go quiet when Tozer poses a question, just for the pleasure of not answering it—but Tozer’s not entirely ignorant, and he’s picked up on a few things here and there. Namely, and mostly: that Hickey likes to be wanted, or maybe that he needs it. 

Tozer grasps Hickey’s ankle with his hand but doesn’t move it, instead drawing his thumb over the bone that sticks out at the side, whatever it’s called. He could refuse, but he can guess at how that will go—Hickey will tell him to get off like this, and though he’s irritated to discover a twinge of shameful interest in that lurking somewhere on the edges of his perception, his desire for more wins out. 

“Please,” he says finally, and Hickey’s grin widens. 

“Come here,” Hickey says for the second time, his voice soft and low, easing up on Tozer with his foot so that Tozer can nudge his leg aside and get back on top of him, planting one forearm next to Hickey’s side, leaning heavy on it. 

With his free hand, he pushes the blanket down so he can press the heel of his palm to Hickey’s cock through his nightshirt, gratified when Hickey exhales shakily and rocks his hips up. He’s had him in nearly every configuration—and Hickey’s had him the same—but Tozer likes this the best, having him laid out under him like this, where he can see his face, can watch him come back from wherever he is in his head. 

Hickey hooks a leg around him as Tozer leans over to fumble blindly for the tin they keep on the chair next to the bed, which they mostly use as a table, so he can slick his fingers up. 

Once he does it, Hickey catches his face in his hands to kiss him, grinding his hips against Tozer’s, and it feels good enough that Tozer drops the tin entirely and they can hear it clatter to the floor and roll off into the dark. He keeps on kissing him, even, as Tozer slots his hand between his thighs, skimming past the ridged scars that start up at the backs of them so that he can work his fingers into him. 

They break apart to catch their breath. “Yeah,” Hickey says quietly, more to himself than anything, with a huffed exhale as Tozer works his fingers into him in a manner that pleases him, although he’s already plenty pleased, by the sight of his cock, hard and leaking against his belly. Either way, it’s an improvement on his usual refrain—some critique of Tozer’s technique, or the size of his fingers, or how long he’s taking.

But he’s the impatient one now. He withdraws his fingers when he’s worked him open just on the edge of enough—but just when he circles his cock at the base with his hand so that he can move to press into him, abruptly Hickey swats him on the flank. 

“Right, then, on your back,” Hickey announces, and Tozer freezes, almost comically. 

“What?” he asks stupidly, still not moving. His head swims. “Cornelius.”

“You heard me, soldier,” Hickey says, much to Tozer’s dismay. He’s already sitting up, so Tozer groans, finally rolling off of him and collapsing at his side. It takes a Herculean effort.  

“You’re just doing this to be bothersome,” he mutters, staring up at the ceiling. 

“Me?” Hickey says indignantly, like no one could describe him as being such a thing, and ever has, even if now that Tozer thinks about it, he’s probably the most bothersome person that he’s ever met. “I changed my mind on how I want it, is all,” he continues, his voice muffled through his nightshirt as he pulls it off of himself. 

He swings a leg over Tozer to straddle him, settling on top of him, albeit decidedly north of where Tozer would presently like him.“Well, you could get on with it,” Tozer mutters, tipping his hips up to bump his cock up against the swell of his arse, although the angle’s all wrong.  

Hickey grins smugly, stretching a hand out so that he can rake his fingers through the wiry hairs on Tozer’s chest. “‘All things come to those who’—nnh,” he begins to reel off, and then doesn’t finish, because Tozer decides that it would be a good idea to get his cock in his hand and pump it in his fist. Even if his true aim had been to shut him up, it’s nearly worth the delay, to watch him thrust up into his grip, face intent on his own pleasure. 

“Don’t need all things,” Tozer grouses, dragging the pad of his thumb over the head of his cock, slicking it up. “Just one thing, really, so—“

It’s his turn to shut up; Hickey’s reached behind him, and Tozer’s own complaint trails off into a groan as he sinks down, until Tozer’s buried in the tight, hot clutch of Hickey’s body. 

“Better?” Hickey pants, and digs his nails into his chest when Tozer thrusts up reflexively. “Easy, Sergeant.”

Tozer opens his mouth, and shuts it again. “I can’t move?” he manages with exasperation. 

“Depends on how bad you want it, I think,” Hickey says, breathless. 

There are rules to sex with Hickey, and Tozer’s worked out about half of them. For now, he doesn’t rise to Hickey’s bait, releasing his prick so that he can settle his hand on Hickey’s waist, needing something to dig his fingers into when Hickey rolls his hips experimentally, although it earns him a hazy glare. 

“I’ve got to do everything myself, then, I suppose,” Hickey mutters sourly, grinding down against him again—time slowly, torturously. Tozer grits his teeth. “You could help a man out.”

“’Depends on how badly you want it,’” Tozer bites out, pitching his voice up just a hair and getting his nose into it, in a poor imitation of Hickey, who huffs in exasperation and takes himself in hand.  

It’s hard to stay flat on the bed with what Hickey’s doing, and with what Tozer’s seeing, and hearing, and feeling. Hickey is blotchy and flushed pink down to his chest, and when Tozer slips a hand down to his thigh, he can feel the muscle underneath his skin, tensing as he raises himself up and sinks back down. He’s just mulling over debasing himself by begging twice in one evening when Hickey speaks. 

“I’m wondering if perhaps you do want it badly,” Hickey amends pointedly, and a good bit more breathlessly than before. Tozer laughs. Hickey always likes the idea of this particular configuration more than he likes the effort required of it, on his part; he’s profoundly lazy, in bed and elsewhere. 

“Oh, please, Mr. Hickey,” Tozer sighs theatrically, already sitting up, his hand on Hickey’s thigh sliding up to the small of his back so that he can keep him where he wants him. They’re close to the edge of the bed, so slings one leg down to plant his foot on the floor for more leverage. Hickey’s forced to spread his thighs further to accommodate for it, which is nice, too. 

And it’s nice that he can kiss him this way, which he does, still half-smiling against his mouth. Hickey gets his hand up in Tozer’s wet hair, fisting it tight in a hand as he does, kissing him back clumsily, and clumsier still as Tozer starts to fuck into him in earnest, the bed creaking underneath them. 

Tozer likes having Hickey on his back best, but he likes this, too, the closeness, how he can hardly tell where he ends and Hickey starts, plastered to his front, his cock trapped between them, although he takes pity on him enough to worm a hand in between their bodies so that he can stroke him. Hickey’s past talking; past kissing, too, because he breaks off to press his forehead to Tozer’s shoulder, exhaling sharply when Tozer angles into him just so. 

At the pace he’s set, it doesn’t take much longer for them to finish. Tozer’s rhythm stutters; he keeps working Hickey’s cock, but it’s with less finesse, and just when he feels Hickey’s fingernails bite little crescent moons into the back of his neck he finishes with groan, burying himself into Hickey to the hilt, working himself through it with slow, deliberate thrusts, until he’s entirely spent. Hickey’s quick to follow, but quiet—Tozer can feel him open his mouth open against the curve of his neck, like he means to say something (Solomon, he hopes, even with the sort of hazy disinterest that settles over him after his crisis), but he doesn’t get it out before he’s coming too, panting hot and wet against Tozer’s skin, leaving his hand slick and his belly, where they’re pressed together. 

Tozer can still hear the rain, a little bit louder than the two of them catching their breath. Hickey still hasn’t moved, quiet and still for once—he’s slumped, deadweight on top of him, at least until Tozer’s hand meanders down, past the curve of his scarred backside so that he can test at where Hickey’s stretched around his softening prick absently. He’s leaking his come, just a little bit, which gets Tozer hot, even in the post-coital haze that he’s in, and he’s just wondering if he could go again when Hickey speaks. 

“Enough,” Hickey croaks, wriggling free from Tozer's arms and pulling off of his cock—both of them wince at the feeling. He flops to the bed, boneless, as Tozer goes to fetch a rag. 

“It’s like you were the one doing the work there,” he remarks as he dips the rag in the rainwater in the basin on the floor and wrings it out. Hickey waves off the remark, too worn out to bicker, as Tozer does a cursory job of cleaning himself up. Once he’s through, he tosses it at Hickey, ignoring the faint sound of disgust it draws from him, and goes to join him on the bed. 

“Get me one you didn’t use.”

“No,” Tozer says, since he’s already settled down next to him—but it had been a cursory complaint, because Hickey’s already cleaning up, too, although he pauses to drag his hand through the streaks of his own come on his front. 

“Eat it,” Hickey demands, thrusting his hand to Tozer’s face. Tozer wrinkles his nose, circling Hickey’s wrist in his fingers.

“You could think of a nicer way to say it,” he complains, but sucks his fingers anyway, and licks his palm clean too, Hickey watching with a hungry satisfaction as he does it. 

Afterwards, they lie in bed. Tozer is curled up around Hickey, one arm thrown over him, the other pinned underneath him, which will go numb eventually. He’s just falling asleep when he hears Hickey’s voice. 

“Do you think I’d be any good at it?”

Tozer cracks one eye open. “What?”

Hickey rolls over onto his back, and the blood starts to rush back into Tozer’s arm. “Boxing.”

“No.” Tozer flexes his hand absently. “You don’t know anything about it. You might, if you’d ever come to see me,” he adds, a little bit sullenly. 

Hickey frowns, looking over at him, and then back at the ceiling, like he’s trying to work something out. “It’s two men in a ring trying to pretend like they’re not trying to kill each other,” he says finally, and Tozer shuts his eyes, very tired, suddenly.   

“That’s not what it is,” he says. “There are rules. You don’t like rules, is the other thing. It’s clean fighting. No grabbing him by the hair, or scratching his eyes out, or biting, or…” He stifles a yawn. “Whichever wretched thing you’d come up with to win, I don’t know.”

“Biting ?” Hickey echoes, and from his voice, Tozer can tell that his mouth is twisting into a smile. Whatever he’s envisioning, it’s got him amused. The seconds tick on before he speaks again. “Well, I think I’d be good at it.”

Tozer cracks an eye open. “You think you’d be good at nearly everything.”

“Not with a gun. Or mending things, now.” He wriggles his hand with its missing fingers. “And I can’t do sums.”

“Right,” Tozer mumbles, shutting his eyes again. “Just those three, then. You’ve perfected everything else.”

“I think so,” Hickey says, quite seriously, enough so that Tozer fears that it isn’t a joke. He laughs anyway, which gets him an elbow jab, but not a very hard one. He’s just trying to rattle some bit of arithmetic loose from his memory to pose to Hickey, just to see how bad he is, truly, when inadvertently, he falls asleep. 

❖❖❖

And then, Tozer dreams of Australia, or perhaps it’s just Wirral, because he’s never seen Australia, and he has seen Wirral, and the Australia he’s dreamed himself into looks exactly like it. Part of the reason that he knows that it’s Australia is because Lieutenant Irving’s there—because he remembers, faintly, an evening of uncharacteristic seasickness he’d had early on in the voyage, the strange and clammy pat on the back Irving had given him when he’d found Tozer draped like a rag over the gunwale, divorcing himself from his supper. Irving had thought that it would be a good distraction to tell him about the assemblage of five hundred sheep and twenty cows he’d left in Sydney, a story which had been so painfully dull that it had served its purpose, more or less, until it had inevitably meandered back to Jesus on the cross again. 

Not very much is different in this dream, although he doesn’t feel sick. “It’s a sin, what you’re doing,” says Irving insistently, trailing after him. “It’s a sin. It is.”

“Are you going to keep saying that?” Tozer mutters, trudging on. “I wish you wouldn’t. And it’s my dream, so you ought to listen.”

Irving looks disgruntled, but he stops it, at least. “It’s wrong,” he says instead, which is essentially the same thing, just a different word. Tozer notices suddenly that he’s clutching a shepherd’s crook; otherwise, he’s in that thing he wore at that disastrous benjo, with the wings and all.

“You’re one to talk,” Tozer says, marching on. There’s shale starting to peek through the lush green grass—it digs into his bare feet. “I saw how you looked at him when he was lashed.”

Irving’s face goes half white and half splotchy red, blooming on his cheeks. “I suffered for it,” he says primly, after a pause. “I did. I suffered greatly—“

“And you think that was God ?” Tozer asks, eying him in disbelief. “Christ. Maybe that’s why it all went to fucking hell. God was too busy watching you eyeing his arse to bother with looking after any of the rest of us.” He jabs a finger at Irving. “You suffered because you were there, and he made a choice. Does the Bible say anything about bad luck, Lieutenant Irving? Because it could’ve been anyone out there with him on that sledge party.”

That’s a sin, too, what he’d just said, probably, but Irving huffs and doesn’t comment on it. Instead he makes a face like he’s just swallowed a lemon. “Well, then it could’ve been you,” he mutters, finally. 

“I wish it bloody well had been,” Tozer grouses. “Then I wouldn’t have to march on through this bloody wasteland again except with you carrying on behind me.”

Not like it had gone with Hickey, who, for some reason, hadn’t said a word for weeks after they’d started back from the carnage of their last encounter with the beast, although it hadn’t been for lack of Tozer trying to get him to come out with something—out of anger at first, and then because he’d been desperately lonely. But Hickey, stubbornly, had kept quiet. Hardly looking at Tozer, hardly sleeping, leaving him out of whatever it was he was working out in his head. Another mystery they left behind them in the north. 

And perhaps because Tozer is thinking of that now, suddenly, in this dream, they’re not alone. Once they come up the hill, just in front of him, there’s the boat, and there’s Hickey. He’s on his knees, bare-chested like when they’d lashed him on the ship, and chained, each of his pale arms stretched out and up, manacles loose on his wrists. He must be cold, but he looks unbothered.

“When did you last dream of England?” Hickey inquires, as loftily as anyone could inquire anything half-naked and chained to a boat. 

It’s a profoundly irritating thing to say. “Is that a fucking riddle?” Tozer asks. And worse still, it feels like there’s meant to be one here—some question. A mystery. Someone missing from this scene. 

Hickey shrugs, the chains clinking gently—which is the only sound apart from the wind. He’d forgotten about the quiet out here, how it stuffed its way into your ears like wool. “Unchain me,” he says. “Perhaps I’ll tell you.”

Tozer casts a look around, just to assess the situation, but he doesn’t see a key, until he fishes through his pockets and finds one there. It’s cold, and it leaches the warmth from his palms as he presses it between them, thinking.  

Irving’s gone silent. Tozer nearly expects to find him gone when he looks over, except there he still is, just gawping at Hickey unhelpfully. “Surely you’re meant to say something important here,” he points out, but Irving doesn’t, just thins his mouth and shakes his head.

“Sol,” Hickey says. Tozer curls his fist around the key in his hand. 

“Cornelius,” he says, but as soon as he does, he’s in the sea, far from shore. He sputters and fights his way to the surface, but he’s swallowed a mouthful of seawater, and he feels as though he’s going to be sick. He knows how to swim, but it’s too hard; it takes every ounce of his strength to keep his face above the water, because he’s wearing heavy diving boots, lined with lead.

But he’s close enough to see the shore. His eyes blur and sting from the sea, but he can see a crowd out there on the beach, far off, just smudges of faces that blur and swim in his vision. They’re all waving for him. Tozer’s eyes prick with tears, or maybe it’s the salt, and then he drowns, and then he dies, and then he wakes. 

❖❖❖

When he wakes, Hickey’s dressing in the corner. Not for tonight—Hickey’s particular about his finer things, and he wouldn’t waste them on whatever it is that Hickey tends to do during the day when he’s not lounging around here, which, now that Tozer thinks about it, he’s never really quite sure of. 

Mouth dry and head throbbing, faintly, from how much he’d had to drink last night, he watches Hickey as he shrugs his shirt on. He hasn't noticed that Tozer is awake yet, and as he watches Hickey do up his buttons with his small, nimble hands, it feels like he’s observing something more private and secret than what he sees when Tozer takes those same clothes off of him. When he bends to retrieve his waistcoat, Tozer can see a bruise starting to smudge on his hip, in the dotted shape of a set of fingertips, he feels a twinge of guilt and satisfaction. That’s when Hickey catches Tozer looking. 

“Remember what I told you,” he says, by way of a good morning, and Tozer sighs, stretching in the bed. 

“I won’t fight. I’ve got to, day after tomorrow, though,” Tozer says, in case that interferes with some other sort of mysterious plan of Hickey’s, yet to be disclosed. “Some lordling visiting from London. Wants to see a real fight. The purse will be decent.” 

Hickey nods, but then he pauses, thinking. Tozer watches, suddenly weary, as the gears turn in his head—as he gets that glint in his eye. He ducks his head, making a show of being intently focused on buttoning his waistcoat. “Aren’t you tired of this?” he asks. 

Tozer eyes him. “What?” 

“This city,” Hickey says, looking back up at him. “Living this way, with all these people. Scraping up as much money as we can find. However we can.”

“We’ve got a bed,” Tozer says stubbornly. “We’re not hungry.” 

It’s more than they’d had once. He’d imagine that it’s more than Hickey had, too, sometimes back in England, although he’d never bothered to inquire, but it doesn’t take much inquiring to reason that it would take a desperate sort of man who’d kill a stranger for the privilege of sailing off to some far-off beach he’d seen a drawing of somewhere.  

“What happens when you can’t box?” Hickey asks. “Don’t say you’d go back on a ship, because I know you wouldn’t.”

Tozer tries not to look bothered by that, because it’s true. It’s not a question he’s considered before, though, broadly, much like he’d never imagined what he’d do if he weren’t a marine, and he fumbles to come up with an answer now. 

“The railway?” he ventures, uncertain. “Maybe.”

“I’ve seen men come back from that. It would take everything out of you,” Hickey says, which is also true. He cocks his head, gaze intent on Tozer, and Tozer is suddenly conscious of the state he’s in, undressed, even if Hickey’s not quite assembled yet either, waistcoat half buttoned. “Five years ago, cholera burned through the North End,” he says. “Hundreds of people, dead in one summer. Could’ve been someone in this room. Could’ve been us.” That hangs in the air as he shrugs. “Imagine that. After everything we’ve suffered through—snuffed out in a handful of days, by chance, from some affliction.”

Tozer can feel something, suddenly, some ghost of who he once was pricking up its ears. Something that he’d left in one of those tents or another. But he’s smarter now. He thinks, anyway. “Are you nearing some manner of a conclusion, Cornelius?” he asks stolidly. 

“All I’m saying is —there’s an easier way to live,” Hickey says nonchalantly, turning his gaze back to his clothes. “A good way. Out there. A way that we deserve.”

Tozer sighs, tired again, suddenly. He doesn’t need to ask Hickey to know what he’s worked that out to be, and when Hickey flicks his eyes at him again, expectant, clearly eager to launch into an elaboration on the west and its riches, he doesn’t take the bait. Instead, he scrubs at his face with his hands.

“When is your engagement?” he asks, finally, letting his hands fall again. “Tonight.”

Irritation flickers across Hickey’s face, but he smooths it away just as fast.

“Half nine. The Society Club on Chestnut.”

Tozer squints. “Beacon Hill? How’d you manage that?”

“I have my ways,” Hickey says smugly.

He’s too tired to chase him for it, but he imagines it has to do with a well-heeled gentleman sorting through his grief in a glass of whisky in some sparkling establishment or another, worlds removed from the Cat.

“Fine,” he says, tiredly. “Who should it be, then?”

Hickey cocks his head, pauses to think. “Your brother,” he decides, before his mouth twists into a smile. “And—perhaps it’s cholera?” Tozer rolls his eyes, and turns over in bed, onto his side. With his back to Hickey, all he gets is his voice. “What’s his name?”

“William,” he says, staring at the wall, tracing the cracks in the paint with his eyes. He’s always liked the name. 

❖❖❖

Tozer’s not sure where Hickey found this particular ensemble that he’s wearing, but he wishes that he’d found things that had been made out of material that didn’t itch quite as much, although maybe that’s how it always is with fine things. He wouldn’t know. It’s the nicest thing that he’s worn in ages, and he feels, a little bit, like an actor playing a part, if there had ever been a play about a man standing in the corner of a corridor leading into an exhibition hall and sweating. 

It doesn’t quite fit him in the shoulders, and underneath his jacket, it gapes down his arm where Hickey had torn out the seams—and even if none of the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen milling around in the corridor can see that, it feels like they can. No matter how many times he suffers through these, he never quite feels right; every passing glance that he gets makes him anticipate an arm thrust out with a finger pointing at him, an interloper in need of removing.

It’s easier in the larger, grimier halls, where they stuff in anyone who can afford a ticket, rather than anyone who knows someone. The crowd here isn’t nearly thick enough to leave him entirely anonymous, and there’s a good chance, he fears, that someone will ask him who invited him here. He’d even raised that fear to Hickey once, after another one of these. Hickey’s recommendation had been that he burst into tears and say something about who he was here for, which hadn’t been a particularly useful suggestion, because he can’t cry on command. Hickey can, probably, although he’s never seen him do it.

He hasn’t laid eyes on him yet, but he can hear his voice, and he knows that he’s there in the next room. Alarmed when a woman about his age casts two longing glances in his general direction, Tozer flees from his corner, following the crowd. It leads him to the exhibition hall, and to Hickey, tucked away there in the back, deep in conversation with some misty-eyed woman. 

He’s dressed in what Tozer supposes that Hickey regards as his finery, although it’s a little bit bright and garish in context, even to Tozer’s untrained eye. Tozer is the only one here who knows that the lining in his waistcoat is carefully patched; another secret, like the seams at Tozer’s shoulders. One evening last week, Tozer had dozed off watching him sit hunching over it, face drawn with concentration as he’d mended it as neatly as he could with needle and thread. He’d wondered where he’d learned that, and then he’d thought of Billy Gibson, too near to sleep to be chased by a twist of shame. 

Someone offers him a drink, and he takes it, listening absently to the conversations that echo there and back in the room. He can’t down it all at once—that doesn’t feel proper—so he’s forced to ration it out, staring over at Hickey. He’s just trying to work out whether Hickey hasn’t seen him, or he has, and he’s ignoring him on purpose, when a voice pulls him from his thoughts.  

“How do you think he lost his fingers?”

Tozer looks over to find a man—well-coiffed, good teeth, around his age. Not someone who’d ever find himself in the vicinity of Ann Street, where he and Hickey live, unless it were a night’s expedition to some house of ill repute, playing at being like the rest of them for an evening. Tozer follows his gaze to where Hickey stands, his hand resting on the woman’s forearm, face gentle, eyebrows drawn together as he puts on a performance of looking very sorry over whatever it is she’s talking about. 

“Dunno.” Tozer shrugs. “Some spirit got hungry, maybe.” 

The man laughs politely, and the two of them watch as Hickey drifts to the next person waiting to speak to him. “My little sister died last year,” the man says, suddenly. “I lay my faith in the scientific, rather than the spiritual, usually, but—where there’s mystery, there’s a chance. Isn’t there?” He looks over again at Tozer and smiles a little bit sadly, which makes Tozer feel guilty enough so that he has to look away. “And you?”

“What?”

“Who are you here for?”

Tozer glances over back at Hickey again, and wishes that he’d come later—snuck in the back, like he was late. “A drink,” he says, uncomfortable. “That’s all.”

The man keeps his eyes on him, and suddenly, that feeling returns to Tozer—that he can guess that Tozer’s just passed into this world for a spell, as out of place as that lordling from London will look tomorrow, in the thick of that crowd around the ring. “There are plenty of other places in this city to get a drink,” he says. “And here you are.”

Tozer peers into his glass. “Need another one, I think,” he announces, and before the man can say anything else, he slips back into the crowd, heart pounding in his chest, fully intending to make good on his ruse. 

But after he does, it’s just a matter of time. Soon the crowd settles into their seats, Tozer included, not quite in the front, and not quite at the back, either. There’s twenty or thirty of them, all together; they more or less fill up the room, which is small, but neatly maintained, lit up by with two glittering chandeliers hanging low above their heads 

Hickey stands on the shallow platform at the front, scanning the crowd absently, with a neutral, nearly sterile interest. He’s not new to this—he’s been at this for the past year or so, under a handful of names, although he’s had enough success with this one that it’s stuck.

His eyes linger when they pass over Tozer, but not for so long. He sets his shoulder, smiles, and speaks. 

“Ladies. Gentlemen. I would tell you that it’s lovely to see you all here tonight—but I know that personal tragedies have led some of you here,” Hickey says, hands clasped behind his back—he keeps his smile a little wistful, a little melancholy, like he’s in on some sort of sad secret that every finely-dressed man and woman huddled there in the little room knows. He’s lacquered his hair down with enough stuff that Tozer’s quite sure if he tossed a coin at his head it would ricochet back at him. “For those of you who’re unaware, my name is Alfred Vernon Lockhurst. I stand before you as something of a conduit. A connection. I’m here at your service; that’s all.”

It would be a pretty speech if Tozer isn’t now realizing where Hickey had pilfered Lockhurst from: the peeling tin of condensed milk sitting on the sill at home, which he’d had emptied for the use of keeping buttons in. There’s nothing very spiritual about condensed milk. And neither Alfred, nor, especially, Vernon, suits him, but Tozer hadn’t been consulted, and he’s reluctant to raise the issue lest one or both of them is really and truly what he’s called. 

“I’d imagine that some of you are disbelieving,” Hickey continues, coming to a halt. “I was, too, once, before I was called to this vocation. But there are mysterious and startling wonders in this world. I’ve seen them. I’ve heard them. And it would be a great privilege for me to share them with you today. I…”

He makes a show of trailing off, his eyes finally locking with Tozer’s. Tozer, resigned, looks back. The handful of times he’s done this has left him well-practiced, or at the very least accustomed to it. Deception doesn’t come easy to him, and this isn’t how he’d like to spend his time or earn his money, but it’s easier than he’d have anticipated. Nearly everyone here is halfway there already,   desperate to hear what they want to hear—all it takes is some sign that they’re in the right place. Tozer’s just helping them along the way. 

Hickey tears his eyes away, and looks flustered. “As I was saying,” he says, but halts again, like he’s finally given up on his train of thought. “I…I’m sorry. Sir. You there in the third row.”

Tozer looks around, and then points at himself, hesitant. “Me?”

“Yes,” Hickey says. “Would you—I’d like you to come up here, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Obligingly, Tozer stands, shuffles out of the second row, tries not to look at the crowd, although he can feel their eyes on him. It makes it easier to look at the lone familiar face in the room, which is Hickey, who now gestures for him to have a seat at the little table draped in velvet that they’d set up there. 

“Apologies,” he says, half to Tozer, half to the crowd. “You’ll all forgive me for cutting my introduction short, I hope. Something’s called out to me from this man here, and—I’d rather not lose the thread. They can be fickle, on the other side.”

All of this, thankfully, is in his own natural manner of speaking; as clever as Hickey is, Tozer’s not certain how good he is with voices, and he’d rather not sit through some attempt of Hickey’s to sound like a member of Parliament. How he sounds works for what he does, anyway—the mystery of his missing fingers, the strangeness of a man who’d been called to delve in such spiritual matters as these. It’s women’s work, generally, from Tozer’s hazy understanding of it, but Hickey’s sex sparks less suspicion when it’s just one piece of a largely enigmatic puzzle.

At least, that’s his guess, anyway. Tozer sits down across from him, fidgety. Up here, the smell of his cologne is overpowering, or perhaps it’s the stuff in his hair, tucked slickly behind his ears. Tozer doesn’t like it, never has, doesn’t quite understand why he does it. It’s sticky when he gets his hands in it.

He only realizes that’s where he’s looking when Hickey has to repeat himself. “What’s your name, sir?” he asks, a little bit pointedly, and Tozer tears his eyes away and up hastily. 

“It’s Thomas,” he says, a little bit flustered, but that’s fine—that’s how he’s meant to be. “Thomas Sullivan.”

Hickey smiles. “Lovely to meet you, Thomas,” he says, and settles his hands on the table, stretching them out, palms up. “Give me your hands, please.”

With a slow, visible reluctance, Tozer stretches his hands out to settle in Hickey’s. He finds them cold, which isn’t a surprise; it’s how he runs, just as Tozer runs hot. He’d kept clear of the ring today, as per Hickey’s instruction—a black eye or a split lip would distract the crowd from what they’re meaning to do, here—but he’s not entirely unmarked by the sport. He carries it with him in his hands. 

When Hickey looks up, there’s gentleness—tenderness in his gaze.  “I understand that you’ve suffered a great loss?” Hickey asks, more nicely than anything he’s asked him in the past three weeks, at least, and Tozer, suddenly, is annoyed.

He remembers what he’s meant to say. William—his brother—died from cholera. He’s only supposed to mete out one bit of information at at a time, for these things; Hickey’s plenty practiced, good at doing his research when he’s motivated to, and he fills up the rest of the time soaking in facts from strangers, but he likes to drag out this first bit as much as he can, with Tozer. He won’t be fumbling through the dark with the next few—it’s remarkable, Tozer begrudgingly admits, how much he can pick up on without having to ask a single question—but Tozer is the only sure thing. 

“My father,” Tozer says impulsively. He’s not sure why he does it, although he likes it when Hickey narrows his eyes at him a little bit, thrown off, although smooths the look off his face just as fast. 

He pivots. “Two years ago, was it?” he says, and Tozer lets himself look surprised, falling back into the charade. 

“How did you know that?” he asks. Someone in the crowd murmurs. 

Now they’re back to their script. “It’s just a matter of asking,” Hickey says, and if anyone else here knew Hickey—if anyone had spent any handful of minutes around, they’d know that he was peddling them something, how he sets his eyebrows like that, like he’s sorry.  If he’d been real—Henry Taylor, grieving for his father, here in the hopes of receiving some signal from him—Hickey might squeeze his hand in encouragement,  but as things stand, there’s no point. It’s not something that the crowd would see. “What was his name?”

It’s wrong that they do this. It’s the worst thing that they do, but it’s not the worst thing they’ve done. He likes the ring better than this. Each man knows the rules before he steps into it. It’s not like this—with Hickey drawing on the hopes and longings of strangers.  

And drawing on his willingness, too. Hickey watches him expectantly, and Tozer is bothered, suddenly, by his own participation in all this; how neatly Hickey has slotted him into this ridiculous bit of theatre. How certain he is of Tozer, and the space that he occupies in the life that he’s carved out for himself in America—how he doesn’t ever come home dogged by the worry that he’ll find Tozer gone. 

And he wants to dash that expectancy on Hickey’s face, now, to pieces. “His name was Francis,” Tozer says.

By the time he’s finished it, he regrets it, but he can’t take it back. Hickey stares. Now, he feels his hand tighten up on Tozer’s; perhaps it’s a warning, or it’s reflexive. Finally, he shuts his eyes, draws in a breath, like he’s concentrating, before he opens them again to speak. 

“A military man, I’m sensing,” he says, slowly. “The navy.” Face prickling with heat, Tozer nods, but he barely has time to speak before Hickey forges on. “And he vanished,” he continues, leaning in. His gaze bores into him like it’s just the two of them in the room. “That’s what’s troubled you, all this time. You wonder what became of him. If he lives.” He cocks his head. “Or if he doesn’t.”

“Yes,” Tozer says weakly. 

“Do you want to know?” Hickey asks. “Truly. The wanting is important. Any indecision you might have, or an uncertainty—it’ll spoil it. I do need your help.”

“I do,” Tozer says. He doesn’t have to think before he says it. Hickey regards him, thinking, and Tozer can see those wheels turning in his head before his eyes slip shut. And Tozer, suddenly, feels alone at the table, like Hickey’s gone—like he’s sent himself, somehow, back to that lonely bit of shale.

It makes him regret asking. He clutches at Hickey’s hands tightly, willing him back here, in this little room, with all of these people peering up at them, rapt with attention.

“Do you want to hear it?” Hickey asks, still with his eyes closed, until he opens them again—returned to Tozer, finally. 

Tozer swallows. He opens his mouth, closes it again. He wants to pull his hands back but Hickey’s grip is tight; after a few seconds, because he doesn’t know what else to do, he nods.

“I see him in the sea,” Hickey says curtly—cold, suddenly. He withdraws his hands. “Drowning. You won’t be seeing him again, Thomas. He’s gone.”

❖❖❖

It suits their charade for Tozer to stumble out of the hall afterwards, seemingly unmoored, which is just fine for his own purposes. He has a smoke out in the alley while he waits for Hickey, tucked away where their generous patrons won’t see Hickey reconvene with that first man to whom he’d delivered a drowned father—or if they do, it’ll be after they opened their purses to furnish the collection Hickey passes around at the end like they’re in church.

Some time later, the crowd spills out. From where he stands out of sight, he can just barely catch a glimpse of Hickey lingering with the man he’d spoken to earlier, the one who’d wondered how he’d lost those fingers. Now, as he watches Hickey laugh at something he says, some kind of strange, ugly feeling wells up in Tozer, so much so that he has to look away to stamp out his cigarette. 

But Hickey finds him soon enough. Tozer guesses that it had gone well, from how he carries himself, and they start to walk home, in frigid silence. After the minutes pass, and then pass some more, and the quiet, well-maintained cobblestones start to give way to the pitted, crumbling streets of the North End, Tozer gets his tongue-lashing, after Hickey gives up on waiting for Tozer to start the argument that he so sorely wants to have.

“That was some trick you pulled, wasn’t it, Solomon,” he’s now saying, as he trails after Tozer, either too pleased with himself otherwise to pick up on the foul mood Tozer’s ensconced in or just entirely disinterested in it. “All these years you’ve had to ponder that particular question and you decide to raise the issue right then, and right there, in the middle of—“

They’ve veered down a long, narrow alleyway, entirely vacant, so no one can see when Tozer whirls and shoves Hickey up against the wall, forearm tight against his chest. 

“Shut it,” he snaps, heart hammering in his chest, frustrated by how restless he feels, restless because he’s not sure why he’s frustrated. Hickey stays put, studies him, even as Tozer tightens up his grip with a fist in Hickey’s nice shirt. “I’m—you shouldn’t keep at this. It doesn’t sit right. With me.”

Hickey cocks his head. “Do you pity them?” he asks, and when Tozer doesn’t answer, looking away, he ducks his head, trying to catch his eyes. “They’ve all got more than we ever had. None of them did anything to earn it other than being born. We’ve as much of a right as any of them do to a piece of it.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.” 

Hickey, still entirely unbothered by this display of aggression, tips his head back to rest against the well. “I’m doing them a service, really,” he says. 

“It doesn’t bloody feel like it,” Tozer interrupts sharply, but Hickey’s still talking.

“I see what they’d like to hear. I say it. It’s easy as that.” 

Tozer hasn’t eased up on him yet; he probably feels it, in his sternum, but he doesn’t try and squirm away. Instead, he reaches up to settle a hand on Tozer’s bicep, gentle. 

“We wouldn’t have to,” he continues, and Tozer already knows what he’s going to say. “If we went out west. As I’ve been saying.”

“You could go,” he says hoarsely. “You don’t need me.” 

“Why do you think that?” 

“If that creature had gotten me, there’d be someone else standing here,” he says firmly. “If I’d been done in by some sickness—you’d have done to me what you’d did to Billy Gibson.” That gets Hickey frowning—he tries to squirm free, but Tozer holds him fast. “Dr. Goodsir,” he continues, and Hickey goes limp again.

“I would,” he says finally, when it becomes clear that Tozer doesn’t intend to let him go without a response. “But you didn’t.”

Tozer finally lets up on him, but he keeps in close, not dropping his hand. Instead, on an impulse, he presses the back of it to Hickey’s face, gentle, brushing his knuckles—bruised, misshapen—against his cheek. They’re too close, like this; close enough that it would draw suspicion anywhere else, but they’ve made it into the dirtier parts of town. In the alleys at night, here, people don’t tend to look twice at anything for fear of being looked at back. 

But even so, they’re alone. It’s a quiet night—there off in the distance, a dog barks, but that’s all he can hear. “I didn’t,” Tozer concurs, and it’s clear from Hickey’s expression that he sees something in his face.

“Did you wish you had?” he asks. 

Tozer’s mouth thins. It can’t be a great mystery, but maybe that’s why Hickey had asked—because he already knows the answer. They stand here because they’d each wanted to live, desperately, at any expense. It usually comes back to him at night, that ugly, selfish, secret corner of himself. He’s glad to be alive—even if it means that Dr. Goodsir isn’t, or Tom Hartnell, or poor Mr. Collins, or any of the others, who had all been far more deserving of it than he is. 

And he’s glad that Hickey lives, too. He doesn’t answer his question now; instead he leans in to kiss him, closed-mouthed and chaste at first, until Hickey lets him in, slipping a hand up to settle on the back of Tozer’s neck, steadily, although that’s all the moving he does. He’s wearing enough cologne that Tozer can nearly taste it on his mouth, bitter and medicinal, but he doesn’t care, finds him hot and wet and willing and eager, although not quite eager enough to keep Tozer from having to duck down to kiss him, annoyingly. He keeps still; makes Tozer work for it, bumping him back against the wall.

Tozer pulls back just enough to catch his breath, dropping his hands to settle on Hickey’s waist. It’s a bright night out, with the moon, but with Tozer crowded in close like this, he’s got him in shadow—although as Hickey tips his head to peer up at him, the light spills across a sliver of his face like a slash, catching him in one blue eye. 

“You were watching me,” Hickey murmurs, and Tozer can feel his hand slip in between their two bodies, fingertips dipping into the waistband of his trousers, and then halting there, just settling. 

“When?”

“With that man. Outside.” He narrows his eyes in amusement. “You weren’t jealous, were you?” he asks, hand drifting down to his buttons. His eyes stay locked on Tozer’s face. 

Tozer shakes his head. “No,” he says weakly, and Hickey grins. 

“Liar.” He’s worked open two of his buttons, but he pauses to lazily palm him through his trousers, languid in his movements. “You don’t need to be,” he says.  “Here I am, returned to you. Just as easy as you come back to me. Isn’t that right?”

“Talked to him before,” Tozer mutters, rocking up on his heels a little bit. “He asked me about your fingers. What happened to them.”

Hickey’s hand stills, and Tozer grits his teeth. “Did you tell him?”

“No.” Hickey drags the heel of his palm against the swell of his cock, and Tozer steadies himself, planting a hand on the wall by Hickey’s head. He arches up into his touch. “Cornelius, I—anyone could see—“

“I wish they’d look,” he says, conversationally. “Could make you come like this, I think. Rutting up against me, like a dog. How much do you want me, Sol?”

“I do,” Tozer says weakly, his face hot. “I want you.”

As soon as he says it, a hungriness settles over Hickey’s face. “Say it again.”

“I want you,” Tozer murmurs, crowding in close, pushing Hickey flush up against the wall. He slots his leg between his thighs, rewarded when Hickey jerks his hips up, grinds up against it, his hand still working between them, as much as he can, crushed up against him as he is. “I want you,” he says again, listening as Hickey pants, and then he says it again, and then again, low and hoarse in his ear, like a prayer, or a spell. 

❖❖❖

At home, once they step inside, Tozer shrugs off his coat and gives it a lazy toss in the general vicinity of the coat stand that Hickey had dragged home from God knows where.

 “Don’t leave it like that,” Hickey orders, and Tozer rolls his eyes, but obeys, bending to retrieve it and put it away properly. For someone who’d set what had to be a world record in duty shirking throughout their time on the ship, he’s fussy about his things, keeping them neat and tidy; and Tozer’s things too, since he seems to consider those his by proxy. 

Tozer is undressed for bed first. Hickey has to wash the stuff out of his hair first, sloshing some water into the basin by the window, and Tozer settles in the bed to watch him sleepily, hand settled on his abdomen, too recently sated to take a particular interest in how he looks when he tugs his shirt off, but capable of a faint, pleasant appreciation in how he looks in the flickering light from the oil lamp. He’s gotten softer since they’d gotten to Boston, a little bit, but he looks much like he had.

“You’re staring,” Hickey says, without looking at him. He fumbles blindly for a cloth, trying to keep from having to move, and therefore having to drip on the floor, and dries his hair, as best he can. 

“I want you to come to bed,” Tozer says, a little bit drowsily, and that gets Hickey’s eyes on him.

“Do you, Sergeant?” Hickey asks coyly, meaning to be annoying, but he’s caught Tozer in one of his moods in which the title doesn’t grate at him, and when he doesn’t respond, it gets him what he wants, anyway, Hickey climbing into bed with him once he’s changed for bed, too. 

Hickey lets him tug him in close, albeit with a token, indignant squirm, but he settles soon enough, fitted underneath Tozer’s chin. Tozer noses at his hair absently—it’s still just the faintest bit stiff and perfumed from the product that’s left in it, as it always is after these sorts of things, but he still smells like Hickey underneath it. 

Two men of their age and station sharing a room, or even a bed, to split costs, doesn’t catch a second glance in such a crowded city, which suits Tozer just fine. He likes this. A little more than sex, even, sometimes, although he’d never admit it—just lying here together, Hickey fidgeting restlessly, occasionally, but otherwise kept and contained, somewhere that Tozer knows. He gets so cold on his own, but it’s easy to warm him up here, and he finds himself fighting off sleep to luxuriate in the feeling a little bit, as long as he can.  

“Do you really think he’s dead?” Tozer murmurs, because suddenly, it feels easy to ask it—here in the dark, indeterminate space between sleep and wakefulness. Underneath his arm, he can feel Hickey go a little bit stiff, and then settle again. 

“I don’t think about him,” Hickey then says, after a pause, which is a lie in itself, Tozer thinks—if he didn’t, he’d ask who he was. “What makes you think he isn’t?”

“A feeling,” Tozer says quietly, and Hickey shifts, peeling himself half off of Tozer so that he can get a better look at him.

“Is it you who’s communing with spirits now?”

“He wouldn’t be a spirit, would he? If he lives.”

He can’t quite make out Hickey’s face in the dark, but it feels like he’s being studied, for a long while, until Hickey settles again. He waits for Hickey to say something else, but he doesn’t; just before he slips off into oblivion, he feels him press a hand to his chest, but he can’t think too much of it before he’s gone. 

❖❖❖

He doesn’t have to fight today, but he does tomorrow, so he takes it easy. He wakes before Hickey, disentangling himself from him and leaving him there in the bed so that he can go down to the docks, early in the morning. He sees a man there about picking up some work—some carpentry, on the basis of a little bit of truth that he can let slip, because it’s not as though the only carpenter’s son in all of anywhere had been Solomon Tozer the Royal Marine. He’s hardly a professional, and it wouldn’t pay much, but it would be something to do, and it might mean that he’d have an excuse to weasel his way out of Hickey’s next scheme. 

He doesn’t know why Hickey wants to leave all this, trade it for another sprawling stretch of land that they aren’t meant to be in. Well, he knows—Hickey’s latched onto the thought of gold there for the taking, just as he’d dreamed up the paradise he thought he’d find on the Sandwich Islands—but he doesn’t understand it. It would take months by land to reach California, and more still if they went by sea, although he suspects that even Hickey would be shy of setting foot on another ship. Either way, it would be a treacherous journey, and not one that either of them is particularly suited for. Outside of his service, all he’s known is a city much like this, and he imagines that it’s all that Hickey has known, too, although like most of the assessments he’s made of Hickey and what he knows and what he doesn’t, it’s all rooted in guessing. 

In his own estimation, it’s inarguable, though, that they have all they need here. A way to make a living—and he thinks, perhaps optimistically, that he could get Hickey into honest work if he decently tried, if he could find something easy enough. Things to eat and a place to sleep. A place like the Cat where he can get a drink.

Tonight it’s busy like it was before, like nothing has changed. That’s what he likes better than Hickey’s dreams of California, too. A cycle of rituals that they can settle into—some work, like carpentry, or boxing, or talking to spirits, and some pleasures, like sex, or walking by the harbor, or huddling up close together at night, or drinking. Here tonight, he drinks about as much as he had the last time he’d been there, and he talks about as much as he had before, to some people he knows, and some people he doesn’t, and he feels, for a moment, fixed in time in a pleasant sort of way. 

He’s two drinks in and thinking, again, of coaxing Hickey to come one of these nights, when he feels a thump on his shoulder, and turns to see Gallagher, black-haired and big and broad—about Tozer’s height, maybe a little taller. Gallagher can take a punch, but he becomes more of an animal than a man in the ring, lets his instincts carry him off, and Tozer, with a little bit of thinking, had taken the purse the last two times they’d fought, although it had taken them nine rounds last time, long and bloody.

“Walker,” Gallagher says in greeting. “Buy you a drink?”

“I’m off, after this one,” Tozer says with a shrug, faintly suspicious. He’s never gotten on with him, particularly—he gets angry when he loses, more than Tozer has the patience to deal with, personally speaking. The last thing that he’d said to him had been in the middle of a shouting match, and it’s strange to find him friendly now. 

“Funny to see you here,” Gallagher says now, conversationally. Two men skulk behind him, transparently listening in on their conversation—probably his mates. Tozer faintly recognizes one of them from the ring, the one with the shock of blond hair, but the other is unfamiliar. 

“Is it?” he asks. 

“Well, not really, I guess,” Gallagher laughs. He’s edged into Tozer’s space, a little bit too close for Tozer’s preference, but if Gallagher is picking up on his discomfort, he’s ignoring it. “I heard you come here. I had a matter to discuss with you.” 

Tozer stares at him, but when he doesn’t ask the obvious question — and what would that be? — Gallagher doesn’t say anything, just stares back. The funny thing is that fundamentally, he’s made of the same oily stuff that Hickey is, Tozer thinks. But when Tozer looks at Hickey, it’s like looking at a wall. When he looks at Gallagher, it’s like peering into a great, black, bottomless chasm of nothingness. A void. 

“I’m looking forward to tomorrow, actually,” Gallagher continues. “I have a good feeling.”

“Suppose that means you’ll win, then,” he says, half into his drink. “Congratulations.” He’s nearly through, and not particularly interested in entertaining this line of questioning, but Gallagher hasn’t gotten the hint, just keeps looking at him. Tozer can feel his dark eyes boring into the side of his face. 

“We could make it easy,” he says. 

“How do you mean?”

“All they’re after is entertainment,” Gallagher says with a shrug. “Don’t matter how we get there, as long as our guest from London gets his taste of blood. We could come to an agreement on how it’s going to go, is all I’m saying. Make it look real.”

It’s not the first time someone’s floated this sort of an idea past him, although he’d been shocked, naively, when he’d first heard it. Now he’s mostly unbothered, because all he has to do is say no. Some men do it; some men don’t. Some men get away with it. Some men say they will and change their minds in the middle of the match, although that’s not why Tozer refuses. 

“Best we keep it honest, I think,” he says, shortly. Gallagher cocks his head. 

“Why drag it out? You could get hurt. You could lose, this time round. We wrap it up in two rounds, split it fifty-fifty, none would be the wiser—“

“I’m not a cheat,” Tozer says, sharply. “I won't do it.”

Behind Gallagher, his two companions exchange looks, half-amused. Gallagher just looks at him, silent until he speaks. 

“Your choice,” he says finally, clapping Tozer on the shoulder again. His hand lingers, just for a moment, and then he’s off, passing back into the crowd, his companions trailing after him. 

Tozer lets out the breath that he hadn’t realized that he’d been holding. Gallagher will take this out on him tomorrow, probably, but Tozer can stand it and deal it out in return, too, and this way, they’ll be able to settle it cleanly, at least. 

Once he finishes his drink, he weaves his way through the crowd to get to the door that leads out to the back alley, desperate for a piss. Out there, he finds that it’s a cold night—the part of the season where the days start to pick up the march from the fall. When they’d come back, at first, he’d been worried about it; that the winter would return him again to the person he’d been out there, but as the days had slimmed into nothing, he’d stayed the same, which had stoked another set of fears entirely in him.

He’s just done buttoning himself back up again when he hears the door swing open and shut behind him. When he turns, he sees Gallagher and the other two; inside, faintly, he can hear a loud laugh, and someone starting to sing, off-key. ‘ I am the king and prince of drinkers…’ No one will have noticed where they’ve gone, nor would they care if they had. 

It’s trouble for him. They’re not drunk, Tozer thinks, judging by the way they move, which means that whatever they’d planned on doing out here was enticing enough to keep them from it, which means that their aim isn’t to make amends. He’s quiet as he watches the three of them approach, just calculating if he can duck around them and get past the alley, even if the thought of running makes him prickle with resentment, when Gallagher speaks. 

“It would’ve been easier, the way I said,” he says, not looking particularly enthused about any of this, but it doesn’t stop him from throwing a punch, which Tozer dodges, staggering back. Reflexively, he gets one back at him, too, landing with a satisfying crack on his jaw, but there are three of them, and one of him. It doesn’t take a seasoned pugilist to make a judgement on those odds. 

Even so, he holds his own as long as he can. Gallagher’s a fighter, but Tozer’s a better one; it’s the same for his pale-haired associate, with a wider gap between the two of them. Tozer suspects that this is the first fight for the third when he stumbles back in shock when Tozer barely grazes him in the mouth, like he’s never been hit before—he waits for cheap shots after that, darting in to punch Tozer in the stomach when the pale-haired man gets Tozer by the arms, holds him still for a handful of seconds, until Tozer sinks his teeth into his forearm and he releases him with a shout, like he’d been burned.  

But eventually, they get him on the ground. They wouldn’t kill him, he thinks wildly, even as Gallagher pitches back and kicks his side, hard enough that breathing feels wrong, suddenly. Killing him, he reasons, would be more trouble than this would be worth, particularly if their aim is to hobble him for tomorrow’s fight, and it’s not like they’re being particularly discreet. But it would be a little bit funny, if this was what did him in, some stupid, vain attempt at holding tight to his morality, all just for sport, after every wretched thing he’s done in his life to survive. If he’d survived it all just to die in an alley behind a whorehouse, lying in the grit and grime. 

He wonders if Hickey would go looking for him, or if he’d just assume that he ran off, and how he’d manage on his own, and once he thinks about that, he fumbles to grab Gallagher’s ankle feebly, although he laughs and kicks it off, easy—

“You’d better leave it,” someone shouts shrilly, and Tozer pulls his arm off of his face so that he can squint over at the back door. He finds a familiar face: that sharp-faced woman, clutching a shawl around her with a fist. Blood has rushed to her cheeks with the evening chill; two blotches of color sit unevenly on her face, and she’s got her shoulders set with determination. “You’ll stop making trouble and come back in or you’ll not be coming back at all,” she says sternly. “Ever.”

Gallagher looks at Tozer, and then back to the woman, and that’s all Tozer sees before he has to blink very hard to get the blood out of his eyes, because it stings. When he opens them again, the world is murky and filmy with red—he can just barely make out the three of them filing back inside. One of them is limping, and another is clutching his side, Tozer notes, satisfied even as his head is spinning. He’s not lost any of his teeth, which feels like a miracle, although there’s blood in his mouth—he’d bitten his tongue—and his nose feels like one giant bruise.

But the woman lingers, even when the three men slip past her inside. “Are you dead?” she asks after a pause. He’s not sure if she recognizes him. He wouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t, with the state he’s in. 

“No,” Tozer wheezes, rolling over. He just needs a second to gather up the strength to get up. The night sky hangs low overhead, swollen with stars—distantly, inside the Cat, he can hear someone start up the fiddle. It’s some sort of genetic trait, with fiddlers, he thinks crossly—or maybe a spiritual sense. They always pick the most irritating moment to start sawing away. 

“Well, you’d better be off before they come back to finish the job,” the woman says. “Can you walk?”

“Think so,” Tozer says, and when he lurches to his feet, he finds that he can, enough so that he’ll be able to stumble home, at least. Her eyes linger on him, but only for a beat or two before she turns to head back inside without a second look. Tozer watches her go anyway, until the door swings shut behind her.

Just a scant few days, and she’s changed already, he thinks as he begins to limp down the alleyway, clutching with one hand at his ribs, steadying himself against the side of the building with the other. Or maybe she’s never stopped changing—one circumstance thinly layered on top of the last. He wonders what he’d find, if he stripped all of it off himself, everything that he’s suffered, all of the suffering that he’s caused. There might not be anything there at all. 

❖❖❖

When he gets back, he manages to drag himself up the stairs somehow, but he doesn’t know where his keys have gone, and he’s hurting too much to look for them, so in his exasperation, he just thumps on the door until it rattles. 

“Cornelius,” he calls hoarsely, and then curses, remembering. “Alfred,” he tries again, stretching out a hand to bang on the door again. “James. Queen Victoria. Whatever you bloody call yourself—“

Hickey wrenches the door open, and Tozer nearly tumbles on top of him before he catches himself against the frame. He looks cross—it’s the Cornelius, probably—but that quickly shifts to confusion as he takes in the sight of him.

Tozer sways, and much to his surprise, Hickey reaches for him, tucking himself under Tozer’s arm, letting him lean heavy on him as he guides him over to the bed, the door swinging shut behind him. Tozer has to steady himself with a hand on Hickey’s shoulder, gritting his teeth as he settles down carefully, still holding his side.  

But once he has him in the bed, Hickey just stands there, peering down at him, hands on his hips, looking as though he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself. This would be amusing in any other context, when, presumably, much of Tozer’s focus wouldn’t be on how much it hurts to breathe. 

“You fought?” he asks finally. 

“Gallagher,” Tozer mumbles.  

“Thought that was tomorrow.”

Tozer glances over at him, faintly surprised that he even remembers. “It is,” he says. “He and his mates caught me behind the Cat and Finch. Stupid of me, really. Before, he’d asked about fixing things, for tomorrow—didn’t think on it much after I told him no. He decided to even the odds on his own.” Tozer reaches up to test at the bridge of his nose, and grimaces; it hurts just to brush his fingers over it. “I do think he has,” he groans, letting his hand slip down to rest flat on his chest. “I know he’s still there having a good laugh at my expense, now.”

Hickey frowns, but he looks as though he’s only half paying attention. After a pause, he comes to sit at the edge of the bed, very nearly tucked against Tozer’s side, but not touching him. He leans in to study his face—from where he’s looking, his nose, specifically, Tozer guesses.

“Is it broken?” he asks.

“Just bruised, I think,” Hickey says absently, reaching up to graze the tips of his fingers across the bridge of his nose—but even if Tozer gets the sense that he’s trying to be gentle, he winces when Hickey’s fingers meander up to his cheekbone.  

“Christ.”

Hickey’s eyes flick up to Tozer’s. “That hurts?”

“Yeah,” Tozer says, and Hickey gets up. It’s subtle, but he’s giving off a humming, frenetic energy—he’s jerky in his movements, stiff and quick as he goes to wrench open the window, presumably for a smoke. Tozer shuts his eyes. 

“I could fetch a doctor,” Hickey says after a moment, and when Tozer can hear some water slosh into the basin they keep by the window, he realizes that he’s not rolling a cigarette after all. Instead, he opens his eyes to find him wringing out a rag. 

“I’ll manage,” Tozer says, shutting them again. “I’ve a good chance of losing tomorrow, though, I expect.”

There’s no response, and after a few moments, he feels a dip in the mattress when Hickey sits again. The next thing he feels is Hickey dabbing at his face with the rag, carefully—cleaning the blood from his face, what he can. 

Tozer opens his eyes again and watches him. There’s an absent sort of concentration written across his face—he’s not looking at Tozer, just parts of him. The blood caked underneath his nose. The cut above his eyebrow, just west of the scar on his cheekbone, healed over twice. 

“Someone had a ring on,” Hickey says.

“One of them.”

It’s a strange feeling, to be looked at by Hickey like this. He’s got some selfish purpose for it, Tozer imagines—probably something to do with Hickey’s inexplicable squeamishness, an unwillingness to lie down to sleep next to someone with blood all over his face. But the attention is almost nice, and Tozer lets himself soak in that feeling, just for a moment. 

“I’ve heard of a book that tells you how to treat all manners of ills,” Hickey says distractedly, after a moment. “You wouldn’t need to call for a doctor at all. For any sort of malady. You could take matters into your own hands. The Complete Herbal, it’s called.”

Tozer’s not quite sure where, precisely, Hickey imagines that he’ll find any herbs growing here, but he also suspects that if he presses him on it he’ll start carrying on about their adventure into the sprawling wilderness of the American west again, so he doesn’t. 

“For your birthday, maybe,” Tozer says instead, and Hickey laughs. 

“My birthday,” he echoes, amused.

“What’s funny about that?”

“I’m nearly thirty.” 

“What’s that got to do with it?” Tozer asks, now just as amused. “People get things on their birthdays, any age.” 

As soon as he says it, Hickey gets a strange look on his face. It takes Tozer a second to recognize it for what it is: embarrassment. 

It had been a joke, because Tozer doesn’t know when Hickey’s birthday is. Everything he knows about Hickey is settled within the span of the handful of years that he’s known him, if you didn’t count what he’d done to get himself on that ship. Tozer thinks, suddenly, of some winter night—it had been someone’s birthday, but he’s lost who it was, now. There had been a haircut. He hadn’t been looking for Hickey, not then, not like he does now, but he’d seen him anyway, there in the thick of that crowd, luxuriating in just being a part of it, in on the joke, like he could soak up their warmth, make up for his lack of it by borrowing someone else’s. 

He wonders when anyone had given him anything for his birthday last, if he’d been a boy, what he’d been like then. He ought to get it out of him, somehow, he thinks. Someday. His birthday. 

“You’ve got blood all over your face, and everything,” Hickey points out, scattering his thoughts. “And the bed. You’ll be doing the washing.” Tozer gives him a flat look, and Hickey has the decency to look chagrined. “Well, once you’re up to it,” he amends. 

“What a prince you are,” Tozer says dryly. He watches him get up to put the rag away somewhere—then he disappears from his vision, for a moment, as Tozer blots his damp face dry with a sleeve. 

Strangely, even with how much he aches, he feels warm and content, nearly enough so that it’s worth having to fight tomorrow. He’ll have to fight carefully tomorrow. He could beg off, but that’s never been his way, and besides, as long as he thinks he has a chance, he couldn’t convince himself to give that up. 

The bed dips as Hickey sits again, and suddenly, it feels like someone’s pressing an iron to his face, searing against his skin. Alarmed, Tozer sucks in a breath, jerking his head back, eyes wide. “Christ. What’s that?”

“Easy on the dramatics. It’s just a spoon,” Hickey says, and true enough, that’s what’s in his hand. In the wake of the intensity of Tozer’s reaction, he looks sheepish. “I didn’t have anything else,” he adds, with a tinge of defensiveness. “Cold things, with bruises, they feel nice.”

It hadn’t been heat—it had been the cold. He’d set it out on the windowsill before, Tozer realizes now—to let it get cold in the night air. Hesitantly, he settles back down again, doesn’t pull back when Hickey holds it to his face again, settling the back of it up against the bruise that he can feel blooming across his cheekbone.  

“Feels nice,” Tozer admits, because it does, even if it makes all this feel like some sort of ridiculous dream—being laid out in a bed like this, Hickey holding a cold metal spoon to his face. Absently, he stretches a hand out to circle his fingers around Hickey’s wrist, thumbing where his pulse is jumping, for some reason, and they sit there in silence, Hickey with an expression on his face that Tozer can’t quite describe as he looks at him. 

But the spoon goes warm quickly. Hickey turns and sets it aside, but when Tozer keeps his grip on his wrist, he looks back over to him. 

“Come here,” Tozer murmurs, watching his face. He wonders what Hickey would be like, if he were different, or if different things had happened to him—if he would be Hickey at all. As Hickey leans in, and Tozer props himself up on one elbow to kiss him, he thinks of Hickey as a marine, Hickey as a boxer, Hickey as a captain. Hickey on his birthday. Hickey as he’d been the first time he’d kissed him in the hold, before everything had gone wrong. 

Eventually, Hickey pulls back, making a face. “Your mouth’s all bloody,” he informs him, face pinched. 

“Can’t help that,” Tozer says, grinning. Hickey had to have tasted it within a second of kissing him, but he’d kept doing it anyway, which pleases him. Encouraged, he decides to try his luck. “Get my boots off? I’m really very injured.”

Hickey rolls his eyes, but goes to oblige, and then some. He tugs Tozer’s boots off of him, and gets his braces off of him, but doesn’t try his luck with the rest, going to smooth the blanket over him, which suits Tozer just fine, as he’d have just as easily slept in his boots to maintain his general disinterest in moving.

The last thing that he does for him is that he holds a cup of water to Tozer’s lips so that he can drink. Even if he’s thirstier than he’d realized, having not suffered any sort of amputation in the scuffle, Tozer could manage that much on his own, but he doesn’t point that out, just drinks. 

He’s hopeful afterwards that he’ll join him in bed, but instead, he watches sleepily as Hickey retrieves his coat from the coat rack and shrugs it on. With the open window, the cold has settled into the room. 

The last thing that Tozer sees before he drifts off is Hickey, leaning out the window to smoke. He wishes he could get a better look at him, but all he can make out is the curve of the side of his face, turned away. 

❖❖❖

When Tozer wakes, it’s to a cold and empty bed. Hickey is gone, and fear floods him, just for a moment, until he scans the room and sees that it’s unchanged from last night—all Hickey’s things are still there in their places. Relieved, he eases back onto the bed with a grimace, and looks up at the ceiling. 

He still feels rough, but he feels better. He’ll be able to fight today, he thinks, even as he reaches up to probe at the tender spot on his cheek and winces. He won’t feel good afterwards, but he’ll be able to do—as long as he makes quick work of him. It still hurts a little to breathe. 

Even so, he rolls over, presses his face to Hickey’s spot in the bed, ignoring his bruising, and breathes in—he can smell soap, cologne, a little bit of the stuff he puts in his hair. Once he’s satisfied, he untangles himself from the bedsheets and gets up.

❖❖❖

By evening, he’s not in fighting form, but he’s feeling decently enough so that he estimates that he’ll probably survive the walk over, at least. They’re in the back room of some tavern tonight—not one he’s been to before, he’s just got the address. He likes it best when they’re outside, generally speaking, which is technically what’s outlined in the rules—that the fight is meant to be conducted on turf, four-and-twenty square—but it’s easier to evade the gaze of the law when they’re not, which he would guess was the aim of whoever arranged the match, and in keeping with the interest of their guest from London. 

But when he gets there, it’s not nearly as crowded as he’d thought it would be. There are men there into the the back room, but not very many, for a match with these stakes—and though someone’s drawn the scratch line, not much else has been done to set up the ring, and it doesn’t look like anyone has any intention to, at least in the present moment, judging by the clumps of men just milling about.

Even so, there’s a nervous, frantic energy in the room—and Tozer notes that there’s no Gallagher. No one’s so much as looked at Tozer. Across the hall, he can see the white-haired man from last night, turned away in conversation, presumably his second, but not Gallagher anywhere that he can see.

Just barely edged into the room, like they fear being shooed out of it, are two boys, some years away from being men, in a flurry of excited conversation—one of them familiar to Tozer, with big, frantic eyes, like a rabbit’s. He’s seen that one at some match or another before, so he nudges him on the shoulder. 

“What’s all this, then?” he asks, perplexed. “Where’s Gallagher?”

“He’s laid out in the alley behind the Cat and Finch,” the boy says, eagerly, the words spilling out as fast as he can say them. “Last I heard, anyway. They’re trying to find a second for his second. If they can’t, they’ll push it to tomorrow.”

Tozer stares. The words are in an order that he knows, logically, make sense, but for some reason, as a whole, he can’t parse them—like it’s an answer to a different question than the one he’d posed. 

“Laid out in the alley?” he echoes finally. Out loud, in his own voice, it makes some more sense. “Dead?” he adds, just to be sure, and that pitches it into absurdity again, but—the boy nods. 

“Someone emptied his pockets, too,” his friend pipes in, but Tozer’s still stuck on that first thing. 

“How? What happened?”

“Knifed him ear to ear,” the rabbit-eyed boy says, reaching to drag his thumb across his throat. “Like this.”

Tozer’s body floods with shock—his stomach churns, and he can feel himself start to go sweaty at his palms, but his body has caught on to whatever it is that’s raised the alarm before his mind has—but he’s working towards it, closer, slotting the puzzle pieces into their places. 

“It wasn’t ear to ear,” the boy’s friend insists. “It was in his heart.” 

“It wasn’t his heart, it was his—hey! Henry!”

Tozer waves him off, stumbles free from the crowd, and keeps stumbling, out of the bar, down the street, not thinking about where he’s going, or much of anything as the sound from the crowd starts to recede behind him. All he can think about is putting one foot in front of the other; all he can hear is his own pulse thumping in his ears. He thinks that he’s going to be sick, but the urge hasn’t quite captured him yet. 

It could be a coincidence, he tells himself dazedly, as he goes. There’s never a deficit for the bloody and the grotesque here, particularly at night, tucked away in those long, winding alleys, far from the eyes of the public. It’s feasible that this is some sort of horrible coincidence, but as he tries to reassure himself, his mind keeps returning to one thing: the sight of Hickey slipping on his coat last night. 

Eventually, he reaches the harbor. He sits heavily on an unused stretch of timber, staring out at the swarm of activity on the docks—every man there with something that he’s meant to do, cheerful, in his eyes, as they work. The line of ships, some big, some small—some for fishing off shore, some bound for someplace far across the sea. And he sits there watching the ships come in—watching them go out. It might be minutes, or it might be hours. He listens, intently, to scraps of conversations as people pass, to the birds calling, a hammer striking an anvil, the hushed whisper of the sea.

He knows now that it had been a fantasy—the idea of leaving all that blood and death and horror behind them on the ice. It had dogged their heels like a curse, following them south, until it had settled at their feet here. 

Or Hickey is the curse, maybe. Tozer finds himself thinking that in the late afternoon, and naturally, just as though he’d been summoned by it, Tozer then watches him come to a halt in front of him—or his legs, rather, since Tozer’s hunched over on the ground, still perched on that bit of tinder. 

“There you are,” Hickey says, hands on his hips. “I’ve been looking for you for ages.”

Tozer doesn’t bother to look at him; instead he rubs at his face, tired. “I know what you did,” he says, voice half-muffled into his palms. 

“Me?” Hickey sounds indignant enough that Tozer finally peers up. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Why would you come looking for me if you hadn’t,” Tozer points out listlessly, and Hickey doesn’t address that, just frowns, like he doesn’t understand.  

A shrill clanging rings out as a ship makes its way to the docks. Tozer squints in the low afternoon sun, giving it a study.

“I could leave on one of those ships,” he continues. 

Hickey thrusts his hands into the pockets of his coat, follows Tozer’s gaze until he’s looking out at the docks too. He doesn’t even have the decency to look troubled by the possibility. 

“I’ve heard of a reward,” he says. “Ten thousand pounds, for anyone who’s got word of Sir John’s men. Can you imagine?”

Tozer’s not sure if that’s a threat, or not, or where Hickey’d heard that, even, or if it’s the truth. Right now, he finds it hard to care. 

“I wish you’d turn me in and collect it,” Tozer mutters sourly, toeing at a loose bit of cobblestone with his shoe. Hickey looks at him, wounded. 

“I wouldn’t,” he says, sounding hurt, but Tozer’s seen him put that face on before, and he rolls his eyes, his irritation prickling at him again. 

“Wouldn’t you?” he asks tersely, shielding his eyes from the sun with his hand so that he can look up at him properly. “Like you didn’t lie to me. Like you don’t keep secrets. Like you didn’t crack me in the head with that rifle. Like you didn’t chain me to a boat.” The bit of cobblestone works itself free; it’s sent rattling off until it halts before it gets to the pier. “I really wonder why you wouldn’t, Cornelius,” Tozer mutters, digging his foot into the pit it had left now. 

Hickey’s starting to look annoyed now, but Tozer doesn’t care, because he’s not got a right to be, in his own estimation. There might be a bit of comedy in this, if he were looking at it from the outside; that all this started because Tozer had wanted to keep it clean and right in the ring, rooted in some delusion that he’s been laboring under all this time, that he could keep one corner of his life good and honest—and in order to do what he’d done last night, Hickey would have had to fight dirty. Gallagher’s twice his size, or was, and Hickey had to have snuck up behind him, gotten him cheaply, like he’d played at seeing something before he’d cracked Tozer in the back of the head with the butt of his rifle, or like he’d gotten Irving, however he did.

“I only did it because I had to,” Hickey mutters, like he’s in his head, and Tozer squints up at him with enough suspicion so that Hickey feels moved to clarify. “That thing with the rifle,” he says. “I told you that.”

“It could’ve killed me.”

“Well, it didn’t, though.”

It’s a circular conversation, one that they’ve had what feels now like a thousand times before, verbatim, and now, Tozer’s too tired and hurt for it. He folds his arms over his knees. 

“Why’d you do it?” he asks tiredly. “Gallagher. You didn’t have to.” He couldn’t have had that much on him, if he’d been desperate to fix the fight for the purse today. It doesn’t make sense. “It just—was meaningless. For nothing,” Tozer continues, just talking to fill up Hickey’s silence, although then he goes quiet too before venturing on again. “The things we did before,” he says, hesitantly. “They were—they were needed.”

Hickey’s face goes cold and hard, and then he laughs. “Needed?” he echoes. “Is that what the Captain would say?” Tozer flinches, looks at his hands, but Hickey’s not done yet. “The thing is—Solomon—every man decides for himself what needs doing,” he says, with a hard, mean edge to his voice. “He’s the one who does it.”

Tozer can feel his face go hot with embarrassment. It had been humiliating to let that slip out loud; how he’d managed to absolve himself of all of it in his head, everything he’d done, and that Hickey had done too, by proxy.

So he gives up on that battle and takes up the next. “Well, why did that need doing last night, Cornelius?” he continues. “You, seeking out some stranger to...” But he can’t bring himself to say it out loud, and so he cuts himself off. “He wasn’t a threat. He didn’t even know you,” he continues, limping to the finish line of his argument. “I don’t understand it.”

“I didn’t do anything last night,” Hickey mutters sullenly, not looking at him. “I told you.”

A sharp and ugly flash of anger comes up in Tozer. He fantasizes, for a moment, about wrestling Hickey off into the wilderness, keeping him somewhere without anyone else around, where there wouldn’t be anyone for him to hurt—keeping him captive, keeping him safe, like a tiger in a zoo. 

But as the anger fades, the guilt creeps in, and he glances at Hickey, expecting to find him looking at him, dissecting the expression on his face until he knows what he’s thinking. 

But he’s surprised to find that Hickey isn’t. He’s gazing off at the sea instead, face drawn and tight, arms wrapped around himself to ward off the chill from the sea breeze, one giant knot of tension. 

So they go quiet for a little bit, watching the men work on the ships. Whatever it is that’s got Hickey bothered, he doesn’t volunteer it, and Tozer doesn’t want to inquire, lest that drag them into another dispute before he’d gotten through with nursing his wounds from their last round. 

“Let’s go home,” he says tiredly, after what might have been an hour or five minutes. He’s perplexed, at first, by the strange look Hickey gives him, until he realizes what he thinks he means. “Here, home,” he clarifies. “I mean.”

“If you’d like,” says Hickey with a trace of sulkiness, still sore over something, some snarl in the conversation that had set him off. But Tozer’s too exasperated to work through any more of Hickey’s mysteries today, and besides, he’s truly reached new levels of delusion if he expects Tozer to coddle him after the ridiculous stunt he’s just pulled. So when Hickey sticks his hand out in what Tozer decides is a peace offering, he takes it so that he can haul himself up, grimacing from the stiffness in his knees. 

In his hand, Hickey’s is like ice, his knuckles pink, and impulsively, Tozer keeps hold of it once he’s up. “You’re always so cold,” he says gruffly, pressing it between his rough palms, feeling how his own warmth bleeds out into Hickey’s skin, his flesh, his bones, willing it to keep going. When Hickey tugs it free, Tozer lets him, but for some reason, it’s like he can still feel the shape of his hand against his skin. 

Hickey turns to begin the walk back home, and looks back after a few seconds, sees Tozer standing there, hand half-curled against his chest. “Are you coming?” he asks, so Tozer nods, and follows. 

❖❖❖

The fight is moved to the following evening. Hickey is gone early in the morning and then scarce, ostensibly to sniff out some of his own work, but maybe gone on purpose, keeping his distance while Tozer’s sore at him, demonstrating an uncharacteristic ability to take a hint. Tozer spends much of the day in bed, willing himself to heal as much as he can, as quick as he can, even if he knows that isn’t quite how it works—if anyone could will themselves into good health, they’d have all gone back to England as heroes. 

But he drags himself out of bed and dresses eventually. It’s colder than it was yesterday, and he can see his breath in the air even before he gets outside. When he does, the crowds are sparse and sluggish, like the city itself is in a daze from the changing temperature. 

They’re fighting outside tonight, at the edge of the city’s north end, a good walk from home. Here, pugilism isn’t much at all like it is in England, or even New York, Tozer’s heard—although they make an attempt to follow the London rules, more or less, it’s a halfhearted effort. Wins and losses generally aren’t tracked, beyond knowing who gives a good showing, and who doesn’t, in order to work out who ought to be summoned to the ring. They don’t dither over heavy-weights and middle-weights. Turf is the ideal surface, but what’s prized most of all is some spot that’s outside the range of the patrol of the lawmen, either organically, or with a whisper in someone’s ear and a few coins passed off into a friendly palm. 

They’re on mud tonight, or recently-been-mud, anyway, just dried from the rain earlier this week, under a bridge. Tozer finds a dense crowd as he draws close to it—thirsty to watch something after yesterday’s match had turned into a bust. In the ring, already bare-chested, stands Gallagher’s white-haired friend, who glowers at Tozer as he approaches, and ignores him entirely when he joins him there.

“Mr. Walker,” the referee says briskly, while Tozer’s in the middle of getting his shirt off. Once he tugs it over his head, he gives a careful study of Tozer’s face and the bruises on it. “Are you in fighting condition?”

“Aye,” Tozer says, passing his shirt off to his second—Cook, a man he trusts more than he knows personally, really, ten years older, honest in his fighting, and not too much of a talker. “Let’s make this quick. However it goes.”

“Right, then,” the referee says, turning his attention back to the white-haired man in his corner. “Mr. Walker, Mr. Clarke. I’ll have you shake now.”

Now that they’re nearing the start of it, the talking in the crowd has picked up, ebullient, eager chatter, some men putting money on Tozer, some putting it on Clarke, their guest from London holding court in one corner. Tozer’s learned to ignore it. He sticks a hand out, and Clarke looks at it disdainfully, not moving. 

“Mr. Clarke,” the referee prompts, and finally, Clarke sucks his teeth and shakes, barely for a moment before he drops Tozer’s hand like it’s a dead rat. Then he stalks off to the scratch line, where Tozer comes to join him. They get their fists up, and the referee tells them that he wants a good, clean fight, and then, like lightning, they’re off. 

Surprisingly, the first round is Tozer’s, easy. Clarke rushes in too hot, and Tozer springs back, letting Clarke’s momentum carry him so that he can land one blow, then two, and then a flurry of more, until one pitched in the direction of his kidneys sends him staggering to the ground and then toppling over. He’s barely down two seconds, though, before he’s up again, joining Tozer where he’s already waved off his bottle-holder and gone to wait at the scratch line. 

The next round isn’t nearly as simple. Clarke had gone down one man and come back up another one entirely; invigorated by the threat of a victory from Tozer, battered as he is, he pours some more steam onto it, ducking a hard right from Tozer with a jerky, frenetic sort of nervous energy, and coming up in a rush to swing a left hook that hits Tozer’s ear hard enough so that it rings. Disoriented, Tozer stumbles back, giving Clarke an easy target to hit again, sending him crashing down, although entirely by accident, Tozer’s foot knocks Clarke’s out from under him, sending him down just after Tozer so that they’re both on the ground. 

Tozer can’t see the night sky, just the stretch of the bridge above him. He blinks, but that’s all that he has the time to do before Clarke rolls over and leans on him, elbow to his sternum, heavy enough so that Tozer has to fight to breathe. 

“What a coincidence, hey?” Clarke hisses, voice low, just for Tozer to hear. “Isn’t it? I know you did Gallagher. Or you know who did it.”

“Don’t know anything,” Tozer says, gritting his teeth as he attempts to shove him off of him, heart pounding. Clarke grimaces, and opens his mouth to speak, before the referee’s voice cuts through, sharp. 

“Mr. Clarke! Off of him while he’s down or you’ll forfeit. You know the rules.”

With a surly look, and one last shove, Clarke lets up on him and gets up, watching him as he gets to his feet too. 

“I’ll work it out,” Clarke mutters to him as he brushes past him on the way back to his corner. “I will.”

It’s never good fighting when a man’s carried something in from outside of the ring like this. Tozer had learned quickly that there’s no benefit to fight nursing some slight; it makes him sloppy and careless. Clarke is as ignorant of this fact as Gallagher had been, which is to Tozer’s advantage. He’ll let Clarke burn through it until he’s got nothing left.  

Now retreated to their respective corners, they’ve got thirty seconds’ rest, then eight to come back to the scratch line in the middle. It’ll end once one of them can’t manage it, and it’ll take as many rounds as it takes. Sometimes it’s over in one round; sometimes it’s over in eighty. He doesn’t think it’ll be eighty, no matter how it goes. Either rage will carry Clarke to victory, or—if Tozer manages it right—he’ll burn through it until he’s got nothing left. 

Otherwise, he’s not much like Gallagher, as a fighter, Tozer notices, as the fight goes on. If Gallagher had been a panther, Clarke is a viper. He’s prudent with his space in the ring, using up just as much as he needs to hit Tozer as quick as he can. But Tozer’s steady and methodical—he works Clarke into a corner, taking the punches he needs to, following as he retreats, reading his feints, getting in one good blow to his jaw and another to his neck. 

Tozer’s never been quick in the ring but he’s always good when he has a man in the corner, because he’s strong, and he knows how to take a punch. But something shifts in Clarke’s countenance; there’s a glint in his eye, and abruptly, he throws everything he has into a punch that sinks solidly into the purple bruise spreading across Tozer’s ribs—where Gallagher had kicked him two nights ago. 

Tozer, dazed, staggers back, clutching at it reflexively, and Clarke advances, continuing that track; going for his aching shoulder, his tender forearm, the bruise on his face, until all Tozer can do is keep his hands up in front of his face to ward off the onslaught. When he desperately makes an attempt to go back on the attack, Clarke gets one wicked right hook into him, which connects solidly into Tozer’s ribs again, and the world, for a moment, rattles and shifts.

And he slips down to one knee, his vision swimming. Distantly, he can hear the referee call time. Blood drips from his nose, what gets in his mouth sticky and tasting of iron; there’s blood in his eyes, too, dripping from the cut above his eyebrow, re-opened. Suddenly, he comes to a realization that he’s going to lose this fight, and from the look in Clarke’s eyes as he surveys him, down there on the ground, he knows it as well as Tozer does. 

It gives Tozer enough fire to lurch to his feet again, and make it back on his own to his corner, where he drinks, and wipes the blood and sweat from his face. When he comes to the scratch line, and they start again, it turns into a grim, methodical spectacle, the both of them slogging on, Tozer getting one blow in, then Clarke getting the same. But although he’s managing now, he can feel himself flagging, little by little.

He’s only glancingly aware of the crowd behind Clarke, having all of his focus on what’s in front of him. But as the sea of faces shifts, one man at the front craning his neck to get a better look, just there and gone again just as fast, Tozer sees behind him, suddenly, a flash of burnt-gold hair—a sharp, pointed nose. 

It’s a distraction that serves Clarke well, and the next thing he feels is an explosion of pain as a fist crashes into his jaw, hard enough to send him reeling and then losing his feet, sent to the ground again. 

But that pain is the last thing that he can think of. Clutching at his side, he’s up on his feet again, searching the crowd, nearly stumbling over himself as he looks in one direction, and then the other, having lost where he’d seen him when Clarke sent him down. Heart pounding, he waves off his bottle-man, looking, searching. He thought he saw him. He knows he did. He could’ve sworn, he thinks, dropping his hand, not looking at Clarke—looking for Hickey.

And the crowd shifts, and he sees him, and Hickey sees him, too. For a moment, the chatter from the crowd slips away, along with every ache that he’s ever had, and the way his blood tastes in his mouth, and how the cold has turned his sweat against his skin clammy, and all the soreness in his knuckles, and the fear that he’s going to lose, until it’s just the two of them there. Everything—all of it—gone, and—

“Mr. Walker,” the referee says, waving to get his attention. “Come up to scratch.”

And he comes back to the world. A little dazed, he tears his eyes away and nods. “Right,” he says, coming up and getting into position again. 

He sets his shoulders, stands up straight, curls his hands into fists, looking Clarke straight in the eyes. The referee barely gives them the go ahead before Tozer surges forward, catching him with a jab to his shoulder, ignoring him when he feints to the side, bearing the left handed lunge that follows it stoically. Nothing pains him anymore—he feels numbed to everything, except for exhilaration. And he knows where Clarke will go now; he lets him make a bid to take that cheap shot, and uses the momentum that it leaves him with to send a flurry of blows into his gut, into his neck, into the side of his face, into his throat. 

It’s with that last one that Clarke goes down, but with some fumbling, he drags Tozer down with him by his hair, even as the referee shouts. The two of them grapple—desperately and inelegantly, Clarke bloodying his mouth, and then striking him again, until Tozer gets him in a headlock. When Clarke breaks out of  it, pinning Tozer underneath him, Tozer surges up, reversing their positions, already pulling back to pitch his fist into his face, where it connects with a dull, wet thwack, and then another. He can feel the referee’s hands on him, trying to pull him off of him, but he can’t hear him anymore, and Clarke fumbles for his eyes as Tozer jerks his head back, scrabbling to clutch at Clarke’s wrist to keep his his hand back, and laying into him again with his free hand, and again, and again, until Clarke’s grip on his arm goes slack, and Tozer looks up, wildly, searching the crowd, and—

—and it takes the referee and two other men to pull him off of him. They’re shouting something at him, but he can’t hear it—can’t waste an ounce of his sense until he finds who he’s looking for. Tozer twists, looking over his shoulder, heart pounding, losing sight of Clarke, lying very still on the ground. The men circling the ring crowd in, howling, some with excitement, some with fury, some with shock, and the referee clutching him is carried off with the crush of their bodies, unable to fight his way back over with how thick the crowd is, one body up against another, flesh against flesh, and Tozer thinks dazedly of a writhing mass of eels, and then a hot carnival tent. Two other men grab at him, trying to keep him there, hold him, and as he tries to throw them off of him, one stumbles into another shouting man, who’s outraged by it enough to throw a punch, which misses him and lands squarely in another man’s face, and everything explodes, into chaos, and—

A cold hand circles his wrist in a bruising grip and, with surprising strength, yanks him back and nearly off his feet entirely, although as he twists to steady himself, stumbling half backwards, he sees the back of Hickey’s head lit up by a splash of light from the moon, copper until he dips into the dark again, weaving through the crowd, dragging Tozer with him, working him free from it all. 

And when they’re out of it, they run. The blood in his eyes clouds his vision, so he has to clutch at Hickey’s hand, letting him lead him on, but just barely, when he casts a look over his shoulder, he can see a few men peeling off from the fray to give chase to the two of them—so they keep running. Fast as they can, down the winding, narrow streets, past the taverns spilling out with people, threading past the streetwalkers on their corners, who laugh as they see them go, past the men crouched on the corners rattling dice in their hands, past the drunks sprawled like corpses in their tucked-away little corners, and finally, weaving through side streets and alleyways, until there’s not anyone else but the two of them, who can’t run anymore. 

Hickey slumps back against the wall of the alleyway, panting as he catches his breath. There’s blood all down his front, but when Tozer looks for the knife in his hand, he finds it empty; when he looks down at his own clothes, he realizes that it’s own blood, or maybe Clarke’s. Or maybe both. Suddenly, he feels as weak as he’s ever felt, and his knees wobble underneath him, but Hickey sees this and catches him, hauling him back up. 

“Easy,” Hickey pants, clutching his face between his hands once he’s steady. “Easy. Sol.”

“If you left, I wouldn’t have to leave you,” Tozer manages, and his eyes sting, which has to be the blood in his eyes. Or maybe it’s the sea. “But you don’t. But you won’t.”

Hickey looks at him; for a moment, he looks uncertain. He opens his mouth, and then he closes it, and then he speaks. 

“You said—before—what would I have done. If you’d died,” he says, slowly, carefully. “And I said: you didn’t.”

Tozer looks at him and doesn’t understand. 

“It was two of us out of one hundred and twenty-nine that walked out. It was you, and it was me. That doesn’t just happen, does it?” Hickey continues. He holds Tozer’s gaze—and there’s desperation in his eyes, like he’s willing him to understand something as hard as he can, without having to say it, like he’s letting Tozer peer into his heart. When Tozer keeps looking at him, silent and uncomprehending, frustration flickers across his face, but only for a moment. “You were never going to die,” he explains to him earnestly. “Because I didn’t want you to. I wanted to keep you. So I did. And that’s why you’re here. That’s why we are.”

He says it with such sincerity that Tozer thinks it’s a joke at first, but the longer that Tozer stares at him, the more serious that he looks, and he realizes, then, that he’s telling him the truth as he believes it.

Hickey is mad, he realizes. He has been, all this time. Maybe that realization is what’s been circling him all this time; maybe the realization that he loves him has been too. That no one could come out of what they had without going mad, or loving the man who brought him out of it. For Hickey, what had happened there hadn’t been a humiliation; it had been an affirmation, something that had pitched that man in front of him into godhood. At least, in his own understanding of himself, and everything around him. 

And he doesn’t know if Hickey could love him, too—if he’s capable of it—but he knows then that Hickey’s settled into what approaches it the closest, at least. And he knows, now, what he can take from Hickey.

“Tell me, and I’ll go,” he says. “Out west. To England. Back to the bloody Arctic, I don’t care, I’ll follow. I swear it. But you have to tell me. You have to.” His voice cracks. He’s bleeding in his mouth—a laceration on his cheek smarts when the salt from his tears gets into it. “I won’t say it. I’ll call you—whatever you’d like. Anything. But I have to hear it, just this once. Please.” He smooths Hickey’s hair back, tenderly. “You’ve got to give that over to me,” he continues hoarsely. “You’ve got to let me in.”

Hickey looks back at him. Tozer can see a number of things on his face: frustration, obstinacy, uncertainty, exhaustion. Fear. Longing. It’s that which tips that expression on Hickey’s face into something else entirely, something that leaves Tozer, just for a moment, perplexed—because it’s something he’s seen before, somewhere. Something familiar. 

And finally, Hickey turns his head to whisper to him, quietly enough so that he has to duck his head down to hear it, tucking his face against Hickey’s, circling him with an arm, holding him close. It’s the funniest thing, Tozer thinks, as he peers up at the night sky hanging overhead, listens to Hickey’s voice, low, soft, and steady. He remembers now where he’s seen it: that face he’d made before he’d started to speak. In the ring, on a boxer, battered and weary, something taken out of him, but something returned, too. Triumph—when he puts all that he has into that last blow. Just before he wins.