It's like coming home again -- to be so close, with the frost glinting on the canvas roof, and heading slowly homeward.

"Like slipping on a familiar glove," Crozier says, and Blanky croaks with laughter.

"Like a hoary old mitten, half-raveled. If I'd have known you were a bugger, some of those winters would have been a damn sight shorter."

Their bodies fit together wonderfully and terribly -- wooly jumper to woolen undershirt, cotton drawers and untied boots, hairy legs under Hudson's Bay blankets. They are face to face and nearly belly to belly, though Crozier favors the one side for a better approach and to allow Blanky's leg a little room. He had reached down to trace the bandages with a sour swell of remorse in his belly and the icemaster had taken his hand away and planted it squarely in the fork of his groin instead. How can a man do anything but oblige? It'd be a long night otherwise.

Crozier's hand is damp with sweat and seed alike, working in the wreath of grizzled hair around his friend's prick; though slow to rise, Blanky's tool is unflaggingly hard, and responds to the expedient rhythm of Francis' furtive tugging with an admirable staying power even as it lets down beads of hot slickness. The oceanic scent of someone else's spendings is heavy in the pocket of warm air the two of them have made for themselves. Two to a bed like conquering heroes, ragged and sinewy old Greeks.

There is a celebratory attitude to the proceedings, which alone may be the proof that they've both utterly cracked under the strain of rescue. Francis Crozier has partaken of horizontal refreshment in drawing-rooms and back-alleys, both under merciful lapses of supervision; he's done his bit of business in civilian togs and full midshipman's uniform and on very rare occasions stripped to the skin. His partners have been naked to the waist and in corded stays, ragged in petticoats and bound up in summerweight silks, tossed up or girded over or dodged beneath for a guilty fingering -- but none of his lovers were ever swathed in wool of the same approximate color and texture as the original sheep. It would be impolite to speculate on its original owner's smell. Crozier buries his face in Blanky's shoulder as he works and feels his great chest rise and fall; he breathes in the smell of comfort, closeness, easy humanity. Friendship, of a kind.

Crozier murmurs the man's given name. Blanky's hand companionably circles his own prick, giving him a steady practiced tug now and again to get the blood throbbing. Neither of them is a young man, foolish enough to jaunt out into the open air for a fuck; better to huddle in close under blankets and fur rugs and exchange strange intimacies.

"If we make it back to England, I'll give you a poking like a real sailor," Blanky growls against the flushed scarlet shell of Crozier's ear, and sends him full of shivers.