"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.)
As promised by that swaying line, he does move for the window. The room is exceptionally narrow, and so the separation isn't all that far really—a half dozen steps at most, the space required for him to feel a little less like he might puncture something.
The air hissing off the waterfront and up into the narrow sidestreet that cuts behind Emlyn's isn't particularly cool. It smells of rotten fish, and the waste that gathers in Lowtown, and salt, and the acrid tang of something burning and sour. But it does move, just a little, and the shape of it skirting outside the window is in a sense grounding. Regardless of the noise grumbling in through the closed door, it would be easy to feel as if this room had been divided from the world about it. He sets his hand across the sill to feel the air at his fingertips. His back and shoulder finds the frame of the open window itself, and the point of his attention doesn't avoid moving back to John. It does so quite readily despite the allotment of distance wedged in between them.
He is always asking for more and closer. John's hands do. His mouth does. Flint doesn't need to be told any of that; he is well acquainted with that desire.
"Is there nothing I can say to make any of this less wretched for you?"
But it isn't the sort of thing that can be asked for. (Would it feel the same to be told in so many words that there is no point at which he could be cast aside, if he were to request such a thing now?) John cannot dredge this out of him. There must be a check. Yes, John wants more. But Flint is, at times, a raw nerve. Why find out if he would crack his ribs open, should John ask for it?
The room is small. Within this space, all that time ago, John had found it so easy to simply reach for him. Draw him in. He had wanted him in some form or another for such a long time. Here and now, there are a handful of steps and a strip of table to contend with, and it is enough of a check on the impulse to give over to the impulse to allow events to repeat.
"I'm not sure."
Not a no. Not something closed. It is only an open door into a pitch black room, dark and difficult to navigate. However—
"I want to take you to bed," is so weighted with sentiment that the meaning inherent in the words shift in the light, depends on the way the shadows fall.
From the taphouse's main floor, the thunder roll of conversation breaks into a sudden cacophony of laughter. Peace, peace you fucks, someone hollers above it. Let him finish. And past this room in the opposite direction, out the window and down the narrow street under the shadow of the neighboring slanting eaves, there is the faint sound of music: the distant roll of a drum being beaten in time to a melody that fails to carry as far as the percussive tempo does. There are other taverns on this street, and other crowded floors, and other private little back rooms like this one. Lowtown is a circuitous warren, a snarled knit folded back and over on itself.
Stood there with the line of his shoulder half across the frame of the window, the back street beyond Flint is a black and featureless square. It plucks at the sleeve and shoulder of his dark coat, threatening to absorb those parts of him until he is just his hand on the windowsill and the low slanting of his brow. He studies John for a long moment until the impulse to grovel after that sentiment—he would like to be taken to bed—passes.
Then he says, "If you stay in that room, if you leave your things there, there are going to be questions." It is even, brusque. Look at him. They are discussing facts now, he has decided. "Clearly you and I at one point decided they were the kind that could be survived or dissuaded. But if that isn't the case and we might avoid doing you further damage by reverting this arrangement to how it has been, then it can be reversed."
In the space of that study, it occurs to John that he might draw that statement into sharper clarity. That he might parse out the dimensions of it so as not to be mistaken for a derailing or a distraction from their present conversation.
This is a desire that stands on its own, and as a variation on an answer. What can be said? Nothing John can ask for. Not aloud, at least. But he might ask in a different way, with the clutch of his hands and the way they slant into each other, the unthinking arrangement of limbs and weight. He has always been pleased by the way their bodies settle into each other, and in that easy familiarity certain truths might be easier telegraphed.
John has bent words into new meanings too long, too easily, to trust them. What he does with his body always feels like a truer thing. Actions tend to be.
Even an action as simple as the relocation of a sea chest up a flight or two of stairs. Where he might hang his coat. How his rings and necklaces might scatter and mingle with Flint's own pieces of jewelry. These are tangible, undeniable things. Anyone who looks into that room might observe them.
(Did they decide before or after he set out for Granitefell? Did the timing matter?)
"I don't want to reverse it."
Straightforward, certain.
"If there are questions, we will manage them," is also a certainty. They are both practiced in dealing with questions to which they have no intention of giving definitive answers. "I'm not concerned that we won't be able to diffuse the curiosity of the inhabitants of that tower."
Edited (sorry i will stop editing every tag i promise) 2023-09-22 03:25 (UTC)
He continues to look at him, something coming set and unset behind the shape of his expression. It's a quiet thing, held close to the chest—not invisible, only largely impenetrable. A clenching of the teeth, a pressing of the tongue against the roof of his mouth. He wills the hum of blood in the back of his head and between the ears to quiet.
(He should have brought the cup to the window ledge with him. The bottle too.)
After a moment he raises his hand from the ledge and rubs the arc of an eye socket with his thumb. He misses Miranda, he thinks with violent abruptness. He wants for her indelicacy.
"That would seem to put the matter to bed, then."
Maybe when he'd asked the first time it had gone worse and the moving of the trunk has been a point of compromise. Wanting things that can't be surrendered usually take considerable violence to capture, and Granitefell certainly qualifies.
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(He is slower to snatch up the cup a second time. Maybe this one will stay filled for longer.)
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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?
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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.
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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.
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What a question.
"I'd like to think so."
A little chagrined under all that flexing irritation. That's plain enough too.
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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.
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(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.
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(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."
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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—
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"I'm not standing here telling you why you should want a thing, John. You're just meant to want it."
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In what ways does John Silver remain opaque?
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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."
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"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.
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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?"
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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.
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"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."
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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.)
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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.
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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.)
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The air hissing off the waterfront and up into the narrow sidestreet that cuts behind Emlyn's isn't particularly cool. It smells of rotten fish, and the waste that gathers in Lowtown, and salt, and the acrid tang of something burning and sour. But it does move, just a little, and the shape of it skirting outside the window is in a sense grounding. Regardless of the noise grumbling in through the closed door, it would be easy to feel as if this room had been divided from the world about it. He sets his hand across the sill to feel the air at his fingertips. His back and shoulder finds the frame of the open window itself, and the point of his attention doesn't avoid moving back to John. It does so quite readily despite the allotment of distance wedged in between them.
He is always asking for more and closer. John's hands do. His mouth does. Flint doesn't need to be told any of that; he is well acquainted with that desire.
"Is there nothing I can say to make any of this less wretched for you?"
It isn't meant to be so fucking difficult.
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But it isn't the sort of thing that can be asked for. (Would it feel the same to be told in so many words that there is no point at which he could be cast aside, if he were to request such a thing now?) John cannot dredge this out of him. There must be a check. Yes, John wants more. But Flint is, at times, a raw nerve. Why find out if he would crack his ribs open, should John ask for it?
The room is small. Within this space, all that time ago, John had found it so easy to simply reach for him. Draw him in. He had wanted him in some form or another for such a long time. Here and now, there are a handful of steps and a strip of table to contend with, and it is enough of a check on the impulse to give over to the impulse to allow events to repeat.
"I'm not sure."
Not a no. Not something closed. It is only an open door into a pitch black room, dark and difficult to navigate. However—
"I want to take you to bed," is so weighted with sentiment that the meaning inherent in the words shift in the light, depends on the way the shadows fall.
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Stood there with the line of his shoulder half across the frame of the window, the back street beyond Flint is a black and featureless square. It plucks at the sleeve and shoulder of his dark coat, threatening to absorb those parts of him until he is just his hand on the windowsill and the low slanting of his brow. He studies John for a long moment until the impulse to grovel after that sentiment—he would like to be taken to bed—passes.
Then he says, "If you stay in that room, if you leave your things there, there are going to be questions." It is even, brusque. Look at him. They are discussing facts now, he has decided. "Clearly you and I at one point decided they were the kind that could be survived or dissuaded. But if that isn't the case and we might avoid doing you further damage by reverting this arrangement to how it has been, then it can be reversed."
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This is a desire that stands on its own, and as a variation on an answer. What can be said? Nothing John can ask for. Not aloud, at least. But he might ask in a different way, with the clutch of his hands and the way they slant into each other, the unthinking arrangement of limbs and weight. He has always been pleased by the way their bodies settle into each other, and in that easy familiarity certain truths might be easier telegraphed.
John has bent words into new meanings too long, too easily, to trust them. What he does with his body always feels like a truer thing. Actions tend to be.
Even an action as simple as the relocation of a sea chest up a flight or two of stairs. Where he might hang his coat. How his rings and necklaces might scatter and mingle with Flint's own pieces of jewelry. These are tangible, undeniable things. Anyone who looks into that room might observe them.
(Did they decide before or after he set out for Granitefell? Did the timing matter?)
"I don't want to reverse it."
Straightforward, certain.
"If there are questions, we will manage them," is also a certainty. They are both practiced in dealing with questions to which they have no intention of giving definitive answers. "I'm not concerned that we won't be able to diffuse the curiosity of the inhabitants of that tower."
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(He should have brought the cup to the window ledge with him. The bottle too.)
After a moment he raises his hand from the ledge and rubs the arc of an eye socket with his thumb. He misses Miranda, he thinks with violent abruptness. He wants for her indelicacy.
"That would seem to put the matter to bed, then."
Maybe when he'd asked the first time it had gone worse and the moving of the trunk has been a point of compromise. Wanting things that can't be surrendered usually take considerable violence to capture, and Granitefell certainly qualifies.
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third location.
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(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.