Work Text:
The Maritime Gallery at Marlinspike seems bizarrely huge at night.
Haddock wanders through it aimlessly. The parchments. An old pistol. A hat. All that is left of his ancestor.
Except, of course, himself.
Lucky that old Sir Francis Haddock thought to take a wife and sire three sons on her before he left for the tropics.
Haddock sinks into a chair and rests his head on his hand. He never means to think about death, but as the years move along and the list of pills from his doctor lengthens, he is slowly realising he will not escape it forever, no matter how cunning or lucky he is or Tintin is for him.
Tintin. Haddock thinks of how he looked as when he left just now to come downstairs, sleeping the sleep of the innocent, beautiful in his nakedness.
Haddock told Tintin long ago, the first time the boy tried to kiss him, about what a sixteen year age difference might mean one day.
Tintin had kissed him anyway (they'd barely made it off the moon rocket at the time; Tintin had been bright eyed with things unspoken all day and finally, hiding in some lounge away from the party, it had all spilled out I thought I'd lost you, I thought... Don't let me ever talk you into something like that again, don't... You're everything to me...) When Haddock had regained the power of logical speech he'd tried to broach the topic again, and Tintin had brushed it aside like he did entire dictatorships -- certainly if anyone had a right to feel invincible it would be Tintin, but even he will be no match for time.
Haddock loves Tintin so much it can frighten him, but even the power of that won't turn nature on its head and give them children.
They are no little Haddocks running through the empty corridors of Marlinspike. In the pages of history, Haddock is a full stop.
He will leave it all to Tintin, of course, although the death duties may make the house impossible to keep up. The whole thing may become a museum, another Haddock shipwreck to come and gawp at.
Further along the cases, relics of their own adventures begin; Arabian pots, a train ticket out of Boduria, a photograph of a grinning gap-toothed pilot, a Tibetan scarf, a highly-coloured sleeve holding a record of Faust... Haddock trails his fingers over the cases, memories awakening with each thing he sees and tries to remember how it used to feel, back on the Ramona, not to care about anything at all but alcohol.
He is fairly sure it hurt less.