Luceti Appointments

[wouldntbetonit]

Messages and meetings that aren't journal and log posts for Lt. William Bush!

(Please date and title accordingly~)

Comments

May 31st, action

[beforethesea]

[What's that, Mister Bush? You're trying to have a moment to yourself, whittling at something?

That's very nice.

But there's a small figure peeking out of his bedroom (where he's been admiring the captain's dress coat with all due awe and being very, very careful not to touch it) at you where you're sitting in the parlour.

No. Scratch that. He's crept out of the bedroom and down the hallway, sort of crouching down at the end of it, as if that will make him less likely to be seen up so late.

After all, if this man is anything like Father, he'll just scold him and tell him to go back to bed.]

[wouldntbetonit]

Ca- [AHEM. He hates correcting himself but...Horatio is not himself now, he looks, acts, and thinks like a child. It wouldn't do him any good to speak to him as if he were his captain. Still, old habits die hard and he isn't so much as killing this habit as locking it in a room until this whole thing was over and done with.]

Horatio. [This was weird.]

Can't you sleep?

[He sounds incredibly weary; not used to taking care of young children. Young men, yes. But there was none of the order of the navy here. He tried to remember how his mother would act with him when he was young, but that was a very long time ago.]

[beforethesea]

N-- no, sir. I-- I'm sorry, sir.

[The boy is still standing near the doorway, not advancing or retreating, though he knows he'll be sent back to his room.

It's a strange difference, this boy and the lieutenant willing to detonate charges in a fort, expecting to do it alone and not survive it.]

[wouldntbetonit]

[That actually made Bush smile for a change.]

It's quite alright. Would you care to sit?

[And there he was speaking to him as if he were an adult again. He needed to work on that.]

[beforethesea]

Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.

[He comes more into the room, carefully taking a seat at the end of the couch.

He looks at the thing the man is doing and he waits a moment before asking--]

Sir... what are you doing?

[wouldntbetonit]

Carving. [He supplies after a moment where he looks over the hunk of wood he's shaving away at. It's starting to look like a bird - but that could also be a woman.]

It was a way to pass the time at sea. Like when one couldn't sleep. [Hoho, so clever.]

[beforethesea]

My father just sends me to my room with a book if I can't sleep.

[Who's surprised the boy had a childhood of reading? No one? Oh, good, then.]

[wouldntbetonit]

[No one at all.]

What kind of stories?

[Bush wants very much to gently remind the child - who should be a man - that he is not his father, despite the fact that Horatio well knows that. He didn't want to have the same things expected of him, things he couldn't do or possibly didn't want to.

The one book Bush can remember reading as a child was Norie's. He wasn't much of a reader.]

[beforethesea]

Whatever he happens to have on hand, sir.

Sometimes it's his medical books, but I don't like those too much. Can't really understand them.

[wouldntbetonit]

Doctors are damnably hard to understand, I wouldn't give it too much thought.

[When do you ever, Bush?]

[beforethesea]

I'm gonna be a doctor.

[Because that was what his mother and father wanted. He was too young to think he could stray from that path.]