Work Text:
A quiet ambiance was a strange thing to have aboard a ship. Any ship, really, let alone one so crowded as the Terror. Yet, this was exactly what Sir Franklin felt, sitting in his quarters and staring out at one stubbornly burning oil lamp which created more shadows than light. It was the first day of a new year, January 1st 1846, and they should have been rejoicing. Aboard his Erebus there certainly seemed to have been merriment aplenty, but Terror was a different matter. All had been quiet from the other shio They had something that Erebus did not: they had a dying man aboard.
Young Torrington, as green as the first sweet grasses of spring, had begun coughing a few months into their voyage. They'd all simply blamed the coal dust that he, as head stoker, was constantly having to breathe, even though he'd not had to do very much actual stoking. Even Torrington himself had jested that he was finally growing into his craft, being only nineteen years old and barely a man, let alone a labourer. They'd teased him with this when he turned twenty. They'd stopped teasing when he'd first coughed blood. Sir John had watched with deep sorrow how the young lad had gone from strapping and strong to emaciated in a few months, until he was hardly more than a skeleton. Last he'd been up had been Christmas, and even that had been regarded as a bit of a miracle. He'd eaten a little to humour the others, but his smile had been as hollow as his eyes. Sir John had not seen him since, but he could tell from the way Crozier's face darkened every time he asked that there were no favourable news to be earned. The mood aboard the Terror was subdued, expectant. Even aboard the Erebus there was the quiet of waiting, a feeling that Sir John knew well. It would be the first death, the end of all optimism by denial, and not the final death they'd see. Only few on the expedition were veterans of this landscape, but they all knew what this meant. The first death. And for it to be their youngest man...
Sir John Rose abruptly from his chair, and began to pace, both to try and keep warm, and to attempt relieving the restlessness settling into his body. He had to do something; anything. His crew were mostly sleeping, he'd let them drink the night before, and drunk they had. Only a skeleton crew on watch... and a dying man on the Terror.
He would visit Torrington. He had to see him.
Unable to really bundle up any further than he already was, Sir John left his quarters and went above deck, sparing a little greeting to the watchman, and the explanation that he would visit Captain Crozier to wish him a happy new year. Then he climbed down onto the ice.
The chill hit him like a striking snake, cutting through the thick soles of his boots smoother than a knife, but he knew it by now and only shivered briefly before beginning his short walk. It was the pit of winter; dark, cold and hauntingly beautiful - the sort of beauty that is just looking for a chance to kill you. From afar he heard the ice singing, as it cracked and creaked against the extreme pressure of its own sheer mass. He felt the vibrations travel from his feet all the way up his legs, and out his fingertips. There was a magic here, the most lethal magic that you could imagine.
And then he arrived, and stepped aboard the Terror, much to the surprise of the wide-eyed watch aboard. An air of nervous expectancy lay over the ship, infecting even Sir John, who secretly thought himself one of the steadies men on the expedition. But then, he was known for bring wrong on that account.
Crozier didn't show much surprise when his superior came to call, mostly he showed weariness. It was obvious that he wasn't in the mood for talking, and Sir John was happy enough to leave him to his brooding and head deeper into the bowel of the ship.
In a corner by the large boiler lay a huddle of blankets and furs. Down here it was just a little warmer than in the rest of the ship, though truth be told it didn't make much of a difference, and by no means was it anything but icy cold. Sir John almost missed him entirely, but when the huddle shivered, he realised that it was a person. There lay John Torrington, so thin that he was almost unnoticeable in the room, and so pale that when Sir John gently moved the bit of blanket covering his face, he could've sworn the lad was already dead. But Torrington opened his arresting blue eyes and looked right at his commander.
"Sir..." had he been any less endlessly weak, the stoker might've tried to sit up, but as it was now he barely even had the air to whisper, let alone move.
Sir John smiled softly and stuffed the blankets a little tighter around the man, "Hush, don't speak -"
"I must... Sir..." whispered Torrington, the words barely audible as he hissed them out past blue lips, "You mustn't... grieve for me."
That was far too much to ask, already Sir John felt his eyes watering, and his throat closing up. He knew this look on a man's face, the hazy clarity of Torrington's eyes told him everything. It was time. "Whyever not, my lad? Surely you know that you will be mourned." There was no reason to lie, or try to make false hope. Sir John knew. Torrington himself clearly knew, too.
"No need... I'm going... to see mam." There was a smile on the young man's face, a blissful one. Torrington was here, and yet not quite here. Perhaps he was already halfway in the beyond. "Beautiful, beautiful... mam. I wish you could... see her, sir. She was the most... beautiful..." here he stopped, and only stared out into nothing, still with that smile.
Sir John swallowed hard against a lump in his throat, and without thinking he reached out to stroke Torrington's long brown hair. A slender hand took his own.
"Look, Sir." whispered the lad, his eyes wide, "There she is." Pointing into nothing, he would not relent until Sir John had looked at the thin air into which he was staring.
"Yes." He said, "I see her. Truly she is beautiful." The first tear ran, then the second, and the third. "Go to her, John. I'm sure she misses you."
Now Torrington, too, wept. "I missed... her... too. My beautiful mam." He hadn't the strength to hold up his arm any longer, and it dropped to his side as he slowly sunk into delirium. "Mam... mam..."
Sitting beside him, Sir John watched through tear-blinded eyes how his eyes kept staring, until they no longer were.
And he wept bitter tears, alone in the depths of Erebus, over the body of a young man who never really got to be a man at all. The youngest had died, the oldest remained.
"Thus passes John Shaw Torrington of Manchester." He croaked through the tears. "In his twentieth year on this earth. God rest his soul."