Member-only story
Modern Chivalry
Slice-of-life/fantasy short. A sea captain asks a question of his attendant aboard ship.
1.5k, rated T, some faint M/M with a ship’s captain and an angel. Set in the late 1700s.
“How old are you?” asks Captain Haigh, and Aquila does not acknowledge the question, continuing to fold the captain’s shirts in neat, orderly fashion.
He enjoys to be at sea, has developed a true taste for the salt-spray fresh air and the shift and rhythm of the ocean beneath the ship, the continuous even swell of the waves, but he can’t wash a shirt so well at sea as he can on land. He’d spent much of yesterday morning sitting with his feet in a freshwater stream, patiently scrubbing each of the captain’s shirts out and various of his other garments as well, and then had laid them out in the sun to dry.
“Mr Lazaar says he first met you when he first went to sea,” Haigh says, setting his cup down, and glancing over, Aquila walks across the room to take up pot from its tray, walking back to Haigh’s desk to replenish his tea. Black and brewed very strong, to the captain’s preferences.
Haigh is looking up at Aquila very keenly, and what a keen face he has — a keen, strong nose, keen, sharp-carved lips, as those hewn in marble, keen, flinty eyes, a very cold brown. His expression now…
