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.
The flicker of skepticism is there and gone, just a blink of reaction.
There is little sense of resolution, though Flint is correct: this is ostensibly the matter they will have to consider, must have considered and deemed manageable once. But what John reads in his face, the kneading press of his hand to his eye, doesn't necessarily read as satisfaction in Flint.
"Come," is in service of this momentary reprieve. "Finish your cup."
They are celebrating, aren't they?
Maybe, maybe not. But regardless, John has exhausted his tolerance for the handful of steps separating them. He is not oblivious to Flint's study, that even this slight distance might afford a better vantage point. He is not even interested in diverting Flint from that scrutiny, only that it might be done at a closer proximity.
No, it is not satisfaction. But what else can be said? From what angle might be next pry in to find the correct leverage to sign up the thing closed to him and bring it out into the light where it can be examined and put to rights? Thomas would have been better at this. He would have known where to apply pressure and in what measure so that the bloody thing eventually ran clear.
He puts his hands to skin and just keeps coming up with more blood.
The shutters over the window are drawn shut. What difference does it make if the room grows warm and stifling about them? They need only work their way through the bottle and then they can quit this place too. When he has finished, he crosses from the wall back to the table. Drains his cup first and only then kicks the second chair out to he might sit in it.
"I would appreciate it if you didn't just watch me drink this bottle."
Perhaps they should have found the nearest man on the dock with a vessel and handed him a coin to return them to the Gallows. Would this conversation have been easier to conduct there rather than here?
Likely no. (They must have been in the Gallows before, hadn't they? The recollection of their work on the stairs must mean—)
At the prompting, John lifts his cup. Tosses back the contents in one motion, so he might fill the emptied cups one by one. Emlyn had given them something smooth and expensive, unaware that this was a strange sort of celebration. That they were marking a thing that didn't happen, regardless of how clear the memory of it's occurrence was.
"How early do you plan on riding out tomorrow?" he asks, sliding one full cup back to him before taking up his own. Doing his part, to drain this bottle while asking a question posed in search of neutral ground. All unresolved topics hang overhead, not quite dismissed.
"Not very," is a simple, easy answer. "A griffon isn't as subtle as she is fast, and if Tevinter has any eyes in Ostwick then my preference is to ride in under cover of dark."
It will still make for a full day of flying, says some small voice still concerned with the semantics of the thing in the very back of his head. But he can leave as late as he wishes, and spend the daylight hours slipping along the coastal edge of the Marches with an eye out for other curiosities.
Anyway. What difference does it make? He swallows down a mouthful of the wine, under appreciating its drinkability. For all his talents otherwise, he has no taste for what qualifies as good liquor and what doesn't. Poor Emlyn, and her thoughtful gesture.
"I expect the Gallows to be in some state of chaos for the next few days."
It occurs to him to say the thing explicitly: Stay.
The shape of it forms at the back of his mouth. John drowns it with the contents of his cup.
"I assume it will pass without much help, as memory returns."
Feels like a reasonable guess. There has been chaos of one form or another before. It is nearly a staple, for something to be going amiss. The only shift is the scope of this event. John hadn't asked after survivors, but he assumes the number of dead casts a very broad shadow across their number.
"You'll be well out of it, regardless."
Estwatch is likely preferable to him, than to manage the confused grief and relief that will likely linger for weeks.
A low hummed affirmative note in reply. Yes, he will.
"You might speak with Petrana," he says. "She took Rowntree and your going hard."
There will be more than enough work here in Kirkwall for Silver to occupy himself with. If they can discuss those details more readily than anything else then so be it. The bottle can't last forever.
There is enough between them that the topic of necessary business can be pieced together over the remainder of the bottle.
Petrana took his going hard. John has been turning this detail over in the back of his head, wearing it smooth, worrying over the choice to say this when they have said so little else about the matter.
Your going.
The words do not quite fit. If John sands off the edges, carves away the ugly, desperation of that last stretch of moments on the battlefield, maybe they will.
But they are talking of their missed appointment. What John might do tomorrow to smooth over their absence and parlay the reparations made into further partnership, a stronger foothold. The bottle empties. There is some casual discussion of another, before John levers to his feet.
He has already said what he wants, and it is not to sit in this room for the sake of drinking down another bottle of liquor.
The ferry is not prompt tonight, which serves them well. It's tardiness is the only reason they are allowed a leisurely boarding, rather than being stranded on the dock.
This is not the first night they have returned together, climbed the stairs together. It is only the first time they have done so in the wake of the kind of conversation they've had this evening. With something unfulfilled between them and John's undone death hanging over their heads.
There should be no reason to pause over the threshold. John is only slower getting over it because it is late, and the habitual ache of his leg is joined with a number of phantom pains that come and go, rolling in like the tide as pieces of memory come back to him.
To be fair to all involved, Flint has hardly raced up the stairs. A bottle and a quarter over a handful of hours is sufficient to shorten his stride and demand some extra attention to the unlocking of the division office's door, if nothing else. Once inside, the bolt is thrown. Flint, prickling with restlessness this whole evening, finally moves to strip impatiently from his coat.
The hearth is cold, and the air in the room is still. Someone has shut the far window, which was cracked, and the whole office has that slightly stale and too quiet sense about it as a result. But there are here to disturb that, which begins with Flint laying his coat across the back of one of the chairs about the fire rather than finding a more ready hook for it.
"You should sit," he tells him.
It has been a long walk from Emlyn's to the ferry, across the Gallows courtyard and up six flights up of stairs. Presumably, John Silver had been standing for longer than that prior to their meeting in Lowtown. It has nothing to do with delaying the transition from these front offices to the apartments adjacent.
Not in this room, apparently, as John makes no move towards the chair slanted into the space between hearth and heavy desk.
"If you've nothing to attend here, we might see if you're right about where we left the key."
There is some lee-way in this statement. Flint might find something to turn over on his desk. John would sit in the unoccupied chair to attend him while he did. But while they are both here, upright and possessed of some continuing momentum, they might let that carry them further towards the thing they have talked in circles around for most of the night.
The light in the room is low. There is just the one lamp lit to welcome them back, and so maybe the pause he gives this possibility is mostly invisible and doesn't much look like hesitation. Only he does, after a moment, gather his coat back off the back of the low chair and that might be proof enough that he'd thought they might linger here in the outer offices for a moment.
Not so, evidently. He moves also to fetch the lot lamp, shifting it down from its hook. There will be no light waiting for them in the adjacent room.
Indeed it is dark there as they cross into it, every candle cold and the hearth without a fire. The season is too warm yet for the latter, and if any of the Gallows' servants have been here then it has been a brief visit to fill the pitcher near the basin, to see that small pot for lamp oil isn't empty, and to hurry along. They company is stretched thin.
The coat finds its hook, and the lit lamp a space beside its cousin on the mantelpiece. In short order Flint had raised the unlit lamp from its base and produced the key to Silver's trunk.
What had it felt like, to give over that key to James Flint?
The gauzy impression of memory is not enough. John has some sense of the facts of the arrangement: the duplications, the new sets of keys being forged, the minutia involved in the establishment of a shared space. But the feeling attached—
What it feels like now is surely not the same as it would have felt in the moment, when they had decided such things together. Coming at a thing deliberately, rather than chasing after something already set into motion, had to have been—
Easier, perhaps.
"Did you use it, while I was gone?"
Here, John begins the processing of stripping out of his coat. (It had been scorched, he remembers. Ruined by a gout of fire, and further destroyed by how much blood had flowed from his body once he had been surrounded on the field.) Custody of the key, it seems, remains Flint's provenance.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
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.)
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
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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."
no subject
(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.
no subject
There is little sense of resolution, though Flint is correct: this is ostensibly the matter they will have to consider, must have considered and deemed manageable once. But what John reads in his face, the kneading press of his hand to his eye, doesn't necessarily read as satisfaction in Flint.
"Come," is in service of this momentary reprieve. "Finish your cup."
They are celebrating, aren't they?
Maybe, maybe not. But regardless, John has exhausted his tolerance for the handful of steps separating them. He is not oblivious to Flint's study, that even this slight distance might afford a better vantage point. He is not even interested in diverting Flint from that scrutiny, only that it might be done at a closer proximity.
no subject
He puts his hands to skin and just keeps coming up with more blood.
The shutters over the window are drawn shut. What difference does it make if the room grows warm and stifling about them? They need only work their way through the bottle and then they can quit this place too. When he has finished, he crosses from the wall back to the table. Drains his cup first and only then kicks the second chair out to he might sit in it.
"I would appreciate it if you didn't just watch me drink this bottle."
no subject
Likely no. (They must have been in the Gallows before, hadn't they? The recollection of their work on the stairs must mean—)
At the prompting, John lifts his cup. Tosses back the contents in one motion, so he might fill the emptied cups one by one. Emlyn had given them something smooth and expensive, unaware that this was a strange sort of celebration. That they were marking a thing that didn't happen, regardless of how clear the memory of it's occurrence was.
"How early do you plan on riding out tomorrow?" he asks, sliding one full cup back to him before taking up his own. Doing his part, to drain this bottle while asking a question posed in search of neutral ground. All unresolved topics hang overhead, not quite dismissed.
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It will still make for a full day of flying, says some small voice still concerned with the semantics of the thing in the very back of his head. But he can leave as late as he wishes, and spend the daylight hours slipping along the coastal edge of the Marches with an eye out for other curiosities.
Anyway. What difference does it make? He swallows down a mouthful of the wine, under appreciating its drinkability. For all his talents otherwise, he has no taste for what qualifies as good liquor and what doesn't. Poor Emlyn, and her thoughtful gesture.
"I expect the Gallows to be in some state of chaos for the next few days."
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The shape of it forms at the back of his mouth. John drowns it with the contents of his cup.
"I assume it will pass without much help, as memory returns."
Feels like a reasonable guess. There has been chaos of one form or another before. It is nearly a staple, for something to be going amiss. The only shift is the scope of this event. John hadn't asked after survivors, but he assumes the number of dead casts a very broad shadow across their number.
"You'll be well out of it, regardless."
Estwatch is likely preferable to him, than to manage the confused grief and relief that will likely linger for weeks.
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"You might speak with Petrana," he says. "She took Rowntree and your going hard."
There will be more than enough work here in Kirkwall for Silver to occupy himself with. If they can discuss those details more readily than anything else then so be it. The bottle can't last forever.
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Petrana took his going hard. John has been turning this detail over in the back of his head, wearing it smooth, worrying over the choice to say this when they have said so little else about the matter.
Your going.
The words do not quite fit. If John sands off the edges, carves away the ugly, desperation of that last stretch of moments on the battlefield, maybe they will.
But they are talking of their missed appointment. What John might do tomorrow to smooth over their absence and parlay the reparations made into further partnership, a stronger foothold. The bottle empties. There is some casual discussion of another, before John levers to his feet.
He has already said what he wants, and it is not to sit in this room for the sake of drinking down another bottle of liquor.
The ferry is not prompt tonight, which serves them well. It's tardiness is the only reason they are allowed a leisurely boarding, rather than being stranded on the dock.
This is not the first night they have returned together, climbed the stairs together. It is only the first time they have done so in the wake of the kind of conversation they've had this evening. With something unfulfilled between them and John's undone death hanging over their heads.
There should be no reason to pause over the threshold. John is only slower getting over it because it is late, and the habitual ache of his leg is joined with a number of phantom pains that come and go, rolling in like the tide as pieces of memory come back to him.
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The hearth is cold, and the air in the room is still. Someone has shut the far window, which was cracked, and the whole office has that slightly stale and too quiet sense about it as a result. But there are here to disturb that, which begins with Flint laying his coat across the back of one of the chairs about the fire rather than finding a more ready hook for it.
"You should sit," he tells him.
It has been a long walk from Emlyn's to the ferry, across the Gallows courtyard and up six flights up of stairs. Presumably, John Silver had been standing for longer than that prior to their meeting in Lowtown. It has nothing to do with delaying the transition from these front offices to the apartments adjacent.
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Not in this room, apparently, as John makes no move towards the chair slanted into the space between hearth and heavy desk.
"If you've nothing to attend here, we might see if you're right about where we left the key."
There is some lee-way in this statement. Flint might find something to turn over on his desk. John would sit in the unoccupied chair to attend him while he did. But while they are both here, upright and possessed of some continuing momentum, they might let that carry them further towards the thing they have talked in circles around for most of the night.
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Not so, evidently. He moves also to fetch the lot lamp, shifting it down from its hook. There will be no light waiting for them in the adjacent room.
Indeed it is dark there as they cross into it, every candle cold and the hearth without a fire. The season is too warm yet for the latter, and if any of the Gallows' servants have been here then it has been a brief visit to fill the pitcher near the basin, to see that small pot for lamp oil isn't empty, and to hurry along. They company is stretched thin.
The coat finds its hook, and the lit lamp a space beside its cousin on the mantelpiece. In short order Flint had raised the unlit lamp from its base and produced the key to Silver's trunk.
So. Some things do persist after all.
"Here." He offers the key.
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What had it felt like, to give over that key to James Flint?
The gauzy impression of memory is not enough. John has some sense of the facts of the arrangement: the duplications, the new sets of keys being forged, the minutia involved in the establishment of a shared space. But the feeling attached—
What it feels like now is surely not the same as it would have felt in the moment, when they had decided such things together. Coming at a thing deliberately, rather than chasing after something already set into motion, had to have been—
Easier, perhaps.
"Did you use it, while I was gone?"
Here, John begins the processing of stripping out of his coat. (It had been scorched, he remembers. Ruined by a gout of fire, and further destroyed by how much blood had flowed from his body once he had been surrounded on the field.) Custody of the key, it seems, remains Flint's provenance.
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the pack is sealed.