Title: Comfort and Joy
Author: godsdaisiechain
Fandom: Jeeves and Wooster
Type: Fic
Characters/Pairing: Jeeves and Wooster
Word Count: ~1100
Rating: PG
Summary: Bertie picks Jeeves up from the hospital after an illness.  Mature couple.


Bertie Wooster twiddled a pensive fountain pen, sending a gout of indelible peacock blue ink across the blotter and a pink monogrammed sleeve, suitable for day or evening wear according to the manufacturer and unsuitable for any occupation except setting out the bins according to the paragon of valets.   Had Jeeves been lurking about the premises like a right-minded valet, he would have oozed in, outwardly helpful and inwardly gloating, whisking the master into clean clothes devoid of offensive monograms. He hadn’t been lurking, though, having been absent from the flat for some days, leaving Bertie languishing and at the mercy of his own tea-making.

So Jeeves did not witness any tearful blinking or a scattering of clear droplets across Crane’s finest note stock.  It was the only speck of only comfort in the whole bally business.

A ring cut through the stillness, sending the fountain pen into the wastebasket.  Bertie popped up, fell over the desk chair, knocking the receiver from its cradle and landing across the magazine rack.

“Hello allo?”

“Is that Lord Yaxley?” a brisk voice demanded, briskly.  It was the sort of voice one imagined would be attached to a stout, if not robust, female of gimlet visage and no-nonsense personality.  The sort of bird that might make even Agatha Gregson blench and think about stepping back.  Bertie dropped the receiver and picked it up again. He asked himself what Jeeves would say.

“Who may I ask is ringing?”

“Nurse Callahan,” said the voice in a strident tone. “Stop dropping the receiver.  I haven’t got all day.  Now who is this? Is that Lord Yaxley’s secretary?” Bertie disdained to answer this ripe piece impertinence, if that was the word he wanted, and resolved to buy Jeeves a rather nice edition of Spinoza.  

“May I convey a message, what?”

“It’s all over now.  I’ve been asked to tell Lord Yaxley.”  The voice seemed to lance through the willowy frame.  Bertie closed his eyes.  “I was told,” the voice went on, “that Lord Yaxley would see to things himself.”

The Woosters had been at Agincourt, and even though the battle had been something of a cock-up in the nature of a fiasco, they retained a vestige of the sort of mettle that would keep a man floundering on a horse in the mud even though all else seemed lost. The last of the Woosters engaged in a mental exercise something like girding the loins and something like resolving to propose to Florence Craye.  “Ah, right, then,” said Bertie.  “He shall.”

Such was his agitation of mind, that Bertie ankled from the flat at Berkeley Mansions as soon as he had donned a hat and coat and gone back twice, once to retrieve his billfold and once to insert the narrow feet into shoes.   A cab conveyed him to St. Thomas’ Hospital, and Nurse Callahan, who proved to be a small, wiry specimen was at the door to receive him.  She scowled angrily at a group of carolers, whose song ceased abruptly just before the audience, which had harked on command, learned what precisely the herald angels were singing.

“Your sleeve is spattered with ink,” she announced loudly, taking Bertie in. Bertie fumbled his hat and gloves.  “Don’t drop those clean things on the dirty floor.”

“I am Lord Yaxley,” he said in the voice he used when the elevator operator at the Ritz was impertinent.  Nurse Callahan proved immune to the tone, however.

“Your secretary is an ass,” she said. “You’d do well to find a new one.”

“May we get on with it?” Bertie caught his belongings and followed the Nurse down the hallway, feeling something like a prisoner about to be freed or possibly condemned and not knowing which.  Passages passed as passages will do and eventually they came to a ward where various elderly men slept or moaned or read in their various beds.  A curtain shielded one bed from view and to this curtain was Bertie directed.

“We’ll be back in ten minutes,” said Nurse Callahan.  “This is not normally…”

Bertie blinked back tears, “the done thing…..  Yes, I know, good nurse.”   He oozed forward, and pulled back a shaking curtain.  Jeeves lay on the bed, fully dressed, eyes closed, skin the color of cigarette ash.  His hair had thinned and greyed over the years, but the face retained its chiseled good looks and the image was one of the better class of gods lying in state after one of the nasty run-ins that caused gods to visit the underworld for a time. The thought closed Bertie’s windpipe.

A sort of smothered squawk escaped and the Jeevesian eyes snapped open. Bertie closed the gap between the curtain and the bed, pressing the manservant back against the mattress before Jeeves could hop up and start waiting on him.

“Sir?” Jeeves whispered, “My nephew agreed….”

Bertie’s eyes filled with tears.  “I can’t,” he whispered hotly. “It was bad enough you coming here.  I won’t have it, I tell you.”  Jeeves closed his eyes and nodded once, then the eyes opened again and he scowled at the inky monogrammed sleeve.

Four minutes later, Nurse Callahan had inserted Jeeves into a wheelchair and a porter had wheeled him to a waiting cab. Never had a brief drive seemed so infernally long or the cheerful chatter of one of the better class of cab drivers so irksome, but Bertie kept up a polite enough patter. By the time they reached home, the Jeevesian visage was as white as the driven snow, but he managed to walk to the elevator.

Jeeves collapsed slightly in the entryway, and Bertie supported him to the larger guest bedroom.  “I am sorry, my own,” Jeeves said, while Bertie pulled off their coats and Jeeves’s shoes and socks. “I had not anticipated falling so ill or I would have never left the flat.”

“I can’t talk,” said Bertie, “not yet,” and Jeeves meekly undressed and put on a new set of pink silk pyjamas and slipped under the covers.  He swallowed his medicine and accepted a half full cup of slightly stewed tea swimming in its saucer.  He did not even frown when Bertie piled his coat and Jeeves’s clothes messily on a side chair.

“I didn’t realize,” Jeeves began again, then set aside the cup of tea because Bertie had curled up on the bed next to him.  “Oh, my love, it was a simple accident.  I apologize for worrying you.”

“It wasn’t bally simple,” said Bertie, when he could muster the pipes into working trim.  “You could have died.”

Jeeves stroked the faded golden hair.  “I missed you,” he admitted throatily.

“Not as much as I missed you,” said Bertie.

“I thought I had destroyed all of these shirts,” said Jeeves, fingering the stained sleeve.

“Would you deny a man any comfort in the absence of the thing that makes his world go round, Jeeves?  His one true love for over thirty years?” Bertie demanded petulantly.

Jeeves sighed.  “No, my joy,” he said.  “I would not.”

Bertie grinned.  “Right, then, because I’ve got you a set as well.”  And they both laughed for the first time in days.