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.
His hand with the key in it remains extended for only a moment. Then fingers close; his elbow draws back.
"I did."
Stood there with a boot on the hearthstone of the smaller fireplace, he levels a look in John's direction. The rasp of fabric on fabric is loud in the quiet room. Turning the key in his hand, he sets the teeth of the thing against his thigh. It's a mild point of contact. Were he to press, would the blunted shape of the thing leave a mark through the waxed linen of his trousers leg?
It seems unlikely. It would require a great deal of effort.
"Your bodies were brought back. The key was among your things. It seemed the obvious thing to do."
John hadn't expected this piece of information. The scope of the undertaking, and beyond that, what it had likely required of Flint.
"I see."
Of course it was the correct thing to do. Who else should have possession of his things? Who else would he have chosen, if not James Flint?
The coat is laid over the back of the chair after a moment's uncertainty. Waiting to see if something rises up out of his mind to direct him as to where they might have decided he should set it down.
"It was the right thing," John reassures, rather than ask any number of questions. He can guess at what was done for him; he cannot guess what toll it took on Flint to manage the process. "I can't imagine that would have been unexpected."
I know you, has been true for some time now.
Resetting his weight onto the crutch, John levers himself across the room. Closer to the hearth, if not drawing quite even with Flint.
"Hold it for me," he says of the key. "You already have been."
Instead, he takes the key up and turns to finds an empty space for it in the mantelpiece. A better hiding spot will have to be sorted for it rather than continuing to secure it inside the base of a lantern, he thinks.
"All right," he says, and fetches a reed from the box on the mantel.
It's a simple thing to light the second lamp off the flame of the first. Shadows lingering heavy in the room are beaten to its fringes in their wake, the space transformed by degrees into something more warm than gaunt. The burning reed is flicked into the fireplace where it may eat itself. The cover of the lamp is replaced about its oil soaked wick.
The second lamp reforms the shadows across Flint's face. It isn't so much revealing as confirming; yes, his face is as John had perceived.
"Look at me."
They have maintained such distance. It feels as if it has been hours since the corner table in the dwarven tavern, since John laid his palm down over Flint's knee.
"Should we speak of it?"
This thing that happened. That never happened. That has threaded itself into every word they've spoken this evening.
He lifts one of the lanterns and does then then to face John and the room. There is a place for this light is destined for on the beside table. From there, it will illuminate the pedestal table with the basin on it. He might wash his face and remove his rings, scrubs his hand and the day's grit from under his fingernails while John makes himself comfortable at the edge of the bed. Those are the things they are meant to be indulging in, isn't it?
"You were dead. When Stark came forward with a solution, I told him he should do it even if it might have been the end of this place. But frankly, I'm not sure that I believed he could do it. It's possible I only said it because I'd a foot out the door already and Riftwatch coming undone was damage I believed could be mitigated."
The light, passing through the lamp's clay body, is hot under the pad of his thumb where he has it set at the hooked handle.
The flex of humor in John's expression telegraphs something to the effect of: Well, obviously.
John knows the rhythm of their evenings as well as Flint. That cannot have been materially changed by the location of his belongings. They could fall into it and let it carry them past this moment, the wound-tight tension in Flint's body, the sense that there is something in him that may fracture, shatter apart, if not handled carefully.
I told him he should do it even if it might have been the end of this place.
There is always a price, John knows. There may well be some yet unpaid toll waiting to be paid in exchange for John standing here in this room. But the understanding of Flint's willingness to pay it—
They are stood close enough that it requires only some slight readjustment on John's part to reach up and set his palm to Flint's cheek. Says nothing, just yet, as he makes a study of Flint's expression. With the light held at such an angle, his face is so clearly illuminated. That hairline scar, so easily missed, is made very so easy to see.
It's unfair that there is no sign of the past weeks hanging about his person—no shadow of distinctly poor sleep, or a bristle hinting at overgrown beard prickling down his neck. But he is good at arranging himself to appear a certain way; it's possible that in those weeks where the company has been reduced by that crucial third, he'd looked much the same as he does now under John's hand. Only a little weary, sharp edges knocked only marginally less so by the hour and the effects of the wine and the privacy of the room.
But yes, there is that narrow scar.
Undeterred by the proximity or thoroughness of John's study, he instead looks right back at him. Asks, "Do you need to talk about it?", and has the air of a man who is going to use the answer for some significant bit of calculation.
It seems an obvious question, but John finds no ready answer. What is there to speak of? Comparatively, he has little to relate. He had died. He had been completely removed from what had passed in the weeks that followed.
"Do you wish to hear it?" is a cousin to Did I tell you what was done to me in Hasmal?
Maybe the details of it may have been divined by John's corpse. Maybe not. With so few survivors, it is unlikely any of them could have been specific as to how John Silver had met his end.
And maybe it isn't any help to hear how the thing had happened. Maybe it is.
It isn't exactly the question that had been put to him. But it is the response John offers back.
A faint shifting then, discernable in the bristle of fine hairs on Flint's cheek against John's fingertips as he withdraws just a fraction from the palm's warmth. A finger of shadow from the shape of his own profile against the lamp light slides across one sharp eye. That calculation, half completed.
John does his own measuring in the wake of this answer. Not an expression of preference, but an invitation. (Can he fault Flint for it, when that is more or less what John had given him in turn?)
"Deliver that lamp to its place, and remove your coat," is no definitive answer either. It is a needling kind of nudge, encouraging momentum rather than rooting the two of them here before the empty hearth.
It doesn't matter what pain lives in his own body. But this is perhaps a conversation best had in a more comfortable arrangement.
Right. With a slanting of shoulders, he draws free of Silver's hand on him.
It's an easy enough thing to do as directed. There is a space on the bedside table more or less ready for the lamp; hardly any rearrangement of papers and loose articles needs to be done to accommodate it there. A book in the bed who first chapters he doesn't recall reading is summarily removed from it and added to the top of the stack already in residence on the side table.
There is a small shell shaped dish into which rings and the stud from his ear might be shucked. He is in no particular hurry, fine hairs at the back of his neck prickling in the thick sense of the air.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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."
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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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
"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.
third location.
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
"I did."
Stood there with a boot on the hearthstone of the smaller fireplace, he levels a look in John's direction. The rasp of fabric on fabric is loud in the quiet room. Turning the key in his hand, he sets the teeth of the thing against his thigh. It's a mild point of contact. Were he to press, would the blunted shape of the thing leave a mark through the waxed linen of his trousers leg?
It seems unlikely. It would require a great deal of effort.
"Your bodies were brought back. The key was among your things. It seemed the obvious thing to do."
no subject
John hadn't expected this piece of information. The scope of the undertaking, and beyond that, what it had likely required of Flint.
"I see."
Of course it was the correct thing to do. Who else should have possession of his things? Who else would he have chosen, if not James Flint?
The coat is laid over the back of the chair after a moment's uncertainty. Waiting to see if something rises up out of his mind to direct him as to where they might have decided he should set it down.
"It was the right thing," John reassures, rather than ask any number of questions. He can guess at what was done for him; he cannot guess what toll it took on Flint to manage the process. "I can't imagine that would have been unexpected."
I know you, has been true for some time now.
Resetting his weight onto the crutch, John levers himself across the room. Closer to the hearth, if not drawing quite even with Flint.
"Hold it for me," he says of the key. "You already have been."
no subject
Instead, he takes the key up and turns to finds an empty space for it in the mantelpiece. A better hiding spot will have to be sorted for it rather than continuing to secure it inside the base of a lantern, he thinks.
"All right," he says, and fetches a reed from the box on the mantel.
It's a simple thing to light the second lamp off the flame of the first. Shadows lingering heavy in the room are beaten to its fringes in their wake, the space transformed by degrees into something more warm than gaunt. The burning reed is flicked into the fireplace where it may eat itself. The cover of the lamp is replaced about its oil soaked wick.
no subject
"Look at me."
They have maintained such distance. It feels as if it has been hours since the corner table in the dwarven tavern, since John laid his palm down over Flint's knee.
"Should we speak of it?"
This thing that happened. That never happened. That has threaded itself into every word they've spoken this evening.
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He lifts one of the lanterns and does then then to face John and the room. There is a place for this light is destined for on the beside table. From there, it will illuminate the pedestal table with the basin on it. He might wash his face and remove his rings, scrubs his hand and the day's grit from under his fingernails while John makes himself comfortable at the edge of the bed. Those are the things they are meant to be indulging in, isn't it?
"You were dead. When Stark came forward with a solution, I told him he should do it even if it might have been the end of this place. But frankly, I'm not sure that I believed he could do it. It's possible I only said it because I'd a foot out the door already and Riftwatch coming undone was damage I believed could be mitigated."
The light, passing through the lamp's clay body, is hot under the pad of his thumb where he has it set at the hooked handle.
"Obviously I prefer this version of events."
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John knows the rhythm of their evenings as well as Flint. That cannot have been materially changed by the location of his belongings. They could fall into it and let it carry them past this moment, the wound-tight tension in Flint's body, the sense that there is something in him that may fracture, shatter apart, if not handled carefully.
I told him he should do it even if it might have been the end of this place.
There is always a price, John knows. There may well be some yet unpaid toll waiting to be paid in exchange for John standing here in this room. But the understanding of Flint's willingness to pay it—
They are stood close enough that it requires only some slight readjustment on John's part to reach up and set his palm to Flint's cheek. Says nothing, just yet, as he makes a study of Flint's expression. With the light held at such an angle, his face is so clearly illuminated. That hairline scar, so easily missed, is made very so easy to see.
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But yes, there is that narrow scar.
Undeterred by the proximity or thoroughness of John's study, he instead looks right back at him. Asks, "Do you need to talk about it?", and has the air of a man who is going to use the answer for some significant bit of calculation.
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It seems an obvious question, but John finds no ready answer. What is there to speak of? Comparatively, he has little to relate. He had died. He had been completely removed from what had passed in the weeks that followed.
"Do you wish to hear it?" is a cousin to Did I tell you what was done to me in Hasmal?
Maybe the details of it may have been divined by John's corpse. Maybe not. With so few survivors, it is unlikely any of them could have been specific as to how John Silver had met his end.
And maybe it isn't any help to hear how the thing had happened. Maybe it is.
It isn't exactly the question that had been put to him. But it is the response John offers back.
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"If you wish to tell it."
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"Deliver that lamp to its place, and remove your coat," is no definitive answer either. It is a needling kind of nudge, encouraging momentum rather than rooting the two of them here before the empty hearth.
It doesn't matter what pain lives in his own body. But this is perhaps a conversation best had in a more comfortable arrangement.
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It's an easy enough thing to do as directed. There is a space on the bedside table more or less ready for the lamp; hardly any rearrangement of papers and loose articles needs to be done to accommodate it there. A book in the bed who first chapters he doesn't recall reading is summarily removed from it and added to the top of the stack already in residence on the side table.
There is a small shell shaped dish into which rings and the stud from his ear might be shucked. He is in no particular hurry, fine hairs at the back of his neck prickling in the thick sense of the air.
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the pack is sealed.