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—
It's understood, that expectation. John has made him promises, sworn to see all that they've devoted themselves to done. The intention has always been to see it achieved together, but—
No. No one is dead.
He wants to hear it again, this assertion Flint offers up to him. John had said offered it up to him before, in that outrageously small room at an exhausting hour of night. You have me, was an easy truth. It still is.
"Ask me something else," John murmurs instead. This measure of trust, offered in turn as the space between them narrows.
"It mattered to you," he says. "That I'd done the asking. Why?"
Like fixing the likely location of a prize, he can guess at where this answer will fall. Not far, he thinks, from what he has already pried free. But he wants to hear it. Can practically feel the shape of it in the permissive air between them. His attention is wide in wait for it, an edge of appetite to his attention on John. Hungry, but not impatient.
Breathing into the space between them, that first impulse towards deflection passes without finding purchase. His fingers flex against Flint's skin, the sweep of his thumb gentle at Flint's cheekbone.
"Because it seems to me that if you'd done the asking, it was because you'd wanted me in this room."
Rather than acquiesced to a request put to him. (John Silver is not unaware of how little he is denied.) And as slight a difference as it may appear, it is vast when John considers it. This crucial difference between being wanted and being some shade of an imposition, it matters deeply that the arrangement falls on the former and not the latter.
His scuff of an exhale is some intermingled thing, frustration and sympathy both. It's an absurd stipulation—one of those make believe requirements whose meaning is entirely contingent on having meaning forced onto it. And also, he understands the impulse. If he didn't, would he be stood here in this moment like this trying to eke thoughts out of John Silver's head?
Rather than say anything, he leans forward then and presses a blunt kiss to the thick curls at Silver's hairline. Lets his hands shift from covering John's, to the man's neck and shoulders. When he draws back—
"Is there anything you need?" He asks, sagging as the taut quality of his bearing gives over. Maker, he is tired. "Before we go to bed."
"No," is easy to offer up in answer. "Come to bed."
Because what John needs is the act itself, the close alignment of their bodies in this now-shared space. His things are only a few steps away. It can be managed later, if it turns out there is some overlooked thing he should have attended to.
He is alive. No one has died. John knows these things are true, but they come into clearer focus through contact. The familiar quality of Flint's hands, the cool stone beneath his foot. They are here. This is real. All other parts of the past day can be reconciled around this and what they have hashed out together.
Come to bed, John says. So he does in parts and pieces, dredging his hands from off the other man's shoulders and shifting free of those about his own face. He has his own boots to work off, and his belt knife and spyglass and the contents of his trouser pockets, and the belt itself to dispense with. There is the salt of sweat and grit too from the day on the back of his neck and face, those these are as common to him as his own skin and he doesn't bother with scrubbing them away.
Presumably with time these things—stripping free of the day in the company of another person—will become ordinary. But tonight there is some prickling quality to the air yet, and it is more like a demonstration than not.
"Let me put out the light," he says, and means the small light left on the mantel. He isn't leaving, only crossing the room.
There is a strangeness to this too, this newness. Knowing that it could not truly be new, because they've had weeks to settle into it.
Sat on the edge of the mattress, John is left with only the few remaining articles of clothing to shuck off. Easily managed, and done by the time the light on the mantel is extinguished. It leaves him folding tunic and trousers across one bare thigh in the soft glow of the bedside lamp, stretching to set both on the chest at the foot of the bed. The rest can be managed come morning.
It's an easy enough thing to answer: he sets his thumb there in the palm of John's hand, wraps his fingers round his knuckles. A touch to the wrist has an urging quality, and "Go," he says, nodding toward the headboard. John should find his place in the bed, and Flint will follow after him.
Which he does, after shedding his shirt and stripping down to his drawers. The thin mattress gives under his weight. The heavy bed's frame whines softly from it. And here the rasping of light summer sheet and coverlet, and the finicky arrangement of pillows. Though he has eventually clambered in under the bedclothes, he remains sitting upright against the headboard for a moment as if resistant to the concept of lying down. Or hesitating over the arrangement until John has first found a place for himself, freckled skin turned ruddy under the lamplight as he waits to fold himself in down around him.
"Come here," is quiet encouragement, underscored by the rustle of bedclothes, the catch of fingers along the inside of Flint's wrist.
It's not enough, John finds.
Yes, the past weeks are an absence. But the recollection of his passing isn't. With all larger uncertainties more or less settled for the night, it leaves space for that thing he had felt in the moments before his death: thinking of Flint, and the inescapable reality of leaving him.
They have been held at arm's length for most of the evening. John's tolerance for even this minor distance is dwindling into impatience.
Quiet though it be, this is encouragement enough for Flint to reach over and cap the lamp. It plunges the room into darkness, the moonlight through narrow leaded windows so thin as to be difficult to parse in those pitch moments directly in the lamplight's wake. The eye will adjust to it. Given time, edges of furniture and the shape of the room would reveal themselves were someone to look.
He isn't looking. Instead, he shifts down in under the light summer bedclothes and settles in warm against the shape of John alongside him in the dark. It would be easy to lay like that, shoulder to shoulder. Instead, he twists over. Insinuates his arm in under the pillow and the shape of the other man's shoulders. Cinches himself in tighter and closer.
It is not easy to press his face in near to John's. Doing it hooks at something in the ribs. Aches like a strained muscle. The sensation of a cut being stitched. It hurts—pleasantly so.
It is not close enough. It is better, but it is not enough. It rattles loose the thing held carefully in check: the sharp grief of that last moment, laid out in the dirt, feeling life slipping away and having so little sense of what he'd last said, the last time they'd touched each other. John hadn't marked it. The leaving had felt unremarkable; a few days' journey, hardly the longest leave he'd taken of Kirkwall. There had been no particular ceremony in their parting, and when the life had been pouring out of him, John had clung on to the disjointed flurry of memory, unable to recall the exact details of their parting.
He breathes out, a ragged punch of an exhale against Flint's temple before John lays a soft kiss to his skin. His fingers sweep across Flint's shoulders, down his back, up again to lay heavy over the nape of his neck.
Closer, says the lay of his fingers, directionless, formless urging. Says instead, "Stay with me."
Cinched in against his body, because tonight even the opposite side of the mattress is too far to go. Present in this space, this room. Their room, an identifier John is turning over and over like a gold piece.
Stay, John had murmured to him on a stretch of a stony beach. It might have sounded similar, nearly the same, if less frayed at the edges, less urgent for the feeling caught behind it now.
His answering huff of breath is warm in that close pressed space, and the bristle of whiskers prickles against bare skin. Somewhere, under the shape of the pillow and the weight of John's body, his arm twists. The lay of his fingers at John's opposite shoulder is soft by necessity, but not in spirit. It's not that he has been keeping himself from this—the impulse to latch on to him and dredge them close together—, only it is particularly easy to do in the dark.
"Go to sleep," he tells him, the shape of his voice abruptly rough from having missed him. It will all still be present come the morning.
But the deep, unsettling ache of displacement and overlapping recollections is dispelled under the warmth of Flint's body, his hands, the low intimacy of his voice laying bare something they have not quite named.
It takes time. They are quiet, breathing in time. John's fingers maintain their clasp at the nape of his neck while his off hand trails across Flint's shoulders. All is as he left it (this morning, weeks ago) though he reassures himself with the tracing of the muscle in Flint's shoulders and back, the attention paid to the rise and fall of his breath.
There is nothing to say, here in the dark, while they are linked so close together. John carries that comfort down into sleep, somewhere in the dark hours before the sky begins its slow shift towards dawn.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
no subject
"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."
no subject
No. No one is dead.
He wants to hear it again, this assertion Flint offers up to him. John had said offered it up to him before, in that outrageously small room at an exhausting hour of night. You have me, was an easy truth. It still is.
"Ask me something else," John murmurs instead. This measure of trust, offered in turn as the space between them narrows.
no subject
Like fixing the likely location of a prize, he can guess at where this answer will fall. Not far, he thinks, from what he has already pried free. But he wants to hear it. Can practically feel the shape of it in the permissive air between them. His attention is wide in wait for it, an edge of appetite to his attention on John. Hungry, but not impatient.
no subject
"Because it seems to me that if you'd done the asking, it was because you'd wanted me in this room."
Rather than acquiesced to a request put to him. (John Silver is not unaware of how little he is denied.) And as slight a difference as it may appear, it is vast when John considers it. This crucial difference between being wanted and being some shade of an imposition, it matters deeply that the arrangement falls on the former and not the latter.
no subject
Rather than say anything, he leans forward then and presses a blunt kiss to the thick curls at Silver's hairline. Lets his hands shift from covering John's, to the man's neck and shoulders. When he draws back—
"Is there anything you need?" He asks, sagging as the taut quality of his bearing gives over. Maker, he is tired. "Before we go to bed."
no subject
Because what John needs is the act itself, the close alignment of their bodies in this now-shared space. His things are only a few steps away. It can be managed later, if it turns out there is some overlooked thing he should have attended to.
He is alive. No one has died. John knows these things are true, but they come into clearer focus through contact. The familiar quality of Flint's hands, the cool stone beneath his foot. They are here. This is real. All other parts of the past day can be reconciled around this and what they have hashed out together.
no subject
Presumably with time these things—stripping free of the day in the company of another person—will become ordinary. But tonight there is some prickling quality to the air yet, and it is more like a demonstration than not.
"Let me put out the light," he says, and means the small light left on the mantel. He isn't leaving, only crossing the room.
no subject
Sat on the edge of the mattress, John is left with only the few remaining articles of clothing to shuck off. Easily managed, and done by the time the light on the mantel is extinguished. It leaves him folding tunic and trousers across one bare thigh in the soft glow of the bedside lamp, stretching to set both on the chest at the foot of the bed. The rest can be managed come morning.
Looks up to Flint, extends a hand out to him.
no subject
Which he does, after shedding his shirt and stripping down to his drawers. The thin mattress gives under his weight. The heavy bed's frame whines softly from it. And here the rasping of light summer sheet and coverlet, and the finicky arrangement of pillows. Though he has eventually clambered in under the bedclothes, he remains sitting upright against the headboard for a moment as if resistant to the concept of lying down. Or hesitating over the arrangement until John has first found a place for himself, freckled skin turned ruddy under the lamplight as he waits to fold himself in down around him.
no subject
It's not enough, John finds.
Yes, the past weeks are an absence. But the recollection of his passing isn't. With all larger uncertainties more or less settled for the night, it leaves space for that thing he had felt in the moments before his death: thinking of Flint, and the inescapable reality of leaving him.
They have been held at arm's length for most of the evening. John's tolerance for even this minor distance is dwindling into impatience.
no subject
He isn't looking. Instead, he shifts down in under the light summer bedclothes and settles in warm against the shape of John alongside him in the dark. It would be easy to lay like that, shoulder to shoulder. Instead, he twists over. Insinuates his arm in under the pillow and the shape of the other man's shoulders. Cinches himself in tighter and closer.
It is not easy to press his face in near to John's. Doing it hooks at something in the ribs. Aches like a strained muscle. The sensation of a cut being stitched. It hurts—pleasantly so.
no subject
He breathes out, a ragged punch of an exhale against Flint's temple before John lays a soft kiss to his skin. His fingers sweep across Flint's shoulders, down his back, up again to lay heavy over the nape of his neck.
Closer, says the lay of his fingers, directionless, formless urging. Says instead, "Stay with me."
Cinched in against his body, because tonight even the opposite side of the mattress is too far to go. Present in this space, this room. Their room, an identifier John is turning over and over like a gold piece.
Stay, John had murmured to him on a stretch of a stony beach. It might have sounded similar, nearly the same, if less frayed at the edges, less urgent for the feeling caught behind it now.
no subject
"Go to sleep," he tells him, the shape of his voice abruptly rough from having missed him. It will all still be present come the morning.
the pack is sealed.
But the deep, unsettling ache of displacement and overlapping recollections is dispelled under the warmth of Flint's body, his hands, the low intimacy of his voice laying bare something they have not quite named.
It takes time. They are quiet, breathing in time. John's fingers maintain their clasp at the nape of his neck while his off hand trails across Flint's shoulders. All is as he left it (this morning, weeks ago) though he reassures himself with the tracing of the muscle in Flint's shoulders and back, the attention paid to the rise and fall of his breath.
There is nothing to say, here in the dark, while they are linked so close together. John carries that comfort down into sleep, somewhere in the dark hours before the sky begins its slow shift towards dawn.