The wind whistles over the shale. The sun beats down, unrelenting. The men sit at their makeshift table in front of him. They look down at the wood, or at the pieces of Goodsir on their plates; Hickey is the only one who looks at Crozier.
"Come and join us," Hickey says, composed and calm. Satisfied with his lot. He spreads his hands. "Let the men begin."
The horror has set in to Crozier's muscles now, in his throat. It can't be, says the horror. It can't be Henry Goodsir over there laid out like so much turkey on its own special side table, prepared and with chunks carved out-- But it is, says the reality of it all around him, it is,, and reality the way it always does presses the horror flat, Des Voeux heating bits of him up in a tin and Hodgson with a fork and knife shining in the sun and a plate balanced on his knees, a delicate porcelain plate, and Goodsir's head turned toward them with his face the colour of clay.
"Will not happen," Crozier grits out though a throat that won't loosen up enough for anything else, jaw stubborn and set. Can not happen, is what he means. Horror wants to tell him something else. He refuses to let it. He has to try.
Hickey tries force. The small of his back aches now where the butt of the gun rammed into it, and Crozier now is standing closer. Still, he shakes his head.
"Mr. Golding, stand up," Hickey says without a pause and, after a couple seconds' pause himself, the boy does.
The men at the table look at him. Look to him.
The wind whistles over the shale.
Crozier lifts his chin, teeth grinding together, he turns and stomps over, grabs the knife and stands a moment at Goodsir's feet, watching Hickey, and watching Hickey watching him. Defiance is the only thing that's going to carry him through. But he bends; he slides the knife under the sole of Goodsir's foot and cuts a slice off there. It's like skinning an apple.
He strides forward, knife in hand, slams the knife into the table. He stands with his feet spread. But Crozier can't eat it-- eat him -- with the defiance that he's done the rest. He has to close his eyes. He has to open them again. He has to eat.
One side of him is rough on Crozier's tongue. The other side is wet. Moist. He can feel a tooth starting to loosen in his mouth as he tries to chew.
He spreads his arms, looking at Hickey with his jaw moving. See? You've got what you wanted now? Defiance, even as he chews.
Eat of my feet. Only of my feet. The memory of it pushes him on. The saliva keeps filling up his mouth. There's only sensation now: The taste of meat over his tongue. The wind whistling over the shale. The sound of rocks sliding against one another some place far away, outside of this moment and over the hill.
The rocks on the other side of the hill slide against each other with a sound like cracking porcelain, a sound that should come from something fine and delicate, that should come only from the objects of civilization. It sounds totally out-of-place in this stark, wild environment, so far from fine china and genteel parties and prescribed social codes that it might as well be the surface of the moon. But it's a sound to which the party has grown accustomed in the past several weeks. Not Crozier's party, nor the mutineers - it's anyone's guess as to what those sad living ghosts can still hear or see or feel at this point in their long years of suffering. No, this is another party of strangers, travelling steadily toward the northern coast of King William Island.
The expedition was sent out many months ago: Sir John Richardson, John Rae of the Hudson's Bay Company, and a crew of twenty men. Their mission, as proposed by the Admiralty, had been to travel overland through the northern American continent, passing through Rupert's Land and into the North-Western Territory until they reached the Adelaide Peninsula. From this desolate base near the tip of continental North-Western British America, they would venture across the ice pack to the many rocky islands that lie sprinkled across the region, like grains of salt breaking up the treacherous coating of ice on a winter walking path. With luck, somewhere in the channels and bays around all of those islands they would find the Terror and the Erebus, stuck fast in a tomb of sea ice, their crews tired but healthy and waiting for their rescuers to meet them.
Of course, even if they found the long-lost Franklin Expedition, the Admiralty knew that no luck in the world could free their ships from a million-ton block of ice. For that, they'd sent along a Magician.
And so the Magician sits, small and unassuming, in the middle of a bouncing, rocking sledge, and listens to the porcelain shifting of the rocks. At the moment she is the only living person riding on the sledge, and she's so surrounded by canvas, boxes, trunks and piled provisions that she looks almost like another piece of luggage herself. Like most of the men around her she wears the uniform of the British Royal Navy, but this piece of identification is currently hidden under thick Inuit furs. For now, she's just a delicate lady, deeply incongruous in this unforgiving place where only the hardiest dare to go, adding her weight to the load and doing nothing to help her crew in return.
It would take a very sharp observer to notice that the sledge on which she sits - as well as the two sledges in front of her and the one behind - is moving more quickly over this uneven, rocky surface than should be the case. As if the clinking, sliding rocks below them are somehow flattening themselves out underneath their treads, or aligning themselves so that no sharp slate edges stick up from the ground to impede the sledges' progress. The trail is still bumpy and uncomfortable, but it isn't slow - and, perhaps more to the point, it isn't noisy.
Once the first sledges crest the hill, the men pulling them can see the strange scene laid out on the plain below them. A camp in dire straits: decrepit, wind-torn tents, an ancient blackened coal stove; a narrow bench made of recycled wood on which one figure lies, completely still; a bigger, longer table surrounded by six figures, with a seventh figure seated a few strides away in its own isolated corner; a figure standing between the bench and the table, arms thrown out as if to catch the wind and set sail. That wind is blowing southwest, pushing the smells of the camp - coal smoke, cooking meat - toward the sledge party on the hill. At the moment, no one in the camp can possibly hear or smell the newcomers - but perhaps, as all of the sledges stop and all of the men look down to see the objects of their long search - one or two of them can see them.
He'll hate himself for it later. Later, when there's time to count his failings, this one of a different class than-- than the saliva in his mouth. That, at least, was a choice. Let a boy, only here in the first place because he's desperate and starving and in the grip of Hickey with his silver tongue, suffer, or... or eat. This, though--
He looks. He sees what's up there on the hill, and he's never been the master of his own expressions. The defiance for Hickey, for the men watching, he can manage that because he can be it, can be the leader of men that he's needed to even with this smiling, satisfied man trying to take up authority that he hasn't earned for his own selfish ends. Crozier can be something, if these men need him to be it. But he can't not be something that he is. He can't not be surprised.
The noise there up at the top of the hill. Then Crozier's attention; all of it's on the taste inside his mouth, but he's facing this way. Even the men seated away from Goodsir are turned now to look at Crozier. So if Crozier had done something else, been someone else, maybe the rescue would have got the upper hand, and maybe things could have ended without any more blood. But Crozier is only what he is. He sees. His eyes widen. It doesn't occur to him to stop it, or the way the shock ripples out over the rest of his face after. And Hickey frowns. Hickey turns.
"Sergeant!" Hickey snaps. "Ready your men for attack!"
Five guns, the man displayed there behind him had said. Tozer. Manson. Armitage. Pilkington. Des Voeux. Five more men who might die here. And the others, in the crossfire -- Hopcraft, Daly, Diggle, Crispe, Hoar, Lane. Desperate men, who only want to live, who spent so long looking to him to lead them there--
"Rescue!" Crozier insists, ignoring the way Hickey whips his head around to scowl at him. "For rescue! If you want to live to see your homes again, put your guns down!"
"And be hanged as mutineers?" Hickey raises his eyebrows as he looks around at the others, confident again. "The Empire doesn't care about us! We'll face justice just for trying to survive! We know better, men. Sergeant! Your arms!"
Tozer looks at him, face hard. He takes a breath. "Men!" he shouts, turning, readying his gun. "Ready! Take your positions!"
Crozier looks to Diggle, Hodgson, eyes wide and jaw set. "Come on!" Crozier gestures to them, to the others, tries to usher anyone who's going to listen behind the gruesome spread on the table next to him, hoping they'll have the sense to get to cover in time, hoping it will be enough. "Get down!"
For several moments, no one in the rescue party moves or speaks; they simply stare down at the camp laid out on the plain below them. It takes that much time for them to figure out what they are looking at. It is a much smaller camp than any of them were expecting to find, for one thing, and a much poorer one. Only a small fraction of the men who they have been sent to look for seem to be present, for another. And what are they all doing? The rescue party is too far away to see fine details. Toward the front of the rescue group, Sir Richardson reaches a hand into his pocket to pull out his spyglass -
When the camp below them suddenly explodes into motion. Five figures grab for long shapes hanging off of their shoulders or down their backs - rifles, obviously - some of them having to scramble up from their seats at the table while doing so. They move without organization and there’s no sign of the strict group unison British soldiers are trained to maintain when readying their weapons, but they are nonetheless achieving the effect they apparently desire: in the blink of an eye, all five of them are on their feet, rifles in position, heads tilted to the side as they sight down their gun barrels and aim at the interlopers. There is a commotion among the other figures around them, noise, shouted phrases impossible to make out fully - “attack,” “rescue,” “guns down,” “Sergeant!” - and then several of the figures dive toward the ground just as one of their armed comrades cries out, loud and very clear now: “Ready! Take your positions! Fire!”
And there is the buzzing sound of bullets whizzing past the rescue party, and everyone is leaping aside and behind the sledges, and two men drop. Blood and screams spurt from both of them, but there’s no time to look and identify where they’ve been shot. “Men!” roars Richardson, “Rifles! Return fire!” But there’s no need to give the order: around them, six soldiers are already hefting their rifles and firing back. One man on the plain below them falls to the ground followed by a comet-tail of blood from somewhere on his torso and -
The magician stands up from her place in the sledge. She does not say a word, does not make a single gesture - but in the same heartbeat, the five rifles in the camp below them explode in gouts of actinic flame with a noise like a bomb strike. Mingled screams, blood splattering on the rocks and oily smoke bursting into the sky as if eager to get free of this place.
Five men on the ground. Three of them are rolling around in agony or to try and put out the fire on their clothes and flesh. One of them is still burning, but not moving. One has a growing dark puddle of blood where half of his head should be.
The ringing, echoing moment of silence that follows has the force of a thunderclap.
It’s a disaster to begin with. Men who not long ago would have been welcoming rescue, inviting death instead. Diggle goes to his knees to round the table and cries out before he gets to cover, hit some place Crozier can’t see. As Crozier moves out to drag him Lane scrambles into the space Crozier had been and with so little room behind the thing, crowded as it is with desperate bodies, Crozier can’t go back; he tries to pull Diggle behind the nearer table instead but as he does it he sees Tozer shot in the chest, falling to the ground in a pool of blood. Horror is an old companion now and shock too, the way they flatten what should stop any man in his tracks; Crozier doesn’t pause, only keeps pulling on the arm and shoulder in his grip—
—and then all the rifles explode. Manson’s voice rises above the others, mindless with pain, and the man that loyal Manson’s skin is boiling for darts between the tents, in a line that’s probably more visible to Crozier from here than it is to their rescue. What was supposed to be their rescue.
There's nothing he can do about Hickey now. But maybe something he can do for the rest of them. “Hold!” Crozier shouts at the top of his voice, knowing his voice will carry up the hill and needing his words to be enough to count, to stop something. “Hold your fire! The rest of us are prisoners!”
Hodgson is scrabbling at fire spreading across his shoulder, breathing hard. He must have been caught in one of the blasts— the kind of explosions that only a magician could have conjured. It says something about how seriously their rescue’s being taken, that one of them was sent out here, and it doesn’t matter now.
“I’m going to come out!” he shouts, and edges out from cover, crouching, to move toward Hodgson and help him in throwing off his burning coat. “Don’t shoot!”
At the shout from their targets on the plain, Richardson immediately holds up a hand. "Hold fire!" he calls out, and the soldiers lower their rifles at once. Perhaps it's down to their rigorous training, or perhaps it's that they all know that they were sent to rescue these men, not butcher them, but not one of them shows any hesitation. Their eyes continue to scan the camp below them warily, though, and Richardson does not give the order for them to shoulder their weapons.
"Hands up, all of you!" Richardson shouts down toward the plain, voice raised now so that it echoes off the rocks. "I am Sir John Richardson of the British Admiralty. Where is Sir Franklin?"
Behind and around him, the other men in the rescue party continue to watch the reactions of the men on the plain. The sun glints off of their gold buttons and shines in white stripes down the polished leather of their boots. It doesn't need to be stated that they are looking for any more signs of resistance; they never expected to be attacked by the men they were meant to be rescuing in the first place, and now they are not certain if they can trust them. Given how still they remain, it's clear that none of them have noticed that at least one man in the camp has disappeared.
In her place on the sledge, the magician remains still and impassive. There is no way for those on the plain to know which member of their party is a magician, and no way for them to see that she is particularly out of place. She is not the only one among the rescue party draped in furs; the two Inuit guides who have led them here wear similar clothing, although they do not currently have their hoods up as she does. Just behind her, one man in the uniform of a commander steps forward, eyes scanning the camp for the leader of these men to come forward.
Franklin. Lord. That's a strange name to be hearing now after all this time, thinking of Sir John and the relative safety of those early days even as he's watching men moaning and rolling on the ground in pain.
"Dead!" Crozier calls up the hill. He isn't looking as he does it; hands up is an order he's got no patience for. If they don't want him helping the three the magician hasn't yet killed, they're going to have to damn well shoot him. Still crouching, he moves over, Hodgson's charred coat still in hand. Hodgson has his hands up, looking toward the armed men up there with wide eyes, and when Crozier looks for help toward the men who'd managed shelter he finds them much the same. Golding's panting sounds like sobs; maybe he's hurt somewhere, or maybe he's just young and scared. Diggle's in no shape to move far, and Daly gives Crozier a guilty look.
But he can't blame them, can he? Not when salvation's waiting up there alongside the guns. What a horror would it be, to somehow survive all the rest only to be shot down now? "I'm in charge here!"
He starts patting at Manson's shoulder and his neck with the coat, pausing at the agonized noise Manson makes. Crozier puts his hand to the side of Manson's head, but he's too far gone for comfort now. Crozier looks up, eyes narrowed, trying to spot where Hickey's gone to. He can see... something. He doesn't know what. Movement. But this is desperate enough to be worth the risk of asking some of them up there to come down; he makes the choice, and takes the risk, looking up the hill again with his eyes squinted against the sun. "These men need help!"
Now, that answer gets a response from the rescue party. Richardson's eyes go very wide; for several moments he seems entirely lost for words. The unarmed men behind him all turn their heads to look at each other in shock, and throughout the group the words whisper back and forth like a breeze blowing through the lower canopy of a forest. "Dead. Dead? Sir Franklin, dead? Sir Franklin is dead!" Even the soldiers at the front of their party make little noises of shock or dismay, and glance at their leader with worried expressions. Everyone knows that Franklin was a dear friend to Richardson.
"Who are you?" comes another loud, commanding voice from the rescue party. Richardson's second-in-command, Rae, has stepped forward to carry on the conversation. He squints down at the man who has said he is in charge - by his voice, it seems to be the same man who had declared that aside from the felled gunmen, the rest of the people in this small camp are prisoners. "Are you Crozier? Fitzjames?"
"Permission to approach and see to the wounded, sir?" asks a man on Rae's left, in an undertone. Rae nods curtly, but his gaze does not move; he scrutinizes the self-declared leader of the men below them as several of his party - a surgeon and three assistants - head quickly down the hill. A second surgeon steps forward toward the front of the rescue group to see to the two men of theirs who had been shot.
In the sledge, the Magician turns her head to look at the man in a commander's uniform next to her questioningly, but with the merest shake of his head he warns her to stay still. She will only be released to tend to the wounded when it's clear that no one is in any more danger of being attacked.
For a moment the question makes him grimace down at the ground, briefly angry; these men burning on the ground don't have the time to waste going back and forth about whether or not he has the right to lead. What needs to be done should be enough, and if it's not, the way Crozier speaks alone should be so obvious as to let them skip the damned formalities--
But he hears footsteps from the hill a moment later, and looks to see four men coming this way. He takes a bracing breath, strokes Manson's hair one more time, then moves to the man on the ground closest to him. This one is Sergeant Tozer, breathing hard and looking up at Crozier with what looks to be real sense, real focus. His jaw is clenched; his hand shakes as he tries to move it toward his wound. Crozier takes it and moves it for him, though against the charred cloth and skin it's hard to tell where the bullet went in. The blood spreading under his chest has put out some of the fire over his side but Crozier pats the coat at the remaining flames, the familiarity of the sight and smell of the burned men a horror that feels as flat and meaningless as the rest of the horrors that make up their lives here now.
He ought to answer that other question; the authority which governs their rescue will be expecting to hear his identity, his own authority, his credentials to it. But it's far more important, first, to make sure: "You've got a magician with you," Crozier tells one of the men coming toward him, insistently. They're paired, aren't they, they only work in pairs, but as his attention moves back and forth between the four he doesn't see anyone standing closer to the others, or who looks unusual at all. "Can he heal? Where is he?"
The four men who are now coming to help the wounded do indeed look like normal Navy men, not magicians; the impression is made into a certainty when, a moment later, they are followed by two other men carrying between them a large chest that could only be a surgeon’s toolkit. They make their way down to the camp more slowly than their comrades, each trying one-handedly to keep their collective balance on the sliding rocks. None of these men could be magicians: magicians don’t use a surgeon’s tools to heal the wounded.
“Yes, sir,” says the lead man in the front group. And he’s certainly got the look of a medical man about him: the glasses, the thin fingerless gloves he wears despite the cold, and the calm, gentle tone of his voice are all haunting echoes of the other surgeon who lately cared for the men in this camp, and whose corpse is even now cooling not twenty feet away. He kneels down on Tozer’s other side, his gaze trained on the spreading red-brown flower of blood on his still-smoking clothes.
“I’m Henry Marion,” he continues. “I’m a surgeon, and so are Mr. Rae and Mr. Levi up there, and Lord Richardson is a doctor. We can take a look at what the damage is here, sir, and then see if our magician can do anything to help.” As he speaks, he motions to one of his assistants, who opens the surgeon’s toolkit and pulls out a heavy looking pair of scissors. Marion takes them and deftly begins cutting into Tozer’s jacket - it may be a waste of a cloth, but it’s the least painful way to access the bullet wound underneath.
“Your name, sir,” comes the impatient voice of Rae from up on the hill. No one else from the rescue party has moved any closer: they’re unwilling to leave this high ground until they know who they are talking to.
“The rest of you, come out and stand behind your captain where we can see you,” Rae adds, making a sweeping gesture with his hand to encompass the men who are still hiding.
It feels like nonsense -- he's never worked with a magician but surely they would be appropriate first when things are really urgent -- but the man is here and he's helping so Crozier moves on. This one is Des Voeux, who took special pains to bloody Crozier on the way to camp, who shot Tom, who's grasping Crozier's arm now as he gasps and moans, looking up at him desperately. Crozier puts out the fire over him as close to gently as he can.
"Captain Crozier!" he shouts impatiently over his shoulder, then looks to the men with their hands still up. "Calmly now," he murmurs to them. "Go slow. No sudden movements, do you understand?" He gets a single frightened nod and he nods back more confidently, making eye contact with all of them. He glances over the bodies, ducking to the still one to put his fire out, just in case, but-- no. No, and this one's Armitage, which means the one with his head blown half-off must be Pilkington. Crozier sighs and then stands up slowly, hands raised up into the air. Hickey must be hiding, waiting for the lot of them to move on. If Crozier alerts them now, for one thing they'll leave the injured. For another, Hickey will be forced to act, and if there's one thing Crozier doesn't doubt it's that man's capacity for cruelty in the face of any other choice.
"Can we move them?" Crozier asks the surgeon, trying to stand ahead of his men, who seem reluctant to walk too far past him in fear of those shouted orders. Will the rescuers abandon them if they know about Hickey? If they notice Goodsir's body? For a million other reasons the heavy hand of fate simply hasn't heaped over them yet? Best to leave here quickly, if they can. "This is no place for wounded men."
The name of Captain Crozier causes another stir to ripple through the group still standing on the hill. There is a certain easing of tension in the men's bodies, a letting out of breath and a shifting of weight as some of them start to relax out of their battle-ready positions; they know that name and trust it not to attack them. But their leaders are not so trusting: Richardson, who seems to have mastered his emotions by now, snaps tersely over his shoulder, "secure a perimeter. See that no one enters or leaves this camp."
"Captain Crozier, we need a report on your current situation," Rae calls down. "Come forward, and your men will stay where they are." He begins making his own way down the hill to meet him as the soldiers fan out to either side, moving to encircle the camp.
"We can do it, sir," says Marion to Crozier in a gentle undertone. He's already got Tozer's jacket and shirt cut open so that he can see down to the skin; blood is pooling in the region of his sternum, which is sunken and hollowed out from his long months of starvation, and every panicked rise and fall of his chest looks painful. "We'll see to the wounded while you go and talk to Mr. Rae."
Behind Marion, his assistants are taking quick stock of Des Voeux and Manson. The men who carried the surgeon's kit down are already dashing back up the hill for more supplies. Eventually, someone is sure to take a look at Goodsir and notice the state of his body. Or someone will run into Hickey. Up on top of the hill, Richardson is talking inaudibly to the rest of his group, who have not yet moved to help.
Crozier looks away from the surgeon, expression tightening. Come forward, and your men will stay where they are tells him where these men's priorities lie, and they're not where he'd hoped any rescuers' would be. But they were shot at just now. Maybe some of those bullets hit. Crozier hadn't seen, but it would explain the wariness. But that any of them was sent down here at all is promising-- and right now it's all he's got.
Armed men come down from the hill and move to spread out around the camp. Crozier starts moving toward the hill, ready to convince these men to help. A choked noise comes from the other end of camp and Crozier's attention snaps toward it. The place he'd seen movement before, damn it, it must be Hickey, but before he can warn anyone one of the other soldiers lets out a shocked cry.
Rae heads down the side of the hill with confident steps, but from the way his eyes scan back and forth across Crozier and the men standing in a row behind him like the world's poorest military parade, it's clear that he's still very wary. And he's also armed: he doesn't have a rifle like the soldiers currently spreading out in a circle around the perimeter of the camp, but there's a holster on the side of his belt that looks the right size for a pistol. As he approaches Crozier's position, he raises a hand toward his head to salute - but at that moment one of the surgeon's assistants off to his left shouts his name. His triage checks have brought him all the way to the naked, spread-out body of Goodsir on its grisly side table.
"My God, Mr. Rae, come -"
Which is as far as he gets before he's cut off by a cry.
Then, as before, the already overly-tense camp erupts into chaos at the disturbance. There's a gunshot - another scream, this one of real pain rather than shock - the remaining men of the mutineers' camp let their raised arms drop and dive for cover again, no longer heedful of their rescuers' orders - the heavy whump of a body falling to the ground at speed behind one of the tents - and then a heart-stopping roar.
From his high vantage point on top of the hill, Richardson can see it as it comes into view over the ridge behind the furthest tent, mouth already bloody with a kill, loping and white like a polar bear but impossibly bigger, twisted and with the wrong bone structure, impossibly, monstrously wrong.
"Marines, return fire!" He yells, voice amplified by his own shock. "Men, up the hill, retreat!"
Easy to tell even at the corner of his eye who here is one of Crozier's men and who isn't; pain and death and fear doesn't shock them, they don't pause to take anything in at all before they dive for cover again, or run, or in the case of some of the injured, start trying to crawl away. Crozier himself doesn't pause to make sense of any of it, or wonder when and how the thing got so close. He only yells as loudly as he can, immediately on the hills of the rescuer's order:
"Do not return fire!" He throws his arm out toward the marines that he can see, toward the man who'd been walking down closer to him. It's contradicting the order of an officer to his men; it's saving their lives. Those shots aren't going to do any more than attract the thing's attention. "Do not run! Magician!"
Crozier looks back and forth over the men up at the top of the hill, not knowing who he's talking to, but knowing he must be there somewhere. Someone who can do what all this time his men have been dying without: "Hide us, hide us!"
The marines do not, of course, follow Crozier's orders: they have been commanded by their superior officer to fire at their attacker, and they will all do as they are told by him. Around either side of the camp, rifles fire - one, two, three shots in quick succession, a fourth one a heartbeat behind the others; another otherworldly roar answers the final shot, making the stone-strewn ground vibrate. Marion the surgeon and his three assistants likewise do as Richardson has ordered and start sprinting for the hill; Marion and one other man stop long enough to scoop up their patients before running, but the other two assistants do not attempt to take any of the wounded with them.
"What - what is that-?" Rae starts to ask, rooted in place not two yards in front of Crozier, but he's cut off by another scream. There's a strange, organic noise, like someone biting into a ripe peach - and then they can all see it: an enormous creature, four-footed and broad-shouldered like a bear, but its face is the wrong shape, its ears too small and its jaw too short and its eyes - its eyes like those of a man, deep-set under jutting brow ridges, black and dead, reflecting no light. In its enormous mouth is one of the marines - or at least, the head, torso and one arm of a marine, cut off just under the rib cage with a bloody spinal column poking out of the end of it like a tail. For a moment it rears up on its hind legs, perhaps ten, twelve feet tall, and with one paw it bats at the nearest tent, flattening it without an effort.
Up on the hill, Richardson looks absolutely stunned, his mouth open to yell another order but no sound coming forth. Several of the men around him look similarly frozen, but the two Inuit who have been standing toward the back of the rescue group are more practical. One of them yells something in Netsilik, and the other grabs Richardson by the shoulder and yanks him down behind a sledge.
The marines are firing; the surgeons or surgeon's assistants or whatever they are are running. The man in front of Crozier, one of the men in charge, hasn't moved, so when the tuunbaq swallows the torso in his mouth and charges it goes toward the ones running first. Then it veers toward the ones who'd thought to pick up the wounded. Of course it does. Des Voeux moans in fear; Diggle tries uselessly to pry his way out from his rescuer's grip, eyes huge and fixed behind him. It only serves to slow their rescuers down.
"A man called Cornelius Hickey--" comes a familiar steady, confident shout, out from the din. It hardly carries over the screams but Hickey makes it stand out anyway, walking forward out from the maze of tents, arms spread. "--told me this expedition would be a year in the polar sea! Then out the other side to the Sandwich Islands, other side of the world! 'One year's nothing', I thought. So I dabbed him and left him in Regent's canal! And here I am instead! No one told me I’d be freezing to death three bloody years instead. But I’ve learnt what I needed to. So bugger London. Bugger Nelson. Bugger Jesus! Bugger Joseph, bugger Mary! Bugger the Archbishop of Canterbury! None ever wanted nothing from me! I'm here! I'm here! See me!"
He doesn't seem to be talking to any of them, at the end. He's looking at the back end of the tuunbaq. In one hand, he raises a knife-- the other hand goes to his mouth.
The creature is so fast that it's difficult to follow its movements with the eyes; it seems to move through the camp too easily, too fluidly for its bulk, so that tents and barrels and haphazardly scattered piles of used provisions present no obstacle to its progress. It moves through the disorganized landscape of these men's last attempt at recreating their civilization in the bare wilderness like mist, like something that does not need to interact with mere physical matter, like something without mass of its own - until it falls upon Marion and Des Voeux. Then, then it possesses the mass appropriate to its monstrous size, its feet punching deep into the layers of shale with each step, scattering stones like shrapnel, its weight barreling into the fleeing men with the force of the ice pack itself, unstoppable, inevitable. It sends Des Voeux's body flying halfway up the hill as its paw clips Marion's back; the surgeon cries out as he sprawls to the ground, but his momentum hasn't even brought him to a stop yet before bends down and rips his head off of his body with a crunch like a warship running aground on a hidden reef.
The men of the rescue party are screaming now, all of them plunging at once into the small spaces of cover afforded by their sledges. It looks like a scrum at a ball game, flailing arms and legs, men being thrown bodily out of the way by one another, one sledge being knocked over entirely by competing forces trying to shelter behind it. Exactly the type of movement to entice the predator that they are desperate to avoid -
When a loud, clear voice carries up from the middle of the camp. For a second it looks like the creature is not paying it any special attention; its too-small ears twitch as it bears down upon one of Marion's assistants, pinning him to the stones with one paw - but then, abruptly, it whips its head around toward the lone, still and unsheltered figure behind it. As if, despite every appearance of shallow, uncomprehending animal intellect, it has heard Hickey and obeyed him. It turns its massive body around, leaving its erstwhile victim pierced through but not consumed - and sees Hickey.
Hickey is no longer talking. He's got his mouth open, his tongue out and held by the forefinger and thumb of one hand while the other hand begins to saw at it savagely. Blood spurts once, then drips, then gushes down his hand, his wrist, dripping off his forearm in an unbroken dark red thread toward the ground. The bear-thing pads closer, silent once again as if its feet do not actually touch the stones on which they stand. It sniffs, chuffs questioningly. Hickey has started to scream in pain as he works now, but it doesn't seem to mind the noise. It approaches, lowering its head so that it can regard Hickey at eye-level.
Now, for the first time, it is truly visible to everyone who is still able to watch it. It doesn't behave like a normal animal, doesn't look like any creature of the natural world. But now, as it stands still and fully apparent under the Arctic sun, it is impossible for any man present to deny that it is a thing of matter, a thing that is real and tangible and alive. It smells of heavy, wet fur and the unmentionable gore of its victims; it casts a shadow eight feet long, although the sun is not low in the sky; it seems to exude cold and damp, not as a breeze but simply as a miasma rising off the yellow-white hedge of fur at the ridge of its back and suffusing the air all around the camp; its sides move in and out as it breathes. Now, it is also apparent that the thing is not entirely unstoppable or immune to damage. There is a long, raw-red wound across its withers and down the right side of his back, dirty fur clotted inside the injury and a crust of black blood all around its perimeter, sometimes merging with blisters scattered around the outskirts. Much of the fur all along its right side is not in fact white but instead a mottled mix of grey and charcoally black. The injury is clearly a burn, either from Blanky's oil lamp or Fitzjames's Congreve rocket. The continued attacks of the men have harmed it, just like any animal of flesh and blood. But they haven't stopped it. They probably don't have a hope of killing it.
And now Hickey, groaning in pain but resolute in his actions, has finished his grisly task. Calmly, hands hardly shaking, he holds out one blood-soaked hand toward the creature's face. The lump of meat resting on his palm must be his tongue; his mouth and chin and chest are running with blood from the root of it still in his mouth.
The creature huffs. Sniffs carefully, almost delicately at Hickey's offering, like a picky child deciding whether or not to accept his dinner. Hickey's eyes are shining and staring straight into its face. There is almost complete silence for three heartbeats.
And then it bites down. Not on the tongue, but on Hickey's whole arm. His expression turns briefly to one of shock, but there's no time for anything else. With an almost careless tilt of its head, the creature releases the stump of Hickey's arm and bites him round the middle instead. There's the beginning of a scream, truncated as it snaps him in half.
Bedlam again: everyone in the camp, the lost crew and their rescuers, are certain now that there is no hope for them. It has killed Hickey, and there is nothing stopping it killing them as an afterthought. The only people left on the hill who have not tried to take cover are the fur-cloaked figure in the sledge and the soldier in a commander's uniform next to them. From somewhere to their left, Richardson can just be heard shouting, finally, an echo of Crozier's orders: "Hide us, Hide us now!" The commander nods to his comrade in the sledge and puts an arm on their shoulder.
The ground shakes, shudders as if in a distant earthquake. Men check their balance and cling to the sledges behind which they hide; one of the injured men cries out and holds a hand over his wound to protect it. The shaking grows more intense, rocks start cascading down the hill and the scent of rockdust permeates the already iron-smelling air. The creature looks up from the remains of Hickey, its face covered in red, apparently confused. The shaking hits a crescendo and one of the sledges actually starts moving down the hill despite the men behind it trying to hold it back -
And a spear of rock erupts out of the ground right between Hickey's body and the nearest hiding men. Then another, then another, in a row like teeth in the mouth of a shark. They are not touching either the creature or the men as they grow taller and taller out of the ground, not hurting anyone - but they begin to form a curving line, like a barbed fence cutting the creature off from the remaining men. The ground heaves like the ocean, groaning and roaring low enough to vibrate the men's bones, like the strongest earthquake any of them have ever felt; someone scrambles out of the way as a spike of black shale breaks right through the top of a tent and sends its support beams crashing to the ground. The creature whips around to escape the wall of spikes, but it's too late - it is encircled now by what looks like several hundred of the most unlikely rock formations in the world. It roars and throws itself at the bars of its prison, but they have grown too close together for it to fit through: unlike the mutineers' camp, the spikes seem to act as a barrier to its movement.
It's the most magic he's ever seen -- ever felt, because the force of it shakes the ground, moves the very earth from under them. He can't imagine using that much magic for anything, can't imagine how. But there's nothing left for wonder, for awe, or for anything more than a few long seconds of surprise and worry; then once the magic is done Crozier only watches the cage to see whether it seems likely to break. But the creature doesn't seem to be able to break through, at least not yet, and if it does the 'bars' seem strong. They'd have at least a moment before it finished. They should take that moment now.
"Move!" Crozier calls, tone commanding. "Get the wounded! Then go, while we still can!" He strides toward the largest body, Manson, who he can tell is still alive by his moaning. But the remains of his own men seem more enamoured with the latter command than the former; go while we still can is obeyed with enthusiasm. Crozier watches them, dismayed, and then his expression hardens and he bends to get to it on his own. He begins pulling Manson's shoulder upward, not certain yet what he's going to do with it or with the whole of the man after. Head swimming and body feeling like it's moving through molasses stopped being strange a long time ago, even for the healthiest of them, but someone else to lift up Manson's other side would help.
By now, the men in the rescuers’ party seem to have decided en masse that Crozier’s orders are good orders to obey in this situation. Or at least, some of his orders: like the remaining men from the mutineers’ camp, most of them obey go while we still can rather more readily than get the wounded. They’ve started sprinting back up the hill, marines and assistants to the late Mr. Marion alike, without stopping to do anything, let alone to pick up a wounded man who might slow them down. They’ve all seen where that kind of behavior will lead if the bear-thing escapes its cage.
But not everyone is so callous. Rae, who has been standing completely still on the hillside since the creature first made its presence known, snaps back into action at the same time. He gives the impression of having been frozen in place not out of shock alone, but also because he was following a protocol: perhaps he knows that standing still is what you do when ambushed by a polar bear.
“Carter, Robertson!” He shouts, sharp and decisive. “Come back and help these men. Now!” The tone suggests that the consequences of disobeying this command will be heavy indeed. And with slightly shame-faced expressions, the two men who had been running up the hill past him turn around and scramble back down as quickly as they can. One scoops up Tozer, who cries out in pain as the bullet wound inside of him is jarred by the movement (although he hangs onto his rescuer desperately with both hands nonetheless), and the other ducks under Manson’s other arm and wraps it around his shoulders to help Crozier lift him. This particular man’s expression changes once he’s in touching distance: he looks almost as wary of being close to Manson and Crozier as he was of being close to a giant bear-monster. It makes some sense: he’s the one who was calling for Rae to come and look at Goodsir’s body before the attack.
As Tozer and Manson are helped up, Rae jogs back down the hill past them, briefly kneels down to check on Armitage before deciding that he is too dead to be rescued - he doesn’t even spare a glance for Pilkington and his half-destroyed head - and then hurries right back up the hill again until he reaches Des Voeux. From the sound of his weak groaning as Rae pulls him up, Des Voeux is still alive, incredibly. Rae moves fast and nimbly, and he’s gone much further than Crozier, Manson, and their unwilling assistant could move in thirty seconds, but he has to slow considerably once he’s weighed down by De Voeux.
“Get them into the sledges,” commands Richardson as the wounded start reaching the top of the hill. “We can see to their injuries once we’ve put some distance between us and this place.” Next to him, Diggle is already being laid flat in the bottom of one sledge while Hodgson is gingerly stepping into another, heavily favoring his right side.
It isn't the one in command who helps Crozier with Manson, but that man does give the order for someone else to. Crozier is grateful, in a fleeting, exhausted sort of way. The man holding up Manson's other half seems to be trying to do it while also not touching him, or looking at either of them at all; they do smell, Crozier supposes, even underneath the char of Manson's burned meat. It doesn't stop them from making progress, or from depositing the man into a sledge, though the other man lets go well before Crozier does and Manson cries out again, this time weakly.
Grimacing, Crozier tries for a moment to make sure Manson's not going to be jostled too badly. Then he stands, eyes darting around to try and see how the sledges are being pulled. If with men, maybe there's a spot for him at one. It's hard to tell; these aren't his men, these aren't his sledges. He knows both of those without looking at them, as easily as he knows the back of his hand. But these ones are new. He sets a hand on the edge of the sledge next to him, to help hold him up while he figures it out.
The sledges are indeed pulled by men, as it turns out. Three or four men haul from the front, aided occasionally by a man at the back when the ground is uneven. In other words, these sledges are many times more mobile than the enormous boat-sledges used by the crews of the Terror and Erebus. Unlike Crozier’s mission, this rescue mission was always intended to travel overland, and its crew has been provisioned accordingly. As the men hurriedly slide into their harnesses at the front of the sledges and form up to start hauling, Rae comes back over to Crozier.
“Are you well enough to walk, Captain Crozier?” he asks. Like the magician but unlike most of the rest of his team, he too has incorporated Inuit-style fur clothing into his uniform. His head and neck are kept warm by a thick caribou hide hood and both his gloves and his boots are made of grey seal skin. He can probably only get away with this nonconformist mode of dress because he is one of the commanders of this mission - but he does look much warmer than most of his colleagues. He taps the side of the sledge that Crozier is currently holding onto. “If you need to rest, we can ride in here for a time.”
His use of the word we is telling. Even in their haste to get away from their supernatural attacker, Richardson and Rae are not about to let Crozier get away without giving them a full report on what has happened to him and his crew.
'We' is telling-- but for reasons that have little to do with what might happen next, even if that next is almost now. There's nothing in Crozier that's left for worrying about anything that isn't yet in front of him, not the bellowing of the creature behind him, and certainly not not questions or mistrust. What 'we' says is that this man isn't helping haul, the same way he hadn't helped carry Manson. It says something that the fur over him says, too; something for himself but not the rest of his men. Well, it is warm, here and now; at least, as warm as this place ever gets. There's more reason than one Crozier's spent the last... however long it's been in shirtsleeves and his waistcoat. Maybe these men would be outfitted differently, in the real cold. There's nothing to do but notice it, then move on.
"I can walk," Crozier confirms tiredly, meaning it because he's still standing, and unwilling to give any of the men any more work than they're already going to have hauling the injured. Maybe these men don't need that consideration in the same way his own do; it's too much work, now, to change those habits that the long trek has long since built in. For the moment, he can walk. "My camp is southeast."
He looks around, finding the direction, and takes a bracing breath. The possibility of questioning is far from his mind but the idea of rescue does still mean something. It has to. "You're here for us? I admit, I wasn't sure whether to expect something so soon. When did you set out?"
If Rae has noticed Crozier’s judgment of him, he doesn’t show any sign of acknowledgement: perhaps he’s too intent upon learning the story Crozier has to tell to notice anything else. With a gesture to Crozier to follow him, he begins walking toward what will be the first sledge in the caravan, the one which currently carries Tozer and around which Richardson and the two Inuit guides are gathered in council.
“We’re headed southeast,” he tells the group. “There’s another camp of them out that way.”
Richardson, who wears his naval issue captain’s uniform with all of the starch and correctitude that Rae’s uniform lacks, raises his eyebrows questioningly at Crozier but does not pass comment. If he wonders why exactly Crozier has been held prisoner at a camp that doesn’t belong to him, he doesn’t ask.
“Southeast, then,” he says. He nods to a nearby marine, who, though still white-faced with shock after seeing his his fellow soldiers’ deaths, follows the unspoken order with alacrity. He heads off to where he can easily be seen by the men manning all of the sledges and begins shouting the commands to prepare to march.
“Yes, we are here for you,” says Rae as the men get into formation, lean forward and start hauling their loads, as if there had been no interruption in his conversation with Crozier. As they start treading toward the front of the caravan alongside the first sledge, he falls in on one side of Crozier and Richardson moves to walk just ahead. “We set out a few months back, but we were given this mission almost a year ago. The Admiralty received word that it was unusually cold up here for the last two summers, you see, so they surmised that the pack ice never melted for you.”
Far behind them, there is another earthshaking roar from the imprisoned beast that they are leaving behind. The sledges set out with haste.
"Mhm." Crozier's walk quickly settles into a trudge, leaning forward in a way they've all gotten in the habit of when starting to walk a while, as if planning to keep himself going through momentum alone. He isn't thinking of it; he's thinking of the ice. "We became part of it. Part of the pack. We kept waiting for it to melt, and it never did."
He brings himself back to the here and now with a sigh. "We'll have sick at my camp. Scurvy, and related maladies -- Mr. Bridgens will be able to tell you more once we arrive. He's been-- he was helping Dr. Goodsir. He'll be able to tell you who needs what, but if you've lemon juice anywhere in these sledges you'll be doing a lot of men a lot of good."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cw: cannibalism
"Come and join us," Hickey says, composed and calm. Satisfied with his lot. He spreads his hands. "Let the men begin."
The horror has set in to Crozier's muscles now, in his throat. It can't be, says the horror. It can't be Henry Goodsir over there laid out like so much turkey on its own special side table, prepared and with chunks carved out-- But it is, says the reality of it all around him, it is,, and reality the way it always does presses the horror flat, Des Voeux heating bits of him up in a tin and Hodgson with a fork and knife shining in the sun and a plate balanced on his knees, a delicate porcelain plate, and Goodsir's head turned toward them with his face the colour of clay.
"Will not happen," Crozier grits out though a throat that won't loosen up enough for anything else, jaw stubborn and set. Can not happen, is what he means. Horror wants to tell him something else. He refuses to let it. He has to try.
Hickey tries force. The small of his back aches now where the butt of the gun rammed into it, and Crozier now is standing closer. Still, he shakes his head.
"Mr. Golding, stand up," Hickey says without a pause and, after a couple seconds' pause himself, the boy does.
The men at the table look at him. Look to him.
The wind whistles over the shale.
Crozier lifts his chin, teeth grinding together, he turns and stomps over, grabs the knife and stands a moment at Goodsir's feet, watching Hickey, and watching Hickey watching him. Defiance is the only thing that's going to carry him through. But he bends; he slides the knife under the sole of Goodsir's foot and cuts a slice off there. It's like skinning an apple.
He strides forward, knife in hand, slams the knife into the table. He stands with his feet spread. But Crozier can't eat it-- eat him -- with the defiance that he's done the rest. He has to close his eyes. He has to open them again. He has to eat.
One side of him is rough on Crozier's tongue. The other side is wet. Moist. He can feel a tooth starting to loosen in his mouth as he tries to chew.
He spreads his arms, looking at Hickey with his jaw moving. See? You've got what you wanted now? Defiance, even as he chews.
Eat of my feet. Only of my feet. The memory of it pushes him on. The saliva keeps filling up his mouth. There's only sensation now: The taste of meat over his tongue. The wind whistling over the shale. The sound of rocks sliding against one another some place far away, outside of this moment and over the hill.
Wow, took me a while, but finally: a reply!
The expedition was sent out many months ago: Sir John Richardson, John Rae of the Hudson's Bay Company, and a crew of twenty men. Their mission, as proposed by the Admiralty, had been to travel overland through the northern American continent, passing through Rupert's Land and into the North-Western Territory until they reached the Adelaide Peninsula. From this desolate base near the tip of continental North-Western British America, they would venture across the ice pack to the many rocky islands that lie sprinkled across the region, like grains of salt breaking up the treacherous coating of ice on a winter walking path. With luck, somewhere in the channels and bays around all of those islands they would find the Terror and the Erebus, stuck fast in a tomb of sea ice, their crews tired but healthy and waiting for their rescuers to meet them.
Of course, even if they found the long-lost Franklin Expedition, the Admiralty knew that no luck in the world could free their ships from a million-ton block of ice. For that, they'd sent along a Magician.
And so the Magician sits, small and unassuming, in the middle of a bouncing, rocking sledge, and listens to the porcelain shifting of the rocks. At the moment she is the only living person riding on the sledge, and she's so surrounded by canvas, boxes, trunks and piled provisions that she looks almost like another piece of luggage herself. Like most of the men around her she wears the uniform of the British Royal Navy, but this piece of identification is currently hidden under thick Inuit furs. For now, she's just a delicate lady, deeply incongruous in this unforgiving place where only the hardiest dare to go, adding her weight to the load and doing nothing to help her crew in return.
It would take a very sharp observer to notice that the sledge on which she sits - as well as the two sledges in front of her and the one behind - is moving more quickly over this uneven, rocky surface than should be the case. As if the clinking, sliding rocks below them are somehow flattening themselves out underneath their treads, or aligning themselves so that no sharp slate edges stick up from the ground to impede the sledges' progress. The trail is still bumpy and uncomfortable, but it isn't slow - and, perhaps more to the point, it isn't noisy.
Once the first sledges crest the hill, the men pulling them can see the strange scene laid out on the plain below them. A camp in dire straits: decrepit, wind-torn tents, an ancient blackened coal stove; a narrow bench made of recycled wood on which one figure lies, completely still; a bigger, longer table surrounded by six figures, with a seventh figure seated a few strides away in its own isolated corner; a figure standing between the bench and the table, arms thrown out as if to catch the wind and set sail. That wind is blowing southwest, pushing the smells of the camp - coal smoke, cooking meat - toward the sledge party on the hill. At the moment, no one in the camp can possibly hear or smell the newcomers - but perhaps, as all of the sledges stop and all of the men look down to see the objects of their long search - one or two of them can see them.
no subject
He looks. He sees what's up there on the hill, and he's never been the master of his own expressions. The defiance for Hickey, for the men watching, he can manage that because he can be it, can be the leader of men that he's needed to even with this smiling, satisfied man trying to take up authority that he hasn't earned for his own selfish ends. Crozier can be something, if these men need him to be it. But he can't not be something that he is. He can't not be surprised.
The noise there up at the top of the hill. Then Crozier's attention; all of it's on the taste inside his mouth, but he's facing this way. Even the men seated away from Goodsir are turned now to look at Crozier. So if Crozier had done something else, been someone else, maybe the rescue would have got the upper hand, and maybe things could have ended without any more blood. But Crozier is only what he is. He sees. His eyes widen. It doesn't occur to him to stop it, or the way the shock ripples out over the rest of his face after. And Hickey frowns. Hickey turns.
"Sergeant!" Hickey snaps. "Ready your men for attack!"
Five guns, the man displayed there behind him had said. Tozer. Manson. Armitage. Pilkington. Des Voeux. Five more men who might die here. And the others, in the crossfire -- Hopcraft, Daly, Diggle, Crispe, Hoar, Lane. Desperate men, who only want to live, who spent so long looking to him to lead them there--
"Rescue!" Crozier insists, ignoring the way Hickey whips his head around to scowl at him. "For rescue! If you want to live to see your homes again, put your guns down!"
"And be hanged as mutineers?" Hickey raises his eyebrows as he looks around at the others, confident again. "The Empire doesn't care about us! We'll face justice just for trying to survive! We know better, men. Sergeant! Your arms!"
Tozer looks at him, face hard. He takes a breath. "Men!" he shouts, turning, readying his gun. "Ready! Take your positions!"
Crozier looks to Diggle, Hodgson, eyes wide and jaw set. "Come on!" Crozier gestures to them, to the others, tries to usher anyone who's going to listen behind the gruesome spread on the table next to him, hoping they'll have the sense to get to cover in time, hoping it will be enough. "Get down!"
no subject
When the camp below them suddenly explodes into motion. Five figures grab for long shapes hanging off of their shoulders or down their backs - rifles, obviously - some of them having to scramble up from their seats at the table while doing so. They move without organization and there’s no sign of the strict group unison British soldiers are trained to maintain when readying their weapons, but they are nonetheless achieving the effect they apparently desire: in the blink of an eye, all five of them are on their feet, rifles in position, heads tilted to the side as they sight down their gun barrels and aim at the interlopers. There is a commotion among the other figures around them, noise, shouted phrases impossible to make out fully - “attack,” “rescue,” “guns down,” “Sergeant!” - and then several of the figures dive toward the ground just as one of their armed comrades cries out, loud and very clear now: “Ready! Take your positions! Fire!”
And there is the buzzing sound of bullets whizzing past the rescue party, and everyone is leaping aside and behind the sledges, and two men drop. Blood and screams spurt from both of them, but there’s no time to look and identify where they’ve been shot. “Men!” roars Richardson, “Rifles! Return fire!” But there’s no need to give the order: around them, six soldiers are already hefting their rifles and firing back. One man on the plain below them falls to the ground followed by a comet-tail of blood from somewhere on his torso and -
The magician stands up from her place in the sledge. She does not say a word, does not make a single gesture - but in the same heartbeat, the five rifles in the camp below them explode in gouts of actinic flame with a noise like a bomb strike. Mingled screams, blood splattering on the rocks and oily smoke bursting into the sky as if eager to get free of this place.
Five men on the ground. Three of them are rolling around in agony or to try and put out the fire on their clothes and flesh. One of them is still burning, but not moving. One has a growing dark puddle of blood where half of his head should be.
The ringing, echoing moment of silence that follows has the force of a thunderclap.
no subject
—and then all the rifles explode. Manson’s voice rises above the others, mindless with pain, and the man that loyal Manson’s skin is boiling for darts between the tents, in a line that’s probably more visible to Crozier from here than it is to their rescue. What was supposed to be their rescue.
There's nothing he can do about Hickey now. But maybe something he can do for the rest of them. “Hold!” Crozier shouts at the top of his voice, knowing his voice will carry up the hill and needing his words to be enough to count, to stop something. “Hold your fire! The rest of us are prisoners!”
Hodgson is scrabbling at fire spreading across his shoulder, breathing hard. He must have been caught in one of the blasts— the kind of explosions that only a magician could have conjured. It says something about how seriously their rescue’s being taken, that one of them was sent out here, and it doesn’t matter now.
“I’m going to come out!” he shouts, and edges out from cover, crouching, to move toward Hodgson and help him in throwing off his burning coat. “Don’t shoot!”
no subject
"Hands up, all of you!" Richardson shouts down toward the plain, voice raised now so that it echoes off the rocks. "I am Sir John Richardson of the British Admiralty. Where is Sir Franklin?"
Behind and around him, the other men in the rescue party continue to watch the reactions of the men on the plain. The sun glints off of their gold buttons and shines in white stripes down the polished leather of their boots. It doesn't need to be stated that they are looking for any more signs of resistance; they never expected to be attacked by the men they were meant to be rescuing in the first place, and now they are not certain if they can trust them. Given how still they remain, it's clear that none of them have noticed that at least one man in the camp has disappeared.
In her place on the sledge, the magician remains still and impassive. There is no way for those on the plain to know which member of their party is a magician, and no way for them to see that she is particularly out of place. She is not the only one among the rescue party draped in furs; the two Inuit guides who have led them here wear similar clothing, although they do not currently have their hoods up as she does. Just behind her, one man in the uniform of a commander steps forward, eyes scanning the camp for the leader of these men to come forward.
no subject
"Dead!" Crozier calls up the hill. He isn't looking as he does it; hands up is an order he's got no patience for. If they don't want him helping the three the magician hasn't yet killed, they're going to have to damn well shoot him. Still crouching, he moves over, Hodgson's charred coat still in hand. Hodgson has his hands up, looking toward the armed men up there with wide eyes, and when Crozier looks for help toward the men who'd managed shelter he finds them much the same. Golding's panting sounds like sobs; maybe he's hurt somewhere, or maybe he's just young and scared. Diggle's in no shape to move far, and Daly gives Crozier a guilty look.
But he can't blame them, can he? Not when salvation's waiting up there alongside the guns. What a horror would it be, to somehow survive all the rest only to be shot down now? "I'm in charge here!"
He starts patting at Manson's shoulder and his neck with the coat, pausing at the agonized noise Manson makes. Crozier puts his hand to the side of Manson's head, but he's too far gone for comfort now. Crozier looks up, eyes narrowed, trying to spot where Hickey's gone to. He can see... something. He doesn't know what. Movement. But this is desperate enough to be worth the risk of asking some of them up there to come down; he makes the choice, and takes the risk, looking up the hill again with his eyes squinted against the sun. "These men need help!"
no subject
"Who are you?" comes another loud, commanding voice from the rescue party. Richardson's second-in-command, Rae, has stepped forward to carry on the conversation. He squints down at the man who has said he is in charge - by his voice, it seems to be the same man who had declared that aside from the felled gunmen, the rest of the people in this small camp are prisoners. "Are you Crozier? Fitzjames?"
"Permission to approach and see to the wounded, sir?" asks a man on Rae's left, in an undertone. Rae nods curtly, but his gaze does not move; he scrutinizes the self-declared leader of the men below them as several of his party - a surgeon and three assistants - head quickly down the hill. A second surgeon steps forward toward the front of the rescue group to see to the two men of theirs who had been shot.
In the sledge, the Magician turns her head to look at the man in a commander's uniform next to her questioningly, but with the merest shake of his head he warns her to stay still. She will only be released to tend to the wounded when it's clear that no one is in any more danger of being attacked.
no subject
But he hears footsteps from the hill a moment later, and looks to see four men coming this way. He takes a bracing breath, strokes Manson's hair one more time, then moves to the man on the ground closest to him. This one is Sergeant Tozer, breathing hard and looking up at Crozier with what looks to be real sense, real focus. His jaw is clenched; his hand shakes as he tries to move it toward his wound. Crozier takes it and moves it for him, though against the charred cloth and skin it's hard to tell where the bullet went in. The blood spreading under his chest has put out some of the fire over his side but Crozier pats the coat at the remaining flames, the familiarity of the sight and smell of the burned men a horror that feels as flat and meaningless as the rest of the horrors that make up their lives here now.
He ought to answer that other question; the authority which governs their rescue will be expecting to hear his identity, his own authority, his credentials to it. But it's far more important, first, to make sure: "You've got a magician with you," Crozier tells one of the men coming toward him, insistently. They're paired, aren't they, they only work in pairs, but as his attention moves back and forth between the four he doesn't see anyone standing closer to the others, or who looks unusual at all. "Can he heal? Where is he?"
no subject
“Yes, sir,” says the lead man in the front group. And he’s certainly got the look of a medical man about him: the glasses, the thin fingerless gloves he wears despite the cold, and the calm, gentle tone of his voice are all haunting echoes of the other surgeon who lately cared for the men in this camp, and whose corpse is even now cooling not twenty feet away. He kneels down on Tozer’s other side, his gaze trained on the spreading red-brown flower of blood on his still-smoking clothes.
“I’m Henry Marion,” he continues. “I’m a surgeon, and so are Mr. Rae and Mr. Levi up there, and Lord Richardson is a doctor. We can take a look at what the damage is here, sir, and then see if our magician can do anything to help.” As he speaks, he motions to one of his assistants, who opens the surgeon’s toolkit and pulls out a heavy looking pair of scissors. Marion takes them and deftly begins cutting into Tozer’s jacket - it may be a waste of a cloth, but it’s the least painful way to access the bullet wound underneath.
“Your name, sir,” comes the impatient voice of Rae from up on the hill. No one else from the rescue party has moved any closer: they’re unwilling to leave this high ground until they know who they are talking to.
“The rest of you, come out and stand behind your captain where we can see you,” Rae adds, making a sweeping gesture with his hand to encompass the men who are still hiding.
no subject
"Captain Crozier!" he shouts impatiently over his shoulder, then looks to the men with their hands still up. "Calmly now," he murmurs to them. "Go slow. No sudden movements, do you understand?" He gets a single frightened nod and he nods back more confidently, making eye contact with all of them. He glances over the bodies, ducking to the still one to put his fire out, just in case, but-- no. No, and this one's Armitage, which means the one with his head blown half-off must be Pilkington. Crozier sighs and then stands up slowly, hands raised up into the air. Hickey must be hiding, waiting for the lot of them to move on. If Crozier alerts them now, for one thing they'll leave the injured. For another, Hickey will be forced to act, and if there's one thing Crozier doesn't doubt it's that man's capacity for cruelty in the face of any other choice.
"Can we move them?" Crozier asks the surgeon, trying to stand ahead of his men, who seem reluctant to walk too far past him in fear of those shouted orders. Will the rescuers abandon them if they know about Hickey? If they notice Goodsir's body? For a million other reasons the heavy hand of fate simply hasn't heaped over them yet? Best to leave here quickly, if they can. "This is no place for wounded men."
no subject
"Captain Crozier, we need a report on your current situation," Rae calls down. "Come forward, and your men will stay where they are." He begins making his own way down the hill to meet him as the soldiers fan out to either side, moving to encircle the camp.
"We can do it, sir," says Marion to Crozier in a gentle undertone. He's already got Tozer's jacket and shirt cut open so that he can see down to the skin; blood is pooling in the region of his sternum, which is sunken and hollowed out from his long months of starvation, and every panicked rise and fall of his chest looks painful. "We'll see to the wounded while you go and talk to Mr. Rae."
Behind Marion, his assistants are taking quick stock of Des Voeux and Manson. The men who carried the surgeon's kit down are already dashing back up the hill for more supplies. Eventually, someone is sure to take a look at Goodsir and notice the state of his body. Or someone will run into Hickey. Up on top of the hill, Richardson is talking inaudibly to the rest of his group, who have not yet moved to help.
no subject
Armed men come down from the hill and move to spread out around the camp. Crozier starts moving toward the hill, ready to convince these men to help. A choked noise comes from the other end of camp and Crozier's attention snaps toward it. The place he'd seen movement before, damn it, it must be Hickey, but before he can warn anyone one of the other soldiers lets out a shocked cry.
no subject
"My God, Mr. Rae, come -"
Which is as far as he gets before he's cut off by a cry.
Then, as before, the already overly-tense camp erupts into chaos at the disturbance. There's a gunshot - another scream, this one of real pain rather than shock - the remaining men of the mutineers' camp let their raised arms drop and dive for cover again, no longer heedful of their rescuers' orders - the heavy whump of a body falling to the ground at speed behind one of the tents - and then a heart-stopping roar.
From his high vantage point on top of the hill, Richardson can see it as it comes into view over the ridge behind the furthest tent, mouth already bloody with a kill, loping and white like a polar bear but impossibly bigger, twisted and with the wrong bone structure, impossibly, monstrously wrong.
"Marines, return fire!" He yells, voice amplified by his own shock. "Men, up the hill, retreat!"
no subject
"Do not return fire!" He throws his arm out toward the marines that he can see, toward the man who'd been walking down closer to him. It's contradicting the order of an officer to his men; it's saving their lives. Those shots aren't going to do any more than attract the thing's attention. "Do not run! Magician!"
Crozier looks back and forth over the men up at the top of the hill, not knowing who he's talking to, but knowing he must be there somewhere. Someone who can do what all this time his men have been dying without: "Hide us, hide us!"
no subject
"What - what is that-?" Rae starts to ask, rooted in place not two yards in front of Crozier, but he's cut off by another scream. There's a strange, organic noise, like someone biting into a ripe peach - and then they can all see it: an enormous creature, four-footed and broad-shouldered like a bear, but its face is the wrong shape, its ears too small and its jaw too short and its eyes - its eyes like those of a man, deep-set under jutting brow ridges, black and dead, reflecting no light. In its enormous mouth is one of the marines - or at least, the head, torso and one arm of a marine, cut off just under the rib cage with a bloody spinal column poking out of the end of it like a tail. For a moment it rears up on its hind legs, perhaps ten, twelve feet tall, and with one paw it bats at the nearest tent, flattening it without an effort.
Up on the hill, Richardson looks absolutely stunned, his mouth open to yell another order but no sound coming forth. Several of the men around him look similarly frozen, but the two Inuit who have been standing toward the back of the rescue group are more practical. One of them yells something in Netsilik, and the other grabs Richardson by the shoulder and yanks him down behind a sledge.
no subject
"A man called Cornelius Hickey--" comes a familiar steady, confident shout, out from the din. It hardly carries over the screams but Hickey makes it stand out anyway, walking forward out from the maze of tents, arms spread. "--told me this expedition would be a year in the polar sea! Then out the other side to the Sandwich Islands, other side of the world! 'One year's nothing', I thought. So I dabbed him and left him in Regent's canal! And here I am instead! No one told me I’d be freezing to death three bloody years instead. But I’ve learnt what I needed to. So bugger London. Bugger Nelson. Bugger Jesus! Bugger Joseph, bugger Mary! Bugger the Archbishop of Canterbury! None ever wanted nothing from me! I'm here! I'm here! See me!"
He doesn't seem to be talking to any of them, at the end. He's looking at the back end of the tuunbaq. In one hand, he raises a knife-- the other hand goes to his mouth.
no subject
The men of the rescue party are screaming now, all of them plunging at once into the small spaces of cover afforded by their sledges. It looks like a scrum at a ball game, flailing arms and legs, men being thrown bodily out of the way by one another, one sledge being knocked over entirely by competing forces trying to shelter behind it. Exactly the type of movement to entice the predator that they are desperate to avoid -
When a loud, clear voice carries up from the middle of the camp. For a second it looks like the creature is not paying it any special attention; its too-small ears twitch as it bears down upon one of Marion's assistants, pinning him to the stones with one paw - but then, abruptly, it whips its head around toward the lone, still and unsheltered figure behind it. As if, despite every appearance of shallow, uncomprehending animal intellect, it has heard Hickey and obeyed him. It turns its massive body around, leaving its erstwhile victim pierced through but not consumed - and sees Hickey.
Hickey is no longer talking. He's got his mouth open, his tongue out and held by the forefinger and thumb of one hand while the other hand begins to saw at it savagely. Blood spurts once, then drips, then gushes down his hand, his wrist, dripping off his forearm in an unbroken dark red thread toward the ground. The bear-thing pads closer, silent once again as if its feet do not actually touch the stones on which they stand. It sniffs, chuffs questioningly. Hickey has started to scream in pain as he works now, but it doesn't seem to mind the noise. It approaches, lowering its head so that it can regard Hickey at eye-level.
Now, for the first time, it is truly visible to everyone who is still able to watch it. It doesn't behave like a normal animal, doesn't look like any creature of the natural world. But now, as it stands still and fully apparent under the Arctic sun, it is impossible for any man present to deny that it is a thing of matter, a thing that is real and tangible and alive. It smells of heavy, wet fur and the unmentionable gore of its victims; it casts a shadow eight feet long, although the sun is not low in the sky; it seems to exude cold and damp, not as a breeze but simply as a miasma rising off the yellow-white hedge of fur at the ridge of its back and suffusing the air all around the camp; its sides move in and out as it breathes. Now, it is also apparent that the thing is not entirely unstoppable or immune to damage. There is a long, raw-red wound across its withers and down the right side of his back, dirty fur clotted inside the injury and a crust of black blood all around its perimeter, sometimes merging with blisters scattered around the outskirts. Much of the fur all along its right side is not in fact white but instead a mottled mix of grey and charcoally black. The injury is clearly a burn, either from Blanky's oil lamp or Fitzjames's Congreve rocket. The continued attacks of the men have harmed it, just like any animal of flesh and blood. But they haven't stopped it. They probably don't have a hope of killing it.
And now Hickey, groaning in pain but resolute in his actions, has finished his grisly task. Calmly, hands hardly shaking, he holds out one blood-soaked hand toward the creature's face. The lump of meat resting on his palm must be his tongue; his mouth and chin and chest are running with blood from the root of it still in his mouth.
The creature huffs. Sniffs carefully, almost delicately at Hickey's offering, like a picky child deciding whether or not to accept his dinner. Hickey's eyes are shining and staring straight into its face. There is almost complete silence for three heartbeats.
And then it bites down. Not on the tongue, but on Hickey's whole arm. His expression turns briefly to one of shock, but there's no time for anything else. With an almost careless tilt of its head, the creature releases the stump of Hickey's arm and bites him round the middle instead. There's the beginning of a scream, truncated as it snaps him in half.
Bedlam again: everyone in the camp, the lost crew and their rescuers, are certain now that there is no hope for them. It has killed Hickey, and there is nothing stopping it killing them as an afterthought. The only people left on the hill who have not tried to take cover are the fur-cloaked figure in the sledge and the soldier in a commander's uniform next to them. From somewhere to their left, Richardson can just be heard shouting, finally, an echo of Crozier's orders: "Hide us, Hide us now!" The commander nods to his comrade in the sledge and puts an arm on their shoulder.
The ground shakes, shudders as if in a distant earthquake. Men check their balance and cling to the sledges behind which they hide; one of the injured men cries out and holds a hand over his wound to protect it. The shaking grows more intense, rocks start cascading down the hill and the scent of rockdust permeates the already iron-smelling air. The creature looks up from the remains of Hickey, its face covered in red, apparently confused. The shaking hits a crescendo and one of the sledges actually starts moving down the hill despite the men behind it trying to hold it back -
And a spear of rock erupts out of the ground right between Hickey's body and the nearest hiding men. Then another, then another, in a row like teeth in the mouth of a shark. They are not touching either the creature or the men as they grow taller and taller out of the ground, not hurting anyone - but they begin to form a curving line, like a barbed fence cutting the creature off from the remaining men. The ground heaves like the ocean, groaning and roaring low enough to vibrate the men's bones, like the strongest earthquake any of them have ever felt; someone scrambles out of the way as a spike of black shale breaks right through the top of a tent and sends its support beams crashing to the ground. The creature whips around to escape the wall of spikes, but it's too late - it is encircled now by what looks like several hundred of the most unlikely rock formations in the world. It roars and throws itself at the bars of its prison, but they have grown too close together for it to fit through: unlike the mutineers' camp, the spikes seem to act as a barrier to its movement.
no subject
"Move!" Crozier calls, tone commanding. "Get the wounded! Then go, while we still can!" He strides toward the largest body, Manson, who he can tell is still alive by his moaning. But the remains of his own men seem more enamoured with the latter command than the former; go while we still can is obeyed with enthusiasm. Crozier watches them, dismayed, and then his expression hardens and he bends to get to it on his own. He begins pulling Manson's shoulder upward, not certain yet what he's going to do with it or with the whole of the man after. Head swimming and body feeling like it's moving through molasses stopped being strange a long time ago, even for the healthiest of them, but someone else to lift up Manson's other side would help.
no subject
But not everyone is so callous. Rae, who has been standing completely still on the hillside since the creature first made its presence known, snaps back into action at the same time. He gives the impression of having been frozen in place not out of shock alone, but also because he was following a protocol: perhaps he knows that standing still is what you do when ambushed by a polar bear.
“Carter, Robertson!” He shouts, sharp and decisive. “Come back and help these men. Now!” The tone suggests that the consequences of disobeying this command will be heavy indeed. And with slightly shame-faced expressions, the two men who had been running up the hill past him turn around and scramble back down as quickly as they can. One scoops up Tozer, who cries out in pain as the bullet wound inside of him is jarred by the movement (although he hangs onto his rescuer desperately with both hands nonetheless), and the other ducks under Manson’s other arm and wraps it around his shoulders to help Crozier lift him. This particular man’s expression changes once he’s in touching distance: he looks almost as wary of being close to Manson and Crozier as he was of being close to a giant bear-monster. It makes some sense: he’s the one who was calling for Rae to come and look at Goodsir’s body before the attack.
As Tozer and Manson are helped up, Rae jogs back down the hill past them, briefly kneels down to check on Armitage before deciding that he is too dead to be rescued - he doesn’t even spare a glance for Pilkington and his half-destroyed head - and then hurries right back up the hill again until he reaches Des Voeux. From the sound of his weak groaning as Rae pulls him up, Des Voeux is still alive, incredibly. Rae moves fast and nimbly, and he’s gone much further than Crozier, Manson, and their unwilling assistant could move in thirty seconds, but he has to slow considerably once he’s weighed down by De Voeux.
“Get them into the sledges,” commands Richardson as the wounded start reaching the top of the hill. “We can see to their injuries once we’ve put some distance between us and this place.” Next to him, Diggle is already being laid flat in the bottom of one sledge while Hodgson is gingerly stepping into another, heavily favoring his right side.
no subject
Grimacing, Crozier tries for a moment to make sure Manson's not going to be jostled too badly. Then he stands, eyes darting around to try and see how the sledges are being pulled. If with men, maybe there's a spot for him at one. It's hard to tell; these aren't his men, these aren't his sledges. He knows both of those without looking at them, as easily as he knows the back of his hand. But these ones are new. He sets a hand on the edge of the sledge next to him, to help hold him up while he figures it out.
no subject
“Are you well enough to walk, Captain Crozier?” he asks. Like the magician but unlike most of the rest of his team, he too has incorporated Inuit-style fur clothing into his uniform. His head and neck are kept warm by a thick caribou hide hood and both his gloves and his boots are made of grey seal skin. He can probably only get away with this nonconformist mode of dress because he is one of the commanders of this mission - but he does look much warmer than most of his colleagues. He taps the side of the sledge that Crozier is currently holding onto. “If you need to rest, we can ride in here for a time.”
His use of the word we is telling. Even in their haste to get away from their supernatural attacker, Richardson and Rae are not about to let Crozier get away without giving them a full report on what has happened to him and his crew.
no subject
"I can walk," Crozier confirms tiredly, meaning it because he's still standing, and unwilling to give any of the men any more work than they're already going to have hauling the injured. Maybe these men don't need that consideration in the same way his own do; it's too much work, now, to change those habits that the long trek has long since built in. For the moment, he can walk. "My camp is southeast."
He looks around, finding the direction, and takes a bracing breath. The possibility of questioning is far from his mind but the idea of rescue does still mean something. It has to. "You're here for us? I admit, I wasn't sure whether to expect something so soon. When did you set out?"
no subject
“We’re headed southeast,” he tells the group. “There’s another camp of them out that way.”
Richardson, who wears his naval issue captain’s uniform with all of the starch and correctitude that Rae’s uniform lacks, raises his eyebrows questioningly at Crozier but does not pass comment. If he wonders why exactly Crozier has been held prisoner at a camp that doesn’t belong to him, he doesn’t ask.
“Southeast, then,” he says. He nods to a nearby marine, who, though still white-faced with shock after seeing his his fellow soldiers’ deaths, follows the unspoken order with alacrity. He heads off to where he can easily be seen by the men manning all of the sledges and begins shouting the commands to prepare to march.
“Yes, we are here for you,” says Rae as the men get into formation, lean forward and start hauling their loads, as if there had been no interruption in his conversation with Crozier. As they start treading toward the front of the caravan alongside the first sledge, he falls in on one side of Crozier and Richardson moves to walk just ahead. “We set out a few months back, but we were given this mission almost a year ago. The Admiralty received word that it was unusually cold up here for the last two summers, you see, so they surmised that the pack ice never melted for you.”
Far behind them, there is another earthshaking roar from the imprisoned beast that they are leaving behind. The sledges set out with haste.
no subject
He brings himself back to the here and now with a sigh. "We'll have sick at my camp. Scurvy, and related maladies -- Mr. Bridgens will be able to tell you more once we arrive. He's been-- he was helping Dr. Goodsir. He'll be able to tell you who needs what, but if you've lemon juice anywhere in these sledges you'll be doing a lot of men a lot of good."
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:if she wouldn't let him grab her wrists let me know
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From:...
From: