A/N-Horatio Hornblower crack! Admittedly some parts are more crack-y than others. But honestly, this is just for fun, I promise.
He had lost count.
He had lost count!!
Horatio had learned how to count when he was very young. Now, standing—perhaps reeling slightly from sleep deprivation—on the deck of the Renown, a ship which he felt secretly loathed him, he demonstrated his perfected ability. "One, two, four…" the four made him feel slightly seasick. He leaned over the side.
Nothing happened, thankfully, to the poor ship. If said ship could have shouted "Whoohoo!!" or "Alleluia!", she would have. Horatio had a rather nervous stomach and the waves of the sea had quite a grudge. And sometimes, though it is absolutely dreadful to admit, sometimes the vomit missed its target…
"Twenty…six?" His counting had reached its drunken climax. (For Horatio's sake, we will merely pretend that he meant to leave out the numbers three, seventeen, and twenty-two). "No! That means I have another…eleven hours!"
"Horatio, are you daft?" With his hair gloriously arrayed, Lieutenant Archie Kennedy looked smart. Much smarter than Horatio who was (gasp!) beginning to have quite the racoon's eyes. "You've been on watch for twenty-four hours and you have twelve left."
Archie thought he had heard some mumbled swear words pass through Horatio's godly lips, but he dismissed them. The man had a right after all. Archie was beginning to suspect that Captain Sawyer was a lunatic who had earned a distinguished service record via his sheer dominatrix-esque tyranny. Okay, so it was more likely that Captain Sawyer was getting a bit old, that he had seen and done too much, and that he was no longer fit to command a ship. But Archie liked thinking of Captain Sawyer as an irrepressible demon or a volatile fury merely pretending to be an old man.
To his horror, he noted that Horatio had fallen asleep while standing up. While a part of him did think that that was bloody talented, another part was screaming to wake him up. Part of Captain Sawyer's demon heritage was his uncanny ability to know exactly when he was being disobeyed and how. Thankfully, he had not turned his demonic eyes upon Archie yet—Archie was, as always, only second best. His slow torturous descent into submission would occur only after Lt Hornblower was completely broken.
So Archie's best line of defense—as well as his only way to save his friend—was to keep Horatio awake by any means necessary. As he stood there beside his totally-not-sleeping friend, he wondered what, exactly, 'any means necessary' would entail…