Prompt-fill: What We Did On Our Holidays I
Aug. 7th, 2025 11:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tweagueSo I was having a particularly awful case of Blorbo Brain this morning, where I just wanted to write nonsense about My Fictional Guys; I'm already writing other stuff about them, but it's quite long and at present quite sad (stuck in the 'hurt' bit of the h/c dynamic for at least another 5000 words, I would guess) and I wanted something to satisfy the brain itch. So I went touting for prompts on the WEJverse Discord, and ysande was good enough to indulge me ^_^ She asked for 'basically every joyous coming of age summer story', and set off about three dozen different ficlet ideas; here's the first of them. It may eventually be the start of a longer story about this particular holiday, the first time Bertie goes to Lorrington, if other ideas spawn around the same time period; in my head it takes place the days before ysande's glorious prompt-fest fill where Gimlet gets sunburn because he's determined to do all the fun holiday things with Bertie, all at once, right now. Unbetaed and scruffy round the edges, but maybe it'll turn into something better later.
Bertie + Gimlet, school age, Gen, c.2k.
* * *
What We Did On Our Holidays I
“Bertie - Bertie, wake up.”
The words weren’t much more than a determined hiss, but the firm shake to his shoulder that accompanied them did the job as well as a shout. Bertie blinked his eyes open, a little groggily. There was a dim suspicion of grey half-light in the gap where the curtains weren’t quite drawn closed, but nothing more definite than that of dawn yet, so it must be frightfully early; and against that faintest hint of daylight, a vague shape that must be King.
“Whatever for?” he managed to croak.
“Come with me.”
“Not a chance,” he said, and attempted to burrow back down under the blankets; but King’s hand on his arm was entirely unyielding.
“Don’t be an ass Bertie. Get up, I want to show you something.”
And because it was King, and therefore a foregone conclusion; and because it was the first morning he had ever been there; and because of the faint note of excitement in King’s voice, and he had found that King’s excitement was something he somehow quite liked to share, he got up.
He had arrived late the previous evening, after a day of delayed trains and being constantly on the point of losing his luggage. It shouldn’t have been possible to take so long to get from Somerset to the borders of Dartmoor, yet there he was, Lorrington station in the midsummer twilight with the scent blowing thick off the tobacco flowers, and him almost the only one there to enjoy it. Then King had arrived, looking very pleased with himself high on an old pony trap, with the reins in his hands and an amused-looking groom taking his ease on the box seat at the back; and it had all started to feel a bit more like an adventure.
He was too old for adventures, of course. Seventeen-year-olds didn’t hold with such things. But driving through the gloom with the carriage lamp swinging beside him as King gave him chapter and verse on the stolid little pony’s virtues and foibles, and the first glow-worms emerged, and the nightjars shirred in the bushes - it felt a little like an adventure, all the same.
He’d been too late for dinner, King had informed him; he’d have a tray of supper sent up to his room. As soon as Bertie had been introduced to his father, of course.
It occurred to Bertie that he had somehow never given much thought to King’s parents; in some vague way he had assumed that he might have sprung into existence fully grown, and possibly armed, much in the manner of Athene. But at least he didn’t have time to work himself up about the encounter, because King led him straight from the hall into the study, and said, “Here’s Bertie Lissie, sir,” in a quiet, level voice, and there was a slim red-haired man looking up from a pile of papers, and freezing him where he stood with a pair of disconcertingly familiar blue eyes.
He was never quite sure, afterwards, what he had said; he only remembered the sensation of cold, like stepping into an ice-house.
“Mother’s already retired for the night,” said King, in a more normal voice, as afterwards he carried Bertie’s suitcase up the narrow, creaking stairs. The house, as they walked through it by lamp-light, seemed to be all in black and white, repeating patterns of black beams, black doors, black stairs, against the white of the walls; but every now and then the pattern would be broken by splashes of colour, walls painted with plants, animals, curlicues of vine and acanthus and stylised birds, old and stiff and strange. “You’ll meet her tomorrow, I expect. I’ll let you settle in this evening - since Father’s study is just at the bottom of the stairs he’s not fond of noise at this time of night. Bathroom’s here - “ as he indicated a door to the left, “and my room’s just across from yours.” He opened one of the many dark, nail-studded doors along the rambling length of the corridor, and went in, to put the lamp down on the bedside table and the case on an intricately-carved linen press at the foot of the four-poster bed.
“Aren’t I going to be in with you?” asked Bertie, a little taken aback.
King frowned. “There’s no need. We’ve got more rooms than we know what to do with.”
“Well, yes, I do quite see that, old thing - Chedcombe’s much the same,” Bertie conceded. “I just wasn’t quite expecting to be treated as a house guest - putting the housemaids to all the extra work, that sort of thing. I’m just as happy mucking in with you, really - “ And then, seeing the expression on King’s face, he hurried on, “though I do quite understand that an Englishman’s room is his castle, of course. Wouldn’t want to batter down the jolly old drawbridge for the world. And this room’s absolutely top-notch, don’t you know - I shall be half the night hunting for peas in the mattress, it looks like just the bed for it.”
King was still frowning. “If you won’t be comfortable in here - “
“It’s splendid, old boy,” said Bertie, putting all the conviction into the words that he could, because it was. “Fit for a king.”
“Was that a pun?” asked King, suspiciously.
Bertie sighed. “Not sure my brain’s working well enough for punning. It’s been an awfully long day.”
King nodded. “Of course. I’ll leave you to unpack. The girl will bring your supper soon.” He left the lamp where it was, and walked back to the open door, where he paused for a moment. “I hope you’ll be comfortable. I’m very pleased to have you here.”
Bertie smiled, and some part of himself that had felt unaccountably chilled since they had arrived in the great dark house seemed to warm a little. “I’m jolly pleased to be here too.”
Now, in the whisper of pre-dawn light, he pulled on yesterday’s shorts and shirt, slipped on his comfortable rubber-soled shoes, and crept out into the gloomy corridor outside his room. “Where on earth are we going at this hour?” Bertie whispered, his mind running on early-morning raids of the larder, of bird-nesting in the park, of taking out the horses King had spoken of so often for a gallop before the dew was off the grass -
“Don’t talk yet,” King replied, hardly more than a breath. “Here.”
Noiselessly, he opened the door opposite, and shut it noiselessly behind them again: a difficult operation with one of those great stiff iron latches, Bertie thought, and wondered how often he had practised. Then he crossed to the window, and pushed aside the heavy curtains just enough to give him access to the diamond-paned window. “How are you at climbing?” he asked, very softly, as he pushed it open.
Not as good as King, was the answer that rapidly became obvious. First a scramble up from an ancient oak chest through the narrow casement and out onto the leads, which here made a narrow flat pathway between the dormer windows and the low parapet that crowned the frontage, and through which a shallow gutter carried rainwater, in a way that Bertie vaguely thought must be desperately prone to leaks. That was easy enough, providing he didn’t look over the parapet too often, to see the yawning gulf from which he was separated only by a crenellation a foot or so high. The next stage - shinning up the leads themselves, up the reasonably gentle angle of the roof where it met a ridge of stones that offered a few finger-holds for support - was only a little more challenging; but the stage after that, where King slipped up and around a barley twist chimney-pot in a way that seemed little short of miraculous, began to test Bertie’s nerve. The air was cool and a little misty; the glazed surface of the chimney-pots very slightly slippery under his hands.
“I say, Lorry old thing, are you quite sure this is all right?” he called forward, a little plaintively. “I can hardly see a bally thing!”
“I’m sure,” King’s voice came floating back. “I’ve done it a hundred times. Just tread where I tread.”
“Not exactly the season for Good King Wenceslas,” Bertie muttered, more to himself than anyone else; but he fixed his eyes on King’s plimsolled feet up ahead, and followed.
Up and along the ridge, a foot on either side, slipping a little unnervingly; up a run of quoins, like a staircase, except a staircase where each tread was only a couple of inches deep; along a piece of moulded stone like a ledge, pressing himself to the wall, trying not to think of how easily stone this old could crumble, or the twenty foot drop to the roof below; and then -
“Nearly there now - just a few more yards. Right hand up and right a little more - there’s a gargoyle under the ivy, it’ll give you a better purchase - that’s it, you’ve got it. Then support your weight on it and bring your right foot across and up, there’s a decently thick branch there, just above your knee height - it’s enough to get your left hand up to the top here - “
- then King’s hand was clasping his wrist, for reassurance as much as steadiness, as he pulled himself up and over the edge and dropped down onto a flat roof, panting with exertion and adrenalin.
“Well done, I knew you could do it,” he heard King say, voice warm with approval. “We’re just in time too. Come and see.”
Slowly, he heaved himself up to his feet again, feeling very slightly shaky, and cautiously made his way across to where King was standing, hands resting against the the top course of masonry, leaning out over nothingness, with his face to the place where, far away to the east, the first ray of the sun had just shot skywards like a firework.
He came and stood next to him, and looked out.
Immediately below them, a tumble of rooftops, tile and lead and slate, different heights, different styles, dropping down around them like a Victorian lady’s skirts; beyond them, the formal gardens, the knots and geometric tangles of box hedges and gravel walks sharply visible; beyond that, the parkland, with great stands of trees, grass already browning in the summer heat, and a herd of deer at their morning forage; and beyond that, a great rolling sea of farmland, grassland, moor and heath, with the sun spilling over it and shreds of mist rising from the rivers. And everywhere the birds were singing.
“I try to come up here the morning after I get back from school,” said King, incongruously matter-of-fact. “Or town, or wherever else I’ve been. Providing the weather’s right for it, of course - not much point coming up if it’s tipping it down.”
“Not to mention that you’d probably break your neck trying,” Bertie murmured.
“I like how you can see everything from here,” King went on. “Look - that’s the river Taw, away there in the distance. It flows all the way up to the sea at Barnstaple. Though some of the other streams round here flow south into the Exe instead - we’re quite close to the watershed here.” And walking around each of the four sides of the tower in turn, he named to Bertie the rivers, the streams, the woods and copses and villages and meadows. “This is where you can see it best,” he finished, coming back to the point where they had begun, and turning to face Bertie for the first time. “Well - this is Lorrington, then,” he said.
There was an expression on his face that Bertie hadn’t seen there before: both complex and oddly open compared to his usually inscrutability. Something like shyness; something like belligerence; something like pride. As if he had wrapped the view up with a bow and handed it to him, and wasn’t sure if he’d regret the gesture.
Impulsively, as if he had been a much younger boy, as if they’d both still been in prep school and King had given him his finest marble, Bertie reached out, and took his hand, and squeezed it briefly before letting go. “Thanks,” he said, not knowing what else to say. “Thanks awfully for having me here, old thing.”
And King smiled: smiled quite brilliantly. “Thanks for coming. Should you like to look over the house today?”
ysande was good enough to indulge me ^_^ She asked for 'basically every joyous coming of age summer story', and set off about three dozen different ficlet ideas; here's the first of them. It may eventually be the start of a longer story about this particular holiday, the first time Bertie goes to Lorrington, if other ideas spawn around the same time period; in my head it takes place the days before ysande's glorious prompt-fest fill where Gimlet gets sunburn because he's determined to do all the fun holiday things with Bertie, all at once, right now. Unbetaed and scruffy round the edges, but maybe it'll turn into something better later.Bertie + Gimlet, school age, Gen, c.2k.
* * *
What We Did On Our Holidays I
“Bertie - Bertie, wake up.”
The words weren’t much more than a determined hiss, but the firm shake to his shoulder that accompanied them did the job as well as a shout. Bertie blinked his eyes open, a little groggily. There was a dim suspicion of grey half-light in the gap where the curtains weren’t quite drawn closed, but nothing more definite than that of dawn yet, so it must be frightfully early; and against that faintest hint of daylight, a vague shape that must be King.
“Whatever for?” he managed to croak.
“Come with me.”
“Not a chance,” he said, and attempted to burrow back down under the blankets; but King’s hand on his arm was entirely unyielding.
“Don’t be an ass Bertie. Get up, I want to show you something.”
And because it was King, and therefore a foregone conclusion; and because it was the first morning he had ever been there; and because of the faint note of excitement in King’s voice, and he had found that King’s excitement was something he somehow quite liked to share, he got up.
He had arrived late the previous evening, after a day of delayed trains and being constantly on the point of losing his luggage. It shouldn’t have been possible to take so long to get from Somerset to the borders of Dartmoor, yet there he was, Lorrington station in the midsummer twilight with the scent blowing thick off the tobacco flowers, and him almost the only one there to enjoy it. Then King had arrived, looking very pleased with himself high on an old pony trap, with the reins in his hands and an amused-looking groom taking his ease on the box seat at the back; and it had all started to feel a bit more like an adventure.
He was too old for adventures, of course. Seventeen-year-olds didn’t hold with such things. But driving through the gloom with the carriage lamp swinging beside him as King gave him chapter and verse on the stolid little pony’s virtues and foibles, and the first glow-worms emerged, and the nightjars shirred in the bushes - it felt a little like an adventure, all the same.
He’d been too late for dinner, King had informed him; he’d have a tray of supper sent up to his room. As soon as Bertie had been introduced to his father, of course.
It occurred to Bertie that he had somehow never given much thought to King’s parents; in some vague way he had assumed that he might have sprung into existence fully grown, and possibly armed, much in the manner of Athene. But at least he didn’t have time to work himself up about the encounter, because King led him straight from the hall into the study, and said, “Here’s Bertie Lissie, sir,” in a quiet, level voice, and there was a slim red-haired man looking up from a pile of papers, and freezing him where he stood with a pair of disconcertingly familiar blue eyes.
He was never quite sure, afterwards, what he had said; he only remembered the sensation of cold, like stepping into an ice-house.
“Mother’s already retired for the night,” said King, in a more normal voice, as afterwards he carried Bertie’s suitcase up the narrow, creaking stairs. The house, as they walked through it by lamp-light, seemed to be all in black and white, repeating patterns of black beams, black doors, black stairs, against the white of the walls; but every now and then the pattern would be broken by splashes of colour, walls painted with plants, animals, curlicues of vine and acanthus and stylised birds, old and stiff and strange. “You’ll meet her tomorrow, I expect. I’ll let you settle in this evening - since Father’s study is just at the bottom of the stairs he’s not fond of noise at this time of night. Bathroom’s here - “ as he indicated a door to the left, “and my room’s just across from yours.” He opened one of the many dark, nail-studded doors along the rambling length of the corridor, and went in, to put the lamp down on the bedside table and the case on an intricately-carved linen press at the foot of the four-poster bed.
“Aren’t I going to be in with you?” asked Bertie, a little taken aback.
King frowned. “There’s no need. We’ve got more rooms than we know what to do with.”
“Well, yes, I do quite see that, old thing - Chedcombe’s much the same,” Bertie conceded. “I just wasn’t quite expecting to be treated as a house guest - putting the housemaids to all the extra work, that sort of thing. I’m just as happy mucking in with you, really - “ And then, seeing the expression on King’s face, he hurried on, “though I do quite understand that an Englishman’s room is his castle, of course. Wouldn’t want to batter down the jolly old drawbridge for the world. And this room’s absolutely top-notch, don’t you know - I shall be half the night hunting for peas in the mattress, it looks like just the bed for it.”
King was still frowning. “If you won’t be comfortable in here - “
“It’s splendid, old boy,” said Bertie, putting all the conviction into the words that he could, because it was. “Fit for a king.”
“Was that a pun?” asked King, suspiciously.
Bertie sighed. “Not sure my brain’s working well enough for punning. It’s been an awfully long day.”
King nodded. “Of course. I’ll leave you to unpack. The girl will bring your supper soon.” He left the lamp where it was, and walked back to the open door, where he paused for a moment. “I hope you’ll be comfortable. I’m very pleased to have you here.”
Bertie smiled, and some part of himself that had felt unaccountably chilled since they had arrived in the great dark house seemed to warm a little. “I’m jolly pleased to be here too.”
Now, in the whisper of pre-dawn light, he pulled on yesterday’s shorts and shirt, slipped on his comfortable rubber-soled shoes, and crept out into the gloomy corridor outside his room. “Where on earth are we going at this hour?” Bertie whispered, his mind running on early-morning raids of the larder, of bird-nesting in the park, of taking out the horses King had spoken of so often for a gallop before the dew was off the grass -
“Don’t talk yet,” King replied, hardly more than a breath. “Here.”
Noiselessly, he opened the door opposite, and shut it noiselessly behind them again: a difficult operation with one of those great stiff iron latches, Bertie thought, and wondered how often he had practised. Then he crossed to the window, and pushed aside the heavy curtains just enough to give him access to the diamond-paned window. “How are you at climbing?” he asked, very softly, as he pushed it open.
Not as good as King, was the answer that rapidly became obvious. First a scramble up from an ancient oak chest through the narrow casement and out onto the leads, which here made a narrow flat pathway between the dormer windows and the low parapet that crowned the frontage, and through which a shallow gutter carried rainwater, in a way that Bertie vaguely thought must be desperately prone to leaks. That was easy enough, providing he didn’t look over the parapet too often, to see the yawning gulf from which he was separated only by a crenellation a foot or so high. The next stage - shinning up the leads themselves, up the reasonably gentle angle of the roof where it met a ridge of stones that offered a few finger-holds for support - was only a little more challenging; but the stage after that, where King slipped up and around a barley twist chimney-pot in a way that seemed little short of miraculous, began to test Bertie’s nerve. The air was cool and a little misty; the glazed surface of the chimney-pots very slightly slippery under his hands.
“I say, Lorry old thing, are you quite sure this is all right?” he called forward, a little plaintively. “I can hardly see a bally thing!”
“I’m sure,” King’s voice came floating back. “I’ve done it a hundred times. Just tread where I tread.”
“Not exactly the season for Good King Wenceslas,” Bertie muttered, more to himself than anyone else; but he fixed his eyes on King’s plimsolled feet up ahead, and followed.
Up and along the ridge, a foot on either side, slipping a little unnervingly; up a run of quoins, like a staircase, except a staircase where each tread was only a couple of inches deep; along a piece of moulded stone like a ledge, pressing himself to the wall, trying not to think of how easily stone this old could crumble, or the twenty foot drop to the roof below; and then -
“Nearly there now - just a few more yards. Right hand up and right a little more - there’s a gargoyle under the ivy, it’ll give you a better purchase - that’s it, you’ve got it. Then support your weight on it and bring your right foot across and up, there’s a decently thick branch there, just above your knee height - it’s enough to get your left hand up to the top here - “
- then King’s hand was clasping his wrist, for reassurance as much as steadiness, as he pulled himself up and over the edge and dropped down onto a flat roof, panting with exertion and adrenalin.
“Well done, I knew you could do it,” he heard King say, voice warm with approval. “We’re just in time too. Come and see.”
Slowly, he heaved himself up to his feet again, feeling very slightly shaky, and cautiously made his way across to where King was standing, hands resting against the the top course of masonry, leaning out over nothingness, with his face to the place where, far away to the east, the first ray of the sun had just shot skywards like a firework.
He came and stood next to him, and looked out.
Immediately below them, a tumble of rooftops, tile and lead and slate, different heights, different styles, dropping down around them like a Victorian lady’s skirts; beyond them, the formal gardens, the knots and geometric tangles of box hedges and gravel walks sharply visible; beyond that, the parkland, with great stands of trees, grass already browning in the summer heat, and a herd of deer at their morning forage; and beyond that, a great rolling sea of farmland, grassland, moor and heath, with the sun spilling over it and shreds of mist rising from the rivers. And everywhere the birds were singing.
“I try to come up here the morning after I get back from school,” said King, incongruously matter-of-fact. “Or town, or wherever else I’ve been. Providing the weather’s right for it, of course - not much point coming up if it’s tipping it down.”
“Not to mention that you’d probably break your neck trying,” Bertie murmured.
“I like how you can see everything from here,” King went on. “Look - that’s the river Taw, away there in the distance. It flows all the way up to the sea at Barnstaple. Though some of the other streams round here flow south into the Exe instead - we’re quite close to the watershed here.” And walking around each of the four sides of the tower in turn, he named to Bertie the rivers, the streams, the woods and copses and villages and meadows. “This is where you can see it best,” he finished, coming back to the point where they had begun, and turning to face Bertie for the first time. “Well - this is Lorrington, then,” he said.
There was an expression on his face that Bertie hadn’t seen there before: both complex and oddly open compared to his usually inscrutability. Something like shyness; something like belligerence; something like pride. As if he had wrapped the view up with a bow and handed it to him, and wasn’t sure if he’d regret the gesture.
Impulsively, as if he had been a much younger boy, as if they’d both still been in prep school and King had given him his finest marble, Bertie reached out, and took his hand, and squeezed it briefly before letting go. “Thanks,” he said, not knowing what else to say. “Thanks awfully for having me here, old thing.”
And King smiled: smiled quite brilliantly. “Thanks for coming. Should you like to look over the house today?”
no subject
Date: 2025-08-11 12:27 pm (UTC)In terms of looks, I agree with you completely! Very much taking after his father, and it’s hurtful for both parents. Although maybe also with a few subtle changes that make it rankle even more for his father. I do like the description of Bertie with an exceptionally thick head of hair, so he just has these lush golden locks as a kid, whereas his father’s family all have very thin hair that tends to balding at an early age. And skin that tans to golden, like his mother, instead of being florid and tending to redness. And yes, eyes from his paternal grandfather! <3