Dangerous Company - New Fic!
A huge thank you to @helloliriels for the stunning cover art created for #FTH2026 to go with this story. Our fandom is so lucky to have artists of this calibre! BIG LOVE TO YOU!
I will post a chapter each day (there are 14) and they will also go up on AO3 as well.
The first time I encountered him was the night before I deployed. Whisky-laden and uneasy, my judgement was no doubt questionable, but even then, there was no mistaking the colour of those eyes. In the dim, flickering candle light, I somehow instinctively recognised they were the wildest blue-green hue like the sea right before a storm takes hold. I’d seen nothing like them before. They seemed to bore a hole right through the centre of my chest and took hold in my brain at the very same time. How it was possible I could not tell you. I was transfixed, reminded instantly of my last visit to my grandmother’s home in Aberdeen, when I would sit on the rocky hill, watching the ships as they were tossed about in rough seas, bringing the soldiers home from battle. Back when my own dreams of becoming a soldier first took hold. I could not have invented those eyes in my own imagination. As they glared through me from across the bar, my heart leapt in my chest as if he was controlling the very rhythm of my atria and ventricles. He drew me to him, urging me closer. Yet, before I could even get off my stool to move, he had vanished just as if he had never been there.
Time to go to bed, Watson, I admonished myself. At the time, I assumed it was the drink that was responsible for the strange encounter.
The rock-hard mattress upstairs in my pub lodgings were not in any way conducive to sleeping but it was all my meagre coin could afford me before boarding the ship to head off to battle and I put the strange occurrence out of my mind.
The second time we crossed paths was on the battlefield. When I was shot in fact. In the midst of the Second Anglo-Afghan War, at the Battle of Maiwand, as I tended to the wounded. There I was, a surgeon trying to heal the injured, when I was shot by a bloody jezail bullet, right through the shoulder; or so the tale was recounted to me after the fact. One minute I was upright and the next, I was staring up at a sky, grey with clouds and surrounded by smoke, explosions and shouting. All muffled around me as my body processed the shock. I wasn’t sure how long I lay there but suddenly those eyes came swiftly into focus. Those sea-glass eyes, crazed with concern and fear, instantly above me.
I’ve been told that pain and shock create the strangest of coping mechanisms. I have heard many an unusual tale from soldiers in their beds – parents or siblings that have visited from across the seas, long dead relatives, impossible visions that men recall with unmitigated seriousness. Of course none of it is true. I suspect whatever inebriated vision I had in that pub, manifested out of a fear of going to war, had visited me again as I lay bleeding out on the field awaiting my death. Probably my hippocampus - my younger self, remembering the proud desire for battle - invented him entirely to begin with. His dark, beautiful curls framing that pale perfect skin which made those eyes all the more alluring and those bowed lips... Lord, he was a magnificent sight. If I was dying, it wasn’t a bad way to leave this earth, that was for sure. My breathing slowed and I felt an incredible calm come over me that he had found me again. I closed my eyes and I was sure I felt a gentle, cold hand touch my cheek.
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