A/N – The pieces of this story have been sitting on my computer for a year(ish) and I was only able to finish over the holidays. I have long adored not only Bennet and Rose, but the way they're written to be so alike and yet simultaneously different. Hence, this two-sided piece that examines how they view mornings. (Point of order: This piece was written by a decidedly anti-morning person. I'll get up; just don't talk to me or expect me to talk to you.)
Spoilers for every episode through the end of the third series; I haven't seen four yet so if anything is inaccurate based on the new episodes, that's why. (And no spoilers for me if you comment – I mean it!) I don't own these people; I don't keep a lawyer on retainer; and the only things I have of value are two horses that cost too much to keep, so you wouldn't want them anyway. Comments go below if you're so inclined. Cheers!
"We can only appreciate the miracle of a sunrise if we have waited in the darkness." Anonymous
He used to be an early riser.
Even as a boy, Bennet Drake was up and out of bed as soon as he could untangle himself from the singled ragged blanket that served as covering to the skinny boy who resided in the rookery – a place that housed a myriad of other scrawny, bedraggled boys and their overworked, underpaid parents and siblings. In fact, there was barely a delay between his feet hitting the floor and his departure, for there was never breakfast of any kind to be found in the Drake family cupboards and he slept wearing the only set of clothes that he owned. What incentive, then, to linger?
Moreover, to rise quickly and hit the street alongside the rowdy gang he ran with was to find the possibility of a meal (usually procured illegally) and avoid the drunken blows of a father who'd spent yet another night in a public house or back alley and sad eyes of a mother who would bear the brunt of them in Bennet's stead.
To lie in bed past sunrise, then, was to put himself in harm's way and young Bennet learned early to avoid it at all costs.
Later, when he joined the army and found himself in the depths of the hellish furnace called Egypt, his boyhood lessons still rang true. There, to rise early (often before dawn had even contemplated cracking the horizon) was to achieve the best chance of seeing the sun set at the end of the same day. In point of fact, few men of Colonel Faulkner's regiment needed reveille to wake them at all – if indeed sleep found them in the first place, so on edge were they after their first glimpse of the dervishes they were sent to fight in the sand.
Most mornings, well before the first fingers of sunlight broke through the frigid cold of the desert night and boiled them alive all over again, Bennet and his compatriots rose swiftly and silently in the gray woolen darkness, kicked bedrolls aside with haste and reached for their weapons in the selfsame motion with which they pulled their broken and exhausted bodies up onto tired and blistered feet.
Of course, sometimes the enemy surprised them just after sunset, descending from within the blackness of the overnight hours - a vicious horde who used surprise to their advantage. Quickly Bennet learned that the human capacity to rise and fight in a single action was deeply engrained, something primitive that lived inside his very bones. Sometimes the war cry ripped from his chest before his eyes were even fully open. The fighting was raw, animalistic, and made the scraps he and his mates got into – indeed, even sought - during their Whitechapel boyhood look tame by comparison.
To rise late in the desert was to assume the risk of nevermore rising again, Army Sergeant Bennet Drake learned, and so he was always the first to his feet each morning, no matter how early it arrived.
After the events at El Teb and his years of regimented service to Queen and country, it was no great stretch of the imagination to understand why Whitechapel policeman Bennet Drake would likewise eschew sleeping past sunrise. Even on the very rare occasions when the nightmares of the desert left him unmolested, he still found that he retained his habit of rising quickly and making his way out the door just as the gas lamps flickered out in the street and daylight first filtered between the buildings.
The only real difference in his London mornings as an adult, it turned out, was the uniform he donned. No more frayed short pants or sand-stained military breeches; now it was a suit and tie and Bennet always took a moment to trim his beard and neaten his Spartan flat before making his way to the stationhouse on Leman Street. Always there was regimented purpose in his routine and never was there a desire to linger at home, no matter how devastating his day's work might be.
Even when the Ripper began his reign of fear in Whitechapel Bennet rose early. In fact, there was little time to do else but look for the fiend and pray his capture came in time to save the next victim. Hardly time to eat or drink or hatch a thought that wasn't related to how they might find and apprehend the Ripper during those dark days, and while Inspector Reid often collapsed onto a folding cot in his office rather than trek home, Bennet would simply locate an empty holding cell or unused chair in a back hallway and doze until Don Artherton delivered a nudge to his outstretched foot (a tentative nudge it was, and delivered with his own toe from a distance of a foot or so, for Bennet's military reflexes remained firmly and famously intact) and followed it with a cup of the thick Turkish mud he claimed was coffee.
Still later than that, when Bennet Drake shared his life with Bella – that too brief time that now is but a shadow of memory - he was up with the sun and moved about the flat as quietly as possible, trying not to wake his slumbering wife. She always looked so peaceful in the pre-dawn hours that it seemed criminal to disturb her and his immediate sense of purpose fell to brewing a pot of coffee so that they could share breakfast before he turned his thoughts toward Leman Street and the work of his day.
And then he blinked and Bella was gone, swallowed into the evils that lurked in the depths of Whitechapel – the depths that Bennet and the Inspector struggled against so valiantly, but to no avail. During the dark days that followed, there was oblivion, but no sleep, exhaustion but no reprieve. Day and night blended into one long slog that he was desperate to end – so desperate, in fact, that he didn't care what the eventual outcome was. Death was acceptable if only it pulled him from the purgatory in which he dwelled.
Manchester's streets offered healing, but even for newly-minted Constable Drake the morning routine was that of the Sergeant Drake of old: sunrise, out of bed, out the door. Bennet followed his habits or else they followed him; they were so firmly ingrained it was difficult to know.
Then came the morning he awakened back in a bed in London, only to discover that the sun was fully over the horizon; dawn had come and gone; and he had missed it.
This revelation should have been a shock. That the sun was at work and he was not should have infused a bolt of confused adrenaline into every drop of Bennet's blood, but on that fateful day it did not. On that day - and on the many that followed - he awakened with a pressing desire never to move again.
After all, why should a man wish to stir when he awoke with the head of Rose Erskine pillowed softly atop his chest?
Every morning prior to that one had served a singular purpose – the drive to go out, to seek something, anything, whether it be food, or knowledge, or to fulfill a duty, to eke out survival, to discern answers to questions, to seek love or peace or even something he couldn't quite put a name to. Every new day presented a mission that Bennet Drake rose to meet as early as possible so as not to waste a moment of it.
But on the morning he awakened with Rose by his side – that first blissful, golden morning when the sun warmed his face before he woke – Bennet Drake felt the purposeful pull no longer. Was it possible that he was, for a brief and sun-washed moment, content? Was it possible that somewhere between the dark of yesterday and the light of this new morning he discovered the sense of peace that had eluded him for so very long?
The first time he saw Rose - the day he saved her life for the first (but not last) time –she purchased a piece of his soul. Call it kismet or propose a preordination by an unknown higher power; whatever it was, their bond was palpable, immutable, and real. It could not be vanquished by the trials life threw before them, nor could it be extinguished by their own careless words or the persistent passage of time.
"If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life," goes a line in one of Oscar Wilde's newest plays and, for his part, Bennet Drake always assumed that his path and that of Rose would follow different trajectories, never to intersect. He might wait in one place and she in another, but never would they converge except to pass by on the road of their singular journeys. His wait would be perpetual.
And then one night they collided, an impact of such force that the recent Whitechapel train crash paled by comparison. Still, in the back of Bennet's mind was the fear that, should they move but a fraction of an inch on the following morning, their lives would diverge once more and he would lose her forever.
But he forgot that it was Rose with whom he was entangled – Rose who purposely shifted her path into alignment with his; Rose of the indomitable will; Rose who refused to merely survive, but was determined to thrive. She hacked a trail into the wilderness of Whitechapel and suffered no fools along the way. When she told Bennet that something existed in Whitechapel that could never be broken, when she referenced the immutability of their relationship, he believed her. Rose would not allow the world to come between them now; it would have her to reckon with if it meddled and woe to the world if it should dare.
On that first morning - and the mornings that followed - Bennet Drake kissed the forehead, the cheek, the lips of the woman curled into him and did not rise. In the cocoon they created, they were safe from harm, from the opinions and actions of others, and from the chill of the London morning. So comfortable was he in his newly contented existence that his reluctance to stir stood in stark contrast to Rose, who always attempted eagerly to begin her day, tugging at his arm and imploring with a laugh, "Bennet! We can't stay here all afternoon!"
But for the power of those beloved blue eyes to beseech him to do anything she asked, he knew he could give up work and every other basic human need if he might merely linger under the covers with his beloved. Indeed, on most Sundays of their married life, Bennet could convince Rose to stay with him and whisper and doze and make love until the morning bled into the afternoon and she finally convinced him to leave the flat. ("I need fresh air! We need fresh air! It can't be healthy to stay in all day.")
With the work of a policeman never done – much less the work of the chief inspector of the busy Leman Street station house – there were, of course, more than a few mornings (and late nights and Sundays) interrupted by Constable Grace or another bobby beating the door and requesting the Inspector come at once. But unlike the frenzied days of the Ripper murders and the nights when a chair propped into a corner served for a quick doze, he never lingered longer than necessary when called from Rose's side. In the dark of the morning or the hazy gray of pre-dawn, he slipped into the flat as though he'd never gone and, no matter the hour, Rose would come halfway to consciousness for a kiss hello and then fold herself softly into him, wrapping her warm body around his chilled limbs and allowing a contented sigh to escape as sleep claimed her once more.
There were no more nightmares of the desert for the Bennet Drake who slept with Rose by his side, no more terrors that dared disturb his rest, for her sheer presence would not allow them to come close. And for a man who had spent so much of his life battling demons in one form or another, the notion that he could rest – truly rest – in the arms of the woman who claimed his heart as her own on the first day he ever saw her, was foreign, unexpected, and welcome. It was a desperate wish fulfilled, and so he cherished every second and never once took them – or her - for granted.
Gratitude did not, however, prevent him from pulling the covers back over his head on the occasional early morning and pretending that he had nowhere else to be – a scheme that typically only worked until Rose's laugh raised him from his repose once more.
TBC