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jedishampooTitle: If I Please
Remixing: Five Things that Never Happened To William Bush: Marriage by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
quigonejinn
Remix Author:jedishampoo
Summary: It was one heck of an explosion at Caudebec.
Author’s Notes: This remixing thing is definitely tough, but fun! :) I hope this story works, as a remix (first-timer here). Thanks to the organizers. Thanks tosharpeslass for the beta!
x-posted to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
hh_remix Go read the others also! :)
“Goddamn--” Bush said. And then the shattering boom of two hundred thousand tons of French powder exploding cut off either his voice, or his hearing, or both.
In that moment, Bush thought, Holy Hell, I’m going to die. Right now. Then he thought, in that way that thoughts have of coming one after the other so that a man could have an entire conversation in his head in but an instant, I can’t, not yet. Who will take care of Hornblower? Bush was not a philosophical man, but he suspected that he was Hornblower’s only friend. Hornblower was yet ill; he would overextend himself on those damned turncoat Frogs.
Then he thought, Well, this ought to take care of Hornblower, for a while at least. Christ, what an explosion. They’ll hear it in London. General Quiote wouldn’t get his artillery down to Le Havre, at least not within the next few months, by God.
And then he thought, but what about my wife? Who will take care of her?
Wait-- he had a wife? And Bush realized he couldn’t remember. Everything became unreal in that moment, like a dream. Bush wondered at it, like that thought was any more unreal or confounding than the blinding, yellow-orange light of two hundred thousand pounds of French powder exploding in the black night all at once, or the sight of green water and flying splinters shards of metal, and flying men or men’s bodies with mouths open to scream, unheard.
In that instant Bush remembered a girl, indecently young but all his, and a sloop-model. A smell of home, a home with a woman in it and spices and flowers, and comfort. And then he remembered at the same time an unbroken life of the sea, the comfort of duty, and the smell of rats and salt-wet clothing and unwashed men.
Whichever was true, he was leaving someone behind.
Bush was not a philosophical man, and he knew this. But in that instant he weighed his imminent death against his life, trying to decide if he was doing the right thing by dying. And then he realized it didn’t matter, because his body was already in a thousand pieces.
***
Consciousness poured back into Bush’s skull. Not smoothly, as one might pour wine slowly to coat the inside of a fine crystal glass, but quickly, sloppily, like a tumbler of bad whiskey poured by shaking hands, sloshing over the sides.
“Son? My son?”
Father? Bush wondered at the voice, and wondered whether or not it was speaking to him. There was so much noise, men, women talking, yelling. And then he remembered that his father was dead, had been for many years. He was, too. That explained it.
“Ungh,” Bush said. It was painful. His jaw hurt. Of the rest of his body he could feel nothing. Perhaps it wasn’t there. He creaked his eyelids open to see a young man wearing an odd green hat bending over him. The voice and face were too young to be the father of any man Bush’s age. The man had a delicate sort of face, and wore spectacles over pale eyes.
“My son, you have no tags,” the man’s highish voice said slowly, carefully, in a flat accent. He sounded American. “If you can’t speak, please try and shake your head. Are you Catholic?”
I’m no bloody Papist, Bush tried to say, but it came out as “Ngh.” Then he swallowed, cracking his jaw, and spoke. He hated the weak, gurgling sound his voice made. Blood in his lungs. If he still had lungs. “Church of England.”
“Oh,” said the voice, in almost childish surprise. The man’s young face bent forward. “Can you tell me your name, my son? Your rank?”
Bush saw the white collar above the strange green jacket, and realized the man was some sort of cleric. Maybe he was not dead, yet, then, only very close to it. Bush took a moment to examine the man some more, and his surroundings. He was laying on some sort of cot, and was covered with a heavy, dark blanket. He was in a tent. It was full of people in strange clothing: men and women in white robes covered with blood, men and women in green, passing back and forth in front of a steady, unnaturally white light. A bizarre low hum permeated the air, and Bush wondered if it was only his ears ringing from the explosion.
He was either dead, or dreaming, or in some foreign medical tent. It was unreal and outlandish, and yet perfectly normal at the same time. The air was sultry, warmer than he’d thought it possible in France in the near-winter. It must be the fires of Codabeck burning-- that must be where all the light was coming from. Bush was not a philosophical man; he didn’t even try to explain it to himself further.
But before Bush could answer the question, a tall, slender black-haired man wearing one of the blood-stained white robes came over to them. He bent down on his haunches next to the priest, looked at a piece of flat wood covered in paper in his hand, and then looked at Bush.
“Still here, huh? Amazing. Figure out who he is yet, Father?” His accent was flatter than the priest’s.
“Still here, and no, but he spoke, sir.”
Bush hated the Americans for talking about him as if he wasn’t even there. Which he still hadn’t decided if he was or not.
“Am I dead?” Bush gurgled. But at least he sounded English when he gurgled it.
“Not yet. Welcome to Heaven. Or Korea, take your pick,” the black-haired man in the white coat said, and flashed white teeth at Bush.
Bush growl-gurgled at the man’s nonsense. Perhaps it was meant to be reassuring, but Bush found it annoying and would tell him so, soon.
“Captain William Bush,” he finally said. “Nonsuch, seventy-four.”
“Captain Benjamin Franklin Pierce, MASH 4077th.” The man gave him a jaunty salute. “Seventy-four? That’s a new one. British Army Special Forces?”
“Navy. Fool.” Bush managed. Americans didn’t know their arses from their foreheads.
“Navy,” the man said, and his face lost that cocky arrogance for a moment. “Here?”
“Nation’s last line of defense. Ours.”
The man’s eyebrows shot up into his forehead, and then his expression smoothed, and assumed an air of innocence that one might use when dealing with a woman, or a child. “That bad, eh? And they keep telling us we’ll be home by Christmas. Well, mine is not to question why. Mine is but to sew all your insides back together, since you’ve lasted this long, Bush. And you’ve come to the right place. I’ll move him up in triage, Father,” the man said, turning from Bush to the priest. He fiddled with something above Bush’s head. “Keep an eye on him. If you get called away, get Radar over here, or one of the nurses.”
“Yes, Sir,” the priest said. He smiled at Bush.
“Why can’t I feel anything?” Bush said, attempting to ignore everything that had gone on before, because it was too impossible and ridiculous. At least it was obvious that Captain Pierce was a doctor.
“Must be the morphine the field medic gave you. You’re a very strong man, Captain. For you to be so… well. I’m amazed you’re awake. No! Don’t look,” he said with a gentle, slim hand on Bush’s chest as Bush attempted to sit up, to see his own body. “Don’t move. Tell me about your life back home. Are you married?”
Am I? Bush wondered, and realized he’d asked himself that question before, only minutes ago. He tried to raise his left hand from under the blanket to see if it wore a ring. Then he realized that his arm was naked, and ended somewhere above the elbow. It was all ragged skin and bone and blood-stained white rag. Strangely, it didn’t hurt. Bush shrugged instead. He’d lost a limb before.
Married? He remembered a young girl, and a sloop-model.
“I think so,” Bush said. “She talks so I don’t have to.”
“I hear that’s very common,” the young priest said.
***
Bush remembered meeting his wife for the first time. That endless-seeming dinner, the chattering, nervous women. Except for her. She’d been silent as a pebble. Bush had wondered if she’d ever speak.
She hadn’t, at least not throughout the meal. One or two muttered whispers, perhaps, and those didn’t count. The one time she’d looked across the table and directly into his eyes, she’d lowered hers almost instantly. Bush hadn’t even been able to tell what color they were.
Neither did she speak aloud through her parents’ brightly desperate conversation that followed. She was so young. When Bush finally left, he stood in the street outside, lit himself a pipe, and considered her.
She was pretty enough, if nothing spectacular. Plain to others, perhaps, but enticing enough to an old sea-dog like himself. Her family was a connection of his, somehow. At least, that was how his sister had explained it in her letter from Chichester. The family was perfectly respectable if a little poor, and they were perfectly amenable to a match. But she’d hardly looked at him, and had never spoken aloud to him.
Bush considered her house, in the row of houses made identical and ghostly by the Sheerness mist, and finally he heard her speak. One of the windows on the lower floor was open.
“He’s ugly, Mama.”
It had to be her. Bush wondered if he should be offended or amused. Then he shrugged. It was true enough, he supposed. And she was very young.
“Nonsense,” said her father’s voice.
“Nonsense,” said her mother. “Only see how well his uniform looked. And he liked you.”
“How could you possibly tell he liked me, when he didn’t hardly speak to me? And he’s old. Why him, and why right now?” her voice said. It wasn’t whispery or lispish, as he might have expected such a young, shy thing’s voice to have been. Clear, the right accent, a bit saucy; perhaps not educated, but then what would Bush want with an educated woman? He briefly pictured himself in bed with someone the caliber of Lady Barbara. He shuddered.
“What do you want, you silly girl?” the mother shrilled. “Some skinny, handsome young lieutenant, writing bad verse and running headlong into battle? Mr. Bush is a captain. A man, not some silly boy, so don’t go expecting any flowery courting. He’s a steady man, and employed right here in Sheerness. Resident Commissioner! You would have your own home. You wouldn’t have to wonder where your next meal is coming from, and you wouldn’t never have to beg for food for your baby, like your sister. He’s a catch, and better likely than you’ll ever see again.”
Mercenary bitch, thought Bush. Then he thought, I’m a catch? The idea made him smile a little around his pipe.
“I suppose,” came the younger voice again. A thoughtful pause, and then she continued, perhaps a little hopefully, Bush fancied. “I suppose you’re right, Mama. We shall see if he comes back.”
She did talk, after all. Bush would be back. And he would ask her father what she liked.
***
Bush looked at the priest’s open face, half-shadowed from the white light behind it. “She’s very young,” he said.
The priest nodded. “The war,” he said. “Times like this make people do many unusual things.” He seemed to ponder his words for a moment. “Unusual and sometimes beautiful.”
Bush was not a philosophical man. He tumbled back into his dream.
***
Bush courted her as best he could, at least while knowing he didn’t really have to, that having her as a wife was a foregone conclusion. Her mother had been right about one thing, at least-- he was a man, a man used to living with men and shouting at them and not to wooing fresh young girls-- but he tried, nevertheless. It was enough. Within a month he was married.
Somewhere in his dream Bush remembered their first night together as man and wife. How uncertain, how innocent she was-- not some whore to have her skirts lifted without ceremony, not what Bush was used to. Hornblower was the one with a predilection for respectable women. But Bush-- Bush didn’t quite know what to do with his wife, at first.
She stood before him, tiny, swallowed up by her wedding nightclothes. She looked at him and shivered.
Bush wondered if she was cold or frightened. Considering himself and his old, battered body, Bush surmised it was probably the latter.
“Would you like some more brandy, sir?” she asked.
“Trying to get me drunk?” he laughed at her. He thought he’d done it gently, but she merely stared at him. So he raised a slow hand, and said, “I’m teasing you. Call me William. Come here.”
She did, like a good girl. He kissed her-- her face was so small in his horny, callused hands. He could have smothered her in one palm, like one of his sisters’ runt piglets. His hands overwhelmed her. He wished for a moment that he had hands like Hornblower’s-- slim, intellectual, despite all their calluses. Hands that knew what to do with a respectable woman.
But Bush-- even he, straightforward, dependable old Bush-- could be caring and cunning when he wanted. He found some twine and showed her some knots, feeling oddly comforted at the sight of something so naval-like and ordinary as knotted twine in this odd world of land-living and of dealing with women and civilians. This new world where Bush had a wife. He let her tie his hands, let her unman him just that little bit, see him as not so frightening. There would be plenty of time, later, to get his way-- to cleave her to himself and to get rid of her shrewish mother and idiot of a sister. To teach her how to go on. But now he could allow this little thing. And his reward would be to touch her.
There’d been no sagging, painted flesh under that ridiculous lacy nightgown; only fresh, clear skin, warm on her backside from the fire, cold where her body faced his.
***
“She’s a good girl,” Bush said to the young man beside his cot. “She takes care of me. She worships Nelson, for all she romanticizes him. Women and their fancies. I tell her Hornblower is even more brilliant, but don’t quote me on that-- heh--”
“Uh huh,” said the young man, and Bush suddenly realized it was somebody completely different from before. This man also wore spectacles but was even younger, and had a moon-face. “I’m sorry, Father Mulcahy had to go. Hawkeye!”
“Coming.” The black-haired doctor from before jogged over, and lay a hand on Bush’s forehead. “You’ve got a chest wound, among other things, and you’re still alive, so you’re mine, Bush. Get ‘im in, Radar.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bush felt his cot lifted, felt himself moved, and he couldn’t lift his head but he could look up and around. He was taken into a nightmarish room of white-robed figures and bodies, and silver-gleaming metal, and that cursed white, unnatural light everywhere, and blood. But it wasn’t the blood that frightened him. It was the light, and the strange metal shapes.
“Read me some signs, Caroline,” Pierce said.
A woman’s voice, oddly familiar even buried under a Yankee accent, rattled off some numbers.
Pierce whistled as a woman’s hands pulled a white mask over his face. “Easy on the sodium pentathol, then. I don’t think he can take it. Four at most.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Where’s my body?” was all Bush could think to say in such a grotesque, acutely frightening moment.
“That’s what I’m here to find out, Bush. Close your eyes and breathe.”
“I have a wife,” Bush said, just before something black was placed over his mouth, and he began to feel drowsy, even drowsier than before.
“Not me, but don’t tell the nurses that,” Pierce said.
Bush slept. Bush dreamed.
***
Thinking of that first time had dredged the other times to the forefront of Bush’s memory. At first, having a clean woman in his bed every night was merely good. One night was like any other.
Bush sat at a table in the local tavern, a glass of brandy in one hand, a pipe in the other. The table was long and low, and filled with other old sailors like himself. Bush loved it here. Here, he could immerse himself briefly, exhilaratingly in that world of men and the sea and things he understood, and escape the one he didn’t.
“And then her mother said, the silly old hag said, would I find a husband for her other daughter?”
“Naw!” said the grizzled ex-lieutenant next to Bush. He had no hands; both his arms were cut off at the elbows. He drank by cradling his ale-mug between the stumps and lifting it to his mouth. He was very good at it. Bush was long-used to seeing men do improbable things with fewer limbs than this man had.
“Do I look like a Christ-sanctified society mama?”
“Hell no.” Another sip of the ale, not a drop spilled.
“She asked me this at her cousin’s dinner, in front of half the town.”
“Naw.”
“Thankfully Mrs. Bush was there, I’ll say that, to keep her off my back.” Bush shook his head. Mrs. Bush was good at it, too, he had to admit. She’d known these people all her life. “Now if she’d asked me to complement a half-crewed ‘74, in Newcastle, in the dead of winter, with two guineas, I might’ve done it.”
If Hornblower had asked such a thing, Bush would have moved Hell and earth to do it.
“Hah! Bet you could,” the man was saying.
God, how Bush missed Hornblower. If a man who regularly achieved the impossible asked one to do the impossible, then one was inspired to do it. Here, in Sheerness, all he had to do was read and fill lists, and fight off crafty-eyed captains and commanders who thought they could charm or bribe him into getting them whatever luxury items or guns they desired. Bush missed Hornblower, and he missed the regularity of life at sea. He wasn’t clever enough to be a petty bureaucrat.
Bush chuckled and quirked an eyebrow at his drinking companion. “I finally told Mrs. Bush to keep her goddamned mother out of our house.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
“So will I,” Bush said, and drank. Not long after that the night devolved into singing, as it always did, and Bush watched as men bigger and harder and meaner than he’d ever been wept like infants. As they always did.
So Bush went home. As he walked through the light snow to his house, stumping on one leg and clopping on the other, he remembered that he had a wife and though his friends were out there and he was here, that he wasn’t alone anymore.
Thus, as he always did, he could deal with her puffy face, her red eyes. She was a good girl. She said, “Welcome home, William,” and removed his coat and his scarf, seeming to hold it briefly to her nose before she put it away. She took his hand, like always. “You’ve eaten already?”
“Yes,” Bush would say, and then, “let’s go upstairs.” And they would, and she would not protest or weep further, but would offer him her body without too much of an air of duty. Sometimes she even seemed to enjoy it.
Things improved, even, as time went on. Bush remembered the first time she’d touched him in bed on their own: that had been sweet. And he remembered a quick, desperate coupling in the sick daylight through the window of a Portsmouth inn, old gleaming wood, the creaking of a bed, and the knowledge that soon he would be back at sea. For the mission to the Baltic had been wildly successful, as it always was with Hornblower. But now, the desperate pleasures of the flesh.
For she loved him. Bush knew this, and accepted it as nothing out of the ordinary. Wives loved their husbands, at least in his experience of married friends. And he supposed he loved her as well.
And wives wept; that was the way things were. He didn’t beat her, he didn’t yell at her. He gave her what she wanted for his home and he always came home to her, and did not stray. Well, there was perhaps that one time, but surely that didn’t count in the great scheme of things. And if he dreamed of getting a letter from the Admiralty or, God willing, of a visit from Hornblower with some new glory-- she didn’t have to know about it.
***
“Seventy-four over forty-one, Doctor.” Bush still couldn’t place the familiar female voice, but he could dimly hear its urgency.
“Shit! We’re losing him.”
Poor bastard, thought Bush, and then realized they meant him.
He felt water filling his lungs, felt his life’s heat leaking from what was left him. He tasted the water in his mouth: it was the icy water of the Seine, tainted with gunpowder and blood. At least he was in the water, where he’d always wanted to die.
***
Bush remembered one of Hornblower’s visits to Sheerness, before the Nonsuch, before the Baltic. Hornblower had surprised him in the Commissioner’s office.
“I’d like to make a requisition, Mr. Bush,” Hornblower had said.
“Sir!” Bush looked up from the papers at his desk, banged his thigh above the stump, he stood so quickly. He took a breath to slow his burgeoning glee. Bush was not a philosophical or even an extremely clever man, but he knew that Hornblower was always surprised and gratified, if a bit frightened, at discovering that people liked him. Hornblower was brilliant and lonely, and he was a good friend. He’d gotten Bush this job, no matter how he waved the appointment off as having happened on Bush’s merits alone.
“I’ve only got the two nights ashore, Mr. Bush, and I wondered if tonight we might have a drink, perhaps, and talk?”
“Of course, sir!” Bush said, trying to keep the happy excitement out of his voice, as well as the slight disappointment that Hornblower hadn’t come for more. He knew such disappointment was foolish: Bush was lonely here, too, and it would be good to forego his lonely office and his lonely quarters for once, and catch up on old times with a good friend. “Let me get my coat.”
It was cold, and their breath misted out before them like pipe smoke as they walked. Bush spoke of his frustration with the scribbling on paper all day, and with arguing with rock-headed captains, but not too much, because he didn’t want Hornblower to think he didn’t appreciate his position here. And Hornblower discussed the places he’d been since the Loire, but not too much, so as not to humiliate the land-bound Bush. They stopped to get a drink, and another.
“Barbara will be coming here, also, but she won’t be able to make it until tomorrow morning,” Hornblower was saying above his coffee. “She’s bringing little Richard. She writes that he’s growing very well.”
“Ah. Good,” Bush said. And then a sudden memory slammed into Bush’s head. He had a wife, a lovely young wife, at home. How had he forgotten that? Surely Hornblower must have remembered the letter Bush sent when he’d married, and was wondering why Bush wasn’t talking about her. But something was telling Bush not to mention it just yet; he felt foolishly that he didn’t really have a wife after all. And how to bring it up now, anyway?
“Yes,” said Hornblower, long fingers cradling his hot tin mug.
“Why don’t we go by my place, and I can grab something?” Bush suggested. He had to see. Was it true? His head hurt. He must be getting very drunk. He swallowed the rest of his brandy in a gulp.
Hornblower was amenable, and as they walked, Bush became more and more convinced that she was waiting for him at home as she always was. Why, just last night, they’d been at the Jenkins’s, and they’d come home and he’d sung to her in thanks for her deft social maneuverings. And they’d made love-- he could feel it again as if it was happening in that moment. Bush fancied that the cool winter air itself, right now, tasted like his wife’s skin, sighed like her breaths. It was real. How had he forgotten?
He was drunk. Still, he’d come home drunk before. When Bush arrived he would kiss his pretty young wife, kiss her hard, just to see what she did, see what Hornblower did. She would blush, and he would chuck her on the chin, and laugh. And he would show Hornblower how happy he was, to have this job and this life, and this lovely young woman with social skill and a saucy smile.
And yes, there were the flowered curtains in the window, the curtains that only she would have picked out. Bush laughed at something Hornblower said and turned the knob--
And inside, they were the same near-empty, Spartan bachelor lodgings he’d had since he’d moved to Sheerness and taken this job. The only smell was of the dirty clothing piled on the chair, and the lingering odor of pipe-smoke. Bush could only stare. Maybe he even swayed a bit.
“But...” he croaked.
“What?” Hornblower wanted to know.
“I thought I had...” Bush said.
“Are you quite well, William?”
Hornblower was concerned, if he was using Bush’s first name. And Bush felt more foolish than he ever had in his life. Why had he thought he had a wife?
“I--” Bush shook his head, and recovered. He stump-walked across the room to his sea-chest, now a land-chest, and pulled something out of it. “I just wanted to show you the medal they sent me after the Sutherland and the Witch of Endor.”
“Ha! Very nice,” Hornblower said.
***
Bush awoke from that dream. He was flat on the ground, encased in something cold and hard. Through an eye-slit in his-- metal?-- head-covering, he could see that the day was grey. He heard the sounds of screaming men and screaming horses, reverberating throughout his-- helmet?
Before Bush had time to assimilate it all, something grabbed him under the arms, from behind, and lifted. “Here you go,” a voice said. Then another voice screamed at him from nearby.
“If he can stand then he can fight. We need to find Lancelot. He has--”
And then the voice was gone.
***
Bush remembered that it was night. He was on the Nonsuch, in his cabin. He had his chisel, and a piece of wood. It would fit into the stern of the newly-started sloop-model on his table, once he’d named it, that was.
“The Caroline,” he whispered, and chuckled to himself. “She liked that.”
Then he thought, who’d liked that?
Then he remembered, and set the tiny chisel against the wood to begin carving the C.
***
Then the cold, gunpowder-tasting water of the Seine was filling his lungs. When they filled, he stood up on the slimy bottom of the river, and walked out, head breaking the water as the riverbed sloped upwards. Around him, men were screaming, guns were firing, fires were burning. But Bush found he didn’t care anymore. His job here was done. Le Havre was safe. But what of her?
“Wow! You were all over the place,” a female voice said from beside him. “That was one heck of an explosion.”
Bush turned to see a slim, ghost-pale girl with black hair and black eyes standing beside him in the mud and gore of the riverbank. She grinned. Like him, she was not bothered by the screaming and shooting and the blood. “Uh,” he said.
She laughed and grabbed his shoulder with a slender hand, shaking it like one might shake a mischievous child. “You must be tired. You were here, you were in Korea. At one point you were in two places at once. Then you came back here, at the wrong time. But now I’ve got you!”
“Do you?” Bush asked. Her words had no meaning for him, but he’d just realized who she was, and why she looked so familiar. She was here for him. Then another voice distracted him. It was a voice almost without sound, but heard nonetheless.
“COME. I AM RUNNING LATE ALSO,” it said.
Bush turned to the voice. And there was Death as Bush had always expected him: hooded, skeletal, menacing, cold, and yet just as comforting as the girl, somehow.
Bush was ready. Except for one thing he needed to know before he could rest... He turned to the girl.
“Did I have a wife?”
“You had whatever you thought you had,” she said. “Now, you gotta choose.”
“PLEASE CHOOSE QUICKLY,” Death said.
Bush looked at them: would it be the soft, pale prettiness of a girl he thought he knew, or the cold spectre from sailor’s tales? He thought for an instant longer. Hornblower. He was generous in that way, and he had been Bush’s friend. Hornblower would find her, take care of her, if she existed. And Bush thought she had. Whatever the case, his worries were over.
“Very well,” Bush said, and turned.
End.
End notes: Uh, yeah. ;) I wondered how to keep Bush alive for a few minutes longer, and this batshit M*A*S*H idea popped into my head and WOULD NOT go away. So I just did it. I hope it retains some of the original’s AU spirit if not its message;quigonejinn had already given us the message. Thanks for reading! All comments, criticism, flames, accepted gratefully.
Disclaimers: Hornblower doesn't belong to me, but probably to the Forester estate. M*A*S*H belongs to someone else also, probably 20th Century Fox? Death and DEATH belong to Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.
Remixing: Five Things that Never Happened To William Bush: Marriage by
quigonejinnRemix Author:
jedishampooSummary: It was one heck of an explosion at Caudebec.
Author’s Notes: This remixing thing is definitely tough, but fun! :) I hope this story works, as a remix (first-timer here). Thanks to the organizers. Thanks to
sharpeslass for the beta!x-posted to
hh_remix Go read the others also! :)“Goddamn--” Bush said. And then the shattering boom of two hundred thousand tons of French powder exploding cut off either his voice, or his hearing, or both.
In that moment, Bush thought, Holy Hell, I’m going to die. Right now. Then he thought, in that way that thoughts have of coming one after the other so that a man could have an entire conversation in his head in but an instant, I can’t, not yet. Who will take care of Hornblower? Bush was not a philosophical man, but he suspected that he was Hornblower’s only friend. Hornblower was yet ill; he would overextend himself on those damned turncoat Frogs.
Then he thought, Well, this ought to take care of Hornblower, for a while at least. Christ, what an explosion. They’ll hear it in London. General Quiote wouldn’t get his artillery down to Le Havre, at least not within the next few months, by God.
And then he thought, but what about my wife? Who will take care of her?
Wait-- he had a wife? And Bush realized he couldn’t remember. Everything became unreal in that moment, like a dream. Bush wondered at it, like that thought was any more unreal or confounding than the blinding, yellow-orange light of two hundred thousand pounds of French powder exploding in the black night all at once, or the sight of green water and flying splinters shards of metal, and flying men or men’s bodies with mouths open to scream, unheard.
In that instant Bush remembered a girl, indecently young but all his, and a sloop-model. A smell of home, a home with a woman in it and spices and flowers, and comfort. And then he remembered at the same time an unbroken life of the sea, the comfort of duty, and the smell of rats and salt-wet clothing and unwashed men.
Whichever was true, he was leaving someone behind.
Bush was not a philosophical man, and he knew this. But in that instant he weighed his imminent death against his life, trying to decide if he was doing the right thing by dying. And then he realized it didn’t matter, because his body was already in a thousand pieces.
***
Consciousness poured back into Bush’s skull. Not smoothly, as one might pour wine slowly to coat the inside of a fine crystal glass, but quickly, sloppily, like a tumbler of bad whiskey poured by shaking hands, sloshing over the sides.
“Son? My son?”
Father? Bush wondered at the voice, and wondered whether or not it was speaking to him. There was so much noise, men, women talking, yelling. And then he remembered that his father was dead, had been for many years. He was, too. That explained it.
“Ungh,” Bush said. It was painful. His jaw hurt. Of the rest of his body he could feel nothing. Perhaps it wasn’t there. He creaked his eyelids open to see a young man wearing an odd green hat bending over him. The voice and face were too young to be the father of any man Bush’s age. The man had a delicate sort of face, and wore spectacles over pale eyes.
“My son, you have no tags,” the man’s highish voice said slowly, carefully, in a flat accent. He sounded American. “If you can’t speak, please try and shake your head. Are you Catholic?”
I’m no bloody Papist, Bush tried to say, but it came out as “Ngh.” Then he swallowed, cracking his jaw, and spoke. He hated the weak, gurgling sound his voice made. Blood in his lungs. If he still had lungs. “Church of England.”
“Oh,” said the voice, in almost childish surprise. The man’s young face bent forward. “Can you tell me your name, my son? Your rank?”
Bush saw the white collar above the strange green jacket, and realized the man was some sort of cleric. Maybe he was not dead, yet, then, only very close to it. Bush took a moment to examine the man some more, and his surroundings. He was laying on some sort of cot, and was covered with a heavy, dark blanket. He was in a tent. It was full of people in strange clothing: men and women in white robes covered with blood, men and women in green, passing back and forth in front of a steady, unnaturally white light. A bizarre low hum permeated the air, and Bush wondered if it was only his ears ringing from the explosion.
He was either dead, or dreaming, or in some foreign medical tent. It was unreal and outlandish, and yet perfectly normal at the same time. The air was sultry, warmer than he’d thought it possible in France in the near-winter. It must be the fires of Codabeck burning-- that must be where all the light was coming from. Bush was not a philosophical man; he didn’t even try to explain it to himself further.
But before Bush could answer the question, a tall, slender black-haired man wearing one of the blood-stained white robes came over to them. He bent down on his haunches next to the priest, looked at a piece of flat wood covered in paper in his hand, and then looked at Bush.
“Still here, huh? Amazing. Figure out who he is yet, Father?” His accent was flatter than the priest’s.
“Still here, and no, but he spoke, sir.”
Bush hated the Americans for talking about him as if he wasn’t even there. Which he still hadn’t decided if he was or not.
“Am I dead?” Bush gurgled. But at least he sounded English when he gurgled it.
“Not yet. Welcome to Heaven. Or Korea, take your pick,” the black-haired man in the white coat said, and flashed white teeth at Bush.
Bush growl-gurgled at the man’s nonsense. Perhaps it was meant to be reassuring, but Bush found it annoying and would tell him so, soon.
“Captain William Bush,” he finally said. “Nonsuch, seventy-four.”
“Captain Benjamin Franklin Pierce, MASH 4077th.” The man gave him a jaunty salute. “Seventy-four? That’s a new one. British Army Special Forces?”
“Navy. Fool.” Bush managed. Americans didn’t know their arses from their foreheads.
“Navy,” the man said, and his face lost that cocky arrogance for a moment. “Here?”
“Nation’s last line of defense. Ours.”
The man’s eyebrows shot up into his forehead, and then his expression smoothed, and assumed an air of innocence that one might use when dealing with a woman, or a child. “That bad, eh? And they keep telling us we’ll be home by Christmas. Well, mine is not to question why. Mine is but to sew all your insides back together, since you’ve lasted this long, Bush. And you’ve come to the right place. I’ll move him up in triage, Father,” the man said, turning from Bush to the priest. He fiddled with something above Bush’s head. “Keep an eye on him. If you get called away, get Radar over here, or one of the nurses.”
“Yes, Sir,” the priest said. He smiled at Bush.
“Why can’t I feel anything?” Bush said, attempting to ignore everything that had gone on before, because it was too impossible and ridiculous. At least it was obvious that Captain Pierce was a doctor.
“Must be the morphine the field medic gave you. You’re a very strong man, Captain. For you to be so… well. I’m amazed you’re awake. No! Don’t look,” he said with a gentle, slim hand on Bush’s chest as Bush attempted to sit up, to see his own body. “Don’t move. Tell me about your life back home. Are you married?”
Am I? Bush wondered, and realized he’d asked himself that question before, only minutes ago. He tried to raise his left hand from under the blanket to see if it wore a ring. Then he realized that his arm was naked, and ended somewhere above the elbow. It was all ragged skin and bone and blood-stained white rag. Strangely, it didn’t hurt. Bush shrugged instead. He’d lost a limb before.
Married? He remembered a young girl, and a sloop-model.
“I think so,” Bush said. “She talks so I don’t have to.”
“I hear that’s very common,” the young priest said.
***
Bush remembered meeting his wife for the first time. That endless-seeming dinner, the chattering, nervous women. Except for her. She’d been silent as a pebble. Bush had wondered if she’d ever speak.
She hadn’t, at least not throughout the meal. One or two muttered whispers, perhaps, and those didn’t count. The one time she’d looked across the table and directly into his eyes, she’d lowered hers almost instantly. Bush hadn’t even been able to tell what color they were.
Neither did she speak aloud through her parents’ brightly desperate conversation that followed. She was so young. When Bush finally left, he stood in the street outside, lit himself a pipe, and considered her.
She was pretty enough, if nothing spectacular. Plain to others, perhaps, but enticing enough to an old sea-dog like himself. Her family was a connection of his, somehow. At least, that was how his sister had explained it in her letter from Chichester. The family was perfectly respectable if a little poor, and they were perfectly amenable to a match. But she’d hardly looked at him, and had never spoken aloud to him.
Bush considered her house, in the row of houses made identical and ghostly by the Sheerness mist, and finally he heard her speak. One of the windows on the lower floor was open.
“He’s ugly, Mama.”
It had to be her. Bush wondered if he should be offended or amused. Then he shrugged. It was true enough, he supposed. And she was very young.
“Nonsense,” said her father’s voice.
“Nonsense,” said her mother. “Only see how well his uniform looked. And he liked you.”
“How could you possibly tell he liked me, when he didn’t hardly speak to me? And he’s old. Why him, and why right now?” her voice said. It wasn’t whispery or lispish, as he might have expected such a young, shy thing’s voice to have been. Clear, the right accent, a bit saucy; perhaps not educated, but then what would Bush want with an educated woman? He briefly pictured himself in bed with someone the caliber of Lady Barbara. He shuddered.
“What do you want, you silly girl?” the mother shrilled. “Some skinny, handsome young lieutenant, writing bad verse and running headlong into battle? Mr. Bush is a captain. A man, not some silly boy, so don’t go expecting any flowery courting. He’s a steady man, and employed right here in Sheerness. Resident Commissioner! You would have your own home. You wouldn’t have to wonder where your next meal is coming from, and you wouldn’t never have to beg for food for your baby, like your sister. He’s a catch, and better likely than you’ll ever see again.”
Mercenary bitch, thought Bush. Then he thought, I’m a catch? The idea made him smile a little around his pipe.
“I suppose,” came the younger voice again. A thoughtful pause, and then she continued, perhaps a little hopefully, Bush fancied. “I suppose you’re right, Mama. We shall see if he comes back.”
She did talk, after all. Bush would be back. And he would ask her father what she liked.
***
Bush looked at the priest’s open face, half-shadowed from the white light behind it. “She’s very young,” he said.
The priest nodded. “The war,” he said. “Times like this make people do many unusual things.” He seemed to ponder his words for a moment. “Unusual and sometimes beautiful.”
Bush was not a philosophical man. He tumbled back into his dream.
***
Bush courted her as best he could, at least while knowing he didn’t really have to, that having her as a wife was a foregone conclusion. Her mother had been right about one thing, at least-- he was a man, a man used to living with men and shouting at them and not to wooing fresh young girls-- but he tried, nevertheless. It was enough. Within a month he was married.
Somewhere in his dream Bush remembered their first night together as man and wife. How uncertain, how innocent she was-- not some whore to have her skirts lifted without ceremony, not what Bush was used to. Hornblower was the one with a predilection for respectable women. But Bush-- Bush didn’t quite know what to do with his wife, at first.
She stood before him, tiny, swallowed up by her wedding nightclothes. She looked at him and shivered.
Bush wondered if she was cold or frightened. Considering himself and his old, battered body, Bush surmised it was probably the latter.
“Would you like some more brandy, sir?” she asked.
“Trying to get me drunk?” he laughed at her. He thought he’d done it gently, but she merely stared at him. So he raised a slow hand, and said, “I’m teasing you. Call me William. Come here.”
She did, like a good girl. He kissed her-- her face was so small in his horny, callused hands. He could have smothered her in one palm, like one of his sisters’ runt piglets. His hands overwhelmed her. He wished for a moment that he had hands like Hornblower’s-- slim, intellectual, despite all their calluses. Hands that knew what to do with a respectable woman.
But Bush-- even he, straightforward, dependable old Bush-- could be caring and cunning when he wanted. He found some twine and showed her some knots, feeling oddly comforted at the sight of something so naval-like and ordinary as knotted twine in this odd world of land-living and of dealing with women and civilians. This new world where Bush had a wife. He let her tie his hands, let her unman him just that little bit, see him as not so frightening. There would be plenty of time, later, to get his way-- to cleave her to himself and to get rid of her shrewish mother and idiot of a sister. To teach her how to go on. But now he could allow this little thing. And his reward would be to touch her.
There’d been no sagging, painted flesh under that ridiculous lacy nightgown; only fresh, clear skin, warm on her backside from the fire, cold where her body faced his.
***
“She’s a good girl,” Bush said to the young man beside his cot. “She takes care of me. She worships Nelson, for all she romanticizes him. Women and their fancies. I tell her Hornblower is even more brilliant, but don’t quote me on that-- heh--”
“Uh huh,” said the young man, and Bush suddenly realized it was somebody completely different from before. This man also wore spectacles but was even younger, and had a moon-face. “I’m sorry, Father Mulcahy had to go. Hawkeye!”
“Coming.” The black-haired doctor from before jogged over, and lay a hand on Bush’s forehead. “You’ve got a chest wound, among other things, and you’re still alive, so you’re mine, Bush. Get ‘im in, Radar.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bush felt his cot lifted, felt himself moved, and he couldn’t lift his head but he could look up and around. He was taken into a nightmarish room of white-robed figures and bodies, and silver-gleaming metal, and that cursed white, unnatural light everywhere, and blood. But it wasn’t the blood that frightened him. It was the light, and the strange metal shapes.
“Read me some signs, Caroline,” Pierce said.
A woman’s voice, oddly familiar even buried under a Yankee accent, rattled off some numbers.
Pierce whistled as a woman’s hands pulled a white mask over his face. “Easy on the sodium pentathol, then. I don’t think he can take it. Four at most.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Where’s my body?” was all Bush could think to say in such a grotesque, acutely frightening moment.
“That’s what I’m here to find out, Bush. Close your eyes and breathe.”
“I have a wife,” Bush said, just before something black was placed over his mouth, and he began to feel drowsy, even drowsier than before.
“Not me, but don’t tell the nurses that,” Pierce said.
Bush slept. Bush dreamed.
***
Thinking of that first time had dredged the other times to the forefront of Bush’s memory. At first, having a clean woman in his bed every night was merely good. One night was like any other.
Bush sat at a table in the local tavern, a glass of brandy in one hand, a pipe in the other. The table was long and low, and filled with other old sailors like himself. Bush loved it here. Here, he could immerse himself briefly, exhilaratingly in that world of men and the sea and things he understood, and escape the one he didn’t.
“And then her mother said, the silly old hag said, would I find a husband for her other daughter?”
“Naw!” said the grizzled ex-lieutenant next to Bush. He had no hands; both his arms were cut off at the elbows. He drank by cradling his ale-mug between the stumps and lifting it to his mouth. He was very good at it. Bush was long-used to seeing men do improbable things with fewer limbs than this man had.
“Do I look like a Christ-sanctified society mama?”
“Hell no.” Another sip of the ale, not a drop spilled.
“She asked me this at her cousin’s dinner, in front of half the town.”
“Naw.”
“Thankfully Mrs. Bush was there, I’ll say that, to keep her off my back.” Bush shook his head. Mrs. Bush was good at it, too, he had to admit. She’d known these people all her life. “Now if she’d asked me to complement a half-crewed ‘74, in Newcastle, in the dead of winter, with two guineas, I might’ve done it.”
If Hornblower had asked such a thing, Bush would have moved Hell and earth to do it.
“Hah! Bet you could,” the man was saying.
God, how Bush missed Hornblower. If a man who regularly achieved the impossible asked one to do the impossible, then one was inspired to do it. Here, in Sheerness, all he had to do was read and fill lists, and fight off crafty-eyed captains and commanders who thought they could charm or bribe him into getting them whatever luxury items or guns they desired. Bush missed Hornblower, and he missed the regularity of life at sea. He wasn’t clever enough to be a petty bureaucrat.
Bush chuckled and quirked an eyebrow at his drinking companion. “I finally told Mrs. Bush to keep her goddamned mother out of our house.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
“So will I,” Bush said, and drank. Not long after that the night devolved into singing, as it always did, and Bush watched as men bigger and harder and meaner than he’d ever been wept like infants. As they always did.
So Bush went home. As he walked through the light snow to his house, stumping on one leg and clopping on the other, he remembered that he had a wife and though his friends were out there and he was here, that he wasn’t alone anymore.
Thus, as he always did, he could deal with her puffy face, her red eyes. She was a good girl. She said, “Welcome home, William,” and removed his coat and his scarf, seeming to hold it briefly to her nose before she put it away. She took his hand, like always. “You’ve eaten already?”
“Yes,” Bush would say, and then, “let’s go upstairs.” And they would, and she would not protest or weep further, but would offer him her body without too much of an air of duty. Sometimes she even seemed to enjoy it.
Things improved, even, as time went on. Bush remembered the first time she’d touched him in bed on their own: that had been sweet. And he remembered a quick, desperate coupling in the sick daylight through the window of a Portsmouth inn, old gleaming wood, the creaking of a bed, and the knowledge that soon he would be back at sea. For the mission to the Baltic had been wildly successful, as it always was with Hornblower. But now, the desperate pleasures of the flesh.
For she loved him. Bush knew this, and accepted it as nothing out of the ordinary. Wives loved their husbands, at least in his experience of married friends. And he supposed he loved her as well.
And wives wept; that was the way things were. He didn’t beat her, he didn’t yell at her. He gave her what she wanted for his home and he always came home to her, and did not stray. Well, there was perhaps that one time, but surely that didn’t count in the great scheme of things. And if he dreamed of getting a letter from the Admiralty or, God willing, of a visit from Hornblower with some new glory-- she didn’t have to know about it.
***
“Seventy-four over forty-one, Doctor.” Bush still couldn’t place the familiar female voice, but he could dimly hear its urgency.
“Shit! We’re losing him.”
Poor bastard, thought Bush, and then realized they meant him.
He felt water filling his lungs, felt his life’s heat leaking from what was left him. He tasted the water in his mouth: it was the icy water of the Seine, tainted with gunpowder and blood. At least he was in the water, where he’d always wanted to die.
***
Bush remembered one of Hornblower’s visits to Sheerness, before the Nonsuch, before the Baltic. Hornblower had surprised him in the Commissioner’s office.
“I’d like to make a requisition, Mr. Bush,” Hornblower had said.
“Sir!” Bush looked up from the papers at his desk, banged his thigh above the stump, he stood so quickly. He took a breath to slow his burgeoning glee. Bush was not a philosophical or even an extremely clever man, but he knew that Hornblower was always surprised and gratified, if a bit frightened, at discovering that people liked him. Hornblower was brilliant and lonely, and he was a good friend. He’d gotten Bush this job, no matter how he waved the appointment off as having happened on Bush’s merits alone.
“I’ve only got the two nights ashore, Mr. Bush, and I wondered if tonight we might have a drink, perhaps, and talk?”
“Of course, sir!” Bush said, trying to keep the happy excitement out of his voice, as well as the slight disappointment that Hornblower hadn’t come for more. He knew such disappointment was foolish: Bush was lonely here, too, and it would be good to forego his lonely office and his lonely quarters for once, and catch up on old times with a good friend. “Let me get my coat.”
It was cold, and their breath misted out before them like pipe smoke as they walked. Bush spoke of his frustration with the scribbling on paper all day, and with arguing with rock-headed captains, but not too much, because he didn’t want Hornblower to think he didn’t appreciate his position here. And Hornblower discussed the places he’d been since the Loire, but not too much, so as not to humiliate the land-bound Bush. They stopped to get a drink, and another.
“Barbara will be coming here, also, but she won’t be able to make it until tomorrow morning,” Hornblower was saying above his coffee. “She’s bringing little Richard. She writes that he’s growing very well.”
“Ah. Good,” Bush said. And then a sudden memory slammed into Bush’s head. He had a wife, a lovely young wife, at home. How had he forgotten that? Surely Hornblower must have remembered the letter Bush sent when he’d married, and was wondering why Bush wasn’t talking about her. But something was telling Bush not to mention it just yet; he felt foolishly that he didn’t really have a wife after all. And how to bring it up now, anyway?
“Yes,” said Hornblower, long fingers cradling his hot tin mug.
“Why don’t we go by my place, and I can grab something?” Bush suggested. He had to see. Was it true? His head hurt. He must be getting very drunk. He swallowed the rest of his brandy in a gulp.
Hornblower was amenable, and as they walked, Bush became more and more convinced that she was waiting for him at home as she always was. Why, just last night, they’d been at the Jenkins’s, and they’d come home and he’d sung to her in thanks for her deft social maneuverings. And they’d made love-- he could feel it again as if it was happening in that moment. Bush fancied that the cool winter air itself, right now, tasted like his wife’s skin, sighed like her breaths. It was real. How had he forgotten?
He was drunk. Still, he’d come home drunk before. When Bush arrived he would kiss his pretty young wife, kiss her hard, just to see what she did, see what Hornblower did. She would blush, and he would chuck her on the chin, and laugh. And he would show Hornblower how happy he was, to have this job and this life, and this lovely young woman with social skill and a saucy smile.
And yes, there were the flowered curtains in the window, the curtains that only she would have picked out. Bush laughed at something Hornblower said and turned the knob--
And inside, they were the same near-empty, Spartan bachelor lodgings he’d had since he’d moved to Sheerness and taken this job. The only smell was of the dirty clothing piled on the chair, and the lingering odor of pipe-smoke. Bush could only stare. Maybe he even swayed a bit.
“But...” he croaked.
“What?” Hornblower wanted to know.
“I thought I had...” Bush said.
“Are you quite well, William?”
Hornblower was concerned, if he was using Bush’s first name. And Bush felt more foolish than he ever had in his life. Why had he thought he had a wife?
“I--” Bush shook his head, and recovered. He stump-walked across the room to his sea-chest, now a land-chest, and pulled something out of it. “I just wanted to show you the medal they sent me after the Sutherland and the Witch of Endor.”
“Ha! Very nice,” Hornblower said.
***
Bush awoke from that dream. He was flat on the ground, encased in something cold and hard. Through an eye-slit in his-- metal?-- head-covering, he could see that the day was grey. He heard the sounds of screaming men and screaming horses, reverberating throughout his-- helmet?
Before Bush had time to assimilate it all, something grabbed him under the arms, from behind, and lifted. “Here you go,” a voice said. Then another voice screamed at him from nearby.
“If he can stand then he can fight. We need to find Lancelot. He has--”
And then the voice was gone.
***
Bush remembered that it was night. He was on the Nonsuch, in his cabin. He had his chisel, and a piece of wood. It would fit into the stern of the newly-started sloop-model on his table, once he’d named it, that was.
“The Caroline,” he whispered, and chuckled to himself. “She liked that.”
Then he thought, who’d liked that?
Then he remembered, and set the tiny chisel against the wood to begin carving the C.
***
Then the cold, gunpowder-tasting water of the Seine was filling his lungs. When they filled, he stood up on the slimy bottom of the river, and walked out, head breaking the water as the riverbed sloped upwards. Around him, men were screaming, guns were firing, fires were burning. But Bush found he didn’t care anymore. His job here was done. Le Havre was safe. But what of her?
“Wow! You were all over the place,” a female voice said from beside him. “That was one heck of an explosion.”
Bush turned to see a slim, ghost-pale girl with black hair and black eyes standing beside him in the mud and gore of the riverbank. She grinned. Like him, she was not bothered by the screaming and shooting and the blood. “Uh,” he said.
She laughed and grabbed his shoulder with a slender hand, shaking it like one might shake a mischievous child. “You must be tired. You were here, you were in Korea. At one point you were in two places at once. Then you came back here, at the wrong time. But now I’ve got you!”
“Do you?” Bush asked. Her words had no meaning for him, but he’d just realized who she was, and why she looked so familiar. She was here for him. Then another voice distracted him. It was a voice almost without sound, but heard nonetheless.
“COME. I AM RUNNING LATE ALSO,” it said.
Bush turned to the voice. And there was Death as Bush had always expected him: hooded, skeletal, menacing, cold, and yet just as comforting as the girl, somehow.
Bush was ready. Except for one thing he needed to know before he could rest... He turned to the girl.
“Did I have a wife?”
“You had whatever you thought you had,” she said. “Now, you gotta choose.”
“PLEASE CHOOSE QUICKLY,” Death said.
Bush looked at them: would it be the soft, pale prettiness of a girl he thought he knew, or the cold spectre from sailor’s tales? He thought for an instant longer. Hornblower. He was generous in that way, and he had been Bush’s friend. Hornblower would find her, take care of her, if she existed. And Bush thought she had. Whatever the case, his worries were over.
“Very well,” Bush said, and turned.
End.
End notes: Uh, yeah. ;) I wondered how to keep Bush alive for a few minutes longer, and this batshit M*A*S*H idea popped into my head and WOULD NOT go away. So I just did it. I hope it retains some of the original’s AU spirit if not its message;
quigonejinn had already given us the message. Thanks for reading! All comments, criticism, flames, accepted gratefully. Disclaimers: Hornblower doesn't belong to me, but probably to the Forester estate. M*A*S*H belongs to someone else also, probably 20th Century Fox? Death and DEATH belong to Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.
