bokof

Fandom: Jeeves and Wooster
Rating: G
Length: 1848 words
Content notes: Truth-telling, hurt/comfort
Author notes: For Challenge 212: Ice.
Summary: The side-effect is the truth.

The most extraordinary dream I ever had, turned out to have been not a dream at all, but large as life and just as natural. Jeeves had asked, “Any further instructions, sir?” And I had answered, “True love’s kiss.” I know how it sounds, but this is completely true, I assure you. True that I said that to Jeeves, and true that I wanted that, liberally applied and as often as possible.

Given the circ.’s, I should have given him a hearty laugh, and a manly clap to the back, and perhaps added something along the lines of “You should look at your face!” Or, “That’s what puts the princesses right in all the stories, what?”

The circumstances were these. In a — fracasserie? Wait a moment. Tracasserie! (Thank you, Jeeves.) In a tracasserie that ranged from tipping the boot boy a sovereign to arise at dawn to remove all possible shoes from the Spode vicinity, cutting the bell wires from the ground floor rooms, getting the butler drunk, and switching one flagrant piece of silver for another, I somehow managed to introduce my skull rather violently to a Chinese vase.

In the aftermath, we were trespassing on the courtesy of Sir Watkyn Bassett, because Jeeves was particularly keen on keeping the master at rest, drinking copious fluids. In fact, he had hardly left my side, constantly flitting here to lower the shades, or there to dim the lamps, and just beside me, to slide a investigatory hand under the pillow and confiscate my Agatha Christie.

Nausea was my constant companion, sticking to me like a plaster, so on doctor’s orders I was prodding an unsalted scrambled egg and eyeing a plain toast with disfavour.

I was experimenting with some preparatory swallows and calming thoughts, when it struck me that Jeeves had the perfect thing for fidgety digestions.

“That thing with the eggs, Jeeves.”

“Sir?”

“And pepper. Not black pepper. Red. That doesn’t sound right. Red pepper. Sounds like Reggie Pepper, doesn’t it?”

“You refer to your Saturday morning preparation, sir?”

“There’s more than one?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is there one for what I’ve got?”

“Which symptom in particular do you wish to affect, sir?”

I sat back and folded my hands across the anxious stomach. I took a brief catalogue. Feet: perfectly all right. Legs: the normal number. Torso: tender in the mid-section. Arms, also two. Head?

“I’m a bit foggy, don’t you know. My head’s all swirly and achey. I want to stand up, but when I try it, I want to lie down. And it’s splendid being able to talk to you at any time of the day or night, but it seems like breakfast comes every hour, and that can’t be right.”

“Sir, your condition required that I wake you at certain intervals. This is no longer necessary. Am I to understand that you desire clarity of mind?”

“Bang on the head, Jeeves.”

He shuddered. Upon reviewing my remark, I amended it.

“Spot on, I mean. Spot on, Jeeves!”

“Thank you, sir. I shall return directly.”

I must have fallen asleep. The light was all wrong for morning and my tray was gone. I pushed out my elbows to get my palms on the bed, meaning to push myself up, you see, and jostled Jeeves’ knee. He must have dragged his armchair next to the bed. 

He was in motion, rubbing his eyes, tonguing his teeth, and blinking awake, but already he was leaning over me, one of his arms holding me almost to his chest, as he built up a stack of pillows behind me. He eased me back with his hands gently gripping my arms.

“If you would try this, slowly, sir,” he said, taking a beverage from the nightstand. I hesitated. Like a firework, Jeeves’ curative beverages start with an explosion and end with a gratifying shower of happiness and light. The explosion bit didn’t sound to hot just then.

“Sir, the doctor has approved the ingredients for a man in your condition,” he said, looking searchingly into my eyes and pressing the rim of the glass against my lip. I guess my pupils passed muster for the recently concussed.

I put a hand on the bottom of the glass and tipped it up. It tasted terrible. There was something rummy in his expression, however, that told me to keep my opinions to myself. Clearly, he expected the usual magic.

“What else did the doctor have to say? How long do we stay here? It’s beyond feudal for you to sleep in that chair another night, Jeeves.”

Jeeves sat and placed a hand on my cheek. This surprised me. Jeeves isn’t in the habit of caressing my damask cheek. I was just about to inquire about the hand on the cheek, when with his other hand, he picked up a water bottle sporting a crochet jumper with ribbons on the neck, and held it to my head. I remembered him doing something similar in the night.

“It’s all right, Jeeves. I won’t budge. Perhaps you could read to me, though. I was just at the bit where the sister sees the vicar leave the summer house.”

I closed my eyes and tried to pretend that Jeeves’ hand was not a medicinal hand, but an affectionate hand. You have to take these little slices of life and keep them to yourself. Secret them away. Press them between the leaves of your heart of hearts, and leave them there. Undisturbed. I opened my eyes and realised I'd been sleeping again.

Jeeves’ voice hung in the room, as if he’d just been reading, and I glanced over to see why he’d stopped. He was closing the book and unhooking a leg from over his knee. His eye caught mine. 

I’ll never forget it. I was half-lying in someone else’s robe, and Jeeves was by my side, in his country browns. The silver in his hair glinted. His unshaven face was haggard around the edges, but his eyes were steadily boring into mine. The lamp had a red shawl draped over it, casting strange shadows in the room. Motes of dust glittered lazily in the lamplight that fell on Jeeves’s hands, but you could see by the light leaking around the curtains that the sun was blazing away outside, where the world of tennis whites, lemonades, and finger sandwiches was playing pretend.

“Any further instructions, sir?”

You see, everything was off kilter. The words fell out of my mouth of their own accord.

“True love’s kiss.”

We stared at each other for a bit. Jeeves fell back on a sure thing.

“Indeed, sir?”

The most plausible explanation was that I was dreaming.

“Am I dreaming?”

“No, sir.”

“Blast.”

“As you say, sir.”

Jeeves removed my improbable water bottle hat and his freezing hand clasped my own. Impossibly, he pressed my knuckles to his lips. Then, grasping my wrist, he held my hand open and pressed the unlikeliest kiss in the world to my bewildered palm.

“Are you absolutely certain I’m not dreaming, Jeeves?”

Jeeves smiled against my hand. He began kissing each fingertip.

Kiss. “Do you — ,” kiss, “dream of my kisses — ,” kiss, “Bertram?” Kiss.

“Yes.” 

I sat up.

“Yes, I do. I mean, yes, I do. I say, Jeeves! I mean to say no, I don’t, but it’s coming out as, wait — yes, I do — How hard did I hit my head, Jeeves?”

“If you would lie back, sir — ” he said, suppressing a smile.

“ — No, don’t do that — ”

“It is a side-effect of this version of my little preparation. Apart from the Worcester sauce, egg, and red pepper, I have added a mild sedative. The doctor told me it he has found it extremely effective in treating pain and inducing restful sleep. And as a truth serum.”

“Jeeves.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Thank you for the — ah — you know. Kisses. Thank you for the kisses. Jolly feudal of you. But you don’t have to.”

I gave him a short list of all the things he didn’t have to, beginning with sitting up with invalids in overstuffed armchairs, and I tell you, this one bore an antimacassar that dialed whimsy all the way from merely ugly to truly hideous (someone had embroidered a series of angels in smocks cavorting with lambs on an otherwise mild piece of lace) instead of hiring a nurse; to reading detective fiction instead of, well, not the sort of excruciating philosophy he reads in his spare time, but instead of something bearable yet improving that Bassett might have in his library, like Dickens, perhaps, or Kipling; to holding an overdressed, ice-cold water bottle to the bump on my head for all of half an hour; to kisses.

“What should I do but tend upon the hours and times of your desire?” Said Jeeves. Hectic spots of colour mottled his cheeks, and his aura of calm seemed to contain frantic preparations, like a stage curtain at an amateur dramatics performance.

His words had the sound of a quote, but we’d have to come back to that. The urgent matter at hand was Jeeves bringing my desires into it.

“Bally anything but that, Jeeves.”

“Shall I act on my own desire, Bertram?” 

“Of course! Always, Jeeves. As if you don’t you already!”

“Not precisely. I fear, Bertram, that in order to experience the full extent of my desires, you shall have be well.”

“The full extent, you say?”

Jeeves passed me a glass of water. He stood and brought a cushion from his seat around to the foot of my bed. He placed it there, then knelt and felt around under my mattress. Popping up with a collection of Holmes stories I’d begged off Stiffy the night before, he sat up against the headboard, his feet crossed and up on the cushion. I felt an urge to confess all.

“I wasn’t asking for a kiss.”

Jeeves coughs where other men give an exasperated sigh and roll their eyes.

He coughed.

“The effects of the serum are well-studied, sir.”

“No, I mean, I can’t ask for a true love’s kiss from someone who isn’t in love with me. I wasn’t asking. I was saying I wanted to give you a kiss.”

That sank in and settled him back.

“Either interpretation would be a truthful one, then. I believe your favourite is The Speckled Band. ‘On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes…’”

The man beside me continued to read. I downed the rest of my water, the remedy to being coshed by vases being ice packs, fluids, and rest. I had a feeling that I was passing into this chappie's clutches, and that if I gave in now I should be entering a life full of the strain of concealment, the disappointment of aunts, and a general cloud of innuendo, gossip, and suspicion. On the other hand, this was obviously a cove of rare intelligence, and it would be a comfort in a lot of ways to have him holding the figurative umbrella. I’d had my ice and my fluids, so I got busy resting.

Notes:

Unbeta’d, all errors my own. Corrections appreciated.

Inspiration from the first line of Jerome K. Jerome’s Dreams: “The most extraordinary dream I ever had was one in which I fancied that, as I was going into a theater, the cloak-room attendant stopped me in the lobby and insisted on my leaving my legs behind me.”

‘Large as life and just as natural’ is from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.

Circ.'s. Many stylesheets suggest an apostrophe after a period and before a plural ’s’. I just had to try it out myself, because Wooster generally ends his abbreviations with a period.

I hope I’ve remembered the plot of Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage correctly.

Sodium amytal is a mild sedative and hypnotic that supposedly works as a truth serum.

I borrowed the angels and lambs from Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. “The whole interior had been gutted, elaborately refurnished and redecorated in the arts-and-crafts style of the last decade of the nineteenth century. Angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler-roses, flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts in Celtic script, saints in armour, covered the walls in an intricate patter of clear, bright colours.”

“What should I do but tend upon the hours and times of your desire?” is from Shakespeare’s sonnet 57. That’s the gay one.

The ending is straight from two books:

The first is Carry On, Jeeves: “I hesitated a bit. I had a feeling that I was passing into this chappie's clutches, and that if I gave in now I should become just like poor old Aubrey Fothergill, unable to call my soul my own. On the other hand, this was obviously a cove of rare intelligence, and it would be a comfort in a lot of ways to have him doing the thinking for me. I made up my mind.” 

The second is from Strangers by Graham Robb. “19th-century homosexuals lived under a cloud, but it seldom rained. Most of them suffered, not from the cruel machinery of justice, but from the creeping sense of shame, the fear of losing friends, family and reputation, the painful incompatibility of religious belief and sexual desire, the social and mental isolation, and the strain of concealment.”

But in the last Jeeves book, Jeeves returns to a Wooster who can’t get along without him, and that's where he presumably stayed.

I join this community on the recommendation of member godsdaisiechain, who might remember me by my livejournal name jasperjasper.