Three Mates lust after their Captain

Title: Three mates lust after their captain. [Chapter LC##, originally lost to censorship]
Author: DasTier
Fandom: Moby Dick
Pairing: Ahab/his 3 mates
Notes: for visual aid, refer to the 1998 mini-series starring Patrick Stewart as Ahab and the most peculiar three mates headed by Ted Levine playing Starbuck. And yes, I know that words like gay, queer or dick didn't have sexual connotations in the 1840s, but let's be retrospect and read them as we would now... it's fun.

Starbuck [by the mainmast, sighing]:

Oh God! My soul belongs no longer to Thee. It is wrung and torn, and wedged away from Thy protecting handan ian influence that overcomes and subdues the human in me by its infernal grandeur. He is my helmsman now - Ahab, the impious captain, steers the ship and its first mate with his firm hand and adamant will, and I dare not take a step out of his tight rein. He has bridled and mounted me, as he mounts the quarter-deck every day to jab the wooden planks with his ivory heel, and I shudder at the touch of his presence just like the deck shudders under his crippled footstep. Ahab, my dark pilot, to no safe harbour you will guide me - this fate I can foresee when I'm summoned to descend the narrow scuttle that leads to your cabin, night-cloaked even in theghteghtest of daylight. This is an unquiet accommodation, troubled by gloomy thoughts and blasphemous intentions; the sheets on your berth are always rumpled with the same anxiety that creases your brow. Your brow! Is it not as furrowed as that of Moby Dick, your ineffable opponent? And like your harpoons sit in the brute's hide, all twisted and wrenched to cause unending pain, is that whale not stuck in your mind like some kind of a vicious splinter?
Oh Ahab, let me for once prove that you demand my presence in your dark cabin not to challenge and dispute, but to collaborate. Yield to the smoothening touch that God is willing to give thee through the hands of the mere human that is your inferior on this ship and thus bound to you in soul as much as in flesh. Let me find a key to lift the weight off your heart, allow it not to shrivel but to take a free flow of softer feelings, and we will be drawn by a fresh wind through the sparkling sea.

Stubb [by the foremast, muttering]:

Ha! Ahem! Should that be our heedful First mate by the mainmast? But what's that? - is he talking to himself in the dark of the night? I can hear his whispering in the wind but Moby Dick can swallow me whole if I can make head or tail of what he's saying. Loaded with metaphors and similes his speech is, and more appropriate to Father Mapple or our teacher guy Ishmael than a real seaman. Our Starbuck, has he caught a bug of being queer from the captain?
A hot old man that Ahab is, you can trust the words of old wise S; ho; hot and queer. The steward says he has no time for sleep, and his bed always has sheets worried down at the foot and a pillow hot as if a baked brick had rested on it. Why, wise Stubb asks? The First mate knows, he goes down the cabin-scuffle oft enough, and comes up just as ruffled and worried as Ahab's creased sheets. Stubb knows not if there's a connection; but he knows sure enough there's a riddle in it.
Well, Stubb, wise Stubb - you have twigged one thing. The old Mogul finds no release to the chick thatpeckpecking its shell. Uptight and filled to the brim he is, like a barrel with too much oil in it and with a peg sitting too tight. Our First mate likes his barrels tight and his pegs dry, much as the dried-up man that he is. Poor captain - he's always summoning the wrong mate. Stubb, good old Stubb, is the mate he needs - the one who knows that a tight-fitting peg is good, but much better is a peg that has come open to let the oil flow.
Oh, but is there not more whispering in the night? Coming now from the mizzen-mast, I swear. Can that be our little man Flask? Ahoy, but I will speak no more - la! - la! - here's a song for my captain that might lull him to sleep: We'll drink tonight with hearts as light, To love, as gay and fleeting...

Flask [by the mizzen-mast, grumbling in a low and rough voice]:

Aye, mister Starbuck, aye, mister Stubb -oh I beg your pardon, mister *Wise* Stubb. You can callshorshort and little, but it's also true that they call me King-Post, and rightly so. For short I may be, but I can clinch tight and last l and and brace against heavy battering, and that's what our captain needs. Besides, I'm standing by the mizzen-mast, and that's the mast nearest to the captain's quarter-deck. Aye, mister Stubb, we'll see who's the wise one in the end.

Ahab [on the quarter-deck, with a longing in his eyes and an arm stretched towards the sea, oblivious to anything else]:

Oh Moby Dick! Oh Moby Dick!...