dodgerfoxweek

[dodgerfoxweek]

A huge thank you to everyone who participated in our small but mighty dodgerfox week!

I will post a masterlist of works in the next few days.

If I did not reblog something you posted, please message me so I can correct that!

<3

[dodgerfoxweek]

remember it once - final chapter

Fandom: The Artful Dodger Pairing: Jack x Belle Rating: E Chapter: 7 / 7 Word Count: 4812

For today's @dodgerfoxweek prompt: happy endings/escape

read on tumblr: one | two | three | four | five | six

Belle’s free to be with him at the hospital as much as she likes now, and Jack’s free to feel all the strong emotions resulting from her being there. Never did he imagine that he would share his profession with his wife (never did he imagine marriage). He loves that he need only turn his head to find her elsewhere in the ward or to spot her through the windows in the doors. He worries, constantly, that she is at risk. He swallows the more uncomfortable fear that she is putting others at risk by being here.

She will be different from the others, those people he treated but could not save. Jack won’t allow it to be otherwise. In the days after Belle was bitten, he monitored the site of her injury. It could be that her diet is what keeps her well—the Governor’s daughter eats better and more often than a child like Alexander did—or that previous exposure, either in London or on the ship back, protects her. Jack doesn’t know whether the disease can be passed through the air. There isn’t time to study factors surrounding transmission, only to manage the effects on the people who come into the hospital. Unlike Prof, at least he orders the windows open to promote circulation of the air.

The possibility that Belle simply doesn’t share the affliction that brings most of Jack’s patients to his ward grows less likely. It’s been six weeks since Al’s death, two since the wedding, when Jack’s denial finally parts like curtains to show him a view of his wife that he’s stubbornly refused to see.

She’s working in the morgue. Once they discovered that the death of people with this particular illness wasn’t exactly binding, they stopped keeping the bodies at the hospital before burial. The room is now a place where Belle likes to conduct her research. Previously, Jack has entered to find her pacing the floor while she mutters to herself, or mixing solutions as she glances rapidly at an open volume on the table where they used to perform autopsies. Today, she sits beneath the window, gaze unfocused.

“Belle?”

“Hmm?”

Jack frowns and moves closer. Confused. It’s the word Charlie used to describe Al, the word Belle used in her story of the man on the ship. There’s some kind of mental decline that accompanies the decay of flesh, and it doesn’t begin with the aggression and physical violence that come immediately before an attack. If a patient can be watched closely, Jack believes, the signs of confusion can possibly be detected at an earlier stage. When one is willing to recognize them.

“Are you alright?” he asks his wife.

He crouches before her and quietly sighs in relief when her gaze sharpens and lifts to his face.

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, of course. I was only thinking.”

“What were you thinking?”

“The child, Anthony—”

“The one who keeps escaping the ward?”

It’s a serious issue, but Jack can’t help his smile. Anthony was bitten by his father and has run to Sneed’s ward in search of him, dodging hospital staff three times. Where the father’s condition is such that a visit with his son would be extremely unwise, Anthony’s is significantly milder; his injury has visibly neither improved nor worsened under Jack’s care. Jack has fledgling ideas as to why this might be—could their biological connection be sparing the child more severe effects? Could the bite be shallower because the father was able to recognize, on some level, the identity of his victim even in the midst of the aggressive haze?

“Exactly.” Belle smiles too. Jack catches the way her hands smooth over her stomach before she folds them in her lap. “Physical activity. Perhaps all Anthony’s escaping is inhibiting the necrosis.”

“It has developed faster in our bedridden patients,” Jack notes thoughtfully.

“If we could have them move around more…”

“How though? That won’t exactly work in concert with our current protocol of strapping them to their beds.”

“Which is rather inhumane. Necessary,” she asserts when Jack opens his mouth to speak. “I know. But inhumane.”

At what point though, Jack wonders, do they acknowledge that these people—these strangers and neighbours, fathers and sons, wives—are suffering from something that is making them inhuman? When they turn on their fellow man? When they rise from the dead? Since meeting Belle, Jack has been locked in a negotiation of how much weight to give life and death. He insists on the harshest realities while she persists in an optimism he’s found more natural to give in to, though which is still not his first impulse.

“It’s a good thought,” he says. “The activity. I don’t know how it will work, yet, but I agree with your thought.”

And he does, and he’s grateful to her for continuing to devise theories when he feels stuck on facts. He smiles at her. She’s done this from the beginning, hasn’t she? Reminded him again and again that there is always another way, that new ways are constantly being discovered, that they can themselves be the innovators by counterintuitively accepting that they don’t yet have the answer to a problem. That’s all this is: a problem. A terrifying, horrific one, but as long as they remain focused…

“What is it?” Jack asks, because Belle’s returned to staring at nothing in particular.

“A thought.”

“Have you already solved it? More fair if you’d at least let me try before you just came up with the answer.”

Belle frowns.

“The answer to what?” she wonders.

“How to allow our patients more physical ac—”

“Physical activity!” she bursts out, brightening. “Exactly! Jack, you know the child, Anthony…”

He nods, but his heart isn’t in it; it’s a function of his body alone. Yes, he knows the child, Anthony. The one Belle mentioned just a minute ago. The one she mentions now as though she didn’t then, presenting him with the same idea he’s just heard.

“I’ll… I’ll leave you to your thoughts,” Jack offers, rising.

Numbly, he exits the morgue. If she were anyone but his wife, anyone he knew had been attacked and personally witnessed them displaying memory troubles, he would go straight to the ward for reinforcements, find her a bed, continue to treat her wound while privately accepting that he was watching a decline from which he’d yet to see a patient recover. But he can only step into the hallway and bury his face in his hands.

He’s been a fool, thinking it could last.

—

The next blow doesn’t so much nudge them—the hospital, the colony, Jack’s stoic equilibrium—gently across a delicate tipping point as shove them out a second-storey window.

Sneed is bitten.

He does something Jack wouldn’t have anticipated: he begs for amputation. The only bright side is that Jack gets to slap him across the face to stop him panicking in front of the patients. After that, he drags the man out of the ward and stares at him with exasperation.

“Are you mad?” Jack demands. “I need you here, damn you!”

It’s worrying that Sneed doesn’t preen at the words, or seem to hardly notice them.

“Only my foot, Dawkins,” Sneed insists with wide eyes, both frightened and frightening.

“Well, yes, if we’re ranking the extremities it would be least inconvenient, as a surgeon, to lose, the foot’s not bad. It’s not a hand. But I do not have time to wait for you to recover from an amputation!”

“If we do it quickly though—immediately—now—before the disease can spread… I know you won’t make a pig’s ear of it, Dawkins.” Sneed swallows. “I trust you.”

“You certainly weren’t in favour of amputation when Fagin shot you in the leg. Have you forgotten the bit where I would be putting a large blade to your skin and sawing like the dickens?” Jack mimes the operation.

This, at last, appears to penetrate Sneed’s skull.

“I… can bear it. I am the finest surgeon in the—” Jack gives him a look and Sneed amends, “I am the second-finest surgeon in the colony. I will endure the pain.”

“Are you certain? Because you did yelp rather loudly when I slapped you in the ward.”

Sneed doesn’t grace this remark with a response. Jack sighs.

“If it’s what you want, I’ll do it. You know I can’t promise it’ll save you, and that I must impress upon you that you are here to heal others. This hospital cannot afford to lose a surgeon. Not now. The wards are full, as are the graveyards. We’re exhausted, and one less surgeon would increase the strain. But I’ll do it,” he repeats.

Jack watches Sneed’s jaw clench before he nods, making up his mind.

“I’ll clean the wound and get back to work.”

Jack deflates, relieved, not having realized how tensely he was holding himself at the thought of carrying on with Belle already inhibited, and then without Sneed. They’ve been losing nurses as well—the staff who interact with the patients most. Jack is endlessly thankful that Hetty has never once walked into a ward without her wits about her.

He claps Sneed on the shoulder in thanks and they exchange a look. How much is Jack asking him to give up by talking him out of the surgery? His health? His life? Likely both, if Jack examines it too closely, but he sees the weary comprehension in Sneed’s eyes and believes he would have stopped the surgery as he did the last time, when a drunken Prof stuffed a wooden rod between his teeth and told him to bite down.

Sneed glances down and Jack follows his gaze as he lifts his foot.

“Bloody woman bit straight through my boot.”

“Wound shouldn’t be too deep,” Jack reasons. “It’s given you some protection.”

“Sod protection. I brought these from Oxfordshire.”

“Sneed, you make it very hard to tell how quickly your disease is progressing.”

“What do you mean by that?” Sneed retorts.

“It’s just that so much of what you say smacks of severe cognitive damage.”

This time, it’s Sneed who slaps Jack. He’s rubbing at the sting, disgruntled but willing to admit the justice of the act, when Hetty comes marching towards them.

“Whenever you’re both ready to be doctors again, gentlemen, the rest of us would appreciate your assistance.”

“It’s Sneed’s fault,” Jack feels compelled to say, even if it does come out sounding petulant. “Values his boots above his life.”

“Remind me, what is your position at this hospital?” Hetty asks archly.

“Head Surgeon.”

“Then I would suggest acting like it.” She turns and heads back into the ward, calling over her shoulder, “Or I’m telling your wife!”

Jack looks to Sneed—wrongly, but it’s an impulse—for commiseration, only to find the prat smirking at him.

“Tattled on to your wife,” he taunts.

“At least I’ve got a wife,” Jack snips back. “Back to work before I put you out on your ear.”

“You wouldn’t. You need me.”

Damn. So he did register that after all.

—

The day Belle tells him she’s carrying his child is the same day Jack meets with Governor Fox and the new Gaines to discuss barricading the hospital. To keep them out or us in? he doesn’t ask, because it doesn’t matter, because the danger is within and without, because Jack has Fagin watching Belle to make sure she doesn’t wander into a ward during one of her distracted periods. There’s far too much on his mind and he finds himself agreeing with the proposal.

“Perhaps if I had rerouted the drainage when Jane suggested… noxious vapours…” the Governor says vaguely. Jack pats his arm.

There isn’t much use in thinking backwards. He nods, knowing his approval isn’t really needed, that his disapproval wouldn’t have stopped the military doing as they please. He nods because it feels like control, even as he’s agreeing to a decision that Belle, in a healthier state, would berate him for, reminding him of the inhumanity already inflicted upon their patients by tethering them down where they lie. What’s another barrier between these people and their freedom when the worse barrier is the one the disease has been erecting in their minds, dividing men, women, and children from themselves?

It’s as if Jack sleepwalks to tell Hetty the news. He knows he can count on her to be measured in her response, outraged yet taking it in stride, because it’s what must be done. There are too many cases of the disease. Barring the hospital’s doors means some people who seek treatment will go without, but it will protect the safety of those inside—patients and staff. Jack’s heard terrible things; in a combined effort, Flashbang and Aputi have taken to blasting to bits any corpse that begins to reanimate. It’s horrendous—both physically and morally disgusting—but Aputi told Jack he saw one of them in the graveyard, saw from a distance as it found… well, a piece of what remained after you threw explosives into a shallow pit of dead bodies. They aren’t just biting anymore. At least not with their fellow dead. They’re consuming.

He's preparing himself to let Hetty know they’re about to cross an invisible boundary, beyond which he won’t blame her if she leaves. Unlike Sneed, Hetty’s always been important to him. Unlike Sneed, Hetty hasn’t been bitten.

Jack makes sure she sees him coming when he approaches her in the ward. They go to the office that became his when Prof retired.

“I’m going to be a father,” is what comes out of his mouth.

“Oh,” Hetty says.

It’s a kinder response than it might’ve been, considering even Jack finds it difficult not to immediately add, Of course, I know we’re doomed, or to defend himself, swear that it didn’t just happen, because sex has hardly been a priority, and since Belle was attacked, she’s slept in a different bedroom, locked herself in. The way he looks at Hetty begs, Help me.

Gently, she says, “You’d better hurry up and find a cure then.”

“I don’t even know where to begin.”

“That’s because you’re exhausted. We all are.”

Jack shakes his head.

“It’s because concocting solutions is very much my wife’s forte. Whereas mine is…”

When nothing comes to him, Hetty supplies, “Keeping this hospital running. Barely,” she adds with a smile, “but running. Thank goodness we don’t have Prof underfoot.”

“He’d have been bitten the first day,” Jack has to agree. “Definitely for the best that he decided to wait it all out from the comfort of his libations cabinet. I mean, his home. Speaking of… you could as well.”

“Join Prof in a tipple?”

He knows she’s joking, and he humours her with a slight smile.

“Leave,” he says. “While you can. The military are going to barricade the hospital. Soon.”

And then Jack explains all the reasons why he went along with it while Hetty, rightfully, looks at him furiously.

Finally, she says, “I suppose you didn’t have a choice.”

“No.”

“And you want me to leave? Your best nurse? The most competent person in this hospital?”

“I don’t want you to leave, I want you to live,” Jack clarifies desperately. “Like Tim. He and Red—”

“No one’s heard from Red and Tim in days,” Hetty reminds him.

“They were smart. I’m sure they went to the bush, away from town. But you could leave another way. This is a port. Get aboard a ship!”

“And you?”

He hangs his head, avoiding Hetty’s gaze.

“Belle couldn’t go. When she worsens, she’ll be a danger to others.”

Hetty doesn’t argue.

—

They have dinner at Jack and Belle’s house, as a family. He still finds it incredibly strange to be hosting the Governor, to see Lady Fox and Fagin seated at the same table—a table that belongs to Jack, of all people. Sturdy and unscuffed. Never been anyone’s but his.

After Jack made the announcement to the rest of his staff, Sneed practically forced him and Belle out, stating that they needed a normal night. Possibly their last for quite a while.

His wife is at the table too, and he watches her parents and sister look at her in a way he knows she probably notices, even if she’s not saying anything about it. They know about her condition—both of her conditions—and regard her with expressions of mixed wariness and concern.

“How does Dr. Sneed fare?” Fanny pipes up during a lull in conversation.

“Well,” Jack is able to tell her honestly. “He was very fortunate to have had a barrier between the patient and his skin—”

“He was bitten through his clothes?” she asks, eyes lit up and speech a bit breathless. Jack stomachs the reaction with difficulty.

“Through his boot.”

“The bite was very nearly just a graze,” Belle contributes, “except that the woman who bit him had rather sharply tapered incisors, which were able to—”

“Yes!” Fanny says shrilly, smiling too hard. “Enough!” She dismisses the topic with an anxious flutter of her hands before apparently remembering some of her manners. More composed, she adds, “Please tell Dr. Sneed I wish him a swift recovery.”

Jack and Belle share an unsettled look.

“I am certain they will, darling,” Lady Fox assures her daughter.

Jack cares for his new sister, but he doesn’t believe in diminishing the severity of the outbreak in order to soothe her nerves. Spending so much time in the hospital, he’s forgotten to account for the fact that those who haven’t don’t know what he, Belle, Hetty, Sneed, and the others in the wards do. They might know people are dying, but not how many. They might understand that the hospital is attempting to treat people, but not that they don’t have a single recovered patient to show for their efforts. He’s trying to think of a tactful way to explain this when his wife jumps in.

“Actually, that isn’t likely, Fanny,” Belle says. “Dr. Sneed may not be seriously hampered by the disease for some time, but he will sicken, and he will die, like all the rest.”

“Belle,” Jack says, terribly soft.

“Like me,” she continues.

Total silence follows her words, until Fanny bursts into tears.

“That’s not very helpful,” Belle comments.

“Forgive my wife,” Jack says, hating to treat her as someone for whom he must take responsibility, but feeling compelled in the wake of her sister’s distraught response. “She’s not herself.”

“My husband is correct,” Belle tells their assembled family. “And I will be even less myself as the disease progresses. Without a cure, I doubt…”

Her bravado fails her. Jack sees her slip a hand off the table to touch her stomach. With her dressed, the curve is imperceptible, but he’s seen it uncovered. He’s sure she was about to say she doubts she’ll live long enough for the baby to be born. His throat tightens.

“We need to redirect our efforts, that’s all,” Jack says, fighting back tears. “Devote all our energy to finding a cure, as you say.”

“How?” Belle’s eyes are desperate, locked on his as they ignore the rest of the room. “You hardly leave the ward, and I need help. I don’t… trust myself. In the meantime, more people are contracting this disease.”

“I’ve heard rumours,” Fagin says, and they turn to stare at him. “Someone’s hired a ship. Standin’ in the ’arbour even now, she is.”

“How is this relevant?” Jack demands.

“Because it’s them who did it.” He’s carried on eating during the conversation, the picture of ease, and now he gestures to Governor and Lady Fox with his fork. “Getaway ship, I heard.”

“Getaway ship?” Belle echoes, turning on her parents.

The Governor starts to babble, but Lady Fox gets right to the point: “Yes. Our family is leaving the colony.”

“You can’t put Belle on a ship,” Jack says. “She has the disease.”

“Yes, and she’ll have you there to treat her.”

His mind stumbles over the fact that Lady Fox apparently includes him in her notion of family. He recovers.

“What, both of us leave?” he checks, baffled.

“I am sure Dr. Sneed is perfectly capable of taking care of things at the hospital.”

“No, he’s not,” Jack says. His voice is rising without his permission. “I don’t even mean to deride Sneed, but if there’s one thing he isn’t, it’s capable. And it’s not his bloody fault! The man’s injured, soon to fall ill, and it’s becoming mad out there.”

“Which is why,” Lady Fox says measuredly, “we will not remain here.”

Jack can feel it—he’s about to shove his chair back, jump to his feet, and start yelling.

But Belle says, “You’re quite right, Mother. You shouldn’t stay, it isn’t safe.” She looks to Jack as she continues to address her words to her mother. “You should take as many healthy people with you as you can.”

“There must be room for us to travel comfortably,” Lady Fox replies.

“Well, I’m not going, so that’s one space to fill.”

“Neither am I,” Jack says, feeling relief in his chest as it suddenly becomes easy. He smiles at Belle, but she doesn’t smile back.

“You are,” she says.

“No, Belle, I’m staying with you, wherever you are.” He thinks she might be edging into confusion, too much distress. He recalls the way their patients will become more aggressive with too much commotion.

Her eyes are perfectly lucid.

“I know that’s what you want,” she says, “but what you need is an opportunity to work on a cure. Somewhere you’re not exhausted and constantly interrupted and in danger.”

“I’d have no idea what I was doing!”

“You’ll take my notes. And Hetty. Hetty deserves a place on that ship if anyone does.”

“Yes, but—”

“Why don’t we all retire to the parlour?” Fagin suggests to the others. He throws a wink Jack’s way and Jack nods back distractedly.

“There are people who need you,” Belle says when they’re alone. She’s sitting sideways on her chair and Jack has drawn out the one beside hers. He clutches her hands between his.

“You’re not one of them?” he asks, hurt beyond words or measure.

“I need you to live. That is what I need. Let me save you this time. You will board that ship in the harbour. You will—yes, Jack,” she says when he opens his mouth to argue. “You will take as many healthy people aboard as you possibly can. Take the contents of the laboratory. Take my notes. Work on finding a cure and I promise you that I will do the same. This is not giving up.”

Belle smiles though tears roll down her cheeks.

“Keep my family safe,” she requests.

Jack takes her face in his hands.

“You are my family.”

They leave it there for now.

They leave it there for two days, and on the third day, a man with necrotic skin extending from raw wounds on his neck and chest gets past the preliminary guard the military have set up and comes barrelling into the hospital.

It’s chaos as Jack instructs Hetty to barricade their ward from the inside. He sprints to Sneed’s domain, but Sneed’s heard the intruder and already shut himself inside. He gives Jack a grim nod through the window, and then Jack is running, flying, to the morgue. To Belle. He can hear thudding, uneven steps behind him, like those of a drunken man.

Belle meets him coming up the stairs, and when she thrusts him aside, he isn’t expecting it and is tossed back. He sees the man—dull-eyed and intent on the pair of them—and then he sees him knocked off his feet, an arrow protruding from his chest. Jack stares at his wife in awe as she lowers her bow.

“That will’ve been enough to kill him,” he says dazedly.

“Unless he’s not the sort to stay killed,” she says. “Come on. Fagin’s been keeping my sword in your old room for me.”

All Jack can do is scramble after her, really feeling that he should be the one protecting her—except that he’s shit with a bow and arrow, and he doesn’t relish being reminded.

They retrieve Belle’s sword and go back to the man, who’s begun to stir.

“Very not-dead,” Jack diagnoses.

He stands aside and waits. When Belle doesn’t act immediately, he studies her face. It goes against their very purpose of doing no harm to intentionally kill the man before them. She shot an arrow into him in defence of Jack though, and he doesn’t think it would be possible to corral someone already so far advanced into the disease, to subdue him and take him to a ward, to strap him to a bed. It’s too great a risk. He’ll have to die (again?).

“Give me the sword,” he says to Belle.

Just then, the man lurches upright and his wife draws back her arm, slashing into his neck. It won’t be enough, and Belle’s breathing is quick and shallow.

“I can finish it,” she tells him before he says anything.

“I know you can.” They look at each other. He sticks out his hand and she thrusts the sword’s handle into his palm. “Don’t watch.”

—

At daybreak, the hospital will be under full military guard, no one in or out, food and bodies passed through a designated door—the one near the pit they used to dump amputated limbs into, where a strong solution of carbolic acid used to be enough to dissolve the dead without them reinvigorating and attempting to spread the disease they’re still trying to understand.

Behind him is the ship. Ladies Jane and Fanny Fox are already aboard. Hetty and Flashbang. Charlie and other children whose bitten parents cannot make the journey. Others, advocated for by Belle, who stood up to her mother to do so, who broke her mother’s heart by refusing to change her mind about coming with them.

Jack stands on the dock, knowing what they’ve promised one another, he and Belle. You told me once you would get on a ship for me, she reminded him moments ago. She’s more beautiful than he’s ever seen her, cast in the fleeting grey light before dawn. They hold hands. He can feel her ring.

I won’t be alone, she said.

Sneed will continue to work alongside her, of course. As will Aputi and Prof, who’s emerged from his stupor to recognize the severity of the situation and returned to the hospital in the position of Temporary Head Surgeon (Sneed is fuming, Jack knows).

The Governor has elected to stay behind as well, blustering about “going down with the ship, so to speak.” Noble, Jack thinks, if mostly a lie. He stays for his child. Jack longs to do the same, sliding his hand over Belle’s stomach as they embrace, but they’ve had this conversation. They’re doctors, formal credentials or not, both deeply loyal to the ideal of serving the people of Port Victory. Through separation, they double their chances of coming up with a cure. This is what they tell themselves. Jack holds Belle and never wants to pull away. He presses his lips to her temple.

When they draw apart at last, Belle rushes to her father, falling into his arms. Jack’s own father approaches him with his loping, unhurried walk. His eyes speak before his mouth opens.

“You’re still me number one, Dodge. Fancy Skirt’s just borrowin’ me for a little while.”

“Thank you. Fagin.” Jack chops up his gratitude, uncertain of his voice, which threatens to rend wetly.

“Just so you’re prepared, my dear, I will be suggestin’ your missus name the baby after Granddad”—he taps his own chest—“should you not scurry back in time to name ’im yourself.”

“Could be a girl,” Jack points out.

“Norberta, then.”

“That’s dreadful.”

“Piss off,” Fagin says, reaching out and giving Jack’s shoulders a fond squeeze.

There’s no finer farewell, as far as Jack’s concerned.

He sniffs and gives them another look: Belle bracketed by Governor Fox and Fagin, whose arm she slips her hand through when he joins them. Jack stretches out the moment, eyes on his wife’s face.

What if I don’t remember? Belle asked him.

I’ll remember it twice, he said. Once for me and once for you.

Remember it once, she requested, because love has bound us so tightly there is hardly a distinction.

Once then. I think I put my heart into your chest that day.

She took his hand and placed it to feel the beat.

And I have kept it. Jack turns and strides up the gangplank. The blazing sun appears, standing on tiptoe to kiss the horizon.

[dodgerfoxweek]

remember it once - chapter six

Fandom: The Artful Dodger Pairing: Jack x Belle Rating: E Chapter: 6 / 7 Word Count: 3555

For today's @dodgerfoxweek prompt: soulmates/protecting each other

read on tumblr: one | two | three | four | five

“You aren’t meant to drink that,” Belle observes as Fagin tips the bottle of surgical alcohol to his lips.

He lowers it again and gives her an indulgent smile.

“It’s got more to fear in my body than my body has of it,” he assures her, taking a swig.

“That is incredibly inaccurate.”

“Ah. It’s only trepidation in the face of the unknown what makes you say that.” Fagin extends the bottle towards her.

“Definitely not.” She cuts a hand through the air to emphasize her rejection, then, unthinkingly, settles it on her stomach. It’s only a reflex at the thought of what the contents of that bottle would do to her insides, but Fagin watches the gesture knowingly. Belle drops the hand to her side.

Thankfully, Jack barges into his old room at that moment. He looks from Fagin to Belle before striding to his bed and sitting down heavily.

“It’s… whatever it is… it’s under control, for the moment,” he announces. “I mean, it’s not, it’s most certainly not, but we’ve moved the rest of the patients out of that ward.”

“Al?” Belle inquires gently.

Jack hangs his head.

“I have no sodding idea what to do for Al—what to do about Al.” He raises his head. “Fagin? Did Belle…?”

“Oh yes,” Fagin pledges with a deep nod. “She’s told me all about it. Got a bit bitey down in the ward tonight, eh, Dodge? Reminds me of when you was four or five.”

Belle stares at Fagin in horror and, admittedly, some curiosity, but the story, apparently, ends there.

“Please, Belle,” Jack implores exhaustedly. “Anything will help.”

“Alright,” she says, feeling more self-conscious than usual about sharing her knowledge. This is beyond the realm of medical texts and repeatable scientific experiments. Even before Belle speaks, she knows it will sound more like fiction.

“We left London in a hurry. On our first voyage, out of the colony, my mother was very cautious about which ship we took. She made sure the captain was a man of good reputation, that there would be other… members of our station aboard. Other women. Families.”

She begins to pace in the small room.

“Returning, sickness had broken out, not contained to the hospital. My mother became anxious, likely more anxious because of my previous condition. There was not time for her to be as discerning when selecting the vessel for our homeward journey.

“Perhaps a week after setting sail, there was rumour of an illness onboard. A member of the crew, it was said. Of course, this made everyone nervous, but I had been at the hospital—as much as I’d been permitted to be. Besides, I have medical knowledge.” Jack nods firmly. “My mother, unsurprisingly, did not wish me to go anywhere near my intended patient, but we were on a ship. I put to her that, should I not attend to him, it was extremely likely that the illness would spread and infect me eventually. It was better that I attempt to assist the man and thereby treat or contain the contagion as early as possible.

“I was relieved, at first,” she recalls, brow furrowing, “to find that he did not seem to be sick after all. There were no immediate signs to make me worry that whatever ailed the man—because something was wrong with him—would be easily spread amongst the passengers and crew. Speaking to him was not especially helpful. He seemed…”

“Confused?” Jack guesses.

“Yes. He couldn’t tell me precisely when or how he’d become ill, but while he was thinking, he raised a hand to his face. I noticed a wound on his hand. At the time, I couldn’t be sure, and it seemed so strange…” Belle fixes her eyes on Jack’s. “It was semi-circular.”

“Like the impression of teeth, do you think?”

“Exactly like teeth.”

“Bitey, bitey,” Fagin says under his breath.

“What happened?” Jack asks urgently.

“The wound was infected. Worse than. Necrosis,” Belle pronounces, “as you observed at the site of Al’s injury.”

Her fiancé is gripping his knees, jaw clenched. She almost smiles because she can tell he wants to leap into the story and rescue her. But she survives it, she is here, and she crosses the room to take his hand and remind him of that fact.

“The man died,” she says.

“Without attacking anyone else?”

“What happened with Al tonight… there was nothing like that,” she swears. “Never any aggression. I travelled with some supplies, so I sprayed the wound with carbolic acid, but I didn’t trust myself to operate to remove the necrotic skin. There weren’t the facilities on board, I didn’t have the tools… I convinced myself botching it would do more harm than good. I did my best to keep it clean and wrapped. I likely killed him.”

Jack squeezes her hand tenderly.

“You tried to save him.”

“They threw the body overboard,” Belle continues numbly. “I instructed them to. It was so early into the voyage.”

“You aren’t responsible for his death. Or for Al getting ill, for that matter.” Jack releases her hand as he gets to his feet. “The man who attacked him clearly didn’t come from your ship, unless there was another severely infected person aboard who you’ve somehow forgotten about.”

“Not likely,” Belle says dryly.

They share a smile, but then Jack’s expression grows more serious.

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” he asks softly.

“I felt like I’d failed him,” she confesses. “I didn’t expect I’d ever have to think about it again. Since it happened, I’ve been trying not to.”

He rests a hand on her cheek. “Your worries are my worries.”

Abruptly, he turns to Fagin.

“By the way, Belle’s parents have given us permission to marry.”

“And you’ve waited this long to tell me!” Fagin appears elated at the news. He slams his bottle down on the nearest surface and reaches out to clap his hands to Jack’s shoulders.

“It has been a bit of a busy night, if you’ll recall,” Jack says defensively, shrugging out of the hold.

Fagin waves off this excuse as Belle looks on with amusement.

“A wedding! My Dodge, a blushing bridegroom! Who’d have ever thought, my dear? Who’d have ever thought, eh? And to our own Fancy Skirt!” he gushes, shifting his warm gaze to Belle. “What a pair!”

“Thank you, Fagin,” Belle says genuinely. Unlike her own parents, Fagin has always been for the match, and—often distressingly—unafraid to make his endorsement obvious with little nods and comments.

“This is splendid!” he says. “I’ll officiate, will I? Still got the holy garb from Father Whatshisface.”

“No,” they say, loudly and together.

—

It couldn’t feel more bizarre to Belle when her mother becomes the most helpful person involved with the wedding. She tells Belle who will be invited (which doesn’t bother Belle in the least; as long as the handful of people she insists upon are there, what does it matter?), and what the invitations will look like, and when the wedding will take place. That’s rather the critical bit, Belle knows, as the propulsive force behind the wedding is the pregnancy she claimed during the dinner with Jack and her parents. Her mother is very firm about the ceremony needing to take place within the next two months. This, like the rest, suits Belle perfectly well. She will be glad to marry Jack, and in the meantime, not having to concern herself too much with the plans leaves her free to spend time at the hospital.

Where hell has made its home.

If Belle’s mother knew how bad it’s becoming, she would forbid her from stepping inside. It would be London all over again, but what would they do this time? Where would they go?

Soldiers found the man who bit Alexander. Or, they believe they did. While attempting to detain him, he bit one of the soldiers. He bit the other as well—in the throat, and so badly that there was no need to bring him through the front doors of the hospital; he went straight to the morgue. It was getting crowded in there, last Belle checked. There had been a third solider. He shot Al’s attacker right in the chest, so the cause of at least two known infections—three, if they count the nurse bitten by Al in the ward—and one death is dead as well. And that’s not even a mercy because they have no way of knowing how many others he might have infected before the confrontation. People are missing. Besides that is the thing that Belle can’t help hanging on to: that just as Al was once a healthy boy, the attacker was once a man. No one in the colony knew him, he was meant to be a passing sailor, but she has no reason to believe he was a violent man before he became sick, the kind of man who would hurt a child.

The time to make a decision about that same child is nearing. Each day, Al worsens. With his head strapped down, they rebandage his wound when there aren’t bandages to spare. Jack cuts away more flesh when he hasn’t the time to spend away from the other patients and Al’s surrounding skin shows no signs of healing. He doesn’t eat, doesn’t recognize them.

Eventually, Belle arrives at the hospital and is told the boy has died. Jack believes the infection spread to his heart. Charlie is inconsolable. Belle gives him the instruction that was so offensive to her in London: stay away from the hospital.

Thanks to the wedding plans, her mother (a master at denial) answers a question they haven’t even noticed they stopped asking amidst the rising chaos: where are all the ships? Belle’s father first brought the shipping delays to their attention, and that was all they were believed to be at that time—delays. By chance, after corresponding with a dressmaker in Adelaide about Belle’s wedding gown (it is all seeming very close, very real now to Belle, in the best way, despite the sickness), her mother has pieced together that ships from elsewhere in Australia are making it to port, while those failing to arrive are largely from Europe, England most of all.

And there are more strange stories. Only, not so strange to Belle, since she’s told one of her own. Stories of sudden deaths aboard. Violent crewmen thrown into boxes and nailed inside. Ships in distress. Wrecks on the rocks, on clear nights, with lighthouse beams swinging to guide them into port. Belle isn’t the only one to suspect the delayed vessels won’t ever make it to the harbour. If even one person on a ship should be stricken with this disease… if that person should survive into the violent second stage of it and infect someone else… if there should then be two such beings onboard… if the ship should be overrun, with no one spared, no one to steer the vessel to its berth…

It’s too horrible.

Belle pictures smashed hulls, torn sails, bodies caught on the rocks, healthy skin rotting away while the heart still beats. Of course, then she banishes such fancies from her mind, because there is work to be done, so much work. A vicious argument with her mother that Belle wins due to an old reflex; when her mother’s voice rises, Belle instinctively presses the heel of her hand to the site of her old pain. Where she thinks aorta, her mother sees and believes baby. Not that she’s much happier to see her pregnant daughter on her feet, tending to the mysterious and increasingly violent ill, but if Belle is calm, that is what’s most important.

Not once does Belle confess that the baby is only a possibility. It’s been extremely handy in helping her get her own way, which, truthfully, she feels she deserves. There won’t be any harm in the end, and in the meantime, she and Jack are free to… enjoy one another’s company howsoever they choose. So long as it isn’t flagrant.

So they curl into each other during the time they permit themselves between shifts in the ward, Belle continuing to turn up at times exactly corresponding to Jack’s schedule. Harrowed and exhausted, they trudge up to his old room, talking over the new patients (is it possible that the disease is progressing faster, that the symptoms are more intense?). They’ve had some luck with slowing the symptoms—are monitoring one patient whose symptoms they seem to have completely stalled, though not yet reversed—but too many cases are bleak. Once alone, Jack embraces her like she is the setting sun on a darkening world. She kisses him, reminds him that there is life as well as death. She reminds him quickly with her words. She reminds him slowly with her body.

—

Not everyone in Port Victory is careful, not yet, but the hospital quits welcoming spectators to surgeries in the operating theatre. Being head surgeon, Jack makes this decision. He supports the practice in general—believes it generates income for and interest in the hospital, as well as educating the colony’s populace on biology and medical advances. And on all sorts of idiotic things they should avoid in their daily lives. He also credits public surgeries with assisting him in improving the speed of certain procedures, when speed is necessary and helpful for curtailing the suffering of his patients. But Belle is aware of their flaws: the distraction, the competition fostered between surgeons, the impossibility, still, of her performing a surgery when she is not actually a doctor.

The temporary suspension of audiences is doing wonders for Jack and Sneed’s working relationship, Belle observes. It’s mainly their rivalry that’s been affected, and a collegiality she was already startled to see upon her return to Port Victory is now positively flourishing. She’s even seen them saying hello to one another in the halls. Without scowling as though what they were really saying is that they wish the other were dead!

This sturdier partnership is much needed, especially the day a nurse walks into the ward while she, Jack, and Sneed are all present. There isn’t anything wrong with this, except that the nurse died the day before.

Aputi’s been so busy with the burials that Jack found the money (Jack gave Hetty access to the hospital’s financial records and Hetty found and reallocated the money; “Well, you’re not going to need Prof’s bourbon budget.”) to get him an assistant—and then to get that assistant an assistant. Practically, this means there are three men and sometimes three shovels, sometimes more, sometimes fewer. They still barely keep up with the deaths, and so, although they would like to get the diseased bodies in the ground as quickly as possible, it doesn’t always happen. (Belle complained about this once; Aputi pointed at one of the shovels. She understood that she was more helpful staying out of it, unless she wanted to dig the graves herself.)

Still, the dead nurse is a surprise.

It’s a chain-reaction of shrieks as those of them well enough to spot the incongruity do so. Worse is the reaction from those in the beds; the arrival of the dead woman energizes the ill. After Al, they’ve all been strapped down to varying degrees, but they fight those bonds with all their strength.

“Go behind her,” Jack instructs Sneed. “Get her arms.”

Belle watches them—her fiancé and her childhood companion—with her heart fluttering in her throat. The woman’s expression is vacant, her eyes clouded, yet, somehow, she senses the men. Belle can tell her focus is torn between them. With a dash and a grab, they take hold of her. She struggles, releasing an awful groan. Belle doesn’t realize how stiff with fear she’s gone until that noise, that terrible noise, sends her staggering woodenly backwards. Her legs collide with a bedframe just before Jack and Sneed strongarm the nurse through the doorway of the ward. By the time she feels pain, they’re out of sight.

For a moment, she thinks she’s backed into a pale of boiling water, brought in to help with the endless battle for sanitation; the pain is incredibly hot. She jerks and turns. In a heated panic, Belle sees that the patient on the bed has escaped the straps that secured his head and arm. There’s no time to assess her injury—was she scratched, bitten?—because Jack comes flying back into the ward. She didn’t even hear herself scream, but he acts like he’s reacting to her, wide eyes only briefly on her face before he pulls her farther from the bed as the patient lunges for her, headfirst. The bed’s legs scream as they scrape the floor, and Jack shouts for the patient to be resecured. “Better. Tighter.”

Jack propels her down the hall, to the supply room. Belle’s in a daze.

“Show me,” he demands, already reaching for carbolic acid.

She can’t seem to make heads or tails of the cuff of the blouse she buttoned herself that morning. Jack ignores her fumbling and spies the place where her sleeve was torn. He grips the fabric and rips.

Just as she remembers, there’s no burn from the acid. The thought allows her to come back to herself, allows her to refocus on assessing damage—something she is very skilled at. Unfortunately, the wound is not easy to decipher. She twists her arm back and forth, studying the torn skin that almost doesn’t feel like her own.

“Do you see teeth marks?” Jack inquires with a forced calm. He sprays acid, dabs away the blood, sprays again.

They examine her together. The wound is ragged, likely because of the roughness with which Belle yanked her arm away from her attacker. There isn’t a clear impression of a bite, which could mean she wasn’t bitten, or that the patient sunk both teeth and fingernails into her, gripping as he bit. She snatches the clean cloth from Jack, wiping tenderly along the edges of the gash with a shaking hand.

“Do you?” she asks, eyes darting between his, loose coils of hair drifting into her eyes.

The harder Jack focuses, the more of a toll it appears to take. There’s a yell from down the hall and Jack snaps, throwing up his hands.

“I don’t know, I don’t know!”

His expression is an immediate apology for the outburst, and he gathers her to his chest. Belle rests her head lightly against him, holding her injured arm out and away from their embrace.

—

She’s married in white lace. The long sleeves don’t hide her skin, but they obscure the thin layer of protective gauze wrapped around her forearm. In the church her family has attended since moving themselves, their lives, from England to the colony, she stands before Jack, who looks dashing if slightly fidgety in his officer’s uniform. There are flowers in her hands, in her hair. When Jack leans in to kiss her, the petals crush between them, and she inhales sweetness as their lips meet.

Most of the people her mother determined had to be there are there; all of the people Belle insisted must come smile when she and her groom head back down the aisle towards the front of the church. Fagin blows his nose loudly and Hetty places a sympathetic hand on his shoulder.

Afterwards, standing in the back garden of Government House before the large dinner they’ll share to mark the occasion, Belle’s father, who gave her away, is blustering with pride rather than drink. Her mother, ever the hostess, navigates the scene with shrewd grace.

“Dr. Dawkins,” she says, arriving at the married couple as Tim steps away to protect Flashbang from himself (he’s found Belle’s quiver of arrows). “I wanted us to speak.”

Jack watches her warily. Belle slips her arm through his in the kind of open support she is completely free, at last, to demonstrate. As his wife. She presses the new ring against his sleeve.

“The events at the hospital… I wanted to thank you for protecting my daughter.”

“I will always protect her.”

“Yes, I know,” her mother says, glancing between them, and Belle thinks she finally sees. “I felt I should recognize… that I should assure you… I see that you were meant to be together. Congratulations, Doctor.” She looks to Belle and the love in her eyes, stern and deep, makes Belle’s nose tingle, her own eyes welling. “Mrs. Dawkins.”

She leaves them to go chaperone Fanny, who Belle can tell at a distance is pretty clearly flirting with the new Gaines.

“Mrs. Dawkins,” Jack repeats when she’s gone.

Belle smiles up at him.

Later, they have their photograph taken in the parlour. They fumble to get arranged, feeling silly, feeling shockingly grownup, feeling like children in costumes and adults who will retreat to their own home when this is over, sleep in their own bed with their legs tangled up beneath the sheets.

The photographer directs them into position. A flash, and they are captured, as they are, forever: Jack standing at her back while Belle sits, hands folded demurely in her lap, wedding ring and bound wound both tilted towards the camera.

[dodgerfoxweek]

@dodgerfoxweek Day 6: We did see each other in our shadow sides.

"I believe you can."

"Please do not ask this of me."

[dodgerfoxweek]

March 1st:

we did see each other in our shadow sides soulmates | protecting each other

[dodgerfoxweek]

remember it once - chapter five

Fandom: The Artful Dodger Pairing: Jack x Belle Rating: E Chapter: 5 / 7 Word Count: 3002

For today's @dodgerfoxweek prompt: post-series/au

read on tumblr: one | two | three | four

Jack straightens his waistcoat before they step into the parlour, draws Belle aside and wraps one of her curls around his finger, attempting to put the spring back into it. She watches him, smile patient and amused. He sweeps an arm out, gesturing for her to enter before him.

Fanny bustles over, wearing a smile that reveals far more than Jack and Belle probably do themselves. Before Jack can panic, Belle diverts her sister, linking their arms and leading her to the harp that was, for some reason, transported from Government House for the occasion. God forbid Head Surgeon Dawkins entertain without the presence of at least one stringed instrument. It’s so absurd that Jack almost wishes Fagin were here, though the likelihood of Fagin sitting amongst Belle’s family and Jack’s colleagues for more than five minutes without saying something so dreadfully peculiar that Jack never has another visitor in this house is low in the extreme. Also, he’d be bloody slipping the good teaspoons up his shirtsleeves the whole time. Rangy menace.

Since Belle has utterly abandoned him, Jack makes his quick, anxious peace with the inevitability of polite conversation. Sneed is looking at him, expression far too smugly knowing.

“Lab all in order, Dawkins?”

“Quite. Thank you for your concern.”

I must not punch his mustache in, Jack reminds himself, gritting his teeth as he takes a seat near Belle’s mother and father.

“Yes, yes, join us,” Governor Fox beckons. “Anything you know about these delays, Dawkins?” (The Governor’s gotten familiar with him over the past year. Another ally when the time comes—and it’s coming very soon—for Jack and Belle to openly broach the subject of marriage.)

“What delays are those, sir?”

“All sorts of shipments! Vexatious, I call it! What the devil’s to be done?”

“You might have written to inform me,” Lady Fox says with a smile, her hand laid on her husband’s arm.

“Quite so, my dear. Yes, you’d surely have known best. Except they were quite recent!” Governor Fox recalls, wrenched from his sleepy kowtowing. “Not long before you and Belle returned! Of course, we hardly noticed in the beginning, but now things are in a fair muddle. Men and goods both overdue.”

“We have observed low stock at the hospital. Of course, we are often—” Jack catches himself before he can say undersupplied. Bit awkward to berate the Governor for the conditions of the hospital when he’s hoping to shortly have the same man’s approval for wedding his daughter. Jack clears his throat. “We are often so busy we don’t catch these things straight away. But there have been shortages in some of our medicines lately. Nothing we haven’t been able to compensate for, but it’s hardly ideal.”

Sneed backs him up, nodding along to Jack’s words.

“Well, we simply can’t have this,” Lady Fox decides. Jack summons all the strength in his body to resist rolling his eyes.

“You’re absolutely correct, milady,” Sneed says. Jack shoots his colleague a look, but Sneed has his sycophantic expression directed determinedly at Lady Fox.

“Our hospital must be a beacon, an example of what can be achieved here.”

“And it would be nice to keep people alive,” Jack puts in. Unwisely, as Lady Fox’s darted glare reminds him.

“Should the colony experience a wave of illness,” she continues, “it is imperative that we are able to manage things, not like what Belle and I witnessed in England. From what she told me, the hospital was utterly unprepared to—”

“And the ship,” Belle suddenly chimes in. They turn to regard her. “The man on the ship.”

“What man?” Jack asks.

Most of what his fiancée’s told him of her return voyage was communicated through her letters. Since they’ve been in each other’s company once more, especially alone, there hasn’t been much room given to conversation.

“Yes, well, we needn’t discuss that just now,” Lady Fox says. She shifts, appearing as though more than the new furniture is making her uncomfortable. “It was most distressing.”

Jack ignores her, staring at Belle, who does likewise.

“He was ill,” she says. They’re all listening now, but Belle’s eyes are locked on Jack’s.

“Not scurvy?” he checks. “Seasickness, or—”

“Not that I recognized. His skin had a pallor, which could certainly have been the result of excessive vomiting—”

“As I said!” Lady Fox interrupts. “Perhaps not the most suitable topic of conversation, Belle.”

She doesn’t dare disobey her mother a second time, but Belle’s eyes scan the assembled group—moving from Jack to Sneed to Prof—and he believes he can tell what she’s thinking: We can’t discuss medicine when nearly half the people in this room are doctors?

“Very well,” Belle says brightly. “I believe Fanny has prepared something for us anyway. It is not a second recreation of Leda and the Swan.”

This piece of news provides visible relief to the elder Foxes, though Jack hasn’t a clue what Belle means.

“Why don’t you sit over here, Dr. Dawkins?” she invites, motioning to a seat next to her own. “It will hardly do for you to be so far from the entertainment at your own soirée.”

Jack rises eagerly, protected by Belle’s sound explanation.

“I missed you,” he says under his breath as Fanny takes her seat at the harp, drawing it towards her.

“You are ridiculous,” Belle replies, but she’s smiling. “This is from the opera Norma. My mother and I saw it in London. She was able to procure music from the aria, ‘Casta diva,’ so that Fanny might learn it.” Jack senses her watching him as Fanny feels out the first notes. “She did it at my request. I wanted to hear it again, but with you.”

Jack turns to her, fully, even though the room will see him staring if they care to look.

“Thank you.”

Belle shakes her head.

“You haven’t even heard it yet.”

He crosses one of his legs over the other to hide how he slides his fingers over to entangle them with hers.

—

It feels a little odd speaking to the young patient’s friend rather than one of his parents, but Jack knows he comes from a family of nine. He also knows what it is to be a boy in a gang of boys—the loyalty, the sense of responsibility they can feel for one another. So, while Hetty builds a rapport with Alexander by showing him a selection of the saws they use for amputations, Jack listens to Charlie explain what happened.

“We were playing at the docks,” Charlies says, eyes already wide. “Didn’t notice the fellow right away, ’cause we weren’t doing anything wrong, no reason to be lookin’ over our shoulders.”

“I know, Charlie, I believe you.”

“When he did come up, I thought he was probably drunk.”

“He was staggering?” Jack guesses.

“Yeah, and it was like he wasn’t really focused on us. Except… then he went for Al.”

“Went for him…”

“Went for him,” Charlie insists. “Next thing, Al screamed bloody murder and I walloped the man with my crutch.”

Even in recounting these perilous events, a shaky look of pride crosses Charlie’s face. It sounds to Jack as though the boy certainly earned it.

“You did very well,” Jack praises. “Did the man injure Al, do you know?”

“I think so, but Al wouldn’t let me see. Only brought him to you today ’cause he seemed confused or something. Is he ill, do you think?”

“I’m not sure yet.” Jack offers the boy a sympathetic smile. “We’ll take a look.”

Charlie tags along as Jack goes over to examine Alexander. They have the ward mostly to themselves today, and the other boy seems relatively at ease. Upon first inspection, Jack thinks Charlie may be right—Al does look ill. His skin appears waxy and pale, and even the biggest bone saw draws only a dull smile from him.

“Right, Al,” Jack says, standing at the boy’s bedside. “How are you feeling?”

Alexander shrugs, scratches absently at his arm.

“Have you been getting enough to eat?”

“We have our ways,” Charlie says smugly. Jack catches his eye and they exchange the sly, silent understanding of thieves. Still, he’ll see the pair of them get some oranges while they’re here.

“And sleeping? Have you been getting your sleep, Al?” Hetty inquires.

Al nods, then shakes his head, then appears indecisive.

“Think so,” he finally settles on.

“Charlie’s been telling me about this man at the docks,” Jack begins. “Did he seem unwell to you, Al? Do you think he got close enough that he might’ve made you ill?”

Al looks away and scratches at his arm again. Jack follows the action with his eyes, then crouches.

“Did he hurt you?” he asks quietly. “I won’t think you any less brave, I swear.”

Al lifts his gaze to look at Jack.

“Bit me clean through my shirt.”

“Bit you?” Jack repeats, but Al’s already rolling up his sleeve. When he winces, Hetty jumps forward to help, tenderly folding the cloth back and back until the ugly wound is exposed.

“Blimey,” Charlie observes. “You can patch that though, can’t you, Jack?”

Jack swallows and pretends he’s concentrating too hard to hear the question. It spares him from having to admit he’s never seen an injury like this in his life.

—

“Necrosis,” Belle says later—she, Hetty, and Jack gathered in the empty operating theatre. “The death of what should be healthy cells in a living body.”

“We saw the decay,” Hetty assures her. “The discolouration. The… odour.”

“And the child was bitten?”

“Yes.”

“Might his condition have resulted from the violence of the injury alone? Are you certain there was a transmission of disease?”

“Right now,” Hetty says with a sigh, “we only have the account Charlie’s given us. We alerted the infantry. They’re searching for the man. Jack requested that we be allowed to examine him when he’s found, question him about his symptoms.”

“Prod him with sharp objects,” Jack adds bitterly.

Hetty glares at him.

“He bit a child!” he defends.

“Do. No. Harm,” she reminds him in a measured voice, then looks back to Belle and shrugs. “Essentially, we’ll diagnose the disease, if we can.”

“You’re welcome to attend, if you’d like,” Jack tells Belle. She gives a short nod.

“I don’t know about the disease, but necrosis is currently being studied in Europe. I brought this latest Lancet back with me from England,” Belle says, thumping the volume onto the operating table. “How have you treated it?”

“Carbolic acid,” Hetty says, “and then…”

“And then I cut away the decayed flesh,” Jack says, hands on his hips. “Ghastly. I’ve kept him in the ward. The last thing Al needs is an infection—or more infection, if that’s what’s caused this. Charlie’s been up and down Port Victory bragging about how I saved his leg, so he’s already promised Al he won’t be getting his arm chopped.”

“Premature,” Belle notes.

“He was only trying to put him at ease,” Hetty argues.

“It should work,” Jack says. He rubs at his chin. “I’m more troubled by the thought of that man passing whatever he has on to more people.”

“Particularly by biting children.”

“Exactly, Hetty.”

He waits while Hetty pores over the Lancet. Glancing at Belle, he realizes she’s unusually quiet. Rather than discussing the medical literature with Hetty, Belle stands apart, seeming preoccupied. Jack approaches his fiancée as Hetty flips the page.

“What is it?” he wonders, studying her.

Belle stares back at him. She opens her mouth, then closes it in a pout. He doesn’t know what she just stopped herself from saying, but it can’t be any worse than what she does say, which is: “I told my parents you’d be joining us at dinner.”

—

They look at each other, Belle slumped back against the front door of Government House as she regards him. The stars twinkle distantly overhead, spilled sugar in the sky.

“I actually thought it went fairly well,” Jack comments after a long silence. “I remembered to remove my gloves. I used the correct forks. For a few minutes there, I believe your mother almost respected me. Which you would think would’ve been the biggest surprise of the evening.”

“I looked at her and I could tell she’d never really entertained it. Us,” Belle clarifies, though Jack knows perfectly well what she means. “After all this time.” She shakes her head, eyes unfocused. “You’re finally an acceptable acquaintance, but she was determined not to see you as a suitable husband.”

“Your quick thinking certainly gave her the push she needed.”

Belle’s gaze flits to his calmly sarcastic expression.

“I gambled on the unlikelihood of her sending me to India when we’ve only been home a month.”

Jack can’t help it; a laugh bursts from his mouth.

“Your father reached out to shake my hand in congratulations, did you see?”

Belle, doubled over with laughter, nods. He can spot the tears of delight, delirious relief, running from the corners of her eyes. Jack goes to her, folds her into his arms. He smiles against her hair.

“Imagine we really were having a baby.”

“We might be,” she counters.

“We might be,” he allows, eyes wide as he holds her close and looks out into the dark. Something inside him is expanding even larger than the view. “What we’re doing for certain is getting married.”

“You will have a wife. And a salary. And a house.”

“And you will be in it.” Jack turns her in his arms, presses his cheek to hers as she leans back against his chest. “And it will be ours.” He kisses the side of her head and whispers, “Thank you for not sodding off when I told you to.”

“You will have ample opportunity to learn that I do not always listen.”

“As if I haven’t already.”

She shrugs.

“There is always more to know,” she tells him.

This he cannot deny.

After a while, when they no longer need to pretend they can’t hear Belle’s parents bickering inside because the argument stops and no one comes out to tell Jack he can’t marry their daughter after all, Belle calls for the carriage, offering to accompany him home—only as far as the street in front of his house, of course. On the way, Jack decides he’d like to stop in at the hospital to check on Alexander.

“May I come?” Belle asks.

“Wherever I go,” he promises. “So long as you don’t think your parents will worry about me impregnating you in the morgue.”

She makes a face.

“Horrible.”

“On the operating table?”

Belle considers this and decides, “It’s seen far worse.”

As they enter the hospital hand in hand, Jack wishes it weren’t so late, that Fagin were here to tell of their engagement. Since Jack got the house, Fagin’s been a bit dodgy about where he’s living. Jack has a feeling he hasn’t fully vacated the old room, the one he doesn’t believe has been given away yet, since they’ve hired no new senior medical staff. He could be just upstairs. He could be telling stories at the Cat and Bagpipes. He could be making house calls as the German doctor character Jack can’t believe he’s still somehow getting away with.

It doesn’t matter. He’ll tell Fagin eventually, and tonight he has Belle, and they’re walking the halls together, and joking as they pass into his ward, and—

Hetty comes up to them, grave-faced.

“He’s worse,” she reports. “He’s much worse.”

Jack looks past her, towards the corner where two other nurses are moving around a bed. The bed Jack himself settled Alexander into. Unconsciously, he drops Belle’s hand and begins rolling up his sleeves. He can hear Belle asking Hetty questions as he approaches Al’s bed, but notice of anything else in the room is cut violently away from him as Al jerks suddenly sideways in the bed, grabbing a nurse’s arm.

She’s screaming when Jack reaches them: the nurse and the boy, fused where his mouth holds firm to her skin. Jack feels rather than hears himself call for Hetty, the pressure of the yell rising from his chest most noticeable as he grips Al’s jaw, pressing hard, pressing harder, pressing surely much too hard before Al releases her. His eyes are a haze as he swings his head towards Jack instead. Jack shoves the nurse behind him, orders, “Hetty, straps,” forces the boy down with firm hands on his chest and forehead. Even as Al thrashes, Jack is careful not to grab his injured arm. Belle is there, holding Al’s ankles to the bed. Although Jack’s body acts with trained focus, his thoughts scatter. He cleaned that arm himself, precisely delineated and removed the necrosis himself, so why is it that he sees discolouration sprawling from the clean, white lines of Al’s bandage? With how the boy’s been watched, even infection and inflammation were unlikely. This shouldn’t be possible. Alexander is far more ill than Jack imagined, and it’s not only affecting his body.

Hetty secures the straps typically reserved for amputation around the boy and the three of them—Hetty, Jack, and Belle—back away from the bed. After a few moments, Al quiets.

“Hetty…?” Jack starts.

“It just happened,” Hetty pants. “He took a turn. Wouldn’t eat or drink. What fluid he had in him he seemed to be sweating through the sheets. They were just going to move him and change the linens when… well, you saw.”

At the mentioned “they,” Jack glances around for the other night nurses. They’re across the room; he watches as one woman helps the other wash and clean the wound on her arm as she sobs—certainly in shock, and likely in pain. As he’s trying to decide what to do, Jack feels Belle’s hand grip his wrist. He looks at her.

“I think it’s time I told you about the man on our ship.”

[dodgerfoxweek]

Bodies in the Theatre

Fandom: The Artful Dodger Pairing: Jack x Belle Rating: E Word Count: 1021

For today's @dodgerfoxweek prompt: post-series

Summary: Jack and Belle make a new memory on the operating table where she almost died.

She lives, and he’s afraid to be near her. She probably sees it before he does, feels it before he does, frowning because he’s always maintaining a distance, clasping his hands behind his back. He thinks, for a while, that it’s a reversion to propriety; she’s been recast, a finished vase back into raw clay on a spinning wheel, made over again, and he doesn’t realize it’s him setting her up on a high shelf, out of his reach.

It’s her who shows him, of course. It can only be her. One day, when the hospital is quiet and the theatre floor is clean, she insists on closeness. One step closer and he feels the thick slickness of blood on his hands. Two steps and she’s cut open beneath him and Jack’s demanding, “Stop. Stop,” holding out a hand to prevent her coming any nearer.

“Jack.” Her eyes are pleading, but tears wobble across his vision. “Look at me.”

“I am looking at you,” he spits, crying freely. “I’m always looking at you. You’re always right there, in front of my eyes. I see you… I see you when I try to sleep…”

His hand is shaking when he lifts it to his face, covers his mouth but can’t muffle the ragged sob. He crumples and she sweeps towards him and it doesn’t matter now because his mind has already gone there, seeing the worse. Her hand is just a weight on his back.

“It’s this room,” he gasps.

She rubs.

“It’s only a room.”

“No.” His breathing hitches, but he forces himself to stand. Her hand is on him still. “You looked… I thought you were…”

“Dead,” she finishes. And it’s the worst thing, but it comes from her living lips. “You couldn’t feel me breathing. You couldn’t find my pulse.”

Hetty will have told her, after he could not. She will have asked, naturally curious about the procedure, probably put out that she couldn’t study the surgery performed on her own body. She knows, and it’s such a relief that his lungs fill properly, his panic beginning to subside.

“It’s over now,” is her promise.

“Not in my head.”

She stands squarely in front of him.

“What’s the worst thing you can imagine?”

“You on that table,” he tells her honestly, immediately.

Taking her hand from his back, she strides to the table. Eyes locked on his, she plants her hands and pushes herself up to sit on its surface.

“Belle…” he says, voice rough, gutted from his throat.

“What next?”

He walks to her slowly, face working through all of it: her fearlessness, her determination to see him through this, her strength in sitting where only weeks ago she lay while Hetty sponged the blood that coursed from her body. He takes her face in his hands. It’s been so long. His hands healed her, but he’s been too afraid that the next time they touched her skin, it would all be taken back. Her body would remember, would recoil. She lifts her face and he brings his mouth down to hers.

“Lie down,” he whispers.

This is harder yet, and easier. She lies back without shifting away from him, so her legs hang off the table. She keeps her eyes open. She doesn’t appear uneasy. He’s trembling as he braces his hands and leans over her. Not checking is impossible; he watches her chest rise and fall, pinches her leg through her loose trousers.

“Ouch.”

“Sorry.”

After a minute, she sighs. He folds over her, ear pressed to the thump of her strong heart.

“I remember this ceiling,” she says, so quiet. “I didn’t think… but I do. I remember your face. I couldn’t feel you kiss me—the pain was too much. That didn’t seem fair. But I was never afraid. If you couldn’t fix it, it meant that it couldn’t be fixed, and all the time I’d had was all I would get. I was relieved, when you put the mask over my face and I breathed in the ether. I was relieved if I’d spent the last of my time with you.”

He releases a pained gasp and turns his face into her blouse. He’s kissing the linen, and then Belle draws it up, and then he’s kissing her skin, her scar, the very line she teetered upon between life and death, his the hand she held as she walked it.

He sighs, hot, and her abdomen quivers. His name moans from her mouth like it doesn’t want to leave. Like the rest of him. That’s right, he doesn’t want to leave her.

They fumble her naked from the scar down, and he never thought he’d be here like this, and his exhausted mind has sketched too many scenes where she isn’t here at all. Because he still doesn’t trust his hands, they’re light, stroking her hips, but his mouth is brave though uncertain, his face between her warm thighs. His tongue licks generously and her hips roll with him. He can hear her breathing, because she does it loudly. On the table, she is alive as he has known her to be, knows her to be, and something in Jack is released.

“I can do it,” he exhales. “I have you, Belle. I can do it.”

Her hands rake through his hair, clutch, and guide his mouth back to her. The wetness on his face, winding trails of sorrow and lingering dread, disappears into the wetness of her. It’s joy now, joy, joy, her knees in the air because she can’t keep them down. He shuts his eyes, just a test, and there’s nothing waiting for him there. Her living presence is too commanding.

This is a theatre and the role she’s played in his life is once-in-a-lifetime. He tells her that he loves her, and he tells her that he loves her, and because she loves him, he knows that he can be loved. He knows that she loves him, and she says it, and he hears her. He hears the breath leaving her body. And he hears it surging back in.

[dodgerfoxweek]

Alive and Alive

Surgery and thievery were alike; both a game of risk.

Pick the wrong pocket, cut the wrong vein, and you—or in the latter case, your patient—were as good as dead.

Jack pulled his knees in, leaning forward to rest his elbows. He sat on the steps outside the hospital and watched the flutter of the sheets on the line.

The door creaked open, followed by the soft swish of Belle’s skirts as she settled beside him. Jack glanced at her, noticed the flush of her cheeks, the loose twist of her hair, yet she was focused on the blood that stained her hands.

They were both accustomed to death’s probability.

Continue on ao3: Jack worries about Belle. She notices.

@dodgerfoxweek Day 4

[dodgerfoxweek]

February 29th:

put me back together, let me soldier on post-series | alternate universes

[dodgerfoxweek]

remember it once - chapter four

Fandom: The Artful Dodger Pairing: Jack x Belle Rating: E Chapter: 4 / 7 Word Count: 2694

For today's @dodgerfoxweek prompt: sneaking around/Jack's room

read on tumblr: one | two | three

Her heart is more patient with him near, but her body is more insistent.

The memory of his face at the docks is one she is certain will forever be among her strongest. There was the jostle of disembarking, position in line overtaking position in society as everyone heaved down the gangplank, desperate for the feel of dry land after months at sea. Her mother’s head swiveled like a shorebird’s, high voice calling out orders about their luggage, instructions to send word to Government House for the carriage, warnings for Belle to watch where she stepped, for goodness’ sake! Her mother hadn’t taken her to England and back only to have her drown in the harbour.

Amongst the commotion, Belle saw Jack. He smiled at her like she was new, like they both were, like almost a year apart could not turn the thing between them cold or stale. Her body’s insistent pull towards his began then, but they were so close, her mother’s blessing all but given, so she resisted. They reached each other—him fighting the tide of people, her bobbing along in it—and she clasped his hands warmly.

“Lucky you happened to be here,” Belle said lightly.

She watched his jaw clench with restrained emotion. He shook his head.

“I’ve been coming every day.”

She would have kissed him then, all her decisions about self-possession in public threatened by the way she watched the world collapse in Jack’s eyes until only she remained. Except her mother came up and greeted Jack with unexceptional politeness. The most they managed was when Belle stepped up into the carriage and felt his lips across the back of her fingers before their hands slipped apart.

That was yesterday morning. Since, Belle has been encouraged to spend time with her father and sister (discouraged from going to the hospital), and not permitted to send Jack a note inviting him to dinner (permitted to skip dinner herself and sulk in her bedroom).

This evening, her family will dine at the barracks. Gaines’s replacement is said to be a formidable man, though less fanatical than his predecessor. Belle will likely find out for herself sometime, but not tonight. While Fanny is, of course, bursting with curiosity and wedding plans for herself and the unmarried captain, Belle has claimed exhaustion from their long voyage, waving a flag of surrender at the thought of putting on a nice dress and exposing herself to social interaction. Her mother’s reaction sways from suspicion to pity after Belle yawns through the afternoon and finally orders a hot bath; this, clearly, is not a young woman about to sneak out to visit a suitor of inappropriate station.

After her family depart, Belle dismisses the servants, and she does bathe. It’s an indulgence, since she had a bath drawn for her upon her homecoming as well, but she gives in to it, sinking deep, her hair splayed over the rim of the clawfoot tub. Her skin flushes from the heat. With a pruning fingertip, she traces her scar, thinking of Jack. She hopes Port Victory’s as small as it used to be, in that word of the dinner at the barracks will reach the hospital. Jack will wonder whether she went. He will, perhaps, take a stroll in the direction of Government House and find himself peering through her bedroom window.

The water cools and Belle climbs out, wrapped in a robe as she pads into her bedroom on slippered feet. No one at the window. Her hair is damp near the root, so she sweeps the length of it forward over her shoulder as she turns, searching for a nightgown. There’s a tap on the glass before she finds one.

Jack lets himself in. It is so very typical.

With some rushed murmurs between kisses, they agree that he probably shouldn’t be here—at night, when she’s alone. The temptation is too great, and how far away could their marriage be, really? Now that Belle has returned and her mother has promised—

“Well, nearly,” Belle pants.

Jack, one arm out of his jacket and his waistcoat hanging open, draws back.

“Nearly?”

“She did…”

“Yes…” He lets out a soft, ironic laugh. “She knows it’s me you mean to marry, doesn’t she? There can’t be anyone else she believes to be courting you?”

“You hardly courted me, Jack,” Belle feels she must say, shaking her unruly hair out of her eyes. Jack’s hands have tumbled it about her face. “We cut several people open together and then realized we were in love. Correct me if you remember it differently.”

“Has she said anything?” he demands, sidestepping her portrait of their courtship.

“No, but there’s hardly been time.”

“But she hasn’t encouraged you to see me either,” Jack points out, expression growing cross. “Your parents haven’t met with me to discuss things. Not that they should, but they will, surely, before they just hand you off—”

“I am most certainly not about to be handed off—” Belle cuts in, voice high and aggravated.

“It’s not how I prefer to think of it either—”

“Then don’t!”

“—but there are the traditional expectations.”

“Hang them!” she blurts.

Jack looks quizzical.

“What?”

“Hang the expectations!” Belle clarifies, throwing up her hands. “And shut up! And sod off, while you’re at it!”

He grins, transparently pleased and proud.

“We will force the issue,” she goes on, prodding him in the chest with a finger.

“We will face them together,” Jack agrees.

“Good.”

“Settled.”

Belle exhales from her nose and gives a conclusive nod. There are a few seconds of thick stillness, not a sound besides the two of them breathing.

“As it’s about to be resolved…” Jack begins delicately.

She grabs his lopsided lapels and wrenches him down to her. His hands scramble at her back, taking hold only to drop again as he shakes off his jacket. She bats the hat from his head and takes a two-handed grip of his hair, making Jack grunt, making him unbelt her robe and back her towards the bed. Belle stumbles out of her slippers. She’s thrilled at the prospect of divesting him down to his skin.

In the time it takes for her to shove away his waistcoat and unbutton his shirt, he’s nearly worked up the courage to put his hands inside her open robe. Jack’s staring. Belle’s blushing. She slows, because she’s nervous too, just a little, because this is the first time they’ll do this without panic for her mortality making itself a third bedfellow. If anything’s absent that was present before, it’s the feeling that this may be the last time. This union won’t be bittersweet or desperate unless they want it to be. That’s their decision, as much as it’s their decision to become secretly betrothed to one another or conduct experimental brain surgery (an integral part of the courtship). Their future isn’t a sad one, neither short nor painful. This night—and Belle thinks it with a sly smile—can be one of many.

So she kneels on the bed, at the edge, and Jack takes small steps to close the distance, eyes heavy on her mouth. When they kiss, his tongue traces lazily along her bottom lip before sweeping past her teeth to make her groan. Her hands start at the back of his neck as she pushes back into the kiss. But he discards his shirt, and Belle feels the slightest, most tantalizing brush of skin against skin. Gliding her hands to the front, over his clavicle, down his torso, she sighs in want. Jack nudges the robe from her shoulders. His chest is warmer than hers when they meet, but heat surges through her as he clutches lower than she anticipates, squeezing the back of her thighs just below her rear. He brings their hips together, then bows his head, and his hair tickles her forehead as he directs his gaze to the protrusion in his trousers pressing against her bare abdomen.

In a heady flurry, his boots come off, his body is fully stripped, the bedclothes are whisked back, they press a palm to one another’s racing hearts. Belle shuffles. Jack lifts her hair so it won’t be tugged under her shoulder. She skims her nose along his, almost kissing his lips.

“Write me a letter?” she murmurs.

His eyebrows flinch together in confusion, but she presents her pale inner arm, guiding his fingers where the blue veins show through. Jack’s expression clears.

“Like when you were in England?” he checks.

She smiles.

“They were so lovely.”

He touches her like a surgeon, and like an artist. He paints her skin with kisses, nipping at her throat, her wrist, her waist to bring out new colours. Sweeping strokes take his hands from her knee to her hip, her chin to her navel, the nape of her neck down the curve of her spine. Precise pinches stiffen her nipples, swell her bottom lip as his thumbnail scrapes her teeth. His fingers say he knows the human body, but their pace—their lingering, their plumbing—says he wants to know hers.

Those fingers are deep inside her when Belle feels herself rocking, swaying, shaking without remembering when she started or imagining how she might make herself stop. She’s on her back and wants to pull Jack from his position on his side to a better one, covering her, but her hand is busy crumpling the bedsheet in a damp fist.

Jack’s explaining about her nerve endings in a low voice before he bites her ear. She feels the wet tip of him drag at her hip. She wants to say she knows: she knows about female anatomy. She just didn’t know her own quite as well as she thought, didn’t know that bit likes that amount of pressure, or that this bit could experience pleasure that feels almost like a tickle if she made her fingers as slow as Jack’s making his. And when he unexpectedly sucks those fingers into his mouth and returns them, wet, between her legs, rubbing light and quick… Belle didn’t know her body was capable of both creating and containing a lightning storm. Her back bows from the bed as the lightning tries to escape. She releases a noise which could perhaps crack glass but does crack Jack; he erupts across her skin, and Belle takes this in: the sensation of being spilled upon, the wild frustration of losing his steady rhythm on her clitoris as he’s distracted by his own bliss, and the cleaned-and-gutted disorientation in his expression. It’s painfully beautiful, to have taken him by surprise.

She shoves Jack onto his back and mounts him, hips curling low and back as she bows herself again, rubbing on his thigh.

“It’s been a long time,” he mumbles, coming back to himself, but wrong, disordered, reaching for her, retreating as if to fix his hair, compromising by smacking himself in the eye. “You looked so beautiful, I couldn’t—”

“Do not apologize,” she gasps, bucking her hips along the path she’s slicked. “Or do. Do and then…”

“Shhhh…”

Jack has become unthinkably cruel in their time apart; Belle is sure of this as he plucks her from him and lays her on her back again. She hears his mumbles descending down her body as her legs thrash aimlessly. She won’t listen, she can’t, and then his mouth is up against her—on her and in her—wet and warm. And his tongue is clumsy but lithe, and Belle’s licked in every seam, harder when she puts her hand on the back of his head and pushes.

“Oh god, Jack,” she sobs. Tears and sweat add to the dampness in her hair. “How…? How?”

She has no conscious idea of what she’s trying to ask, but it’s of no concern, it all goes away under the edge of Jack’s teeth and the sudden suction of his lips sealing over the wet mess they’ve made of her. Belle trembles away—certainly from her sanity, and possibly from her body, because it barely feels like hers, all the sensations occurring on a higher plane, until she’s back, and Jack’s caressing her gently, his hands on her face and in her hair.

“Devotedly,” he signs off. She can feel his heart pounding. “Your fiancé.”

There don’t seem to be words, that Belle can tell, to speak of the gloss of her at the corners of his lip, of him on her hip, of the bath she took not an hour ago, of the urge she has to never wash again. She holds him to her and Jack’s arms are just as tight, the embrace almost fearful for them both. When she feels him harden, she slips a hand between them, weighing him in her palm. Her eyes speak to his. Jack nods, enters between the thighs she parts beneath him. They rediscover patience with the inches of him, the heat of her, the sweet insanity of slowing each transit in and out. He curses a thousand love letters into the tender skin behind her ear. She answers every one with a lift of her hips.

—

“Don’t you think we should go back downstairs?” she checks.

Jack affects a casual expression, leaning his shoulder against the wall.

“Nonsense. I’m meant to be giving you a tour of the laboratory. It may be lengthy indeed, what with my demonstrations, your questions…”

“Do you think I will not notice that we are in your bedroom and not the laboratory?”

“See? Yet another question.”

He smiles slyly and pushes away from the wall, collecting the hands she has folded in front of her and leading her farther into the room—the room with the bed, which she was never opposed to seeing, but her entire family and quite a few other members of society are assembled downstairs. They can only be gone so long. This is, after all, Jack’s occasion; they are gathered to belatedly toast his appointment as head surgeon, now that he’s finally taken up residence of this house.

“I’m proud of you, you know,” she says.

“Yes, my new station is most impressive.”

“I am being sincere, Jack.”

“I know.” He makes a face at her. “That’s always been the trouble with you.”

Belle smirks and accepts that now is not the moment to make him acknowledge and accept her compliment.

"Will you ever show me the laboratory?”

“No,” he teases, mouth twitching. “You’ll have to marry me to gain access.”

His arms link around her waist and he stoops to be kissed. Belle obliges. She knows he can tell when she decides to stay, to indulge him, to indulge them both with a breathless encounter. Below, her family and his colleagues sit on fashionable chairs and engage in polite conversation. Jack releases a shuddering inhalation before kissing her more deeply.

They stagger a few confused steps, eyes shut and lips joined, until she senses the imposing bureau at her back. When she feels Jack’s hands ready to unfasten her skirt, it’s not remarkable in the least; it’s been barely two weeks since the evening they shared in her bedroom, and each time they meet, they try for some sign, some secret touch or gesture. They shake hands in greeting. Jack’s fingers trail across her back when she comes to assist in his ward. She ran into him on the street when she was with her mother and had the great pleasure of watching his face flush as he attempted to concentrate on exchanging pleasantries with Lady Jane while Belle stared at his mouth with naked want. Every time, their looks say it won’t be much longer. Now that they’re finally alone again, their bodies say it’s foolish to wait.

“I recall a time when I cleaved to the same maxim,” Belle says with a suggestive cock of her head as she drops her outer skirt to the floor and hitches her chemise to her knees.

With any luck, the chatter in the parlour will be enough to cover the steady thump of the bureau against the wall.

[dodgerfoxweek]

February 28th:

still can’t kiss my own neck sneaking around | jack’s room

[dodgerfoxweek]

remember it once - chapter three

Fandom: The Artful Dodger Pairing: Jack x Belle Rating: T (will change) Chapter: 3 / 7 Word Count: 2900

For today's @dodgerfoxweek prompt: love letters/banter

read on tumblr: one | two

The months are long without her. Jack finds himself softening towards Sneed of all people. Following the lifesaving procedure Jack performed on Belle, Sneed has demonstrated a genuine interest in bettering his basic surgical skills and acquiring the more advanced techniques he lacks. He’s still superior, still snide, still essentially Sneed, but now he listens to Jack’s ideas and, occasionally, compliments him on his successful surgeries.

The number of successful surgeries has been increasing steadily since Belle introduced ether and carbolic acid, and with Sneed cooperating, the two doctors are able to work side by side in the theatre on the same patient. This frequently shortens surgery time, which has manifold resulting benefits: decreased blood loss, reduced risk of death from time spent under anaesthesia, shorter duration for Jack and Sneed to endure each other’s presence. Strangely, the situation has become something akin to… training each other. When Prof goes, the hospital’s power structure should actually change for the better, with two capable surgeons sharing their knowledge. Sneed will be Jack’s reliable right hand, and Jack has dreams of bringing in new doctors who will contribute to the pooling of information rather than existing in competition with one another and risking lives in the process.

Of course, it isn’t a completely smooth partnership. Sneed can be awfully Sneedy at times. Whenever he makes a dig about Jack’s reading, Jack urges him to put his own educated shoulder to the wheel to see if he can find the cure for being an insufferable git. Someone really should, he insists while watching Sneed’s mustache twitch with restrained petulance, in this day and age.

Unless he’s tending to his patients, Jack keeps his evenings for himself. He’s trying not to gamble, not to drink too much (admittedly, “too much” is an inconstant measure), not to say yes to Fagin’s more suspicious plans; anything he claims is “foolproof” is particularly to be avoided. It isn’t exciting, but nothing really is without her.

Just once during the four-month voyage that carries Belle to England, a letter is delivered to Jack. Well, it’s delivered onto another ship, to the postmaster in Port Victory, to Government house, into Fanny’s hands, and she turns up at the hospital—to his initial confusion. Since Fanny escaped marriage to the Lettuce, Jack isn’t aware of any renewed interest in Sneed. He doesn’t understand what she’s doing here. When she says she’s received a letter, he imagines the very worst and feels his face drain of blood, but Fanny launches into a description of Belle’s experiences thus far. By her tone, Jack slowly recognizes that this letter was not followed by a note about Lady Belle Fox’s tragic burial at sea. He exhales. Even though Fanny feels that she’s communicated everything, Jack asks her to read the letter. He wants to hear Belle’s words.

Tell Jack I would write to him if Mother was not watching me like a hawk, Belle writes. I forgive her, only because we have been two months at sea and even the pastimes which were initially the most novel have become dully familiar. Without a full household staff to command—and Father, crucially Father—her attention falls heavily on me. She tells me to do my embroidery and study my Latin instead of the anatomy texts she finds “vulgar” and “revolting.” This is most amusing, considering her own pricked fingers and the seasickness that rears its head whenever she attempts to read for an extended period.

“It sounds dreadful,” Jack remarks, crossing his arms.

“But you were in the Navy!” Fanny protests. “Don’t you love the sea?”

“I didn’t mean the sea.”

She may be willfully ignoring the implication that he was talking about her mother.

It is not recommended that I stand on deck, Fanny reads on, but after I had done it once, I was determined to return. Fanny, it takes the breath from one’s lungs. Blue. Everywhere. To be in constant motion, harvesting the energy of the waves. Some mornings—

“Isn’t it dangerous?”

Jack’s vision had unfocused as he listened, reintroduced to the sea he’d made his career upon through Belle’s eyes. He realizes the question is Fanny’s and blinks.

“Which part?”

“All that dreadful… air! The wet!”

“Keep reading.”

Fanny sulks but lifts the paper once again.

Some mornings, I catch the dawn. The sky is the blackest thing you can imagine, and then, suddenly, the ship and all of us onboard are born into the world. I believe we are hardly real between sunset and sunrise. Colours seem to seep up from the horizon as though the paintings you love so much have been washed in the distant water, fleshy pinks and bitter oranges rise and bleed. It is the most vital thing I have ever seen. I only wish Jack were with me. Tell him, Fanny. I can hardly believe I won’t sail from one shore and meet him at another…

“It becomes a bit… romantic,” Fanny explains, not exactly bashful, but certainly aware that she is privy to something Belle and Jack would ideally keep to themselves. “Would you like to read the rest alone?”

Ah. Then it is uncomfortable.

Before he can speak, Jack watches Fanny’s eyes widen as she recalls the disastrous dinner. She’s about to assume (only because Sneed bloody announced as much) he can’t read. He heads her off, quiet and flushed while he explains that it is difficult, not impossible. Easier when words are written clearly with plenty of space, more difficult when someone’s handwriting is cramped and smudged. He can read. It just takes time, but he will spend time on Belle, he will sit with her letter and focus and squint in order to relieve Fanny of her messenger duties.

“But what about when you want to write back?” Fanny asks, eyes searching but kind.

“I’ll ask—” But who will he ask to correspond with his fiancée on his behalf? Fanny is probably the best choice as she’s keen to support their romance, but she’s nosy. He might (he does) want to say things that only Belle’s eyes will read.

“Oh! I have already thought of something much better!” Fanny gushes. Jack hasn’t yet had the opportunity to suggest a single name.

—

“It is the images that I find so very awful,” Fanny explains, supporting this assertion with a grimace as she pages past an illustration of a grotesquely swollen tongue, “but it was the images Belle seemed to like best, of late.”

She’s installed him in her sister’s room. One of Belle’s medical texts is open on her desk, and the pair of them stand over it in contemplation. The Governor is in town and the household staff are either entirely disinterested in what Lady Fanny and Dr. Dawkins might be doing in Lady Belle’s bedroom or else they don’t care a whit. Even if they did care, Jack thinks, what are they to do about it? Most of them probably can’t read any better than he can, if at all. They certainly won’t be writing to Lady Fox to inform her of the young doctor’s latest misdeed.

“What do you think?” Fanny asks.

“I couldn’t overstate their usefulness,” Jack says, turning a few pages himself. “And I suppose they are things of beauty, when done well.” He traces graceful lines of musculature. “The detail shows an interest in precision and care, which I can certainly relate to.”

“Not of the images themselves,” Fanny complains, closing the volume with sudden petulance. “My idea! Drawing to Belle instead of writing to her!”

“I’m not sure I have your… skill,” he states cautiously, recalling Fanny’s very memorable trees. “Not to mention your instruction. You must have had tutors?”

“I did have one, but he was quite rigid. We had a difference of taste.”

“I see.”

“Have you ever drawn?” she wonders.

“A little,” Jack admits. At last, he removes his hat, setting it on the desk. He brushes a hand through his hair. “We surgeons try to keep notes of our surgeries—successful and not. Often, Hetty will take dictation for me, but if she’s busy, or the procedure’s something I did by feel rather than by sight, it can be easier for me to try to sketch what I remember.”

Fanny smiles encouragingly.

“Try, then.”

This is how he removes his coat and pulls up a chair. It is how he casts his eyes over the pencils and sticks of charcoal, the messy potted watercolours, before reaching out to touch the tools with his fingertips. Jack doesn’t notice when Fanny leaves him to it, but at some point, there is a cup of tea on the desk into which he accidentally dips a brush. He doesn’t realize until he fills his mouth with the chalky flavour of diluted paint.

It's his own palm he’s attempting to represent. He curls and opens his hand, studying the toughened skin. In his mind, he peels back time, scrubs away the callouses to peel back his very skin, remembering his palm ripped open from the ropes on the first ship on which he sailed. Jack sketches the ragged edges of the injury, the glow of abrasion. With a sodden brush, he dips into the red, then swipes across the paper, watching the wound bleed as the water spreads. He wrings some of the water out before applying more paint to the spot, getting the colour rich and real and—

Fanny shrieks from behind him.

“How awful! I mean, excellent.” She smiles in apology. “I wish I had never seen it, and I mean that as the most sincere compliment.”

“I understand. I appreciate your opinion.”

“Do you?” She looks genuinely surprised. “I can see why Belle fancies you.”

It really isn’t his place to tell his fiancée’s sister she should expect more than basic respect from any man she’d hope to marry, so he doesn’t. Fanny is much more assured in the advice she gives to him, offering blunt criticism as she points to different parts of his creation. Not unkind though.

“Again soon?” she asks when she’s done and he’s standing to go, realizing he has paint soaked into the sleeves he didn’t roll up his arms soon enough. Unusual. It’s normally blood there.

Jack nods.

—

While he’s still learning, Belle’s letters begin arriving from London. Fanny dutifully shares each one. Now that Belle has more freedom to write—physical freedom, without her mother looking over her shoulder—each letter contains the sentence “Fanny, stop reading.” Jack appreciates the honesty of Fanny reading this line aloud, though she does also frown at being excluded from the rest.

The rest.

It has to be Fanny who explained, and Jack is grateful for it. The remainder of Belle’s letters are written larger, with spaces between the letters, each word cleanly executed on the page. They’re legible, specifically for him, exactly how he told Fanny a letter would need to be to lessen his struggle.

At last, he has an account of her longing firsthand. She doesn’t speak of the engagement—there is still a risk that Fanny would spy the word, even if she weren’t intentionally snooping—but it’s clear she isn’t only writing to an acquaintance, a friend, a fellow student of the human body. That Belle refers to well enough, perhaps dangerously so, but it’s all in Latin. The switch from one language to another stumps Jack at first, but he learns to watch out for it. In Latin, Belle is both formal and erotic, and Jack finds himself angling her letters away from the eyes of Hetty and Fagin, though neither knows the language. While Belle’s sentences are stiff, the parts of the body she employs Latin to address—parts of his body, and hers, frequently imagined together—evoke visceral memories. The dusty old language can be surprisingly sensual, Jack finds, when Belle writes of skin on skin.

He responds with broken bones, chipped teeth, dislocated jaws—drawings of all the latest cases to pass through his ward, everything Belle’s missing. It’s when he’s replicating the twisting line of stitches he threaded into an elbow the other day that he has the idea to embellish beyond paint; Jack pokes through her belongings (sorry, Belle) until he discovers her embroidery thread. After that, his art becomes vivid in a way that almost astounds him, even as he jabs the needle through the page. He lays a skin-coloured wash on an arm, then raises a blue vein down its length. He adds fibre ribs to open cadavers, creeping lines of red to blood-shot eyes. When he gathers both Fanny’s art supplies and his strength to recreate the surgery he’ll remember for the rest of his days, he brings Belle’s aorta to life in crimson before sewing in the noose that ties it off. I love you, he tries his best to say. I love you all the way through.

—

Dearest Jack,

I must tell you immediately, or with as much immediacy as a letter from Britain to Australia can allow, that my mother and I will be home in Port Victory sooner than we had planned. Therefore, do not suspect me of neglecting our correspondence if you do not hear from me with the regularity to which we have both grown accustomed. I may be boarding a ship within the week. I fear my mother is being overly cautious, but as an earlier departure is to my benefit, I was hardly about to protest. The responsibility for her agitated state is mine, as I will unfold.

I’ve told you of my time at the University College Hospital here in London. As access to the hospital was key to my mother getting me here, she has allowed me to maintain a standing appointment with staff. I have observed so much and taken copious notes. Your letters also inspired me to seek out a young nurse here, who I was told had something of a talent for drawing. I’ve paid her to illustrate my notes, so that we might more easily replicate these new techniques on our patients when I am back.

Though I miss you terribly—you know I do, Jack, do not be too jealous of London’s sick and injured, monopolize my time though they may—there has been so much to learn that I was deeply frustrated by the wave of sickness that suddenly swept the city. Before you leap to chastise my response, yes, I know it was a selfish one. You see, at home, you might have called on me to help mitigate the spread of illness. Here, I am an indulged guest. I may be present at surgeries and question patient doctors, but in the case of an outbreak, I am denied entry. Foolishly, I complained about this to my mother. Rather than commiserate with me over the injustice of my being shut out when I have the time, inclination, and very possibly the skills necessary to help, she determined they were quite right to bar me. A mere two days later, she decided we had better leave them to it and sail for home while our own health is still sound.

This does not mean I have seen nothing, and, Jack, I am not so selfish as to hope this illness reaches Port Victory. It appears to be neither influenza nor typhoid. I may have been able to diagnose it with closer study, but such a thing was denied me. At least these male doctors cannot separate me from my books; I have already begun packing my trunks with all the latest literature. I know you will make time for me so that we can discuss things properly. It is an enormous comfort.

It's been more than half a year since our separation began, yet I doubt you have forgotten what awaits us upon my return. My mother will see how you have flourished in your role as Head Surgeon, and she will know how steadfast our love has been. I believe our engagement has lasted long enough. I long for us to be united in all ways.

Yours across oceans,

Belle

—

The months are slower than ever, but not even Sneed on his crankiest day can bother Jack now. When Prof finally stepped aside, as recognition for his substantial contributions to the health of the colony (To the death rate, more like, Jack thought, but resisted impertinence just this once), he was allowed to maintain his residence in the house meant to be passed between head surgeons. Braced for the worst, Jack was surprised that this didn’t mean he wouldn’t be offered the things his predecessor had enjoyed.

Instead, they built him a new house.

The day he was granted his own bed is still clear in Jack’s mind, the day he was given his own quarters at the hospital even clearer. An entire house is so overwhelming that he puts off moving in. He’s afraid of the strange and terrible objects that will fill it—spoons in the kitchen and settees in the parlour. Innumerable trinkets for Fagin to nick, no doubt. Jack will have to pretend to mind, because the best thing that will be in the house will be Belle. He can’t imagine being concerned about much else.

He takes to strolling down to the dock each morning. On one of them, Belle’s ship comes in.

[dodgerfoxweek]

most beloved sister for dodgerfox week day 2: family

Fanny rushes through town, skirts hiked above her ankles, British propriety be damned. It’s hot in Australia and she has the joy of a most beloved sister to save.

Jack Dawkins sits in a cell, her sister Belle lies in hospital– that leaves her to make things right.

Belle may think her and Fanny have nothing in common but they do. It’s lying to their mother. Belle can do it because she’s smart and stays out of Mother’s way. 

Fanny does it through prattle. Prattle and talking and distraction. Mother doesn’t understand her either. Few do. Fanny can tell her all about a day of needlework, of ruffles and satin and lace, of reading stories only meant for high society girls. 

And yes, she usually means it. Not always.

(read the rest under the cut or here on ao3!)

Some days she walks along the coastline, petticoat dripping with saltwater, shells lying heavy in the pockets of her apron. She stares across the water and dreams of the English countryside and cold winter days. When no one’s around, that’s what she wants most: life back in England, a place she knows and understands, and that knows her in turn.

Right now, the prattle leads to running, hopefully catching Jack before he makes it too far, and telling him her plan to sneak into Belle’s room later that evening.

She needs you, Fanny practices saying in her head. You may think I’m stupid, but I know that.

Jack Dawkins will listen. Belle Fox will be happy tonight. 

Fanny Fox will be too, knowing the work that goes into making this happen. The lies she will happily tell to do it again.

[dodgerfoxweek]

February 27th:

tart and sweet your words to me love letters | banter

[dodgerfoxweek]

remember it once - chapter two

Fandom: The Artful Dodger Pairing: Jack x Belle Rating: T (will change) Chapter: 2 / 7 Word Count: 2894

For today's @dodgerfoxweek prompt: family/fighting

read on tumblr: one

She’s been told she’s going to England, which is obviously unacceptable, but without a husband it’s her father who has the final say, and with how her particular father cedes to her mother on all things… Well. Belle’s going to England.

This will be a trip of months, possibly a year. The sea voyage alone will fill most of that time, and who knows what excuses to extend their stay her mother may come up with once there? Of course, she’s sworn they won’t be away any longer than is completely necessary, as she meets with officials on her husband’s behalf (she is certain to be underestimated, Belle knows, and therefore all the more likely to succeed in her aims). Belle is aware of the dual forces tugging at her mother: what she could accomplish if she went and what mess she would prevent her husband from making of the colony if she stayed. For Belle, it is all loss; the thought of being without Jack, especially now they are engaged (secretly), is intolerable.

But her mother requires a companion, and Fanny is awful on boats.

If Belle does this with her mother, she will not be trotted around to society events when they arrive. Not made to sit in airless parlours with the dry mothers of eligible men. Not trussed into elaborate gowns and wedged into tight shoes for balls where she won’t know the steps to any of the dances. Nothing like flirting or courting or coy blushes behind a feathered fan. Her mother will spare her these things, if she goes. She even implies that Belle will be allowed to have a say in her own future when they return. The sourness around her mouth implies more: that her mother thinks of her marriage—that her mother thinks of Jack. She won’t go so far as to give her blessing to the match now, instead emphasizing that Belle will be permitted to make up her own mind when the time comes. No fool, Belle would bet their estate that her mother is simply hoping she’ll see and do enough to change her mind about Jack, to forget the unrefined surgeon from the colony when she finds herself deposited on the streets of London. When she has her head turned, not by a dashing young gentleman or a fashionable dress in a shop window, but by access to the hospitals her mother has promised to secure her entry to.

Belle feels guilty about this. She struggles with the selfishness, but it will not only be her mind she’ll be broadening; she will learn things she can bring back here. Doesn’t all of the medical literature she reads come from abroad, mainly from England? Isn’t that where the surgeries she longs to replicate are being performed? She imagines being able to actually observe a groundbreaking procedure as it happens rather than reading about it months or years later in a publication whose pages will always be slightly swollen from the dampness of being transported by ship. To be able to help people with what she discovers. To be able to tell Jack—

It's difficult. She knows his protestations, no need for him to voice them. Setting sentiment to one side, he will argue that she’s still recovering, could experience unforeseen complications, should remain where he can care for her. She will counter that it is not his job to be her constant caregiver, and with his responsibilities at the hospital, who is the next best person to monitor her? Herself. She will have herself to attend to herself all that time. Once in England, there will be other doctors. None of them will be Jack, but Belle doesn’t plan to fall ill anyway, so it’s inconsequential!

She still needs to inform him though. Without any real choice, her mind is made up for her; all she’s doing is seeking out the bright spots in the coming year, like studying the night sky, so much blackness between stars.

“What is it?” Jack asks again.

He is far too observant, eyes scanning Belle’s face as though for signs of disease.

“Awh, she’ll tell you in her own time,” Fagin assures him, directing a kindly, oddly paternal smile Belle’s way. “No secrets betwixt the two of you, eh? Not once you’ve seen someone’s gushing innards.”

“I don’t believe I asked for your opinion.”

“That’s alright, Dodge. I don’t mind givin’ it.”

Their bickering soothes her. Though her relationship with the people who raised her is significantly less complex than Jack’s is with Fagin, she’s jealous of their undisguised messiness. What must it be like to talk? To openly contradict one another? To recognize each other’s strengths as vocally as their flaws?

“And here you are, my dear,” Fagin says. With a little bow, he presents the sword he’s brought for her to practice with. “Nice, eh? Lovely balance.”

Belle eyes him shrewdly, but slides her fingers around the handle, feeling the weight.

“Where did you get it?” she inquires.

“No,” Jack cuts in, pointing a finger in Fagin’s face. “You will not tell Lady Belle about how you stole this sword off some navy vessel while its owner was sleeping or some nonsense.”

“Now you’ve let the bees out of the bag!” Fagin admonishes. “Spoiled the story completely. No flair, no details. Try tendin’ to your imagination, Doctor, lest it wither and die. Anyway,” he says, turning to Belle, “never mind that. I bought it fair as you please with me hard-earned gains.”

“A blatant lie then, is it?” Belle checks dryly. “I think I would’ve preferred no answer at all.”

“Forgive me, milady, but that does smart. I think you are aware that I recently… came into a modest fortune.”

Belle has to smile.

“Yes, and I don’t believe you’d spend a shilling of it on something you could steal instead.”

Fagin smiles back proudly.

“Like a daughter to me, she is, Dodge,” he announces.

She doesn’t know why she’s blushing, because she and Jack actually are betrothed, but it feels so indecorous to be teased. A sideways glance at her fiancé reveals him to be equally flustered, going pink along the top of his ears.

“Thank you for the sword, Fagin,” Jack says—a clear dismissal.

“Fine, Dodge, fine. Nighty-night, Fancy Skirt.”

Resting the point of the blade on the floorboards, Belle watches Fagin amble out of the operating theatre. Aside from the overfamiliar nickname (not that she minds), it’s a fitting farewell. It is nearly three o’clock in the morning.

Belle chose this place for its spaciousness, having seen Jack practice his swordsmanship in here before the ill-conceived duel with Sneed. The time was Jack’s insistence. Apparently, the smaller the hours, the fewer the emergencies. Anyone ill prefers to see how they fare in their own bed, anyone prone to taking dangerous chances usually does so during daylight, anyone drunk will already have suffered their foolish, preventable accident by this time of night. Belle hasn’t had a guard watching her staircase since the surgery, so it was quite easy to slip away—just as easy as keeping herself awake, with the news she hasn’t yet gathered the courage to impart jerking her heart on puppet’s strings.

“Just like I showed you without the sword,” Jack counsels.

Belle raises the weapon and he motions her forward and back, watching the sway of her skirt to interpret her footwork.

“Good, yes, more bend at the elbow.”

She adjusts, and he nods.

“It’s beginning to feel almost natural,” she notes.

“That’s good, Belle.”

Amazing how easy it is to feel perfectly comfortable with a weapon in one’s hand, Belle thinks. Also, how convenient it would be at dinner to impale a bit of roast or a piece of cheese off a tray at the far end of the table. If men hadn’t been hogging the sword for purposes martial and ceremonial, they might have been put to various domestic uses ages ago.

“When might I get to stab you?” He’s standing off to the side of her path, so when she lunges, thrusting the sword into empty air, he’s in no danger. She straightens and beams at him. “Not in earnest, of course.”

Jack gives her an extremely cautious, assessing look.

“Not yet, as I’m confident you’re at a stage to do me far more damage by accident than you might on purpose.”

“That’s not very generous of you,” she protests. “I’m sure I was much more encouraging towards your efforts at archery.”

“Crushingly truthful, in fact.”

“Ah. Yes, I do recall that now, actually,” Belle allows. She gives the sword a low swish that just misses her skirt. Woops.

“You will progress,” Jack promises, offering a reassuring smile even as he approaches and takes the sword from her hand. “We’ll keep practicing. I have ten years on you, remember? You have time to improve, and I’ll help you, if you really wish to learn. Maybe we can spar with broomsticks or something. And, naturally, once you’re healed, you’ll have more energy to—”

“I’m going away,” she blurts, before he can say anymore. His relaxed expression stiffens. “B-but maybe another time or two before I go?”

“Where are you going?”

“Certainly when I return we’ll resume,” Belle presses on, ignoring his question. “On the bright side, if I don’t learn much before I go, there won’t be much for me to—”

The sword clangs against the operating table as Jack sets it aside. Her face is suddenly in his hands and he’s forcing her to look at him.

“Where, Belle?”

Her eyes flood until she blinks out tears that Jack’s clutching fingers prevent from rolling down her cheeks.

“England.”

Jack’s shaking his head, frowning.

“But that’s… and both ways? Belle, that’s months—that could be years! Why—”

“It wasn’t my decision! My mother…”

“And you couldn’t have bloody fought her on it?” he demands, throwing his hands up. “You tell me I’m wrong every single day!”

She rolls her lips together, dabs the bottom of her nose with the back of her hand.

“I know it feels like this is the end of the world—”

“No. No. No, Belle, it doesn’t.” Jack, hands on his hips, shakes his head once more. “I know the end of the world. This colony feels like it’s at the very end of the world, and you know what? I like it here. I get to be who I want to be here. That made me happy enough, but then we met, and you’ve let me promise myself to you.”

“I know. I know.” Belle’s weeping now, almost trembling because she can tell Jack isn’t angry—he’s desperately hurt. There’s a glisten in his dark eyes like stars reflecting in a pail of water. The fact that he’s letting her see it is proof of how much he loves her, what she’ll be leaving at the dock when she boards the ship for England.

“You’ll—”

“No.”

“Someone else—”

“No.” She shakes her head hard, gripping his arms, gripping his hands, gripping his waistcoat as she pushes up, kissing him hard with closed lips. Against her will, her mouth opens to free a sob, and then Jack’s kissing her back, wet with thick throats and slick tongues and tears that fall from two sets of eyes. It’s a mess.

Jack grabs her wrists, transferring her hold to the back of his neck and taking her waist in his hands as he walks her back into the wall of the operating theatre. Not a shove, not a slam, nothing in his actions that forgets that she has been fragile, that caring for her is paramount, and still, there is his candid need.

“I love you, Belle Fox,” he gasps between kisses.

“All of England could not amount to what you are worth to me,” she says urgently, truthfully.

And then she stops trying to prove anything with words. She draws Jack as close as she can, contending with the curve of her skirt. His fingers plunge into her hair; she wore it half-down, but his nimble fingers ferret out the pins that hold the rest and it’s suddenly heavier on her shoulders, thicker where it falls around her face, until Jack scrapes through it, clutching her hair in his hands. A slight tug where he bunches her hair at the nape of her neck has her chin tilting up into his. His tongue is in her mouth, his body crowding as close as he can get, and she needs, she needs…

Belle’s fingers tear blindly at his scarf, already loose. The buttons of Jack’s waistcoat obey even her fumbling hands, and then his fingers join hers on the buttons of his shirt. A rapid, twisting dance, like a pollen-drunk bee on a cluster of flowers. They barely finish before he’s reaching for her, and Belle’s breath catches because she’s never seen this haste in him. When they… that morning… against the sheets that had held them through the night… Jack was keen but patient, certain but savouring. He undressed her by centimeters, moved so slowly she felt she might cry with the sensation of experiencing his every intention as it flowed from his mind into the fingers that trailed along her skin. The way he now wrenches the tucked blouse from the waist of her skirt and unfastens it like someone’s timing him is wholly different. And delicious. Belle’s head falls back against the wall. She’s panting, heart thumping joyously, lungs expanding, and Jack’s mouth drops to the swell of her breasts above her corset and chemise. She moans.

She puts a hand on his bare chest and feels his own galloping heart. She knows he will worry, that he will suffer because of the severe intervention he had to take to save her life, and she’s grateful to be leaving a healthy man behind her. He could still die. He could engage in more ill-advised gambling. Drown in the harbour. Get bitten by something venomous. Anger any one of numerous people in this colony who seem perfectly capable of and interested in doing him harm. Belle tries to refocus. Jack’s kissing up her neck, his hands where his mouth has recently been. He is so obviously a doctor; his touch betrays a love of the human body. Hers. Her.

“Don’t leave,” he requests dangerously, lips persuasive beneath her jaw. Belle’s eyelids flutter with the pleasure.

“Nothing will change.”

“I won’t be able to do this.” Jack kisses her throat some more, slips his hand inside her blouse to caress her waist over her corset. Promising more. Always promising her more.

“What I meant is that I will love you just as much,” she says. “I will think of you just as often. When we are next together, we will be married. Is that not worth waiting for?”

Jack lifts his head, smooths her hair back from her face.

“The wait’s just so much easier to bear when I know you’ll be by the hospital to bother me twenty times a day.”

“Is that what I do?”

“You are a complete nuisance.” He sighs, smiling sadly. “And I don’t know how I’m going to get a damn thing done without you.”

“Take comfort in the knowledge that you were competent before I ever interfered.”

“Merely competent?”

“That assessment shouldn’t wound you too much,” Belle points out, “coming from a common nuisance.”

Jack holds up a finger.

“Now, I never said common.” She gives him a look that says this is not good enough, that she’s waiting. “You are so beautiful,” he says, softly, the humour leaving his expression and tone, “that I would sail to England to bring you back.”

“Because I am beautiful?” Belle asks doubtfully. “That seems rather extreme.”

“Ever heard of Helen of Troy?” He makes a face like he is irrefutably correct, and, god, will she miss him.

So she doesn’t start crying again, Belle clears her throat, glances down at his open shirt.

“We can’t, um, go any further.”

He follows her gaze.

“I believe this was largely your handiwork.”

“If I’m to go… when I go, there can’t be any chance that…” Belle’s eyes drop to her own torso, the flat stomach concealed by her clothing.

“It’s quite enough to lose you to England,” he says in acquiescence.

“I’m coming back,” she says, as he begins to right her garments first.

“I know you are”—his eyes are on her placket, slipping small white buttons back through their holes—“because I’m coming to retrieve you if you don’t, as I said.”

“Don’t even say that in jest.”

He doesn’t respond.

“Jack,” Belle says, firmer. “I will return to Australia. You can’t come to England; you’re a wanted man.”

“It wouldn’t be thoughtless, but I would if I had to. If you needed me to. I would get on a ship for you.” He meets her gaze. “You’ve seen what I would risk for you. That I would get arrested for you. That I would be imprisoned for you. It can hardly be a surprise that I would die for you as well.”

Her heart gives a kangaroo’s hop.

“I don’t know that I can just accept that.”

Jack grins.

“Take all the time you need. It’s a long way to England.”

[dodgerfoxweek]

Returning to his room, shabby as it was, was heaven after the dirt floors of jail. Jack was covered in mud, mixed from the floors and his sweat, and smelled like a cadaver. He needed an hour-long scrub and a two day nap to even begin the process of becoming normal again.

As normal as he can be anyway, after a life like his. After holding Belle’s heart between his hands, feeling her pulse, feeling the invisible noose squeeze around his throat.

He missed her while he was gone. Thought only of her in jail. Could have kissed Hetty when she sneaked around in the night to tell him of Belle’s status– still alive. Tired but awake in spurts.

“She keeps asking for you. Her mother says nothing in response.”

(keep reading here on ao3!)

[dodgerfoxweek]

Jack didn’t know what the squiggles on his arm were supposed to be until he was fourteen and Captain Grimm sketches him an anatomically correct picture of a human heart.

Day one of Dodgerfox Week 2024