Work Text:
Cornwall, 1892
It was a Cornish summer day: cool compared to the desultory stink of London, and cooler still at Heligan, where the lushness of the gardens could defeat any real attempt at heat.
'Sweltering today, isn't it?' Merrick said to Keita at the table as they settled in for supper. They were in the kitchens eating like old bachelors, kicking at one another's feet. The proper formal dining table upstairs, which stretched what felt like an acre, was used only during Christmases.
'You should never have been naturalised to English weather,' was Keita's response. He was setting out tea, or rather teas: a decade spent in London had done nothing to convince him that tea the way someone British took it was worth drinking. In the years that Merrick had been away in Peru, Keita'd amassed a small collection of Japanese housewares at Heligan for when he'd use it over the summers to flee London, and Merrick liked seeing the things tucked away amongst the other bits of crockery. He accepted the mug that Keita put, with silent friendly disdain, on his side of the table, and was glad that the man had fled here this year again.
Merrick had been thinking a lot about legacies of late, precipitated by a number of things. He'd re-done his will, something which had become a yearly ritual ever since he'd inherited Heligan, but this year it'd put him in a thoughtful mood. Merrick had had a brief scare on his last trip back from India, a severe fever that had got bad enough that the ship's doctor – a grizzled Company veteran – had been worried. He'd come out of it all right in the end, but it'd been a reminder of his own mortality. Merrick was at the sort of age that most active Companymen didn't get to. Those contemporaries of his who had lasted were all slowly transforming into Sings of their own variety: men who rode desks instead of ships. Merrick had no plans to stop his back-and-forths; if his mother were still alive she might have gone a little bit madder to hear how her son was now repeating her husband's biannual trips to South America.
Things had come full circle, Merrick mused; the future was catching up to the past. The heartwood in the Himalayas was finally maturing – that was why he had been in India – and he was getting older. He was the last of the Tremaynes. The thought of the line ending with him had never bothered him, and Merrick still had no cares for the name dying out, but now it itched a little. There wouldn't be anyone after him to pick up the thread of history that his family'd been part of for three generations.
Merrick, lost in thought, was almost startled when Keita said, apropos of nothing, 'It's about time you quit the India Office.'
Merrick blinked, came back to the present, and lifted his mug to his lips. 'You were a lot less annoying last year,' he said to Keita cautiously. 'Back when you stopped plucking things out of my head for a little while.'
Keita lifted one shoulder in a shrug. He really was marvellous in middle age: if Merrick hadn't known him as a child, he'd be intimidated by the baronial cloak that now fit properly around Keita's still-delicate shoulders. 'It's just that you're easy to read.'
'I haven't told anyone,' Merrick felt obliged to point out. 'Not even Sing.'
'You're not getting any younger,' Keita retorted, but he smiled afterwards to soften the blow even before Merrick could wince. 'You'll be richer than I am, soon enough. There'll be no need for Company contract work. That's why you're here in England, aren't you? To settle affairs?' He arched an eyebrow, but the effect was spoiled by the laugh lines that had engraved themselves around his eyes over the last year: Keita metamorphosing.
'Oh yes,' grumbled Merrick. 'Tell me why I'm in England, why don't you? Sometimes I wonder how you're not a spy.'
'I don't work for other people,' Keita said, solemn and serious suddenly as he had been as a child. 'It's been difficult enough managing my own problems.' He looked off to the side for a moment, frowning as he did so, then looked back at Merrick. 'I didn't lame you to make you rich; I did it so that–'
'Keita,' Merrick cut him off before he could finish. 'Shut up.'
Obedient for once, Keita shut his mouth. Merrick had a sudden sense that he was one of very few people in the world who could make Keita do that, and that Keita needed sometimes to have it done to him. He wondered, not for the first time, what might have happened if Keita had come back to England with him instead of returning to Japan, back when everything had fallen to bits. He didn't say it aloud. Keita tapped the table with his fingers a few times, a complicated look on his face, but did not comment either.
Merrick picked up his fork and knife and set his elbows on the table. An idea formed in his head, nebulous. 'My open invitation to South America: would you like to take it this summer?'
Keita picked up his own utensils; in his hands they seemed like tools of surgical precision. 'I am currently at loose ends,' he allowed. Keita's companion was a musician who'd recently come into some fame and was on tour performing; he'd even stolen Cecily as a piano soloist for the current leg. It had left Keita and Merrick both on their own for the holidays.
'Then it's settled,' Merrick said firmly, turning to his meal. 'It won't take us much more than the summer to get there and back again if you don't want to stay too long, but I should like to get us out of the heat.'
Merrick saw Keita consider the thousands of miles that lay between England and Peru, focusing hard for a while. 'Ah,' Keita said eventually, blinking rapidly as if clearing his vision.
'Pack something warm,' Merrick advised. 'We'll leave at sundown.'
The next evening, Keita met him at the back of the big house, a small valise at his feet. Merrick himself had not much either, just some things in a rucksack. He grinned to see how similarly they'd packed; he couldn't guess if Keita was used to travelling light as he was, or just used to not having to worry about acquiring whatever he needed wherever he was going. It could very well have been both.
Merrick nodded at the path leading down towards the hangar that had been built a little ways away. It was a ruddy great thing, like a wooden barn of exaggerated scale, but it'd been necessary to keep – quite literally – a lid on things.
'Whitehall grumbled at me plenty for this,' Merrick said as he worked on unlocking the first of several devices that kept the hangar secure. 'But I'd had Sing do up the legal rights for my portion of the whitewood plantation from the start, and nothing that man writes is anything short of watertight.' The locks undone, Merrick hauled one of the hangar doors towards the side. Both doors opened in tandem, gliding back on oiled wheel tracks. Pollen bulbs glowed down from where they were anchored in arrays in the rafters. They cast warm, flickering shadows over the gleaming hull of the whitewood ship that was moored below.
'I know you didn't push me overboard all those years ago to make me rich,' Merrick said to Keita as he watched the man inspect it in the relative gloom. 'I can guess that you didn't go back to Japan two years ago for nothing, either: not when the world's starting to get electrified.' Merrick pulled on the lever that activated the electrics: the filamented bulbs that had been wired in next to the pollen lamps fired up and shot the space through with light. The ship's sails burned white under their glare.
Keita walked in a full circle around the ship before he let himself lay a hand on it. Merrick watched him stroke the smooth line of the hull with the sort of appreciation that a craftsman had at seeing a piece of work finely executed. The whole hangar smelled of beeswax; naval engineers had had their own ideas about how to seal up an airship, but Merrick hadn't bothered to find out what those were. 'I'm sure Whitehall is busy working out how to put great big electric generators on for better steering and speed,' Merrick said, walking up to join Keita. 'But we'll go the slightly old-fashioned way. The future will catch up with us soon enough.'
Keita put a hand on the rope ladder leading up to the deck. 'No time like the present,' he agreed.
The flight to Peru was by no means trivial; they had to be cautious and take their time. They picked up a crew from Whitehall on the way out, hovering on the outskirts of London in the pitch black of night as a system of ballast weights was used to get them low enough for the men to climb on board. Many engineers and navigators had, over the course of some very precious experiments with the first mature batches of the heartwood, put a lot of time and effort into deciphering the art and science of this new form of sailing, but every long journey was still a significant undertaking; Whitehall and the India Office were both eager to train up crews.
Still, it would be a generation or more before there would be enough mature plantations for the British empire – nevermind the world – to have a proper fleet, but the door had been kicked open and it was never going to be shut again.
'I'm not sure if I'm glad or not that I won't be around to see it,' Merrick said to Keita, leaning over the side of the ship and looking down at the world below.
'There will be other witnesses,' Keita said, leaning briefly into his side. In the cold, thin air, he felt incredibly warm.
Merrick, taken aback by the phenomenally uncharacteristic physical contact, took a moment to grasp the man's meaning. 'Yes,' he agreed eventually, heart in his throat. Three generations of Tremaynes in Bedlam would end with him, but... Merrick leaned into Keita in turn, tilting his body so that Keita was pressed against his chest; it was almost the way they'd used to sit together on ships when Keita had been a boy, almost his boy.
Gazing up at the mostly-fixed stars above, Merrick waited for Keita to pull away. When he didn't, Merrick said, 'There will be, won't there? This year, I've brought you. Next year, I'll bring Cecily.'
Keita hummed instead of replying. The whistling wind stole most of it away, but Merrick caught phrases of a melody he'd heard Cecily practicing before.
'I was sick for a while last year,' Keita said to Merrick in the darkness of their shared private berth later that night. 'I've never had a very good memory, but while I was ill it was easier to remember things I'd once known. I'm usually too busy forgetting things that might have happened.'
Merrick laid both his hands over his stomach, feeling it rise and fall as he breathed. It was pleasant, laying flat on a bunk bed instead of hanging bent in half in a hammock. He made an affirming noise, the way Keita sometimes did to indicate go on.
'Turns out I have quite a good memory when my head's not full of other things,' Keita went on. 'I remembered old tax receipts. I remembered how sad I'd felt on that ship at Canton, and why.'
'Oh?'
'If I'd stayed with you, I'd have spoken with an awful Bristol accent and spent a lot of time designing clockwork flower clocks.'
'It's not a flower clock if it's made of clockwork.'
'Shush. The point is, I might not have been as happy as I am now – but I had a far higher probability of having been much less miserable with you at Heligan than doing almost anything else.'
'Don't be dramatic.'
'I'm not.'
Merrick huffed. 'I get the feeling Charles would've ended up dead a lot earlier if you had, so maybe it worked out in the end that you never became something of an adopted Tremayne.'
He heard Keita huff in turn. 'Most people think I'm a monster.'
Merrick shrugged even though he knew Keita couldn't see him. 'Most people haven't worked for the Company. I don't care for throwing stones.'
Keita was quiet. Merrick tapped his fingers against one another, then turned his head on his pillow and made himself comfortable. 'I'm glad you risked whatever it is you did and ended up the way you are, Keita. Even if you do sound horrendously northern.'
They didn't need to cross the salt at Bedlam: Raphael was there in the churchyard when they arrived, waiting by the tapestry wall. Aquila had put up an extension of the roof that jutted out a metre or so from one of the church's sides. Underneath it, he'd hung up racks of string for the markayuq to use: over the years it was coming to form quite a tapestry.
Keita reached for most recently knotted of the strings. Merrick watched him run his beautifully jointed fingers slowly down them, his thumb coming up to stroke the ends of sentences.
Raphael watched very closely.
Keita's thumbnail caught on one of the knots. Merrick watched, feeling breathless for reasons beside the altitude, as Keita worried at it for one moment. Then air rushed back into his lungs as he watched Keita's quick fingers flick the thread back and forth, writing a message in a language he was now remembering.
Merrick stood in between the two others, feeling vertigo for the first time in years: he wasn't sure if he was introducing some past part of him to his future or some future part of him to his past. Merrick was sixty-three this year; Keita was fifteen years younger than him and Raphael two generations older, and yet they'd come into his life from opposite ends and left him anchored somewhere in the middle.
It didn't, Merrick figured, ultimately matter. Time, in its own way, liked to circle in on itself. So he pushed his boat out onto Time's river instead of having to be pushed overboard this time, said, 'Keita, this is Raphael; Raphael, this is Baron Keita Mori,' and let the current take them.