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.
John is still waiting for those pieces to settle into his mind, for something more than the recollection of all the times they have certainly come awake in this bed, prepared for the day together, and John had descended to his own rooms to collect what was needed for the day's work.
It wouldn't have been necessary this morning.
He finds his way to the bed. The crutch slants across his lap. Breathes out in quiet relief, as some of the aches in his body are assuaged.
"Come here," is a broad, formless request. Here to whatever degree Flint chooses, as John works free his own rings, the pendent hanging from about his neck.
He should answer this direction too. Obviously, the desire to is there. He has spent these last weeks either in a state of comfortable pseudo domesticity, or he has been terribly lonely. The answer to either of those is the impulse, Yes, he would like to clamber into the bed and be close to him. He should do more than just sit beside John there at the edge of the bed; he should work free of his boots and climb into it and refuse to come out again.
There will be plenty to do in the Gallows, he'd said. But on that list might have easily been 'First, lay on bed for two days straight.' Surely no one in the tower would begrudge anyone that much.
Instead, Flint takes the half step necessary to align the side of his thigh against the outside of John's knee. It's a firm, but narrow point of contact. Keeps both his feet firmly on the ground as he busies himself with retrieving two candles from the table's drawer. They are lit off the lamp. Set on a small tin plate. It's the kind of light for reading by.
They have played at the prospect before: bolt the door, ignore any knocking. Be together, for some leisurely stretch of time.
But Flint remains standing. Johns hand catches at his hip, fingertips hooking into the leather of his belt, as he offers the discarded jewelry. In the past, John has let it scatter where it may. Across the little table, among the papers at the beside table. But like the key, they are given over to Flint's discretion as he says, "Help me off with this."
Whether this is his boot, or his own belt, or the loose linen of his tunic.
There will be no marks. John knows this. Even if he had felt the pain making a loose circuit through his body, he knows that it won't be written on his skin. The magic erased every tangible sign of what happened, and left the recollection of it. That's all John has to impart, once they are better settled. Once Flint's attention has come back around to him, rather than the minute tasks of preparing for bed.
The rings and the pendant necklace go into the shell shaped dish alongside his own magpie pieces, the shape and look of them familiar and distinct enough that picking them from one another will be a straightforward enough task when the time comes.
As for the rest, what point is there is being unbiddable? It would only do damage, which is the least of his intentions. So he bends with hand at the edge of the bed to balance himself with and picks loose the fastenings of John's boot. It takes both hands to ease it free, but he returns it against to the bedframe in order to help him straighten again once the thing is done and the shoe has been set aside. There is a pinch in the small of his back—
Which he ignores in favor of laying both hands on Silver's belt next, being economical about the process of freeing him from it.
"I've some work to see to tonight," he says, stripping leather free. Coiling it round his hand. "I'll stay to ensure you're made comfortable here, then should see to sorting it."
Any other night, this would be less than noteworthy.
Any other night, John might opt to see himself to the chair in that outer office, to be quiet company while Flint managed whatever odds and ends required attention. Or he might wait here, making use of the books stacked alongside the bed and be glad enough to discard when Flint returned and bolted the door behind him.
But tonight—
"Stay," is a murmur, underscored with John's hands catching at his wrists. "Leave it for the morning."
Or let it slide into the sea, with the rest of this place.
His wrist doesn't tighten under the catch of fingers, but maybe his elbow does. The look he gives Silver is very frank and at least half plain in the mix and lamp and candlelight.
"What would you like me to say?"
Has he not been talking? They have spent the whole evening in this crooked, limping conversation and it seems intolerable to continue flogging the thing along. It's already in ribbons, isn't it? He's already asked this question once tonight. Is there a number he needs to reach before it produces an answer, or is it just a way of testing himself like checking for feeling in fingertips after sustaining a wound. Do you feel that? Do you still want to do everything he says and be grateful to crawl into bed with him?
(Obviously he does. Obviously he'd wanted the same however many days or weeks ago they'd carried the trunk up those stairs. It would seem there is very little that can be done which might alter these facts.)
The point of a knife, handed over some months ago, now set against skin.
They might have done this better, before. John has chosen to believe as much. But here and now, he would like to salvage some part of it. Alleviate the bracing tension in Flint's body.
"I'm not sparing you from anything," is the automatic answer like the jerk of a reflex under pressure. Only after he's said it does he nip his teeth tight together as if he might yank it back by its trailing edge and swallow it back down.
Failure to do so, the inability to erase the thing from the record, produces a short frustrated inhale. He doesn't draw his wrists free, but now there is a flexing taut quality in each joint. Eventually (the moment feels longer than it is)—
"It bothers me," he says. "When it becomes this difficult to persuade you into telling me your mind. Particularly when I've spent the past weeks attempting to discern it from papers and an empty room."
A repetition, no less sincere for the retreading over that ground. Yes, he is sorry.
His thumbs sweep along the delicate muscle working there at the inside of Flint's wrist. Looks into his face, observing the expression he finds there.
What more is there to say?
John winds his way to a question, slowly coming to a reply as his thumb runs lightly over the beat of Flint's pulse. Trying to find the edges of this pain without rupturing it in the process.
"Do you think I don't want this? You?"
The answer is yes, John wants him. Yes, he wants this shared room. To share this bed. It terrifies him, how much he wants those things.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
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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.
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
John is still waiting for those pieces to settle into his mind, for something more than the recollection of all the times they have certainly come awake in this bed, prepared for the day together, and John had descended to his own rooms to collect what was needed for the day's work.
It wouldn't have been necessary this morning.
He finds his way to the bed. The crutch slants across his lap. Breathes out in quiet relief, as some of the aches in his body are assuaged.
"Come here," is a broad, formless request. Here to whatever degree Flint chooses, as John works free his own rings, the pendent hanging from about his neck.
no subject
There will be plenty to do in the Gallows, he'd said. But on that list might have easily been 'First, lay on bed for two days straight.' Surely no one in the tower would begrudge anyone that much.
Instead, Flint takes the half step necessary to align the side of his thigh against the outside of John's knee. It's a firm, but narrow point of contact. Keeps both his feet firmly on the ground as he busies himself with retrieving two candles from the table's drawer. They are lit off the lamp. Set on a small tin plate. It's the kind of light for reading by.
no subject
But Flint remains standing. Johns hand catches at his hip, fingertips hooking into the leather of his belt, as he offers the discarded jewelry. In the past, John has let it scatter where it may. Across the little table, among the papers at the beside table. But like the key, they are given over to Flint's discretion as he says, "Help me off with this."
Whether this is his boot, or his own belt, or the loose linen of his tunic.
There will be no marks. John knows this. Even if he had felt the pain making a loose circuit through his body, he knows that it won't be written on his skin. The magic erased every tangible sign of what happened, and left the recollection of it. That's all John has to impart, once they are better settled. Once Flint's attention has come back around to him, rather than the minute tasks of preparing for bed.
no subject
As for the rest, what point is there is being unbiddable? It would only do damage, which is the least of his intentions. So he bends with hand at the edge of the bed to balance himself with and picks loose the fastenings of John's boot. It takes both hands to ease it free, but he returns it against to the bedframe in order to help him straighten again once the thing is done and the shoe has been set aside. There is a pinch in the small of his back—
Which he ignores in favor of laying both hands on Silver's belt next, being economical about the process of freeing him from it.
"I've some work to see to tonight," he says, stripping leather free. Coiling it round his hand. "I'll stay to ensure you're made comfortable here, then should see to sorting it."
no subject
Any other night, John might opt to see himself to the chair in that outer office, to be quiet company while Flint managed whatever odds and ends required attention. Or he might wait here, making use of the books stacked alongside the bed and be glad enough to discard when Flint returned and bolted the door behind him.
But tonight—
"Stay," is a murmur, underscored with John's hands catching at his wrists. "Leave it for the morning."
Or let it slide into the sea, with the rest of this place.
"Come to bed. Talk to me."
no subject
"What would you like me to say?"
Has he not been talking? They have spent the whole evening in this crooked, limping conversation and it seems intolerable to continue flogging the thing along. It's already in ribbons, isn't it? He's already asked this question once tonight. Is there a number he needs to reach before it produces an answer, or is it just a way of testing himself like checking for feeling in fingertips after sustaining a wound. Do you feel that? Do you still want to do everything he says and be grateful to crawl into bed with him?
(Obviously he does. Obviously he'd wanted the same however many days or weeks ago they'd carried the trunk up those stairs. It would seem there is very little that can be done which might alter these facts.)
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The point of a knife, handed over some months ago, now set against skin.
They might have done this better, before. John has chosen to believe as much. But here and now, he would like to salvage some part of it. Alleviate the bracing tension in Flint's body.
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Failure to do so, the inability to erase the thing from the record, produces a short frustrated inhale. He doesn't draw his wrists free, but now there is a flexing taut quality in each joint. Eventually (the moment feels longer than it is)—
"It bothers me," he says. "When it becomes this difficult to persuade you into telling me your mind. Particularly when I've spent the past weeks attempting to discern it from papers and an empty room."
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A repetition, no less sincere for the retreading over that ground. Yes, he is sorry.
His thumbs sweep along the delicate muscle working there at the inside of Flint's wrist. Looks into his face, observing the expression he finds there.
What more is there to say?
John winds his way to a question, slowly coming to a reply as his thumb runs lightly over the beat of Flint's pulse. Trying to find the edges of this pain without rupturing it in the process.
"Do you think I don't want this? You?"
The answer is yes, John wants him. Yes, he wants this shared room. To share this bed. It terrifies him, how much he wants those things.
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the pack is sealed.