There's no keeping the surprise from his face - or it's as much for show as any of the half dozen words he's said. Either way, it's easy to mark the moment where she catches him sideways. His eyebrows climb and the line of his mouth goes crooked under the waxed corners of his mustache. Really - wrote an entire suite of poems, did she?
How many of them featured human teeth, he wonders. How far exactly has she strayed from home? (And what does she think she's playing at here?) A man he guesses could grow bored and end up in a place like this calling themselves a pirate, but not with the end point of falling in with the likes of Charles Vane's crew. No one picks that, especially not a woman. Particularly not a woman fond of writing her own poetry.
He makes no move from the window and doesn't soften his hand across the closed book. It's his; he's already decided. "Unfortunately, I can't say I'm familiar with him or his reforms. My French is patchwork." At best.
Spanish and the look of someone who doesn't belong though, he knows.
"Why do you want it?" he asks after a still moment. The book. The Ranger. Any of it.
Work and weather and more consistent meals have molded her into something more human than what had crawled out of that shipwreck in chains, but even now -
he is never between her and the door. Her fingers trace books, but her eyes track him and the set of her shoulders says she's acutely aware of where he is when it's impossible to look at both him and the titles of the books she's turning over in her hands. She did not learn these instincts in the drawing rooms that taught her how to smile and speak; they are not where she found the scars mostly hidden under her clothes, her wrists still faintly marked when her hands lift and her sleeves slide for the elbow. Whatever made her what she is today was crueler than boredom, her falling in a harder landing.
"Thomas's French needs a little work, he's out of practise," she says, because it's the book he's asking after, obviously. "And he appreciates poetry. It'd be nice for us to have - to introduce to him something I loved. He brings me this ring," the only one on her hand that doesn't feature Hamund's teeth, a wide copper thing with blue and green, "and I'll bring him books."
He's doing the translating, today, and a more than serviceable job; now that there's no one to beat them for doing it, they can often enough be heard chattering or murmuring to one another in her mother tongue. And maybe he's read her favourite humanist before, or maybe he hasn't, it would have been nice to - well, Captain Storybook is unlikely to give it up now, but she's picked up one or two things so far that are promising, too, so that's fine. It will make for a story. The book that got away, with a rude man from a fairytale.
Her fingers tap restlessly on the book in her hands. She thinks some people deserve soft things, but even in her head it doesn't sound like something that should be said out loud, so she doesn't. She says, "You understand writing your own story," instead, with a gesture to him.
A loft in Saint Kitts with a few dusty bookshelves behind barrels of sugared fruit and bolts of cotton is so far removed from particular studies in London (which must still exist, even if it seems unimaginable) that it seems unfair to expect him to be so prepared for a stranger to wrench the latter forward in time and across an ocean.
A moment ago, 'languid' wouldn't have been the word to describe him there. Then the easiness in his shoulder, the angle of his wrist, his elbow hooked there at the window ledge evaporates so completely that it must have been. It's as a steel plate being snapped shut or the reflex of snatching fingers from heat. A blunting of his attention on her, curiosity snapped over the knee. He goes from lit by the light from the window to a shadow blocking it in an involuntary instant.
(Miranda isn't why he's here looking after books, but there's no denying a shared language or the people it's been spoken with. Maybe he should've been ready to be stuck between the ribs like this here.)
He's so removed from what she's saying, but theres almost no pause between her last word and his next. So clipped he might as well be interrupting her. "That kind of ambition is blood in the water to a crew like your captain's. But I imagine you know that already." A look to her rings - all but the copper one. "He won't be impressed by it."
Or her poetry. Or how sharp her eyes are, used so.
The time when that blow would have landed wasn't so long ago - but times change fast. The argument they'd had in Nassau, the mess with Hamund, her own bloody-minded certainty of purpose; she thinks only that it's interesting he wanted it to.
"You shouldn't take it so personally," she recommends, mild as a little lamb, since no part of that denied the accuracy of her observation.
He could, instead, consider first the flaw of being the sort of man to draw someone into conversation for the purpose of ridiculing and disparaging their answers. That's what pricks under her skin now - not what he says, when the ground feels so much firmer under her than it did before, but that she fell so readily into the trap, that some now-embarrassed part of her hadn't been expecting the dismissal. Had wanted to talk about poetry and stories more than she'd been wary of why she was being asked.
Even after he'd already been rude. What the fuck had she been expecting?
She folds her slim hands over her books - there was an Ars poetica, so - and moves for the staircase.
"Neither should you," he says from the window, far less gently. The part where he's done nothing but pick at the people surrounding her from the moment she climbed the stairs. It's a common trait among pirates - cutting their teeth in the direction of anyone with an insult for a ship, a crew, a captain. Best to either get used to letting it lie or better at parsing who warranted biting.
(Under any circumstance - say, the one where the Ranger isn't lurking out there in the bay and she's come straight from it; the one where her friend has any other name or she'd simply neglected to use it - they might have actually found themselves on conversation long enough to make the shopkeeper anxious and smooth the raw seam there between them. He might have gone on his way with his Œuvres poétiques and she with her Ars poetica with something like rare contentment.)
Instead, Flint passes the book from the sill into his hand. He offers it out with a flat look, but makes no move to intercept her (that too would be easy - it's a shorter line from here to the staircase than the one she must take). "Take it. It's of no use to me."
Miranda won't know the difference for weeks yet. And God help him if he deprives anyone on the Ranger of an education.
Registering first that he doesn't intercept - and it would be easier - she regards him for a moment with unflattering surprise that doesn't have much to do with his evidently unplanned generosity. That, too, a beat later when her gaze drops from man to book. Oh.
It isn't hesitation, just the time it takes to process and for her face to stop doing that thing - she takes the book. Of course she does. She might've decided she was too proud and didn't want it any more, but first of all that would do Thomas no good and second of all she's not and she does. Far be it from her to look a gift horse in its answer-for-bloody-everything mouth.
(It becomes apparent, the longer one spends in her company, that the flatness doesn't speak to subtlety. She's expressive to a fault, and that look is just a different tell.)
Would you look at the pair of them - all stillness and flat looks that betray more than they're meant to.
"Then I'm sorry not to have met him," he says, punctuating it with a smile that's too toothy and a pointedly raised eyebrow. It feels fractionally artificial, a thing he does with his face because it's what men in close proximity with women who think they know better do. Or is that just the story he's telling her: that he is selectively wolfish, that he cares more about what she thinks of him over a book than some other alternative vulnerability.
(Some weaknesses are easier than others.)
He hooks his elbow back on the window sill. "Mind in which direction you bare those teeth next time, won't you."
It's a small concession to make, one calculated on that story he's decided to tell that what she finally says, hugging all of her books to her chest, is: "He'll be sorry to have missed someone else telling me."
It can come as no shock, probably, that Flint is not the first person to tell Gwen to be more careful. Even on this brief acquaintance - especially. She should listen. She does try to listen. It's just that this is really all her teeth fucking do--
Her crooked, closemouthed smile is a knife palmed inward; "You are all, I think, a bit late with it."
That was almost friendly, if the punchline weren't look what they already did to me.
(Thomas doesn't want to remake her, though. He just wants her to survive throwing herself so headlong into what she makes of herself - for his sake, sometimes, she thinks before she lunges.)
"My name is Gwenaëlle Tavington," her hand on the rickety banister. "I think 'the French cunt' is more common, you can always add 'with the books' for yourself, but that's my name."
Then there's nothing at all similar about her Thomas to--
It's a relief, one that sits on top of everything else as a drop of oil in a cup of water. Remote by design. He doesn't think about it as a balm because it would require considering the thing stung (even if examination might make him more sympathetic to her, to the marks on her wrists and all the reasons why she could be here in a place she can't have chosen that must, at the end of it all, come down to the same reason anyone else is).
He lifts his chin a degree from his post at the widow, half acknowledgement and half something else. Gazing down the length of his nose at her out of habit or practice. It's the look of a man used to standing at the rail of a quarterdeck while sure it's where he belongs.
"James Flint of the Walrus, though I hear Captain is more common."
Her sudden scrutiny, the honest frankness of her immediate assessment - "I imagined you taller," when he is still quite a bit larger than she is, but people talk about Flint as if he's eight feet fucking tall - it is rather of a piece with her apparently inspiring such concern in everyone she meets who isn't trying to kill her. How has she lasted so long with such a mouth; maybe partly because she avoided speaking at all for quite some time.
Still. She tilts her head til, manages to look as if she's finding a frame for him despite not lifting her hands, finally settles on, "No. I see it."
There's a flicker in his face, though it finds its way to the corners of his mouth. That grin still has too many teeth, but it reaches into other parts of his face now even of it doesn't penetrate farther. Something true for some fragmented reason. "Good," he says.
Storytellers, she thinks, satisfied. He knows. And maybe he thinks she won't be as good as him, but that's fine. He can be wrong with everyone else who's ever said she can't do, won't succeed. Look how far she's got. Look how much she's already lived.
If he can do it, she can do it.
"En échange," she says, produces from somewhere tucked on her person a flattened piece of paper, handwritten. She doesn't try to give it to him - and risk having him rebuff it when they're very nearly ending on a positive note? not likely - but lays it flat on the nearest shelf for him to take or leave when he takes his own leave.
It isn't Peletier, but it is a French poem. He will have to have it translated to find out how many human teeth it features; she doesn't linger any longer.
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How many of them featured human teeth, he wonders. How far exactly has she strayed from home? (And what does she think she's playing at here?) A man he guesses could grow bored and end up in a place like this calling themselves a pirate, but not with the end point of falling in with the likes of Charles Vane's crew. No one picks that, especially not a woman. Particularly not a woman fond of writing her own poetry.
He makes no move from the window and doesn't soften his hand across the closed book. It's his; he's already decided. "Unfortunately, I can't say I'm familiar with him or his reforms. My French is patchwork." At best.
Spanish and the look of someone who doesn't belong though, he knows.
"Why do you want it?" he asks after a still moment. The book. The Ranger. Any of it.
no subject
he is never between her and the door. Her fingers trace books, but her eyes track him and the set of her shoulders says she's acutely aware of where he is when it's impossible to look at both him and the titles of the books she's turning over in her hands. She did not learn these instincts in the drawing rooms that taught her how to smile and speak; they are not where she found the scars mostly hidden under her clothes, her wrists still faintly marked when her hands lift and her sleeves slide for the elbow. Whatever made her what she is today was crueler than boredom, her falling in a harder landing.
"Thomas's French needs a little work, he's out of practise," she says, because it's the book he's asking after, obviously. "And he appreciates poetry. It'd be nice for us to have - to introduce to him something I loved. He brings me this ring," the only one on her hand that doesn't feature Hamund's teeth, a wide copper thing with blue and green, "and I'll bring him books."
He's doing the translating, today, and a more than serviceable job; now that there's no one to beat them for doing it, they can often enough be heard chattering or murmuring to one another in her mother tongue. And maybe he's read her favourite humanist before, or maybe he hasn't, it would have been nice to - well, Captain Storybook is unlikely to give it up now, but she's picked up one or two things so far that are promising, too, so that's fine. It will make for a story. The book that got away, with a rude man from a fairytale.
Her fingers tap restlessly on the book in her hands. She thinks some people deserve soft things, but even in her head it doesn't sound like something that should be said out loud, so she doesn't. She says, "You understand writing your own story," instead, with a gesture to him.
Fucking look at this guy.
no subject
A moment ago, 'languid' wouldn't have been the word to describe him there. Then the easiness in his shoulder, the angle of his wrist, his elbow hooked there at the window ledge evaporates so completely that it must have been. It's as a steel plate being snapped shut or the reflex of snatching fingers from heat. A blunting of his attention on her, curiosity snapped over the knee. He goes from lit by the light from the window to a shadow blocking it in an involuntary instant.
(Miranda isn't why he's here looking after books, but there's no denying a shared language or the people it's been spoken with. Maybe he should've been ready to be stuck between the ribs like this here.)
He's so removed from what she's saying, but theres almost no pause between her last word and his next. So clipped he might as well be interrupting her. "That kind of ambition is blood in the water to a crew like your captain's. But I imagine you know that already." A look to her rings - all but the copper one. "He won't be impressed by it."
Or her poetry. Or how sharp her eyes are, used so.
no subject
"You shouldn't take it so personally," she recommends, mild as a little lamb, since no part of that denied the accuracy of her observation.
He could, instead, consider first the flaw of being the sort of man to draw someone into conversation for the purpose of ridiculing and disparaging their answers. That's what pricks under her skin now - not what he says, when the ground feels so much firmer under her than it did before, but that she fell so readily into the trap, that some now-embarrassed part of her hadn't been expecting the dismissal. Had wanted to talk about poetry and stories more than she'd been wary of why she was being asked.
Even after he'd already been rude. What the fuck had she been expecting?
She folds her slim hands over her books - there was an Ars poetica, so - and moves for the staircase.
no subject
(Under any circumstance - say, the one where the Ranger isn't lurking out there in the bay and she's come straight from it; the one where her friend has any other name or she'd simply neglected to use it - they might have actually found themselves on conversation long enough to make the shopkeeper anxious and smooth the raw seam there between them. He might have gone on his way with his Œuvres poétiques and she with her Ars poetica with something like rare contentment.)
Instead, Flint passes the book from the sill into his hand. He offers it out with a flat look, but makes no move to intercept her (that too would be easy - it's a shorter line from here to the staircase than the one she must take). "Take it. It's of no use to me."
Miranda won't know the difference for weeks yet. And God help him if he deprives anyone on the Ranger of an education.
no subject
It isn't hesitation, just the time it takes to process and for her face to stop doing that thing - she takes the book. Of course she does. She might've decided she was too proud and didn't want it any more, but first of all that would do Thomas no good and second of all she's not and she does. Far be it from her to look a gift horse in its answer-for-bloody-everything mouth.
(It becomes apparent, the longer one spends in her company, that the flatness doesn't speak to subtlety. She's expressive to a fault, and that look is just a different tell.)
"I'm sure he'd thank you very nicely."
Dry. She doesn't.
no subject
"Then I'm sorry not to have met him," he says, punctuating it with a smile that's too toothy and a pointedly raised eyebrow. It feels fractionally artificial, a thing he does with his face because it's what men in close proximity with women who think they know better do. Or is that just the story he's telling her: that he is selectively wolfish, that he cares more about what she thinks of him over a book than some other alternative vulnerability.
(Some weaknesses are easier than others.)
He hooks his elbow back on the window sill. "Mind in which direction you bare those teeth next time, won't you."
no subject
It can come as no shock, probably, that Flint is not the first person to tell Gwen to be more careful. Even on this brief acquaintance - especially. She should listen. She does try to listen. It's just that this is really all her teeth fucking do--
Her crooked, closemouthed smile is a knife palmed inward; "You are all, I think, a bit late with it."
That was almost friendly, if the punchline weren't look what they already did to me.
(Thomas doesn't want to remake her, though. He just wants her to survive throwing herself so headlong into what she makes of herself - for his sake, sometimes, she thinks before she lunges.)
"My name is Gwenaëlle Tavington," her hand on the rickety banister. "I think 'the French cunt' is more common, you can always add 'with the books' for yourself, but that's my name."
no subject
It's a relief, one that sits on top of everything else as a drop of oil in a cup of water. Remote by design. He doesn't think about it as a balm because it would require considering the thing stung (even if examination might make him more sympathetic to her, to the marks on her wrists and all the reasons why she could be here in a place she can't have chosen that must, at the end of it all, come down to the same reason anyone else is).
He lifts his chin a degree from his post at the widow, half acknowledgement and half something else. Gazing down the length of his nose at her out of habit or practice. It's the look of a man used to standing at the rail of a quarterdeck while sure it's where he belongs.
"James Flint of the Walrus, though I hear Captain is more common."
But surely that's no surprise.
no subject
Still. She tilts her head til, manages to look as if she's finding a frame for him despite not lifting her hands, finally settles on, "No. I see it."
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What would be the point otherwise.
no subject
If he can do it, she can do it.
"En échange," she says, produces from somewhere tucked on her person a flattened piece of paper, handwritten. She doesn't try to give it to him - and risk having him rebuff it when they're very nearly ending on a positive note? not likely - but lays it flat on the nearest shelf for him to take or leave when he takes his own leave.
It isn't Peletier, but it is a French poem. He will have to have it translated to find out how many human teeth it features; she doesn't linger any longer.