Title: After the Heydey of the Joosters
Author: godsdaisiechain
Fandom: Jeeves and Wooster
Pairings: Bertie/Jeeves, Stilton/Florence Craye, Bertie/Florence, Percy Gorringe/Florence, Bertie/Madeline, Madeline/Earl of Sidcup (Roderick Spode), Bertie/Honoria Glossop, Honoria/Biffy Biffen, Jeeves/misc women
Rating: PG-13 (for gore)
Word count: ~3400
Notes: Not really all that Halloween-y.  Schmoopieness occurs.  And all-girl herring wrestling.
Summary: Ghosts--Bertie sees ghosts and makes a decision about his future with Jeeves.  Gore--Bertie, Jeeves, and Stilton Cheesewright struggle to forget the horrors of battle...and Florence Craye is on the lookout for a new husband.


Ghosts

Bertie Wooster lay awake, looking at the cracked ceiling of his bedroom a moment before he sat up and surveyed the room.  He had lived there all of his adult life, except for a few years during the war, and nearly everything was the same.  He was the same, underneath, he knew, even though the youngsters called him “Lord Yaxley” now and no one had dared hint that he was mentally negligible in decades.

The wardrobe, the tables, the bed, every bit of furniture had been there the day Jeeves had first shimmered in to put his life to rights.  The room was tidy now, but in his mind’s eye Bertie could see the dead flowers, the opera scarf draped over a chair, the whangee carelessly leaned in the corner, a stud dropped on the floor.  He thought of all the friends and aunts who had ankled into the room to seek his help and advice, disturbing him in his pajamas.  And he thought of Jeeves, shimmering about noiselessly, bringing his tea, never spilling it or rattling the cup in the saucer.  Yes, those had been good days, even though the threat of marriage had hung over his head like a bally pitted pendulum, or what-have-you.

Bertie swung his feet to the floor and slipped them into a battered and much-mended pair of leather slippers.  He could almost see the parade of slippers he had worn as a young man, the pairs that were discarded nearly as soon as he had gotten them used to his slender feet. His niece was constantly after him to replace them, but they didn’t make slippers like that any more, and Jeeves had purchased these.  His dressing gown was also faded and worn, but the lining inside was new and kept his frame cozy as he shuffled to the kitchen. 

Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management had come apart at the binding and the page on making tea was laminated and affixed to the wall.  Bertie used his newfangled toaster and made the tea, still puzzled about giving an extra spoonful to the pot but knowing there would never be a sensible answer to his reasonable question.  He buttered the toast while the fragrant eggs and b sizzled, and fixed up the breakfast tray, just as it had always been fixed when he was a young man, even down to the single flower in its little crystal vase, which had been chipped and repolished many times and now looked a bit odd around the top.

Ankling back to the bedroom, Bertie set the tray on the bed and bent to kiss his lover awake.  As he did so, he thought with profound gratitude of all the mornings he had woken to that well-beloved face.

“Sir?”  Jeeves’s eyes fluttered open and he flushed, as he always did when he slept later than his former master.

“Good morning, sunshine,” said Bertie, setting the tray over Jeeves’s lap and settling back into the bed. The old men ate their breakfast companionably, quietly discussing their few plans for the day. They would take lunch at the club, Bertie with Motty Pershore and Jeeves with another friend. They had seen their solicitors and accountants the day before and Bertie felt a treat was in order.

“We still have plenty of oof, Jeeves,” said Bertie cheerfully.

“Indeed, sir.”  Jeeves felt it would be more of a treat to have lunch together.

“There is a thingness in the tone that I do not care for, Reg,” said Bertie, patting his lover’s hand. “I know it’s not like it was in the old days, but we can still ankle about the place, what….”  He had been going to say that they could see their friends, but he paused a moment, as the ghosts of those who had died danced before his eyes.  Tuppy Glossop, never quite right after the war, had been placed in some type of a home because his mind was wandering. Their clubs were different. “Perhaps we can take in a show later this week.”

A light shone in Jeeves’s eyes. He adored shows and had seen very few in his youth. “Thank-you.  That would be wonderful.” He put his arms around Bertie and kissed him.

“Jeeves?”

“Yes, darling?”

“Do you feel up to a trip?  I’ve a yen to be in Paris, or Cannes or Monte Carlo.”

Jeeves paused and Bertie could see the old Viking glimmer behind his eyes. “I would love to go one last time.” And suddenly Bertie was crying.  “Oh, darling, please calm yourself.”  Jeeves petted his lover patiently. “You remember what happened two years ago when we went to New York. It won’t be the same.  It will remind you of the friends we have lost and the life we once had, and you won’t want to go back.”

“Ah,” said Bertie.

“We are not so old,” rumbled Jeeves, kissing Bertie soundly. “My uncle served at table until he was seventy-five. You needn’t worry so.”

Bertie squared his shoulders, realizing that he had not been clear. “I meant for us to go and live there, Reg.  I am so tired of hiding and being afraid.” Jeeves froze suddenly. “There’s no one left to be hurt.”  He scrambled in the night table. “I bought you a ring.”

“Oh, yes. Yes, my dearest pet,” breathed Jeeves. “I can never find the words to thank you enough. Yes.”  They kissed and washed the dishes, and kissed, then they dressed and Jeeves called their man, the one who came to pack and see to them.  Two weeks later, they were settled comfortably in a cottage near the beach, with enough room to host their nieces and nephews.

As they strolled through the town, so different from the one they had known as young men, Bertie could see, in his mind’s eye, the people he had once travelled with, the aunts and cousins and friends, the places that had been destroyed during the war.  The firm grip of his life’s companion sustained and steadied him as it had all those years before.  Even though he knew that in a few years they, too, would be ghosts, Bertie glowed with love and contentment and beside him, Jeeves did the same. They paused and kissed briefly in the warm light of the setting sun and returned home for what Bertie still called “a bit of a snuggle.”

Gore

Stilton Cheesewright retched into a hedgerow.  He had just broken a man’s spine in three places and he was covered in the blood of a comrade in arms.  Near him, Bertie Wooster was holding a man’s hand and dosing him with morphine. The wound had spilled his intestines, and he would die even though Stilton had killed their assailant, a German sniper left behind by a hurried retreating army.  Stilton turned and saw who had been wounded then retched again.  The men had fanned out and were looking for a place to set up a camp, but two had already begun to dig the grave.

“Stilton, please,” said Bertie.  “He wants to speak with you.”

“Gorringe,” said Stilton gruffly, setting a hand on the forehead of the dying man.

“Florence,” gasped Gorringe, and Stilton pulled out a picture.  It had been taken while he and Florence were engaged. Bertie closed his eyes. No wonder Stilton’s wife had left him.

“Please, you must tell Florence I loved her, that I am sorry, that you…”

Stilton could have wept in relief. “Of course, old crumpet. She’d be happy to know that.”

“One of you should…” he gasped and heaved and Bertie started to take out another vial, but Percy waved it away. “No time, please take…” he gasped with his last breath. 

They buried Percy with his wife’s picture in his hand, took his letters to mail to the woman he actually had married. Wordlessly they agreed to lie, to forget what he had said about Florence, who had married some earl or other.  Bertie would remember in some calmer moment who it was.

“Do you think he knew?” asked Bertie that night in their shared ‘officers’ sleeping area.  Somehow the men had found them a place to wash and fix a hot meal, and Percy had hoarded some better rations.  Stilton nearly choked, but a look from Bertie had him forcing the food down.

“No,” said Stilton. “I don’t.  I think he thought we were all back at Brinkley Court.”

“Ah,” said Bertie. He gave some of his dinner to a hungry-looking lad.

“I apologize, Wooster.”

“No need, old fruit.”

“I didn’t understand what I was threatening all those years ago.  It was horrid.”

“You saved our lives, Stilton.  Me and eighteen men and fourteen of Gorringe’s.”  Bertie chewed and swallowed, trying not to think of Anatole. “Besides, I never knew how much you did love her, D’Arcy.  I never did, not in that way.  I admired her profile, certainly.”

“You snuck into her room.”

“It was a mistake.” Bertie told the tale and Stilton nearly convulsed laughing. Finally he cleared his throat and wiped his eyes.  He never spoke of that old pain, how he had realized far too late how much Florence meant to him. “We’ll say Gorringe saved us, then?”

“Yes, of course, old crumpet, if you wish it.”

“That’s Major Crumpet to you, Wooster.” Stilton had quietly written the report and sent it along, describing the truth of the thing and how Bertie, in fact had saved everyone except Percy and two of his men.

Three weeks later, they came upon a desperate scene. The shooting was thick and somehow their little band got mixed up in with Gussie Fink-Nottle’s.  A bullet caught Gussie in the shoulder, and he bled out before they could fetch a medic.  Bertie was beside himself, weeping, and a bullet caught him, tearing muscle and cracking ribs.  Stilton never forgot the sound that came from Reginald Jeeves when he saw them on the hospital transport.  Bertie had blacked out from the pain and Jeeves at first thought him dead.

“Colonel, he’s alive.”  Stilton grimaced at the pain in his own leg, but he had given his morphine to one of the dying. He hoped he would keep the limb.

Jeeves made a species of growl. “How many of your men are still alive?”

“Seventeen,” said Stilton. They’d lost fifteen in the fighting. He indicated the transport.  “General Spode took the healthy ones.”

Jeeves looked sharply at Major Cheesewright, then indicated him and Captain Wooster. “Bring these two to my rooms and send the physician.  I want them seen to properly right now.”

The nurse they sent was Emerald Fink-Nottle.  She wept when they told her Gussie had died bravely and suddenly, without pain, and after extolling her virtues and telling them how much he had always loved her. Later, she accused Stilton of lying, but she never had the heart to confront Bertie.  “He is too much of a lamb,” she said wistfully. Jeeves sent her away after a few days of overenthusiastic nursing. Stilton missed her, but he understood.  Bertie had begun to panic whenever he gained consciousness.  Jeeves had Bertie moved to his own bedroom, just off the office where they did business, and put him to work running the phone while he convalesced.  Stilton was sent home to London.

Bertie would live, once his cracked ribs and torn muscles healed. He had been very, very fortunate that the bullet had passed through another man before it hit him, that Jeeves had seen him treated before infection could set in. Stilton would keep his leg, but it would pain him whenever it rained. Jeeves kept Bertie by him to play piano in the officer’s club and fetch his tea and type his dispatches.  The reversal of their roles from the old days was the topic of some discussion, but no one noticed the occasional watchful look Jeeves gave his new secretary when he rubbed his side or whether both the beds were equally mussed in the mornings in the room they had to share.  No one got very much sleep anyway.

Every night Stilton dreamt of the gore, of Percy Gorringe’s intestines spilling from his belly, of Gussie Fink-Nottle weltering in a pool of his own blood, or the German sniper, his spine broken in three places. Florence never understood the bond that D’Arcy had formed with Bertie. “You two never cared that much for each other before.”  It had been impossible to explain to a woman who still thought that the Oyster Club was truly tawdry. She spoke of Bertie often, in a rather wistful voice, and Stilton wondered why she came to visit him so often, never spoke of her husband.

Later, they met each week for drinks, usually after Bertie and Chuffy had returned from the House.  Stilton was able to relax and forget for a few hours, welcomed Jeeves when he came into the room and watched with envy as he had a quiet conference with Bertie. “Florence is coming, old thing, and I must hie,” said Bertie, leaving by the side door.  She had expressed a willingness to marry him since her divorce and he was keeping a low profile.

Chuffy smiled. “You are still living in his flat, then, Reg?”

“Yes,” said Jeeves. “Housing is very tight at the moment and I cannot justify taking space away from those more needful. Besides, once my service is ended, I will become his secretary and there is no need for such upheaval.”  Chuffy smiled and patted the shoulder, renewed his offer of more lucrative employment.  Jeeves thanked him and regretted that he was not equal to so much travel to America.

Stilton lingered and Jeeves looked at him.  It was a level, calculating sort of look.  “Thank-you for my leg, Jeeves.  I would have lost it if you had sent me on to the hospital.”  Jeeves waved this away and D’Arcy understood then that he had known, that even in the extremity of worry for Bertie, Jeeves had recognized D’Arcy’s danger and saved him.

“He screams for you in his sleep,” said Jeeves, not adding that he had taken to reading in bed in the mornings to prevent this happening.

Stilton flushed. He had not known. “It was quite bad.  I dream of it often, myself.”

“Indeed.” Jeeves lowered his voice.  “If you have no intentions, you should tell him.”

It was as if all the air had been drawn forcibly out of his lungs. “Intentions of what?” he gasped.  Jeeves raised an eyebrow.

“Lady Florence is available again, Mr. Cheesewright, and he has been trying to throw you together.  She has been nursing a belief that he has always loved her and that she can finally make him happy.” Stilton marveled at the sheer number of women who believed this of Bertie Wooster.  There had been some court case where Madeline Bassett spoke for him after he stole her picture from the house in broad daylight, and Honoria Glossop spoke of him with a fond regret that never characterized her speech about Biffy Biffen, who had abandoned her in a theater in front of Bertie and her parents. “However,” Jeeves continued, producing the creased and blood-stained picture Stilton had thought was lost, “I have been given to understand you might have some other interest in the matter.” A slight movement at the doorway revealed Florence Craye, who looked more beautiful than ever, it seemed to Stilton.

Stilton flushed, and suddenly Florence had his arm.  She smelled wonderful as she bent to kiss him hello. “D’Arcy!  You are looking very well, indeed,” she said warmly.  “Have you seen Bertie?”

“Ah, he was called away, Florence, but he asked me to see to you, if it is agreeable?” It was more than agreeable. Bertie was their best man, and neither of them ever spoke of Percy’s deathbed confession.  As it happened, Florence was very understanding, and even tender when Stilton woke gasping from his gore-filled dreams. He never would have expected it, but the years had softened her and she comforted him lovingly.

Jeeves and Wooster maintained a household together.  Jeeves was Wooster’s secretary, it was said, and both occupied themselves doing their bit for the country. Wooster was said to have made a few intelligent remarks in the House. Jeeves also made a fair amount of money keeping books for Bertie’s friends. They went on for some years in this way until Bertie’s persistent single state—Jeeves was constantly seen with some woman or other on his arm—began to create the usual talk. When the ugly rumors started, it was because Bertie called out for Stilton Cheesewright in his sleep while visiting friends. Fortunately, Florence was there, and indignantly claimed that she and Bertie had been lovers in their youth, which had ruined him for all other women. Madeline Spode, their hostess, had lunged up from the breakfast table to slap her and a melee ensued amongst the kippered herrings. Jeeves was phoned and, at some strong advice from the Earl of Sidcup and Sir Roderick Glossop, he bundled Bertie off to France for an extended visit.

Out of habit, they said, Jeeves accompanied him, but Sir Roderick was quite clear that Jeeves was under his orders. Stories circulated that Jeeves had lost a lady love to another and that Bertie had been seen sending flowers to Madeline Spode and had to flee from the wrath of the Earl of Sidcup. No one would ever believe that Bertie would take Jeeves for a lover. Not after the man had made him a servant and tried to get him disqualified from military service. Bertie had proven his former valet a fool, being twice decorated for valor.  It was accounted a great piece of mercy that Bertie took the man back in when he was homeless after the war.

Bertie awoke, nestled closely in Jeeves’s arms. “Reg?”

“Yes, Bertie?”

“I missed you dreadfully during that visit.”

“Not as much as I missed you, dearest.”

That afternoon, Bertie fell asleep on the divan and Jeeves came running at his cries. “Why do you scream for D’Arcy Cheesewright whenever you sleep alone?”

Bertie flushed.  “It’s the dream. You know the one, Reg.”  Jeeves nodded.  They had not spoken of it, but Jeeves’s mere touch was always enough to calm. “Because Gorringe had something to tell him. I’d never seen a pal die before. It was different with the men. I’d never seen them at Brinkley. It simply haunts the bean, how it was. The gore spilling out from him. It was so awful.”

Jeeves buried his nose in his lover’s hair. “We’ll go back there, so you can see.  Perhaps it will help you.” Bertie crowded closer and shuddered.  It took several moments for Jeeves to realize he was crying. “Darling, I love you, and I will stay with you.  You don’t have to go alone.”

“I wanted to help him, Reg, and I just…all I could do was hold his hand.”

Jeeves tightened his hold on his lover. “I never said this because I did not want to embarrass you, Bertie, but I knew you would be brave and valiant in battle. My fear was that you would be hurt or killed and I knew I could not live without you.”  Bertie stopped moving.  “You are my very life, Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, the heart and soul of me, and I am deeply honored to be with you.”

Bertie considered this quietly and came to a conclusion. “Might we have a bit of a naked snuggle to celebrate this declaration, Reg?”

A snorting chuckle escaped Jeeves’s throat. “I believe a thorough snuggle would be more in order, given the magnitude of my feelings for you.”

“How thorough, exactly?”

“As thorough as I can make it.”

“Ah, Reg, now the pins have gone completely to jelly.”

“Very good. Then I may have my way with you unhindered.”

“Why are you unbuttoning that? Oh, Reg,” Bertie melted into his lover’s arms.  He had to be carried to the bedroom, but Jeeves did not seem to mind.

The visit did Bertie good, and he took a picture of the spot, now covered with grass and looking healed of the ravages of battle. The dreams never fully left him, but neither did Jeeves, and for them it was enough.