The cups are drained. The bread consumed. The dwarves have multiplied to such a degree that their exit from the tavern is frustratingly slow-going.
But by and by, they make it out onto the street. The sky has grown darker. It's a remarkably clear night. The muggy heat of Kirkwall has broken, shifted towards cooler evenings. There is some time yet before the last ferry, and no clear consensus whether they wish to be on it.
Their unfinished conversation will become unavoidable should they return to the Gallows. It is unavoidable regardless, John knows. All the space Kirkwall affords them is the luxury of engaging it as they so choose.
This perhaps is what drives them in to Emlyn's.
It is familiar ground. There is a bottle for them, unprompted. (Stronger than the one set on the table for them in their previous haunt.) An offering of a table in the corner, or perhaps the balcony, or would they prefer the narrow back room John has taken to holding his meetings within?
The latter affords them only marginal insulation from the noise of gathering sailors, but it more importantly masks them from impending interruptions, the frequency of which depend on the number of Walrus men who happen to be in attendance. Flint is charged with throwing open the shutters. John works the cork free, sat in the same rickety chair he once tumbled into, years ago now.
"Did she give us cups?"
John doesn't care so much about the contents of the bottle. But it has been put into his hands. It is ostensibly their reason for stopping here as they wound their way, noncommittally, downwards through Lowtown.
And the question beckons Flint back, away from the opened window.
If he resents the choice of locale—simultaneously too private, and too close to the company of Walrus men to indulge in a bit of proper drinking unless he can tolerate the idea of crossing under their noses while clumsy on his feet—, he makes no remark of it. His greeting for the proprietress (who has never made much effort to disguise her distaste for him) is perfunctory, but not altogether impolitely sour, and his leveraging open of the back room's various narrow shutters is attended to without complaint.
Here, a grunt of acknowledgement as Flint turns from the open window and brings the two cups he'd set aside on the sill with him. He clacks them against one another where they've been stacked together for effect. Yup. She gave them cups.
He doesn't linger at the window, though the cooler tang of the salt touched night air is a balm against the bare skin. Instead, Flint shifts back to the narrow little table, divides the cups, and sets them there where John might fill them. There is a second rickety chair he. He doesn't take it. The privacy of the room affords him the luxury of his restlessness, if nothing else.
A second rickety chair, a narrow table. A wicker chest, bristles broken on one side. A woven basket piled with linen. A carved statuette gathering dust in a corner. On the far wall, a warped painting hangs at a slant. Whether the latter furnishings were gifts or are Emlyn's attempt at sprucing up the space has yet to be seen.
Given the cups, and the task of filling them, John allows himself to linger over the process. Working the cork free, letting the liquor slosh over the rim, while he holds the urge to bid Flint sit behind his teeth.
Flint is permitted his restlessness, yes. And John, aware that to some extent the silence is his to fill, waits out the immediate instincts to placate, to talk around a thing to keep the heart of it guarded. The question put to him requires more than that. He wants to offer more than that.
The silence settles. John slides one cup across the table, the rasp of contact loud in the quiet.
Flint's hand finds and takes up the cup without hesitation. A brief raise of the thing, a nod—congratulations on not being dead—, and then he nips down it's contents. Why not? They're here to drink, and he can be more deliberate with the cup that follows.
"I have business in Ostwick," he says across the lip of the cup after. It hadn't been a long walk from that hole in the way public house to this one, but barring anything better to fill the lapse in conversation with this seems as fine a topic as any. "Word from Estwatch. I've a man coming over to pass on news for some coin. I'll leave tomorrow, and be back in short order."
This, at least, he remembers with perfect clarity. Maybe he was pursuing something similar in the aftermath of John's death, and the alignment of these two points have cut the shape of this clear from the middle surrounding it.
He sets the emptied cup down again in easy pouring reach.
He knew this already, and there is little surprise in it. He didn't know this, and is something like blindsided by it.
It stalls the refill of Flint's cup. John's hands work over the bottle, thumb passing briefly over the minor speckled imperfection in the glass as he winds his way to tipping wine into that emptied glass.
"I'm sorry to hear it," he says. "Though I expect the news will be worth the journey."
Their objectives, the work carrying the two of them towards accomplishing them, are not a mystery. John knows the why, it is only the suddenness of the departure that lands like a blow.
"There's no way I could convince you to put it off a day or two?" is a useless question, at such a late hour.
"It's done. A delay would risk missing the man in question entirely." Anyone's feelings on the subject are irrelevant. He is going to Ostwick whether anyone likes it or not.
(He is slower to snatch up the cup a second time. Maybe this one will stay filled for longer.)
Of course, there can be no allowances. John knows this. The margins of time in which they work are often unforgiving; how often have they seen circumstances shift wildly in the course of a few weeks at sea?
The bottle thunks to the table.
"How long do you imagine those dealings will keep you?"
This measuring quality, a veil drawn over the contemplation of an empty room.
Will John occupy the apartment by himself, in Flint's absence? Will he descend a few flights of stairs and return to the little Gallows room he's dwelled in on his own since they arrived?
"I don't know." Is more true that the evenings other deferments have been, but no less personally vexing and so he changes his mind and tacks on, "A few days at most. If that doesn't seem the thing done, nothing will."
Pragmatic. He is briefly satisfied for having cut to the quick of it. Nevermind that is crumples a bit the moment he lifts his attention from the cup to John sat there beside the narrow little table. This room isn't really meant for drinking in, it doesn't feel like. It's only furnished for subterfuge, and private conversations. The impulse to throw the door open and allow the noise of the room beyond to reach them unimpeded is a powerful one.
He does not say, You can do as you like with the room. I doubt anyone will notice anyone coming or going in the next few days.
If John grips his cup too tightly, the ache in his hand flares back to life. If he tries too hard to pry into the void of the past weeks, it makes his head hurt.
This is a satisfactory answer. A predictable one, even. John understands it. Flint will carry back the word they need. They will decide how best to make use of it. John will remain here and go about his business. In almost all appearances, it is any other venture they've taken part in.
Except—
"Do you think we managed this better the first time around?"
We standing in for I, perhaps.
He is slow to engage the subject. He tries, often, to avoid the easy turns of phrase that might placate Flint but offer halves and shadows of the truth. John is gifted, certainly, but he has drawn a careful line for himself when it comes to their partnership.
The things that come fastest to hand are excuses, placating and honeyed. There is no space for such things between them.
The cup halts halfway to his mouth. In the world of dramatic gestures, it's a very brief check. But when his wrist unties itself, Flint returns the cup to the table rather than drink from it. Something in his face—his mouth, or a muscle in his cheek, or the telling lay of the skin about the corner of his eyes, or the height of his brow, maybe—has tightened like a wince and stuck there.
What a question.
"I'd like to think so."
A little chagrined under all that flexing irritation. That's plain enough too.
They must have, John has decided. Surely the thing was easier to address when they walked toward it together, rather than having it sprung up around them in the midst of some greater crisis.
Resolved crisis. No one is dead.
John has made very little of his own portion of these bottles. Drunk little and less of it, slow to lift the glass from the table amongst the dwarves and slower somehow in the near-privacy of this room. His fingers skirt around the rim of the cup, thumb worrying at some small dent in the edge. Flint is stood, obliging John to look up at him as the speak, and John has not yet bid him sit. May not.
Recalls how he had once reached up to him, here in this space.
"I'm sorry," he repeats, two words become a reliable refrain tonight. "I've been slow to find my footing."
Honest, if likely unsatisfying.
Flint carries much for him, John knows, up to and including perhaps the patience afforded in conversations such as these.
I'm sorry, John says, and some part of it rankles. In the moment, he can't immediately identify why—just that it feels too heavy for the room, like something thick against the skin he'd prefer to shrug out of in this weather. Why should he be apologizing for being out of balance? The man was dead a few hours ago.
(Weeks ago. Never.)
"Fine," he says, and it's not curt agreement so much as it is simple outright permission. It is, actually. "That isn't the problem." Sounds like there is one, so he briskly amends with a sharp dividing gesture of the hand, rings tarnished bright in the narrow room's dusky light: "There isn't a problem."
Enough so that after a moment's study, John's palm sets flat to the uneven surface of the table. Straightens in the chair by degrees. Comes to a rejoinder, of sorts.
"Tell me," is a prompt.
Not Ask me, but Tell me. If there is a burr caught in his fist, dug in beneath the skin, tip it into the light.
"Tell you what, exactly?" Here again, that flare of impatience—closer to the surface now given what might generously be termed half a bottle in him and the walk back up through Lowtown having served to suffuse it thoroughly. Stop looking at him like he's cut himself open and hasn't yet realized the extent of the bleeding.
(He is distantly reminded of that narrow back alley they'd fallen through the Fade to get to. A dead man, and shadows ready to coalesce again at his own fingertips, and the look John has given him over the working of such magics like they were ugly things not meant to be exposed.)
"There's nothing I haven't said to you. If you don't have any opinion about any of it, then we can be done with turning it over and simply let it lie as it is."
Some minor flicker of a look in return, some faint humor at the near-fable of James Flint letting something lie.
It would be funnier if they were speaking of something else.
But they are speaking of a specific thing. Mishandling it creates damage; it draws blood. John has observed this already, and still finds himself wanting when the subject is broached between them.
"We hardly know what it is," John tells him, a likely unnecessary reminder. "It may be days yet until we do."
Days which see them separated, which feels less than tolerable in this moment. Necessary, yes, but tolerable—
Later, when he recalls how this might have gone, will he feel foolish for having dug at this like fingernails at a splinter? Likely so. But maybe not; James Flint has an astounding capacity for arranging the look of the world about him so as to make all manner of things appear necessary.
In this moment where he picks up his cup, and uses the motion like a rail on which to steady (or check) himself. Patience. Rather than the wine, he swallows his temper down or tells himself that he does.
There is some temptation to let the silence stretch between them until Flint says some other thing. It is not a favored technique, but John feels the appeal of it, turns it over in his mind as he considers the threads of the conversation thus far, the tension in Flint's body, the cup's journey upwards and downwards from the table.
"No, but that's not an answer."
An observation, dropped mildly onto the table between them. John is not on his feet, but he has been drawn further upright. Sees him sat straight-backed in this rickety chair rather than slouched into his habitual lean, leg stretched outwards.
"I do," follows smoothly; John's decision not to wait for an answer before nudging this point forward. "I want this. You."
Maybe the trouble is that it is so broad a statement it begs misinterpretation.
He knows this. It isn't some revelation saved only for the confines of this very familiar room. This particular fact is no mystery to him. It would be as if he stood on a ship's deck and we're unaware of the slanting of the wind, or how the vessel might bend to it.
Maybe that's why it doesn't give him any measure of pause on the way to, "Then what are you so ashamed of that it requires all of this to say it?"
Were he standing, it is the kind of unexpected question that might well knock him back, require the shift of weight on his crutch. As it stands, it only tips him back slightly. The chair creaks. Beyond them, a burst of laughter rises and falls in quick succession.
The immediate instinct is only variations on the same defense mechanism: to pick apart the question, define it's terms into nothingness, realign the query until it points in a wholly different direction away from all points vulnerable.
How rare it is, to be so at a loss for words. (Not unlike being stood in the cabin aboard the Walrus, trying to talk his way past the wrenching reveal of his magic.) It puts him adrift, and there is no immediate answer forthcoming.
There is a yawning, screaming void at his back, drawn into this room with them. John can feel the chill of it even in the warmth of late summer. It raises the fine hairs there as John sorts through replies, testing the truth of them against the smooth honey of their formation.
"I don't think I'm ashamed," is what feels nearest to the truth. When he continues, "I may be wrong," it is some concession to what was passed between them in that room in Antiva, with Flint drawing damp cloths down his thigh, his fingers stopping just above the severing below John's kneecap. What had been said.
There is a fine scar on Flint's cheek. It is so narrow a scratch that the line of it it hardly registers amidst the ruddy and freckled quality of his sun-baked skin, and the other less fine wrinkles which have begun to cut his face up. But it is there. In the right light—which this isn't—it sometimes shows. But for the man who cleared the blood from the cut, it must be easy enough to picture it there across the muscle in Flint's cheek that flexes as his mouth narrows and his brow draws down.
"Then what would you call any of this?" They have gone at swords; he knows what it looks like when John Silver moves his hand to parry a blow. This might not be one, but he has certainly made extensive use of the technique already this evening.
"If it's nothing and I'm making demands of you for no good cause, then say so. But if there is something we both know is true that you're denying yourself, then I want to know the purpose."
Palm face-down on the table, all the scars John has collected there on his hands are hidden from view. Some have healed well. Some have not. John has wondered sometimes if they can be felt when he puts his hand to Flint's skin.
They come to mind now, as this question is put to him. As his thumb runs along the low edge of the cup, weighing the opening Flint has shown to him. He might say there is nothing. They might leave it here. They might let it lie long enough that they recollect how they navigated this topic before, and use it as a guide.
When these words come, they are chosen carefully because of how easy it would be to cut himself to shreds upon the admission.
"I want share that room with you," is amended with, "Any room, so long as it would be ours."
They are not talking of a specific room. Not really.
It had been easier to dredge up these things in conversation with Muldoon. To unsnarl the truth in parts and pieces, never quite touching the heart of the thing.
What does he call this? John has wound his way to the word, but stops short of it here.
(What a terrible thing it is, to have something too essential to bear losing.)
Instead, stood there beside the unoccupied chair with that cup in his hand, it feels very like he has put the point of a knife up against John's skin. Threatened to slip it between his ribs and find some sensitive, vital part of him with it. It is not a particularly pleasant sensation to feel him squirming under the pressure.
So Flint studies him for a long moment, some inexplicable sense of frustration and wanting clenched in his belly. When he soothes it, it's by pulling a mouthful of wine from the cup before setting the whole thing aside.
"All right," he says, the line of his shoulders swaying as if he might go to the window. The air in this room is hot and unpleasantly close. "That's enough."
And the man sat in the chair, face tipped up in study and observation of that suggestion of movement that might carry James Flint away from him, asks, “Is it?” with all the expectation that it is not.
Not enough.
If there is one thing the man called John Silver knows, it is what satisfaction looks like. How to recognize its absence.
If it is enough, it is enough in the sense of cut losses. Folding at a card table before losing what’s already been gained. Cutting lines before wind snaps the mast. It doesn’t bring any particular pleasure, doesn’t quell any uncertainty.
(If there is a knife at his breast, how can he complain? He is the one who put it into Flint’s hands. He is the one guiding its trajectory.)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
secondary location.
The cups are drained. The bread consumed. The dwarves have multiplied to such a degree that their exit from the tavern is frustratingly slow-going.
But by and by, they make it out onto the street. The sky has grown darker. It's a remarkably clear night. The muggy heat of Kirkwall has broken, shifted towards cooler evenings. There is some time yet before the last ferry, and no clear consensus whether they wish to be on it.
Their unfinished conversation will become unavoidable should they return to the Gallows. It is unavoidable regardless, John knows. All the space Kirkwall affords them is the luxury of engaging it as they so choose.
This perhaps is what drives them in to Emlyn's.
It is familiar ground. There is a bottle for them, unprompted. (Stronger than the one set on the table for them in their previous haunt.) An offering of a table in the corner, or perhaps the balcony, or would they prefer the narrow back room John has taken to holding his meetings within?
The latter affords them only marginal insulation from the noise of gathering sailors, but it more importantly masks them from impending interruptions, the frequency of which depend on the number of Walrus men who happen to be in attendance. Flint is charged with throwing open the shutters. John works the cork free, sat in the same rickety chair he once tumbled into, years ago now.
"Did she give us cups?"
John doesn't care so much about the contents of the bottle. But it has been put into his hands. It is ostensibly their reason for stopping here as they wound their way, noncommittally, downwards through Lowtown.
And the question beckons Flint back, away from the opened window.
true crime girlies everywhere aghast
Here, a grunt of acknowledgement as Flint turns from the open window and brings the two cups he'd set aside on the sill with him. He clacks them against one another where they've been stacked together for effect. Yup. She gave them cups.
He doesn't linger at the window, though the cooler tang of the salt touched night air is a balm against the bare skin. Instead, Flint shifts back to the narrow little table, divides the cups, and sets them there where John might fill them. There is a second rickety chair he. He doesn't take it. The privacy of the room affords him the luxury of his restlessness, if nothing else.
wait'll they find out abt the third location
Given the cups, and the task of filling them, John allows himself to linger over the process. Working the cork free, letting the liquor slosh over the rim, while he holds the urge to bid Flint sit behind his teeth.
Flint is permitted his restlessness, yes. And John, aware that to some extent the silence is his to fill, waits out the immediate instincts to placate, to talk around a thing to keep the heart of it guarded. The question put to him requires more than that. He wants to offer more than that.
The silence settles. John slides one cup across the table, the rasp of contact loud in the quiet.
no subject
"I have business in Ostwick," he says across the lip of the cup after. It hadn't been a long walk from that hole in the way public house to this one, but barring anything better to fill the lapse in conversation with this seems as fine a topic as any. "Word from Estwatch. I've a man coming over to pass on news for some coin. I'll leave tomorrow, and be back in short order."
This, at least, he remembers with perfect clarity. Maybe he was pursuing something similar in the aftermath of John's death, and the alignment of these two points have cut the shape of this clear from the middle surrounding it.
He sets the emptied cup down again in easy pouring reach.
no subject
He knew this already, and there is little surprise in it. He didn't know this, and is something like blindsided by it.
It stalls the refill of Flint's cup. John's hands work over the bottle, thumb passing briefly over the minor speckled imperfection in the glass as he winds his way to tipping wine into that emptied glass.
"I'm sorry to hear it," he says. "Though I expect the news will be worth the journey."
Their objectives, the work carrying the two of them towards accomplishing them, are not a mystery. John knows the why, it is only the suddenness of the departure that lands like a blow.
"There's no way I could convince you to put it off a day or two?" is a useless question, at such a late hour.
no subject
(He is slower to snatch up the cup a second time. Maybe this one will stay filled for longer.)
no subject
The bottle thunks to the table.
"How long do you imagine those dealings will keep you?"
This measuring quality, a veil drawn over the contemplation of an empty room.
Will John occupy the apartment by himself, in Flint's absence? Will he descend a few flights of stairs and return to the little Gallows room he's dwelled in on his own since they arrived?
no subject
Pragmatic. He is briefly satisfied for having cut to the quick of it. Nevermind that is crumples a bit the moment he lifts his attention from the cup to John sat there beside the narrow little table. This room isn't really meant for drinking in, it doesn't feel like. It's only furnished for subterfuge, and private conversations. The impulse to throw the door open and allow the noise of the room beyond to reach them unimpeded is a powerful one.
He does not say, You can do as you like with the room. I doubt anyone will notice anyone coming or going in the next few days.
no subject
This is a satisfactory answer. A predictable one, even. John understands it. Flint will carry back the word they need. They will decide how best to make use of it. John will remain here and go about his business. In almost all appearances, it is any other venture they've taken part in.
Except—
"Do you think we managed this better the first time around?"
We standing in for I, perhaps.
He is slow to engage the subject. He tries, often, to avoid the easy turns of phrase that might placate Flint but offer halves and shadows of the truth. John is gifted, certainly, but he has drawn a careful line for himself when it comes to their partnership.
The things that come fastest to hand are excuses, placating and honeyed. There is no space for such things between them.
no subject
What a question.
"I'd like to think so."
A little chagrined under all that flexing irritation. That's plain enough too.
no subject
Resolved crisis. No one is dead.
John has made very little of his own portion of these bottles. Drunk little and less of it, slow to lift the glass from the table amongst the dwarves and slower somehow in the near-privacy of this room. His fingers skirt around the rim of the cup, thumb worrying at some small dent in the edge. Flint is stood, obliging John to look up at him as the speak, and John has not yet bid him sit. May not.
Recalls how he had once reached up to him, here in this space.
"I'm sorry," he repeats, two words become a reliable refrain tonight. "I've been slow to find my footing."
Honest, if likely unsatisfying.
Flint carries much for him, John knows, up to and including perhaps the patience afforded in conversations such as these.
no subject
(Weeks ago. Never.)
"Fine," he says, and it's not curt agreement so much as it is simple outright permission. It is, actually. "That isn't the problem." Sounds like there is one, so he briskly amends with a sharp dividing gesture of the hand, rings tarnished bright in the narrow room's dusky light: "There isn't a problem."
https://i.ibb.co/ZNVyvRc/190215.png
Enough so that after a moment's study, John's palm sets flat to the uneven surface of the table. Straightens in the chair by degrees. Comes to a rejoinder, of sorts.
"Tell me," is a prompt.
Not Ask me, but Tell me. If there is a burr caught in his fist, dug in beneath the skin, tip it into the light.
Can John assuage it? That's a different question.
guffaw
(He is distantly reminded of that narrow back alley they'd fallen through the Fade to get to. A dead man, and shadows ready to coalesce again at his own fingertips, and the look John has given him over the working of such magics like they were ugly things not meant to be exposed.)
"There's nothing I haven't said to you. If you don't have any opinion about any of it, then we can be done with turning it over and simply let it lie as it is."
no subject
It would be funnier if they were speaking of something else.
But they are speaking of a specific thing. Mishandling it creates damage; it draws blood. John has observed this already, and still finds himself wanting when the subject is broached between them.
"We hardly know what it is," John tells him, a likely unnecessary reminder. "It may be days yet until we do."
Days which see them separated, which feels less than tolerable in this moment. Necessary, yes, but tolerable—
no subject
"I'm not standing here telling you why you should want a thing, John. You're just meant to want it."
no subject
In what ways does John Silver remain opaque?
no subject
In this moment where he picks up his cup, and uses the motion like a rail on which to steady (or check) himself. Patience. Rather than the wine, he swallows his temper down or tells himself that he does.
"That's not what I said."
no subject
"No, but that's not an answer."
An observation, dropped mildly onto the table between them. John is not on his feet, but he has been drawn further upright. Sees him sat straight-backed in this rickety chair rather than slouched into his habitual lean, leg stretched outwards.
"I do," follows smoothly; John's decision not to wait for an answer before nudging this point forward. "I want this. You."
Maybe the trouble is that it is so broad a statement it begs misinterpretation.
no subject
Maybe that's why it doesn't give him any measure of pause on the way to, "Then what are you so ashamed of that it requires all of this to say it?"
no subject
The immediate instinct is only variations on the same defense mechanism: to pick apart the question, define it's terms into nothingness, realign the query until it points in a wholly different direction away from all points vulnerable.
How rare it is, to be so at a loss for words. (Not unlike being stood in the cabin aboard the Walrus, trying to talk his way past the wrenching reveal of his magic.) It puts him adrift, and there is no immediate answer forthcoming.
There is a yawning, screaming void at his back, drawn into this room with them. John can feel the chill of it even in the warmth of late summer. It raises the fine hairs there as John sorts through replies, testing the truth of them against the smooth honey of their formation.
"I don't think I'm ashamed," is what feels nearest to the truth. When he continues, "I may be wrong," it is some concession to what was passed between them in that room in Antiva, with Flint drawing damp cloths down his thigh, his fingers stopping just above the severing below John's kneecap. What had been said.
I know who you are.
no subject
"Then what would you call any of this?" They have gone at swords; he knows what it looks like when John Silver moves his hand to parry a blow. This might not be one, but he has certainly made extensive use of the technique already this evening.
"If it's nothing and I'm making demands of you for no good cause, then say so. But if there is something we both know is true that you're denying yourself, then I want to know the purpose."
no subject
They come to mind now, as this question is put to him. As his thumb runs along the low edge of the cup, weighing the opening Flint has shown to him. He might say there is nothing. They might leave it here. They might let it lie long enough that they recollect how they navigated this topic before, and use it as a guide.
When these words come, they are chosen carefully because of how easy it would be to cut himself to shreds upon the admission.
"I want share that room with you," is amended with, "Any room, so long as it would be ours."
They are not talking of a specific room. Not really.
It had been easier to dredge up these things in conversation with Muldoon. To unsnarl the truth in parts and pieces, never quite touching the heart of the thing.
What does he call this? John has wound his way to the word, but stops short of it here.
(What a terrible thing it is, to have something too essential to bear losing.)
no subject
Instead, stood there beside the unoccupied chair with that cup in his hand, it feels very like he has put the point of a knife up against John's skin. Threatened to slip it between his ribs and find some sensitive, vital part of him with it. It is not a particularly pleasant sensation to feel him squirming under the pressure.
So Flint studies him for a long moment, some inexplicable sense of frustration and wanting clenched in his belly. When he soothes it, it's by pulling a mouthful of wine from the cup before setting the whole thing aside.
"All right," he says, the line of his shoulders swaying as if he might go to the window. The air in this room is hot and unpleasantly close. "That's enough."
Less like gratification, more like relenting.
no subject
Not enough.
If there is one thing the man called John Silver knows, it is what satisfaction looks like. How to recognize its absence.
If it is enough, it is enough in the sense of cut losses. Folding at a card table before losing what’s already been gained. Cutting lines before wind snaps the mast. It doesn’t bring any particular pleasure, doesn’t quell any uncertainty.
(If there is a knife at his breast, how can he complain? He is the one who put it into Flint’s hands. He is the one guiding its trajectory.)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
third location.
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
the pack is sealed.