“Where are your manners, Mr. Jopson? Is this how they do it in the wardroom?”

The little steward is not so little after all — it is only when he is behind him with his weight against Hickey’s back that the pistol comes up, cold and stinking of oil. His pocket knife has cut a gash in the seat of Hickey’s wool trousers, deep enough to ruck up his shirttails but shallow enough to only leave a smarting stripe. His gloved hand is thrust through the split in the fabric, yanking it wide, and his hard member presses awkwardly against the top of Hickey’s leg.

So this is how it will be, whatever rivalry there is between them in their desires. Behind him, Mr. Jopson spits into his hand. The steward can’t have much spittle going spare; the dry air licking at Hickey’s backside is cold enough to make his balls tighten and the scars crossing his thighs prickle and bunch. The canvas tent flaps rattle together behind them.

“Never did like shirkers, Mr. Hickey.” There is a mocking lilt to Jopson’s voice that rankles far more than the indignity of being bent over at pistol-point and fucked. “I’ll get good service from you now.”

The weight of him presses against Hickey’s back, against his legs — no warmth, only pressure. Jopson moves into him with his fingers, and in his disgust Hickey finds himself responding — cold fingers like the press of the cold metal barrel against the back of his skull.

“—thought sodomy was against the articles. Laws of God and man, and the like.”

“Sedition, “ Jopson says, ”mutiny,” bent low against his ear. He has Hickey’s arm bent back behind him, and the weight of the steward’s body crushes against his joints, the lean and hungry sinew left behind by hunger. He’s sick, same as the rest of them, he can be no different — perhaps he will lose a tooth, in the course of fucking him, or a testicle. There is the smell of blood on his breath. It could be Gibson there behind him, sweet Billy with his golden curls —

“Against your lovely captain?” Hickey affects impudent good cheer. No thought to spare for John Irving and his sawn-off tackle.

“Against the law, Mr. Hickey.”

There is pure hate in that voice, pure hot contempt. Thomas Jopson has made a servant of himself, a servant for life.

Hickey is not afraid, but he does not move, either; he does not squirm or buck beneath the steward’s weight in the interest of avoiding a cobbing. The pistol’s barrel chips at his skull. To be fucked is nothing, and if he dies like this at least it’ll be a devil of a thing to explain. Jopson labors away in him, bracing him down with a hard fist in the back of his collar and an elbow buried in the small of his back; his thrusts are punishing and short, like blows. His exertion and his anger lead him to breathe roughly, the kind of ragged panting behind one’s back that Hickey remembers so well from earlier life, and from the force against his vitals Hickey must respond in kind — each thrust squeezes a groan out of him, an involuntary utterance through gritted teeth and gash-tight lips. His cheek is thrust into the flat ticking pillow, saturated with some other man’s smell.

Perhaps the steward thinks he’ll make him beg — but the man who is Hickey has never begged in his life. Hickey pants, twisting his body against the blankets and making lewd sounds like a man receiving the drilling of his life — to bring him off quicker or to shame him, or to haunt him.

The wind whistles past the tent flaps, louder than skin against skin, and the pillow beneath his head spits goose-down. Jopson must he is acting as the captain’s arm in this, doing what the captain in his limp dignity cannot — but he does not understand Crozier’s mind, he cannot grasp what pleases him with only a servile attitude. He has none of Billy’s courage, he has no pride, he has only what supportance the feeble ladder of rank will give him. If he truly had the nerve to avenge Lieutenant Irving, he’d have to do better with that knife of his, and not the sharp intrusions of his prick.

“You think he sees you, Captain Crozier? You think he’s wondering where you are now?”

“Quiet,” Jopson says, warningly. He knows that he risks the monstrosity of what he has done becoming known. His strength is in conquest. He has wedded himself to the empire, and the empire will never give him so much as a cold kiss in return.

But the matter goes nowhere else, there is no response, no further warning. Jopson presses his face against the nape of Hickey’s neck — he can feel the stubble of his black beard prickling like splinters, he can feel the wetness of his breath and the hardness of his teeth through his lips. Under other circumstances, it would be intimate. It calls out to stop his breath.

If he meant to resist him, he’d have called out — he’d have called out for help the moment his captor first produced a knife in his free hand like a broadsheet bandit, the moment he rolled him over and made to outrage him like he was some girl gathering gillyflowers by the side of the road and not a man about to be hanged on a desolate Arctic plain. It is not that he desires this — if he’d wanted Mr. Jopson’s prick in his backside he could have had it during that first long winter, with the way the poor bastard mooned after anything in epaulets. Nor is he afraid. The man who is Hickey has been buggered worse than this before. It’s only that he wants to see how far this good and faithful Thomas Jopson will go.

Hickey draws deep swelling breaths and situates himself in the ache in his shoulders, the pain in his wrists, the cold pain against the low corner of his skull. They haven’t very long together, the two of them; Jopson knows this, from the way he pierces into him, from the way he pumps his hips as if he’s already close to the last sour strokes. Knees apart, stiff and unyielding as a block of wood — the steward moves in him as if he is nothing, a contemptible object. He has given him this much, at least — Jopson has not taken his mouth, he has not stopped his breath.

To hang for murder in London is surely no worse than to do it in this holy, haunted place. If they really wanted to keep him out of trouble, better to stuff a rag between his teeth than hold a gun to his head. In the silence of their crime, Hickey speaks to him, urgently, rapidly — but he does not beg.

“I would never have thought you for a jealous man. I buggered your precious captain, did you know that?’ Hickey lets his accent grow broad, even as his voice has gone thick with pressure and exertion. “I soiled his good linen with my spunk, I wiped my prick on his handsome blue uniform —“

Jopson strikes him in the back of the head with the pistol’s grip, pressing him sharply into the wadded blankets hard enough to jostle Hickey’s teeth and make his nose-bone ache almost as much as the back half of his skull. He is a desperate man, he is at the end of his resources, he is afraid — afraid of things from which his good captain cannot save him. His fear is as useless as a silk slipper out on the ice, a silver medal, a silk purse.

Nothing is degrading to the man who is determined to survive it.

When Jopson finishes, spitting out his scant nature, he buttons himself back up as if nothing has transpired between them — he tucks down Hickey’s shirttails like he’s dressing him, even as the pistol is still pointed his way. He has a gentleman’s manners, however servile; his boots are polished, even now. He will die a servant. Hickey will see to that.

Rising up, Mr. Jopson clears his throat like an afterthought and spits on him.

“Your uniform’s a shambles, Mr. Hickey. Seems a shame to be hanged looking such a sight.”

“I always knew you had it in you,” Hickey rasps. His bleeding nose dribbles, as he takes stock of his vitals — a sore arse, a bruised nose-bone, a split scalp, a pain in the head.

Hickey tries rolling over onto his back and finds it is permitted. Standing there above him, Jopson looks half-bestial — dark with beard, lips smeared with blood that can only be his own. Hickey grins up at him.