Work Text:
i.
He can taste blood, copper and sour in the corner of his mouth. “Well,” says Tintin—just that. He sits on one of the crates in the corner of the small storage room as Interpol floods inside, trying to remain well out of way, and also because his legs feel weak. The wall is so cool against the back of his neck.
He watches them pull Frank Kovac up by his elbow; he watches Kovac sink back to the concrete, then try to raise his head. Maybe I hit him too hard, Tintin thinks, and there’s something wrong about that but he can’t put his finger on it. He touches his mouth, then his ear. His ear hurts, too. No one has ever tried to jam a gun in there before. He wonders where the gun has gone now.
But he doesn’t have time to wonder on that for long, because blue pushes through the wall of black-cloaked Interpol officers in the doorway, and Tintin looks up, and color slides out of his hands, pooling in a jumbled mess. Blue is in there somewhere, though. A blue that feels warm when it cups his shoulder. “Tintin,” someone says, and his name again, and his name again, more insistent. “Tintin!”
Yes. That’s right. He tries to say something, but his tongue has gone thick and heavy. The blue presses a hand against the side of his head as if trying to keep it from spilling out. Tintin tries to grasp it; that isn’t quite right, either. Should he be falling apart?
“You odd-toed ungulates!” someone roars. “Baboons! Stoolpigeons!” And other things. The palm against his cheek quivers with each sound but never leaves him. It smells like—a clean burn, or something familiar.
Tintin lets his eyes close. He thinks, Oh. He lets his head rest heavy.
ii.
“He beat you within an inch of your life,” the Captain tells him later.
“Surely not an inch,” Tintin says.
“Don’t get caught up in the metrics!” the Captain argues miserably. Against the sun caught up in the window, his face is bright in outline and dark in the middle. He lights his pipe and shakes the match too hard to put it out again, too hard and too long. The curl of gray smoke creates a question mark in the air. After a while, he says, “That’s what happens when you run off after a story without thinking. If I hadn’t found the scratch paper where you’d left your notes, I—lad, what then?”
Tintin feels his breath enter and leave him; his hands, folded across his stomach and the wrong-blue blankets, lift and fall. Each inhale and exhale seems slow, unguarded. He suspects it’s the effect of the morphine. He’s never liked morphine. It’s in how he knows Snowy is draped over his elbow, cold nose butting against his ribs, but he can’t exactly feel the small weight. He remembers the opium den—men studying their fingernails with glassy eyes. “I’m fine,” he breathes.
He can’t exactly recall what the Captain says to that. Much of his recovery is not dissimilar: time comes in patches, hazy, between a dry throat and someone reading the newspaper out loud at his bedside.
iii.
Thomson and Thompson come to visit him, bringing azaleas and irises each. They bumble around his hospital bed until the Captain chases them away, and Tintin just smiles and waves them off. He’s lucky to have friends in all kinds of places.
And also, Professor Calculus comes every other day. He’s the one that tells Tintin it’s been over a week but he’ll be heading back to Marlinspike Hall soon. Sometimes Tintin wakes up and the pendant is swinging over his chest, glittering every time it catches a sunbeam, moving in a lazy swing. “You’re a little off course,” says Professor Calculus, “but I’m sure you’ll be fine. See, right there? Give it time yet, Tintin.”
Tintin is glad when he can get up and walk, despite the soreness that lingers like rot in his body. He gingerly shuffles around the hospital room under the Captain’s gruff orders and concern. His toes feel bruised—how strange. He remarks on this to the Captain, but doesn’t receive the laughter he’d expected.
iv.
It’s good to be home again. The spring brings bird calls and curious flowers to Marlinspike Hall.
When Tintin checks himself in a mirror, the thin scar above his ear and the mottled color of his cheekbone are a bit disconcerting. He thinks little of it, though. The bruises are fading and will soon be gone. It’s too bad, he thinks, that I was out for so long. I’ve missed so much. Like the last cough of winter.
v.
It takes another few days before Tintin realizes that something has changed: neat, imperceptible, like a stitch suddenly tightened. At first, he wonders if it’s a side effect of being out of sorts for so long—that while his mind hasn’t sensed the time pass, his body has, and the disconnect is pulling him apart. Something is off. Something hangs in the spaces between each step.
In the morning, he drinks coffee and takes breakfast with the Captain as he’s always done since moving into Marlinspike Hall. Most often, it’s toast and grease-slick bacon and a poached egg, pale and yellow; other days, there are fresh blueberries and oats. The Captain scans the newspaper, sometimes pinning it with his thumb as he reads certain lines that want to escape him. These are things that haven’t changed at all.
But now, every sip of coffee tastes bitter. Their silence is loaded. Tintin feels uneasy about that. The Captain isn’t one to resist saying something that he wants to say, and Tintin can’t think of a single thing to clear the air.
He’s angry at me, Tintin thinks. He just can’t imagine why.
Their days progress as normal despite the tension. At night, Tintin’s sleep is restless; he wakes every few hours and pads up and down the hallway, from his bedroom to the window at the end that overlooks the fountain. Once, he’s startled by the flicker of his reflection in a mirror—it appears half-swallowed by the dark, white as bone elsewhere. The Captain’s bedroom door is always shut, but sometimes he sees a line of light at its bottom. He never knocks.
vi.
His personal study has accumulated a web-thin layer of dust—not noticeable to many, but Tintin keeps his work places neat, clean, professional. That’s something he had to convince Nestor of when he first moved in—that while the butler’s attentions were kind and in good company, Tintin prefers, at least in matters of his journalism, to keep up with the cleaning. Who knows what kind of document may be shuffled out of view? What about his carefully designed maps, dotted with pins and tacks, woven with string into elaborate yarn-cradles that only Tintin can decipher? No, he’ll clean his own study, thank you, but thank you, for taking him in, for accepting him along with Marlinspike’s true master.
It is not that Tintin had needed another home; rather, he found himself at Marlinspike Hall so often that he couldn’t turn down the offer when it came, for reasons of sensibility and gladness. Snowy, anyway, had taken up a vendetta with the cat.
Now that Tintin has returned to his home, he’s surprised at how long it takes him to get back to work. When he finally opens his study and cleans out the soft pepper of dust that’s fallen over the desk and bookshelves, Tintin can’t bring himself to begin writing up his latest account. He sits at the typewriter. Fingers still, as if reading the imprints of the keys. Thinking pensively. He tries to put the clues back together, to recollect Frank Kovac’s rant about his ingenious plan, and to reassemble the facts of the story. It is such a remarkable story.
But he can’t.
I just need something new, he thinks. That idea spurs some excitement in him. The rest of the afternoon, Tintin reads newspapers hungrily, hoping to find footprints to follow.
vii.
“Kovac’s trial is next week,” the Captain says over breakfast.
Tintin glances at him. He folds his toast over on itself. “So soon?”
“Menace,” the Captain grumbles at a black-and-white still on the page. He rolls the newspaper up and offers it to Tintin. “The sooner the better, if you ask me.”
Tintin takes the paper and unfurls it. He studies Kovac’s picture: the hooked nose, the surly set to his brow. The headline is titled JEWEL THIEF TO BE TRIED FOR ROBBERY AND SAVAGE ASSAULT. Something in Tintin’s stomach drops and squirms. He reads the article slowly.
When he’s done, he says, “Hm.” Puts the newspaper aside.
The Captain gives a frustrated cry. “Dunderhead!” He crams his hat down over his hair and stands so abruptly that it rattles the dishes. Tintin exclaims in surprise and grips the table edge, though not soon enough to save the coffee pot from toppling. Brown bleeds into the white tablecloth, a stain that nearly burns Tintin’s fingers when it reaches him.
“Captain! What—”
“No, don’t bother! I’m the real idiot here.” The Captain stomps away. “Eat your breakfast!”
But Tintin can’t; he’s not hungry at all. He tries to mop up the coffee with the newspaper, and his hands, they shake.
viii.
Over their evening meal, the Captain doesn’t look him in the eye. Tintin feels a low, heavy sling of misery in his belly until the Captain invites him to read together before bed. They don’t speak, but Tintin lets the words on the page carry him away. He loves to read: stories, facts, adventures, song. Every so often, the Captain clears his throat and drifts, staring at his socks as if contemplating their stitches.
What would I do without this? Tintin thinks, some point in the night. Under his palm, the book is warm from the fire’s reach. He’s surprised—not at the thought’s honesty, but certainly at its fear. He has never known such creeping, urgent fear. Not until Marlinspike.
ix.
If he is going to be honest.
If he is going to be honest, there’s something not quite right going on inside of him. At this point, Tintin should be finished writing out the story of his last adventure. He should be selling it to the papers. He should be following up on Kovac’s trial, if only to see his work through to the finish. But Tintin doesn’t want to think about Frank Kovac.
If he is going to be honest, sometimes Tintin wakes up in a cold sweat, Snowy yipping unhappily in the tight vice of his arms. He doesn’t remember his dreams—only the damp barrel of a gun forcing its way through his teeth. The slip of his shoe as it left his heel, as it was yanked hard. The fleshy give of skin beneath his hands as he pushed at it desperately, tried to put up a barrier between him and the blows. These are only fragments. He gets up; he walks around.
If Tintin is going to be honest, which he isn’t, the only thing that puts him back to sleep is a swimmy memory: someone holding up his head, the scent of damp cat hair and wool and whiskey. The hurt eases. This, too, he had never known until Marlinspike.
x.
He falls asleep on the sofa in the reading room, a collection on European mammals left split open across his chest. When he wakes up, the rain has begun, bringing with it a quiet, thoughtful patter kept out by the blaze that glows merrily in the fireplace. Snowy sleep-whines in the crawl space between his side and the sofa back.
The afghan has been taken from the sofa and draped over him. Tintin rubs his fingers into its softness and thinks about how to thank Nestor without speaking the words. Or maybe—
He’s surprised when his eyes sting, as if maybe the fire has finally touched them. Tintin pushes his forefinger and thumb into the hollows of his eyes. He breathes deeply. He thinks about how he should go to Frank Kovac’s trial and sit in the third row, staring calmly forward as the lawyers tell everyone his story, being implacable, being steadfast and unmoved and straight-spined. That’s what he ought to do.
He lets out a wet breath. He presses his knuckles to his mouth. Steady on.
xi.
It ends like this.
Night drives him up and into the hallway again, to watch the fountain in the moonlight, to talk himself back into calm. The light in the Captain’s room is on, a sliver of yellow at Tintin’s feet. He knocks. He hadn’t meant to.
“Come in then,” the Captain says. He doesn’t sound tired at all.
Tintin opens the door and pads into the room. He goes and sits on the edge of the bed because the Captain is seated in the only chair, the one at his writing desk, bathed in butter light, tired crags in his face cast into shadow. He’d been addressing letters in rough sailor script. But when Tintin sits, the Captain gives him his full attention—back straight, dark eyes watchful, a little cloudy from the drink.
“Am I bothering you?” Tintin asks.
“Not at all, Tintin. I could use some company before putting these sea-rocked bones down. A nightcap to ease the way?” The Captain gives him a weathered smile that goes ear to ear, right up to his crinkled eyes, reaching for the bottle of whiskey at his elbow. But Tintin shakes his head. In his lap, his fingers knot. Air is compressed into a tiny bullet in his esophagus that refuses to come out.
The Captain picks up the bottle—puts it back down. He looks at Tintin.
This is hard, Tintin thinks. It’s much harder than trying to fix a radio or running away from goons or even shooting a padlock at twenty feet. He’s always been able to do these things without thinking twice. He says, “He stuck a gun in my mouth. And my ear. Well,” he says, “tried to, in my ear.”
“Ah,” says the Captain—just that.
And so, Tintin does the talking.
xii.
He wakes up sprawled across the bottom half of the Captain’s bed, sunshine gentling its way through his hair. His mouth still remembers the shape of the smile it’d given a few hours ago: shaky, brave. It’s too early to break the stillness. Instead, Tintin listens to the Captain shave in the adjoining bathroom, the clack of his razor hitting the sink’s edge. A low hum. Water stuttering.
He feels embarrassed and bad for depriving the Captain of his bed. He can’t remember falling asleep. But more than that, he feels like himself. The return is welcome. And with himself, something new, cautious and shy to the daylight.
The Captain gargles wash and spits.
Tintin lets himself close his eyes. He lets his head rest heavy.
end