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.
It's a brisk answer for so careful a question. These assertions do nothing to strip the shadow from under his brow, however, and the thing moving in his face by fractions is a kind of hungry unhappiness. It's harder to let these things lay in quiet closed rooms, with thumbs across the inside of his wrists or a hand at his knee. It gets his blood up. He can't observe it as a distance, and finds this too close vantage frustratingly poor. Give him two days or daylight and he might have been able to come at this more reasonably instead of from this scattered, scraped raw direction.
"I think you don't trust me with your opinion on the thing. I think I can't put any part of it to question without having to first define my own position. But I don't care to have your thinking only tethered to mine. I'd rather you just said it, whatever it is."
With all the ways in which they have made themselves known, how much of John had been left opaque? Was he not rendered transparent in this of all things, after all this time?
"If there is one thing in which I am obvious, it must be the way I feel for you. The way I am devoted to you. Us."
He doesn't have the words. Not the right words, true in spite of his fears and apprehensions. But he has the way in which they touch each other, the way their bodies fit together, the way they speak without talking.
It is a terrifying thing, feeling this way about another person. John hasn't been able to shear that fear away.
Turning wrists now, shucking those thumbs across fine sinew and more delicate bones. He closes his own hands roughly round Silver's own wrists in turn. It's not a careful hold, a gentle curve of fingers; the grip is firm, insistent. His knee presses, jamming there against the edge of the mattress and heavy bed frame along the outside of John's own.
"My concern isn't over what you feel for this. It is apparent."
The books, and the shape of his hands, and the fact that they are both still here where there is a litany of reasons not to be. How he has some measure of confidence that it has been him dead in Granitefell, Silver would had found some way of carrying forward the work they've toiled in this place for regardless. It would not be like Bastien, who had left when Byerly had gone, and it would require more than simple blindness not to be aware of what motivates that.
He isn't blind.
"If you don't want me to close these things away from you—if you want me to talk to you—, I'm only asking that you do the same. I've put questions to you. Why not answer them?"
Because it is terrifying, to be laid so explicitly bare.
Because John can twist words into so many configurations that it is always, endlessly, of some concern that he is offering up the truth.
Because it is not unlike turning the knife between them, guiding it to vulnerable flesh.
But in this moment, with his wrists caught up in Flint's grip, with the proximity of him crowding John—
"Ask me again," is the only thing John can offer up to him. Ask him again while he is caught up in Flint's grip, while they are so close to each other here. While John's pulse is beating hard under the clench of Flint's fingers. He doesn't twist his hands from Flint's grip, though there is some passing compulsion to touch his face.
On the field in Granitefell, John recalls the moment of relief that Flint had not been among their number. Relief, and then slowly, regret. It is as clear to him now as the phantom ache of wounds undone.
It would be easy to do it. There is a whole list of them that might be recycled from tonight alone. Does he wish to speak of Granitefell? What can he do to make this less wretched? So (tell him how the trunk and it's place in the room will be managed)? And then more than that, other questions. Does the mage touch trouble him? And does John really think he would be so careless with his safety as to prop up a man who would be counter to it? And is he tired, and how is Madi? Would he stay here in this room with him?
We should bring up your things, he must have said some early shortly in the wake of Granitefell—the version where no one else had died, and only the ordinary spirits are present. Lying here in this bed, one leg over the rumpled sheet to let some of the residual heat stroked between them leach faster from him. All this going up and down at all hours is getting ridiculous, and who gives a fuck what any of them think, if anything? Stay here with me, hadn't been a question but it could have been refused just the same and wasn't.
"I just did." If he were to tighten his fingers now, it might ache. He makes himself not do that, the clinging impulse rippling in the shape of his fingers. "Answer me. Tell me what you think will happen if you do."
Maybe the shape of it is familiar, even if John hasn't put name to it. The look that crosses John's face lays it bare, as it had months and months ago in this room, as they'd talked around some similar thing.
What does John think will happen?
The answer is slow in coming. Flint's fingers are secure around his wrists. John breathes out, letting go of a passing impulse to lean into him. Say these words into a narrowed space between them, where John might be spared whatever his expression illustrates as well.
But no, the urge is resolved into some minor flex of his wrists in Flint's grip. Not to dislodge, only to feel the catch of Flint's fingers as John tells him, "That there will come a point where I am not enough, as I am."
These words, dredged out of his chest alongside a rush of blood. This old fear, drawn out for inspection, even as John wishes he could call it back.
He balks at this—a grimace that looks very like confusion pulling at Flint's brow and the corner of his mouth. So blatant is the response that the answer must be so counter to his own thinking that he'd failed to prepare for it or any of its closest relations. Not enough? When so much of this has been to carve out a place for him?
(Nevermind that he is asking. Relentlessly digging for it. Show him the things that have made up this person.)
"I'm standing here begging to know you, and that's your concern?"
And John had said, I'm not ashamed. It had felt true. But fear and shame are something like cousins. They come from the same place.
If this reaction stings, John gives no sign of it. His expression twists into a smile, abashed. His knee presses into Flint's. Hemmed in as he is, the ways in which he might exert even some small measure of contact between them are limited.
"I won't pretend it to be a rational thing," is a measured concession.
Or that the way it exists within him isn't rooted in something else.
In what came before. What exists only as shadow, as an absence. What John carved out of himself, severed and left far behind.
The sound he makes is short, sharp. It is not dismissive; only, it's as if for a moment he doesn't know the direction to turn this admission in so it might be addressed correctly. No, it doesn't seem rational and seriously orienting himself in relation to it requires a vexed moment of reorganization to accomplish.
The press of his fingers persists. The shape of his knee remains fixed there.
Then—
"You've picked the wrong people for this if you wish to go unquestioned," is insistent where so many many of his remarks this evening have possessed that braced, flattened quality. "But trust me when I say that resistance is good in this."
How is a muscle meant to be strengthened without testing it?
"There is no damage that could be done that I would be unwilling to repair. Know that."
There is a beat of quiet. A measuring sort of pause, John's eyes intent in their study of Flint's face before he moves at all.
John has no intention to break Flint's grip on his wrists. When he shifts, it is a slow, incremental thing, closing the space between them so he might touch him. Take his face in his hands.
"Alright," comes first. Letting that assurance settle into the space between them, holding fast to it, as he draws breath to dredge up—
"I couldn't bear to lose you," John tells him, and it is a sentiment colored over with some other, unspoken thing. Something John has relayed to him in borrowed words, in tissue-thin pages of leatherbound books. It is something that has lived between them for such a long time now.
Stay with me, says the sweep of his thumb along the bristle of his cheeks.
Ask me whatever you like, John doesn't say, though that offer catches at the back of his throat, so near to hand.
It's a slow, careful thing that shape of his hands closing about his face. For a moment, his fingers tighten there at John's wrists. Thumbs pressing. A flex of tension. And then slowly, like a stubborn animal gives over to a rein, the shape of his grips loosens. Fingers uncurl, and palms work flat with a rasp of calloused skin across the peaks of knuckles. His hands flatten roughly overtop John's. They are warm and tough in equal measure.
"You would find a way forward. If by some disaster it came about," a corpse laid on a cool stone floor in a dark room of the Gallows where the summer heat was least likely to find it. "I trust you to do that."
There is an expectation in that. It travels hand in hand with a more vulnerable desire: promise to do this thing for him; swear that if he were a corpse, it won't all be for nothing. That is what love is, as he knows it.
But no one is dead today. Nothing is broken. And so maybe it can be more specter than curse, particularly as Flint asserts—
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.)
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
It's a brisk answer for so careful a question. These assertions do nothing to strip the shadow from under his brow, however, and the thing moving in his face by fractions is a kind of hungry unhappiness. It's harder to let these things lay in quiet closed rooms, with thumbs across the inside of his wrists or a hand at his knee. It gets his blood up. He can't observe it as a distance, and finds this too close vantage frustratingly poor. Give him two days or daylight and he might have been able to come at this more reasonably instead of from this scattered, scraped raw direction.
"I think you don't trust me with your opinion on the thing. I think I can't put any part of it to question without having to first define my own position. But I don't care to have your thinking only tethered to mine. I'd rather you just said it, whatever it is."
no subject
With all the ways in which they have made themselves known, how much of John had been left opaque? Was he not rendered transparent in this of all things, after all this time?
"If there is one thing in which I am obvious, it must be the way I feel for you. The way I am devoted to you. Us."
He doesn't have the words. Not the right words, true in spite of his fears and apprehensions. But he has the way in which they touch each other, the way their bodies fit together, the way they speak without talking.
It is a terrifying thing, feeling this way about another person. John hasn't been able to shear that fear away.
no subject
Turning wrists now, shucking those thumbs across fine sinew and more delicate bones. He closes his own hands roughly round Silver's own wrists in turn. It's not a careful hold, a gentle curve of fingers; the grip is firm, insistent. His knee presses, jamming there against the edge of the mattress and heavy bed frame along the outside of John's own.
"My concern isn't over what you feel for this. It is apparent."
The books, and the shape of his hands, and the fact that they are both still here where there is a litany of reasons not to be. How he has some measure of confidence that it has been him dead in Granitefell, Silver would had found some way of carrying forward the work they've toiled in this place for regardless. It would not be like Bastien, who had left when Byerly had gone, and it would require more than simple blindness not to be aware of what motivates that.
He isn't blind.
"If you don't want me to close these things away from you—if you want me to talk to you—, I'm only asking that you do the same. I've put questions to you. Why not answer them?"
no subject
Because John can twist words into so many configurations that it is always, endlessly, of some concern that he is offering up the truth.
Because it is not unlike turning the knife between them, guiding it to vulnerable flesh.
But in this moment, with his wrists caught up in Flint's grip, with the proximity of him crowding John—
"Ask me again," is the only thing John can offer up to him. Ask him again while he is caught up in Flint's grip, while they are so close to each other here. While John's pulse is beating hard under the clench of Flint's fingers. He doesn't twist his hands from Flint's grip, though there is some passing compulsion to touch his face.
On the field in Granitefell, John recalls the moment of relief that Flint had not been among their number. Relief, and then slowly, regret. It is as clear to him now as the phantom ache of wounds undone.
no subject
We should bring up your things, he must have said some early shortly in the wake of Granitefell—the version where no one else had died, and only the ordinary spirits are present. Lying here in this bed, one leg over the rumpled sheet to let some of the residual heat stroked between them leach faster from him. All this going up and down at all hours is getting ridiculous, and who gives a fuck what any of them think, if anything? Stay here with me, hadn't been a question but it could have been refused just the same and wasn't.
"I just did." If he were to tighten his fingers now, it might ache. He makes himself not do that, the clinging impulse rippling in the shape of his fingers. "Answer me. Tell me what you think will happen if you do."
no subject
Maybe the shape of it is familiar, even if John hasn't put name to it. The look that crosses John's face lays it bare, as it had months and months ago in this room, as they'd talked around some similar thing.
What does John think will happen?
The answer is slow in coming. Flint's fingers are secure around his wrists. John breathes out, letting go of a passing impulse to lean into him. Say these words into a narrowed space between them, where John might be spared whatever his expression illustrates as well.
But no, the urge is resolved into some minor flex of his wrists in Flint's grip. Not to dislodge, only to feel the catch of Flint's fingers as John tells him, "That there will come a point where I am not enough, as I am."
These words, dredged out of his chest alongside a rush of blood. This old fear, drawn out for inspection, even as John wishes he could call it back.
no subject
(Nevermind that he is asking. Relentlessly digging for it. Show him the things that have made up this person.)
"I'm standing here begging to know you, and that's your concern?"
no subject
And John had said, I'm not ashamed. It had felt true. But fear and shame are something like cousins. They come from the same place.
If this reaction stings, John gives no sign of it. His expression twists into a smile, abashed. His knee presses into Flint's. Hemmed in as he is, the ways in which he might exert even some small measure of contact between them are limited.
"I won't pretend it to be a rational thing," is a measured concession.
Or that the way it exists within him isn't rooted in something else.
In what came before. What exists only as shadow, as an absence. What John carved out of himself, severed and left far behind.
He doesn't wish to invite it into this room.
no subject
The press of his fingers persists. The shape of his knee remains fixed there.
Then—
"You've picked the wrong people for this if you wish to go unquestioned," is insistent where so many many of his remarks this evening have possessed that braced, flattened quality. "But trust me when I say that resistance is good in this."
How is a muscle meant to be strengthened without testing it?
"There is no damage that could be done that I would be unwilling to repair. Know that."
no subject
John has no intention to break Flint's grip on his wrists. When he shifts, it is a slow, incremental thing, closing the space between them so he might touch him. Take his face in his hands.
"Alright," comes first. Letting that assurance settle into the space between them, holding fast to it, as he draws breath to dredge up—
"I couldn't bear to lose you," John tells him, and it is a sentiment colored over with some other, unspoken thing. Something John has relayed to him in borrowed words, in tissue-thin pages of leatherbound books. It is something that has lived between them for such a long time now.
Stay with me, says the sweep of his thumb along the bristle of his cheeks.
Ask me whatever you like, John doesn't say, though that offer catches at the back of his throat, so near to hand.
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"You would find a way forward. If by some disaster it came about," a corpse laid on a cool stone floor in a dark room of the Gallows where the summer heat was least likely to find it. "I trust you to do that."
There is an expectation in that. It travels hand in hand with a more vulnerable desire: promise to do this thing for him; swear that if he were a corpse, it won't all be for nothing. That is what love is, as he knows it.
But no one is dead today. Nothing is broken. And so maybe it can be more specter than curse, particularly as Flint asserts—
"Though you have me."
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the pack is sealed.