Retirement Beckons

Slice-of-life & fantasy short. An ageing doctor tends to a deliveryman.

2.5k, M/M, rated M. A deliveryman to fae lands comes back to his doctor — his lover, too.

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Metcalf was tall, thin, and dead-eyed, and when he shambled into Ginger’s office, it was without his greatcoat — a sign that the winter had given way and that spring had given way, although it took him a lot longer than most people to start feeling the heat, and Ginger was fairly certain he only really noticed because he started to drip with sweat, and enough sweat gave him a rash.

If it didn’t, Ginger supposed he wouldn’t take it off until Ginger told him to, much as he started to wear it again at Ginger’s instruction, or he’d wait until he started noticing his frostbite.

It was past six o’clock, and Ginger had actually closed the office at half-past four, sent Claire home, but when he’d gotten word from Verity at the train ticket office that Metcalf had arrived, he’d opened the surgery back up again. Metcalf always came to Ginger’s surgery first before he came to the house, no matter the time of day or night. It was as if he moved according to a map sometimes, as though his way forward had been plotted out for him in advance and all he could do was follow it unfailingly.

The surgery had no carpets.

“That was a long one,” said Ginger, by way of greeting.

“Was it?” asked Metcalf tonelessly as he trudged up the steps and into the surgery, and Ginger pushed the door closed behind him, pushing the lock across before going for the clasps on Metcalf’s rucksack straps. Metcalf made no move to do them himself, just stood there obediently with his gaze forward as Ginger worked on him.

First, he unbuckled the straps across his chest, and then eased the back off his shoulders, letting out a hiss at the weight of it. The bag was enchanted to reduce the weight down by a significant percentage, but it couldn’t make it weigh nothing, and it was still astonishingly heavy.

Metcalf had a wiry strength to him, hare-like in his proportions and the packing on his shoulders, his legs, his chest, and Ginger knew it — he knew that Metcalf could lift him, even — and yet it seemed astonishing that such a huge weight could be so easily carried on his back.

Ginger dropped the bag on the bench, then started to undo Metcalf’s shirt buttons.

“How was it?” he asked.

Metcalf’s eyes, which had been staring blankly forward, flitted down, and he looked at Ginger’s face, studying it.

As an infant in the 1910s, he had contracted rubella, and it had impacted several of his senses. As a young child, he’d been more deaf, had had cataracts in his eyes, although he’d had a magical hearing aid installed that counteracted much of the former damage, and he’d had the cataracts treated.

He remained severely anosmic, with little sense of taste and almost no sense of smell at all, and there was a dullness to his physical senses, too. His reflexes were far slower than most people’s, and he had almost no ability to sense magical fields even when they were very heavy.

The first time Ginger had examined him had been in 1988, taking over from Doctor Keeley when he’d retired, and Metcalf had told him in mild, unconcerned tones, “It’s as if I experience the world through a Paling, Doctor Halifax. Every world, through a Paling.”

You couldn’t run a train through fae deadland, and going through by car or engine was risky — if you ran through a magical field that impacted your engine, it would be difficult for anyone to come through to your aid, let alone to move and push the damn thing once it was stuck. Plants and vines would reach and entangle it, spirits would gather around its heat and pull it down into the mud. As soon as you walked away from it, the land itself would move and change, and it would be far away from you.

Metcalf couldn’t ride a bike — he went on foot.

The stretch of deadland between the village of Wetley and the fae kingdom of Secret was impossible to measure, but it was a significant distance, and the time was strange on the path. For Metcalf, it was a sleepless journey, walking for three days, resting on the other side, walking back.

It was a long, long three days. He slept very little on the way if he slept at all.

It was months between when he left and when he came back, for Ginger. Sometimes one, sometimes three.

Once, he was gone six months, and when he’d finally gotten to Ginger, he’d slept in Ginger’s guest room for a week straight before he was up and about again, and Ginger had kept him on for a few weeks more so that he could keep changing the bandages on his wounds.

He’d been gone for just a month and a half this time, and when Ginger peeled the shirt off of Metcalf’s shoulders, he saw ridges digging into the flesh from his bag straps, but no fresh wounds or bites.

It was a different story when he unlaced Metcalf’s ruined boots, the soles coming away from the shoes proper, his feet bloodied and blistered from all his journey. Already, Ginger could see blood crusted on the side of one of his ankles, thick and black, and he undid Metcalf’s belt and pushed down his trousers, which rattled with the various tools and ephemera he kept in his pockets, sliding them down his thighs, his knees.

The wound was on the back of his calf, a savage bite that was mostly scabbed over, bruises surrounding the marks.

“What happened here?” he asked, touching the marks, and Metcalf glanced down at him, at Ginger crouched down on the floor in front of him. His cock was soft, thick, and Ginger considered leaning forward and just sliding his mouth over it, letting it rest on his tongue and feel it thicken, harden, feel it swell and fill up more of his mouth until he had to stretch his jaw open wider to accommodate it.

He hadn’t slept with anybody since Metcalf had last gone. He’d thought about it, a few times, but he was getting to be too old for too many hook-ups, and each time he’d started glancing at some of the apps or considering driving into the city to meet up with someone, he’d thought of Metcalf’s bony, scarred hands, the heat of his wiry body, how he always thrust just a little too hard compared to other men, and how weathering it felt so good, like a too-hot bath that your body had to adjust to.

“Something bit me,” answered Metcalf, a minute after he should have.

“I ran a bath for you already,” said Ginger quietly.

“Thank you,” said Metcalf, which was quicker than he responded to most things — it was reflexive, Ginger supposed. He waited patiently for Metcalf to go on, and after Ginger had finished peeling the scraps of Metcalf’s ruined socks from his feet, Metcalf said, “I missed you.”

It took Ginger so by surprise that he just stood there with the ruined socks in his hands, his lips parted, and as he looked up at Metcalf’s face, at its long, drawn angles, its heavily shadowed eyes, its exaggerated lips. He had a hard jaw and a hard nose and such an eternally soft expression on his face.

“I dreamed of you,” Metcalf went on. His voice was toneless and even, and Ginger had heard it described by people in town as emotionless or offputting, but he’d never found it so. There was a profound depth of feeling in it, he thought — not emotionlessness, but every emotion at once. “I slept one night beneath a cherry blossom, and I dreamed of you at every age I’ve known you — when first you became my doctor, do you recall? But I had seen you before that. At twelve, I think, you visited your grandmother here, and every summer after that. I caught glimpses of you sometimes, or I would hear you practicing your violin.”

Ginger reached up and touched one of his own faintly blushing cheeks, feeling the heat under the skin before he said — once he was certain Metcalf was done speaking — “I had no idea you’d noticed me before then. You never told me.”

“I thought it would be… creepy. I didn’t, you understand, I didn’t look at you as — ”

“No, no, I know,” Ginger said, catching one of his hands and squeezing gently.

Metcalf looked at him, so much younger than he should have been, and yet, in forty years, Ginger had aged past him by a long shot. When first they’d begun this, Ginger had been his doctor for several years, had been in his early thirties, and they’d looked of the same age.

He was nearly seventy now. He’d retire himself, as soon as someone volunteered to take over his practice — he’d already been asking around.

“If you walked with me,” said Metcalf in a soft, half-whispered voice, and there was such delicacy in it it was as though he’d woven the sound from spider’s silk, “the magic would permeate your body, your bones.”

“I’m not like you,” said Ginger, his heart panging. “The deadlands frighten me — and you know how they respond to fear.”

“I do,” said Metcalf. “I fear things too.”

He’d gone, once. The first time Metcalf had been gone for longer than three months, he’d gone to the deadland’s edge to look in at the long stretch of too-dark woods, permeated with a deathly weight to the very air, let alone the soil, the trees. It had been so silent his own heartbeat had threatened to deafen him, and he’d felt sickened, nauseated, by the strength of the world’s sound when he’d finally stepped away again.

He didn’t know that he could stand such agonizing silence, let alone the things that lived in the deadlands — not lived in them, even, but haunted them, stalked them, infested them.

“I know you do,” said Ginger. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.” He took Metcalf by the hand and began to lead him down the corridor, nudging open the bathroom door with his shoulder and bringing him inside, where the whole of the room was hot with steam and smelt of lavender.

It was so strong it made Ginger feel a bit light-headed, but that also meant it was strong enough that Metcalf could get a whiff of it, and he inhaled, his nostrils flaring, before he smiled.

“Did you break the bottle?” he asked.

“You can smell it?” Ginger asked.

“Yes,” said Metcalf. “I think. It’s — flowers?”

“Lavender.”

“It smells like purple. It’s… it’s faint. But it smells like it should be that colour.”

Ginger squeezed his hand again, then went to the bath and dipped his fingers into the water, making sure it was hot, but not so hot that it should burn him, or scald him — not that Metcalf would notice, of course.

“I would protect you,” Metcalf said as Ginger laid down a bathmat. “And you don’t — Doctor Halifax. Ginger. You needn’t make the journey as I do — to Secret, I mean. I have lodgings there, a home of my own. A cottage. If you would only live there, instead of here, you would go on living for years more, centuries more, as I do.”

“You’re fae now, to whisk me away?” Ginger asked softly.

“They used to call me a fairy,” said Metcalf. “When I was a boy.”

“Me too,” said Ginger, and found himself laughing at the ridiculousness of it — Metcalf laughed too, although he took a moment to join in. His eyes were watering, and it made their brown colour seem lighter, shinier. “I need to find someone to take over. I have been looking for someone already, you know.”

“I didn’t know,” said Metcalf. “Doctor Keeley was younger than you when he retired.”

“So he was,” Ginger agreed, and gently took Metcalf’s arm to ease him toward the bath. He obediently came closer, but didn’t get into the bath right away, and Ginger came to settle his hand on Metcalf’s waist. His hand rested just above the jut of his hipbone, the same way it had done for forty years, and he remembered the first time — he had a vision of his hand back then, steadier than now, a little paler, so smooth, and almost hairless.

His hand was aged now, liver-spotted and hairier and wrinkled, and while he was fitter than many men his age, blessedly free of arthritis, it was still inescapably and obviously an old man’s hand, resting on what appeared to still be a young man’s body.

Metcalf leaned in and kissed him, and Ginger closed his eyes as he kissed him back, felt the warmth of Metcalf’s mouth on his, the sweetness and gentleness of the touch, before Metcalf pulled away and eased himself slowly beneath the thick suds in the bath.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” said Metcalf, contemplatively scooping small clouds of white frothing bubbles in his palm. “Retirement.”

“Who would do your runs?” Ginger asked as he fetched a flannel.

“No one,” said Metcalf. “They’re building a train between Secret and Crystallum — the treaties are signed, the construction is started. Crystallum to Camelot is no trouble, and from Camelot, anywhere in Loegr and Cymru. I received a letter from the Crown thanking me for my service, saying my last run would be this winter.”

“Oh,” said Ginger.

He imagined it, for a moment. Living in a cottage with Metcalf in Secret, the two of them together, day after day, with no long timespans separating their meeting or their dates or sex or simply their companionship. Whenever Metcalf lingered for longer periods, it was typically for convalescence from one injury or another, not just for the sake of it — ferrying medicines to Secret was more important than anything else.

He’d never resented it, of course — it was simply the way of things — but he had never imagined, even in his own retirement, that things might be different on Metcalf’s end.

“Your eyes are watering,” said Metcalf.

“It’s the lavender,” Ginger lied in faint tones. “I used so much of it.”

“Of course,” said Metcalf, pretending to believe him. It was almost believable, too. “Bend down.”

Ginger did, resting his hands on the edge of the tub, and he closed his eyes as Metcalf’s palms came up to cup his cheeks, his thumbs sliding through the hot tears there and wiping them aside. He was pushing on the wrinkled skin, and Ginger was agonizingly aware of the lines at his eyes, around his mouth, the loose skin around his neck, behind his ears.

“You’re so very beautiful,” said Metcalf, and Ginger let out a hitching sob, half a cry and half a grateful laugh, as he leaned his face further into Metcalf’s warm hands, still filthy from the run. “Will you play for me tonight?”

“Tomorrow,” said Ginger. “We need to eat, and then, sleep.”

“Between the former and the latter,” said Metcalf. “Will you play your violin for me, Ginger?”

Ginger dipped in closer, and gave him another, this time wetter kiss. “I’m a pathetic old man,” he whispered.

“I’m more pathetic,” Metcalf reminded him. “And older, too.”

Ginger laughed, reaching up to wipe his eyes, and wet a cloth to start on Metcalf’s feet.