His smile is crooked, small and reflexive and tied so entirely to his exhale. He says, "Something like one."
There are other tools in the oil cloth packet: a tin cap of iron shavings, a flint for striking a light, a bundle of dried yellow grass from the interior of New Providence, a piece of parchment paper folded into some accordion shape, a bell with no tongue. Sitting there in the high backed chair, Flint draws six straws from the bundle of grass and crushes them in his hand. They are placed in the bowl.
"I've never had the knack for this. There's some tradition of a kind adjacent to it in the places I knew as a boy, as most places by the sea do, but I don't recall the actual practice being very popular. You'll have to forgive me if I don't remember the order of things."
He removes the rings from his fingers and places the silver band in the bowl with the straw as if it is easy. As if he has not turned the thing around and around his finger in contemplation these past days. There are more obvious pieces he might use to hold his place - objects with more meaning and sentiment - but this one is his alone. Surely it must be a more stark and obvious commitment because of it. This ring has known only a version of the world driven by the ravenous want for this thing they now pursue with such immediacy. It has never known the hand of the man who came before the one he is now.
If they were different men, in a different place with more time, John could have told him more about how the rituals shifted from place to place. He could have told him about the way bone crunched as it was bitten down upon and the way the power of it insinuated itself like splinters in your limbs. Certain kinds of rituals brought exactly what was asked for, but never comfortably.
But Flint isn't bringing forth poorly preserved fingers or toes. The assortment of iron and grass and fire are deceptively light. John's fingers itch to touch. The air is humming in preparation as Flint removes his rings. Even at the invitation, John is loathe to disrupt the energy gathering around them. Even the scrape of the chair and the movement of his body as he levers himself into it feels like too much of an interruption.
"The order isn't always important," John says, unsure if it's a confidence or an admittance. He's always been careful not to let on exactly how much he knows, but there are moments closed away alone with Flint where all his pretenses fall away.
"Do you need one of mine?"
Another man's ring, stolen, would be an easier offering to promise than blood. John measures the ties he's made and how easily they break with every breath he takes. Skin-warmed silver comes away easier than most things on his person. John knows this. His own blood soaked the boards of the Walrus. He bound himself to the crew and to Flint with flesh and bone and pain so great it blotted out every instinct he had apart from a singular need to see this crew safe. It tied him here. It had been an accident. Looking at Flint's bowl, John feels himself on the cusp of something more deliberate and permanent, but he does not walk away.
That too could be a kind of black humor as there is an easiness in his face and the way he nudges the bowl closer to the other man. But maybe not -- or not just that. Maybe it's also a last habitual attempt to close his hand around the space between them, an effort to feel its weight and understand its dimension. If they are partners (which they not just must be, but are; that much seems undeniable at this junction), then let it be something every part of the world will somehow recognize. The dirt will know them; the air will know them; the sea will know them and men both with and against them will feel it in their marrow no matter what they understand of magick.
But honestly (and pointedly): "It's doable with just the one. I'll need your blood either way, but a second memento is technically optional."
He will invest an extra piece of himself into this if he needs to if this pact needs sweetening. He is willing and able and knows in his flesh that it doesn't matter whether Silver puts some second self into the bowl. The man's never needed rituals like this one to commit himself to people, to things, to an idea of what could be. They are strung together already and there can be power, literal or imagined, in even one sided honesty. He does this and they will both remember it. Silver will carry it with him whether one of his rings is consecrated or not, whether he wears anything at all on his finger or not. An empty space indicates a missing component as much as the actual object or promise or truth does.
Rather than linger on the point, Flint turns his attention to dividing the iron shavings. He does it by licking his thumb and pressing into the cap of filings - flicks them and some trace dampness from his tongue, over the contents of the bowl.
John has seen this moment approaching for some time now. He'd thought that maybe the loss of his leg had stalled it. Any question of loyalty had been stalled by the thick-layered power of what John had sacrificed. His protection clung to every line in the rigging, seeped into the sea-soaked wood body of the ship. It was an answer to every unasked question about John Silver, but as it turns out, such barriers are insufficient against Flint.
He's a man who has always needed more. The gnawing hunger in him was as strong as the threads of power he dragged in his wake. John hooks a finger on the edge of the bowl as his breath catches in his throat. What would it cost to break away from this? What would it cost if he offered nothing?
"We're both lucky I've gotten acquainted with the presence of a little blood on this ship," John answers, before lifting his hands and twisting off one ring. There's dirt in the grooves of his skin; left behind is a lighter, more vulnerable strip of skin as John deposits his offering with a soft clink.
John has seen more blood than Flint could ever know. But the old lies hold. It helps that John still doesn't like the sight of it, nor does he like to spill his own. But remains. Foolishly perhaps, John has set himself on this course alongside Flint, and refuses to spook from it.
The tak of the ring in the bowl warrants the slightest tip of the head, a brief glance, but his hands are busy with recapping the iron, with putting away the remaining bundle of dried grass. He does hum out a low laugh though, an easy grumbling exhale as he sweeps stray metal fragments from the table before him. It'd be better to leave as little trace of this after them. The rumor of these things among the crews and maroons is likely more useful than the facts of it.
"Then let's hope this it the last of it either one of us gives to this then," he says, raising his eyes to him. That is true good humor, a flash of real pleasure as he fetches up the short knife.
This is the part in stories they are meant to put their palms side by side and share the same stroke of the knife. But the artifice of that is senseless dramatics for the sake of pamphlets and the whispers of civilized people in parlors far removed from places like this one. Besides - they will need their hands for the work ahead and nothing says unpleasant like salt in a wound. Why make this fucking task waiting for them more physically demanding than it already is?
So Flint unbuttons the cuff of both jacket and shirt sleeve, parting the former and rolling the latter with a sensible efficiency. The skin there is sun ruddy, though only bares a few small marks - just two hair thin white scars. He cuts himself first: a shallow line drawn across the inside of his forearm. He holds it until it wells, then extends his arm across the waiting bowl and coaxes the cut to drip. The patter of blood on the dried grass and metal is soundless, but the tang of it in the air seems palpable. The world doesn't still for this, but a part of it is living here presently and the weight of that is an eye opening in the dark. The dark wood grain of the shallow bowl shivers.
When he's finished, he turns the knife in his hand and offers its grip to Silver.
The air grows heavy with the taste of blood. For the first time, it isn't death creeping into the room. The low hum of Flint's intent disturbs the air around them but it isn't heralding something grisly.
Or more specifically, it isn't something grisly for either of them. Closed away in this room, they are disrupting the course of the universe. John feels nearly drunk on the possibility of what Flint is creating. It's almost enough to give him a little distance from the realization that John is offering up more of himself to Flint than he ever intended when he first talked his way onto the Walrus. He's settling into this snare of his own will. It should terrify him into upending the bowl and leaving the room, but John has never had this in his entire life. For all he walked along the ragged edges of magic, watching and learning, there was never a moment where he was so centered in a ritual and so sure of the benefits.
As he licks his lips, John leans forward on the table to watch the first cut of the knife. Flint has done this before, John suspects. Two little scars on the delicate skin of his forearm cannot be coincidence. John wants to put his hands there and feel the vibration of a two souls sewn together. Instead, he draws a breath and shrugs out of his coat. After he pushes up his sleeves, he lays his forearm on the table between them, palm facing up, and meets Flint's gaze.
"I'd make a mess of it."
To the very last, John downplays what he's capable of. By now, he can't tell what Flint believes of him. John is capable at a great many things. Bit by bit, the truth is being drawn into focus. All John can do is obscure it with word, settling like smoke between reality as it stands and reality as John wills it to be.
This is really how the world is remade. It happens in quiet places and back rooms, in parlors after their evening salons have wound to a close, in the dark jungle where fortunes are buried. If there are versions of this that are less secret, built on something other than desire of a few people (four or three or two--) burning so hot so as to cast the rest of the world in shadow, then he has never known it. He doesn't know that he could trust it otherwise. Even tonight, looking at the coalition by which they are surrounded, he'd felt some splinter of uncertainty. The union of their forces is as delicate as a paper ship, but it must only hold together as far as the initial assault. Once they have stormed the island, he's certain they'll find their metal--
This though? The two of them? Impossibly, he trusts this. Surely he must now recognize the man's fractures. If there were no accord between them, they never would be here in this room. There would be no bowl, no blade, no island, no war. This isn't a test, he thinks. They are beyond that. This can be a promise like every other one he has buried. A garden of new things can be encouraged to grow over this one too.
His thumb shifts in his own blood on the edge of the short blade. After a moment, Flint turns the knife in his hand and takes Silver's arm in the other. "Be still," he warns, though it's unecesssary as his grip is sure and the cut he gives him is decisive enough that the air might hum with it. But the way he draws John's arm across the bowl so he can give up whats necessary is as gentle as if handling a lamb. He presses above the cut with his thumb (leaves a red fingerprint) and encourages it to bleed.
It was not so long ago that Flint had a knife to his throat in the hold of a Spanish Man O'War. Everything he'd done there had been illogical too. The world had lurched under his feet and his heart had faltered as the spindly threads of allegiance dragged some unanticipated vestiges of honor out of John at the most inconvenient moment. The shift had happened then, John thinks. The slow erosion of all the goals he'd thought he'd been angling towards tipping towards something new.
The kind of power John wanted will never be something he can hold alone. Instead, it's something he grasps with both hands and bears between himself and Flint. The world doesn't bend for one man. But two—
"Fuck," John hisses, fingers twitching as the knife slashes. Just like on the Man O'War, John is aware of how easily he could end up with his throat cut. But now, he no longer fears it.
The pain is as potent as the blood Flint coaxes from the cut. Everything Flint takes from him will play a part. John breathes through it, watching as Flint's finger leaves a bloody impression on his skin. It's appropriate. Surely the spell will mark him just as thoroughly.
"Is it enough?"
Nothing will be enough for either of them. They're hungry men. John has been starved even in his very earliest memory. And Flint hungers for something so specific that he's gone ravenous in the pursuit of it. The air around them has gone heavy and dense, as if all that they crave is pressed into the room here, observing as Flint coaxes blood from John's arm.
Suddenly, certainly, John thinks: We can destroy the order of the world like this.
Strange, how all this time has passed and John has never realized how inevitable that outcome has become.
"It is," he says, releasing John's arm. He means it to be true. This can be the last of it, Flint thinks with such sincerity that there's a split second where he regards the other man's blood on his fingers with a twitch of revulsion. "There's a linen folded in the kit. Hold it to the cut; I'll wrap it for you when this is finished."
He does no such thing for himself. Instead he takes up the flint stone and rises to stand, the blood running sluggishly from the slash down the length of his forearm. Snap! Snap!, as the blooded knife strikes the stone. A spark jumps between the two in the copper scented room, and there is the weight of something like a stone on the tongue. It is strange and real and natural in a way that makes the blood in him and on his skin and smeared on his fingers hum. There is power, true, but comfort too: it seems right to be bound this way to someone. Maybe man by his nature longs for it. Isn't a version of this is a want so honest that God himself once answered it in Eden?
Snap. The spark falls into the bowl, smokes for a moment in the bed of straw and metal, then catches. The knife sizzling with a sympathetic heat, the blood on its edge rapidly blackening as the yellowed grass burns. As the room swallows the smoke. As the distinct scent of salt and and sharp air and green growing things rises from the bowl. It smells nothing like burning - just sweet and clean as ocean air for a pure, perfected moment before the six threads of grass are swallowed by fire and the flame collapses to ash and ember. It leaves behind a fetid stench of rot and brackish water which fills the room as black blood flakes from the knife's edge.
The wooden bowl is untouched by the fire and the rings too are cool when Flint draws them from the ash.
The flare of power is always intoxicating. John inhales deeply, as if he could draw it in to himself. It's a deceptively small spell. To say it's a small thing would be foolish. Nothing Flint does is truly small. He is not a man to shake off. John's blood spreads over clean white linen as fire releases a sweet scent into the air. It sours, as all good things do. What's left is the smell of rot and death. John suspects it's a sign of what they're going to bring forth together. All that can possibly be left in the wake of their ambitions. For the first time, John regards it with faint stirrings of excitement rather than disgust and dread.
What have we done?
There are droplets of their blood on the table. The bowl has survived, unmarred, and their rings do not blister Flint's fingertips as he handles them. John's breath has gone shallow. In all his senses, the awareness of having shifted the world to their liking is singing there. It's deafening. He leans an elbow on the table, linen loosely draped over the slash on his forearm as he watches Flint's ash-smudged fingers.
"Finished?"
It felt finished. But this is not a ritual John knows, and it rarely serves him to assume anything where Flint is concerned.
He blows the clinging particles of ash from the metal, then divides them: sets John's ring there before him with a small tak on the table top. Or it should be small; it is, after all, just a loop of metal. But the appearance of it there is heavier than it had when he'd first removed it and as it had sat in the bowl. The power which melts from the air and clings so invisibly to the ring's surface seems as if it should pin it there to the table, nevermind how light it had been in Flint's palm. His own seems the same as he slips it back on his finger. It's a presence both unchanged - a familiar weight and shape - and impossibly, perceptibly more dense.
It is both small and simple. Things that matter often are. Without further pretense, Flint tips the remaining traces of ash from the bowl into the crack between two floorboards.
"There will undoubtedly be more to be done when we reach Nassau, but nothing in such direct relation to this." To them. Magick is certain to play some part in what they must do, as the wind and weather and the dirt and sea will. But this thing between them at least is as two ends of metal forged together on the anvil. Heating it again would only serve to reopen the seam.
Can a commitment of this kind be altered? He knows the same spell on two people can be perceived as different creatures (he feels that box in the ground like an animal hunger, a companion beside him in the darkness; but he thinks Miranda had felt it like a cold stone held in the fingers - something that had once been alive that had become inert and worn by everything that surrounded it), but thinks there is no changing it. He can imagine no use for doing so and has no idea how he might begin to complicate or undo the stark design of the thing they now both share.
"If you dream, it's normal that they might be disturbed after this," he says. There is another piece of scrap linen in the kit that he presses to his own wound long enough to slow the bleeding to an ooze. "It'll pass. Whatever you see shouldn't come again once we put our plans into motion on the island."
The ring on his finger is already comfortably warm from the heat of his own flesh.
For a long moment, John looks at the ring on the table. The energy coming off it is impossible to ignore. It feels as suffocating as what had flared in the room when Flint had struck a match. It's the exact same sensation as when the Walrus had been dead in the water; there's no wind, no air. As John focuses on the ring itself, the world around him recedes. All that persists is the way Flint's bent the world with the force of his power, and John's awareness that he can and will bend the world even farther before they're done.
Slowly, he lifts the ring from the table. It's deceptively light for the enchantment it carries. Weighing the ring in his palm, John wonders what it will feel like to wear. A shackle? John knows that feeling and he doesn't care to know it again, but flex of Flint's power hadn't felt as if it promised the sort of binding that shackles symbolized.
"Disturbed by what, exactly?" John asks, though it's hardly the most pressing question. "Visions of what's to come?"
Or of shared memory, passed between them in the night. John prefers the vision, unsurprisingly.
Cautiously, he takes the ring from his palm and slides it on his own finger. There's blood still streaking his forearm now the the linen has been abandoned. Rather than a shackle, it feels like a comfort. Like an awareness of Flint beyond anything John has carried lodging in his chest like a knife. It knocks the breath from him momentarily. He opens and closes his fist as if to flex the newly awakened sensation.
"You should know, there are things I could offer. Beyond this."
But Flint must know. John's refusal to talk about who he had been had been as much confirmation as anything else about the kind of power that sparked, carefully hidden, in his veins. There are things he won't say. (I hunted men like you. I was a bloodhound. I would have the scent of you across oceans.) But there are things and powers he could offer, and it feels remiss of John not to address the possible advantages they could grasp between them.
He has no answer for the questions outside a glance in John's direction while he wipes the bowl clean and begins to stow his tools back into their kit. It's not simply because no answer will be satisfying, but in part because he doesn't know one. If the shape of a spell is different on each man who wears it then particulars of its sensation and experience must be too. Maybe John will see where they're headed or he'll learn some secret of how to reach what they need between them. Or maybe he will know some part of the things Flint thinks or dreads in the dark. He may dream what Flint sometimes does: of a finch escaped from its cage whose black eye stares at him with the feeling of whatever part of Miranda is still left in the ground of that waiting island. Or maybe that black eye will belong to the Maroon Queen or her daughter or someone else who only John would recognize.
If there is anything similar or secret in what they will see, there can be no telling until it comes to pass.
--But the second thing, the one beyond this. That warrants some answer (and examination, but not in this instant and only because he won't be able to help himself from it). He pauses in the task of scratching the last dark flecks of blood from the knife blade and looks at John squarely.
"Oh?"
Of course he knows. Not since the beginning, no, but there is an uneasiness to the world around John Silver which he has long known the look of. At first he'd mistaken it for some omen, a manifestation of his own blatant disregard. But the truth of it is something more simple and strange. If there is latent power in every article of the world - the soil and shoots of grass and the ocean's salt evaporating into the air - it can only sit against John's skin, not be drawn out of it. He is an inert shore against which magick might somehow drive itself against and be broken.
He tucks the knife back in its place though hardly looks away.
Flint's answering acknowledgement isn't enough to hook the whole truth from John's throat and draw it out. Self-preservation wins out, as it always does. He has given over so much of himself to Flint. Even what he's been given in exchange isn't enough to soothe the fear that he's caught in a current, drawing him towards deep water.
"You aren't the only one who knows the old traditions. Our...enemy might say they're above dirty superstition, but in the hold of their ships they'll have someone who can weave protection for them out of thin air."
Among other things. Disgust catches in his throat. John's hands closes into a fist, watching the ring gleam on his finger as the blood streaks his skin. He thinks of the way the world could be warped. It's not as hard as the stories say. Two men, a little blood, a little metal, a little fire, and it would all come to pass just as Flint envisioned it.
They sent me to find it all. They used me to root out the knowledge they needed before they set it all to the blade and the flame.
Maybe someday he'll give Flint that truth. But not today.
"I know a way to steal that from them. If you're interested."
And John knows because he'd used those spells once, to break the wards and safeguards of people like them. There's no poetry in this. It's just the wielding of something blunt and ugly; all John can hope for is to use it without enough for to shatter the cycle along with everything else Flint is changing around them.
Something in his expression flickers open, though he continues to stow and wrap the bundle.
Interested? He almost laughs. "Let's hear it."
Not just because they can use any advantage available to them (they could), or because he's surprised by their enemy dabbling in the old traditions (he isnt - though how Silver knows is another matter). But because if John can do what he's implying-- Well, why hasn't he done it before? Not that he's doubting him. If the man says he can do something, there's some merit in believing him. Only that there have been a dozen instances since they met where the things on Flint's agenda have relied or been supported by luck charms and spells, by blood pressed into oak and poured into the sea. Why never bend those?
'You shit,' he thinks. He cinches the kit closed again by its leather cord. The ring on his hand flashes in the lantern light and the urge toward humor lingers there in the crooked line of his mouth.
Admitting this truth aloud lays him completely bare. Flint has always had the uncomfortable gift to see John. Maybe he never saw what John was capable of, but he'd seen John's machinations. There had been no chance of taking Flint unaware. Even as John leans over the table, bloody cloth clutched in one hand, he suspects Flint isn't half as surprised as another man would be.
"You told me what you were, before you were Captain Flint," John begins, stalling by habit. "Well, poetically, you're not the only one with some experience with our enemies."
The finer details die in his throat before John can put voice to them. He isn't as brave as Flint. He can't spill his demons out so easily. He'd intended to up until this moment, and finds he can't drag the old wounds out into the open.
"I can break every spell they spin. I'm good for...sensing that kind of power," John admits, breaking with a tense smile as his fingers curl into a fist. The ring is warming to his skin. "I'm sure that doesn't come as any surprise."
Reading people the way he did was a natural gift. But the ability to see the way power was woven through the world? That was a different sort of boon.
There is nothing left for his hands to do. The kit with its knife and metal filings, bundles of sweet yellowed grass and dried garden herbs and ash flakes and black stones with white marks carved into them lays closed and secure under his fingers. Maybe John feels those things too. Maybe those things with their waiting, murmuring power are bare to him too. Some of the satisfaction has slid sideways from his expression now. He studies him plainly for the span of a second, though standing under the hanging lantern as John sits lower from it paints some inscrutable shadow in the corners of the other's man's face.
It doesn't - surprise him. He's been canny from the beginning. But John's clarity, his fixation on his ability to snap those bonds, must raise the question:
"Because I'm fairly certain you're not going to turn me over to them."
It's a very general "them." John trusts Flint can differentiate without needing John to delve into all the different factions who would be happy to chase John down and harness him to do their bidding. He presses his palms to the table, traces the grain of the wood with his fingertips while he lets that simple, honest statement settle.
"And as we've already begun the process of tipping the scales, tipping them a bit more between the pair of us can't hurt."
The time where John could have simply walked away is past. He'd have done this without telling Flint, perhaps. But they've shared a fair number of secrets at this point. John doesn't need to shroud himself in shadow to spin out his will anymore. Flint's brought him into this. John feels he owes him the same in return.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
There are other tools in the oil cloth packet: a tin cap of iron shavings, a flint for striking a light, a bundle of dried yellow grass from the interior of New Providence, a piece of parchment paper folded into some accordion shape, a bell with no tongue. Sitting there in the high backed chair, Flint draws six straws from the bundle of grass and crushes them in his hand. They are placed in the bowl.
"I've never had the knack for this. There's some tradition of a kind adjacent to it in the places I knew as a boy, as most places by the sea do, but I don't recall the actual practice being very popular. You'll have to forgive me if I don't remember the order of things."
He removes the rings from his fingers and places the silver band in the bowl with the straw as if it is easy. As if he has not turned the thing around and around his finger in contemplation these past days. There are more obvious pieces he might use to hold his place - objects with more meaning and sentiment - but this one is his alone. Surely it must be a more stark and obvious commitment because of it. This ring has known only a version of the world driven by the ravenous want for this thing they now pursue with such immediacy. It has never known the hand of the man who came before the one he is now.
"Will you sit with me?"
no subject
But Flint isn't bringing forth poorly preserved fingers or toes. The assortment of iron and grass and fire are deceptively light. John's fingers itch to touch. The air is humming in preparation as Flint removes his rings. Even at the invitation, John is loathe to disrupt the energy gathering around them. Even the scrape of the chair and the movement of his body as he levers himself into it feels like too much of an interruption.
"The order isn't always important," John says, unsure if it's a confidence or an admittance. He's always been careful not to let on exactly how much he knows, but there are moments closed away alone with Flint where all his pretenses fall away.
"Do you need one of mine?"
Another man's ring, stolen, would be an easier offering to promise than blood. John measures the ties he's made and how easily they break with every breath he takes. Skin-warmed silver comes away easier than most things on his person. John knows this. His own blood soaked the boards of the Walrus. He bound himself to the crew and to Flint with flesh and bone and pain so great it blotted out every instinct he had apart from a singular need to see this crew safe. It tied him here. It had been an accident. Looking at Flint's bowl, John feels himself on the cusp of something more deliberate and permanent, but he does not walk away.
no subject
That too could be a kind of black humor as there is an easiness in his face and the way he nudges the bowl closer to the other man. But maybe not -- or not just that. Maybe it's also a last habitual attempt to close his hand around the space between them, an effort to feel its weight and understand its dimension. If they are partners (which they not just must be, but are; that much seems undeniable at this junction), then let it be something every part of the world will somehow recognize. The dirt will know them; the air will know them; the sea will know them and men both with and against them will feel it in their marrow no matter what they understand of magick.
But honestly (and pointedly): "It's doable with just the one. I'll need your blood either way, but a second memento is technically optional."
He will invest an extra piece of himself into this if he needs to if this pact needs sweetening. He is willing and able and knows in his flesh that it doesn't matter whether Silver puts some second self into the bowl. The man's never needed rituals like this one to commit himself to people, to things, to an idea of what could be. They are strung together already and there can be power, literal or imagined, in even one sided honesty. He does this and they will both remember it. Silver will carry it with him whether one of his rings is consecrated or not, whether he wears anything at all on his finger or not. An empty space indicates a missing component as much as the actual object or promise or truth does.
Rather than linger on the point, Flint turns his attention to dividing the iron shavings. He does it by licking his thumb and pressing into the cap of filings - flicks them and some trace dampness from his tongue, over the contents of the bowl.
is this a fuckin wedding
John has seen this moment approaching for some time now. He'd thought that maybe the loss of his leg had stalled it. Any question of loyalty had been stalled by the thick-layered power of what John had sacrificed. His protection clung to every line in the rigging, seeped into the sea-soaked wood body of the ship. It was an answer to every unasked question about John Silver, but as it turns out, such barriers are insufficient against Flint.
He's a man who has always needed more. The gnawing hunger in him was as strong as the threads of power he dragged in his wake. John hooks a finger on the edge of the bowl as his breath catches in his throat. What would it cost to break away from this? What would it cost if he offered nothing?
"We're both lucky I've gotten acquainted with the presence of a little blood on this ship," John answers, before lifting his hands and twisting off one ring. There's dirt in the grooves of his skin; left behind is a lighter, more vulnerable strip of skin as John deposits his offering with a soft clink.
John has seen more blood than Flint could ever know. But the old lies hold. It helps that John still doesn't like the sight of it, nor does he like to spill his own. But remains. Foolishly perhaps, John has set himself on this course alongside Flint, and refuses to spook from it.
I mean
"Then let's hope this it the last of it either one of us gives to this then," he says, raising his eyes to him. That is true good humor, a flash of real pleasure as he fetches up the short knife.
This is the part in stories they are meant to put their palms side by side and share the same stroke of the knife. But the artifice of that is senseless dramatics for the sake of pamphlets and the whispers of civilized people in parlors far removed from places like this one. Besides - they will need their hands for the work ahead and nothing says unpleasant like salt in a wound. Why make this fucking task waiting for them more physically demanding than it already is?
So Flint unbuttons the cuff of both jacket and shirt sleeve, parting the former and rolling the latter with a sensible efficiency. The skin there is sun ruddy, though only bares a few small marks - just two hair thin white scars. He cuts himself first: a shallow line drawn across the inside of his forearm. He holds it until it wells, then extends his arm across the waiting bowl and coaxes the cut to drip. The patter of blood on the dried grass and metal is soundless, but the tang of it in the air seems palpable. The world doesn't still for this, but a part of it is living here presently and the weight of that is an eye opening in the dark. The dark wood grain of the shallow bowl shivers.
When he's finished, he turns the knife in his hand and offers its grip to Silver.
"Would you rather I do the cutting?"
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Or more specifically, it isn't something grisly for either of them. Closed away in this room, they are disrupting the course of the universe. John feels nearly drunk on the possibility of what Flint is creating. It's almost enough to give him a little distance from the realization that John is offering up more of himself to Flint than he ever intended when he first talked his way onto the Walrus. He's settling into this snare of his own will. It should terrify him into upending the bowl and leaving the room, but John has never had this in his entire life. For all he walked along the ragged edges of magic, watching and learning, there was never a moment where he was so centered in a ritual and so sure of the benefits.
As he licks his lips, John leans forward on the table to watch the first cut of the knife. Flint has done this before, John suspects. Two little scars on the delicate skin of his forearm cannot be coincidence. John wants to put his hands there and feel the vibration of a two souls sewn together. Instead, he draws a breath and shrugs out of his coat. After he pushes up his sleeves, he lays his forearm on the table between them, palm facing up, and meets Flint's gaze.
"I'd make a mess of it."
To the very last, John downplays what he's capable of. By now, he can't tell what Flint believes of him. John is capable at a great many things. Bit by bit, the truth is being drawn into focus. All John can do is obscure it with word, settling like smoke between reality as it stands and reality as John wills it to be.
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This though? The two of them? Impossibly, he trusts this. Surely he must now recognize the man's fractures. If there were no accord between them, they never would be here in this room. There would be no bowl, no blade, no island, no war. This isn't a test, he thinks. They are beyond that. This can be a promise like every other one he has buried. A garden of new things can be encouraged to grow over this one too.
His thumb shifts in his own blood on the edge of the short blade. After a moment, Flint turns the knife in his hand and takes Silver's arm in the other. "Be still," he warns, though it's unecesssary as his grip is sure and the cut he gives him is decisive enough that the air might hum with it. But the way he draws John's arm across the bowl so he can give up whats necessary is as gentle as if handling a lamb. He presses above the cut with his thumb (leaves a red fingerprint) and encourages it to bleed.
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The kind of power John wanted will never be something he can hold alone. Instead, it's something he grasps with both hands and bears between himself and Flint. The world doesn't bend for one man. But two—
"Fuck," John hisses, fingers twitching as the knife slashes. Just like on the Man O'War, John is aware of how easily he could end up with his throat cut. But now, he no longer fears it.
The pain is as potent as the blood Flint coaxes from the cut. Everything Flint takes from him will play a part. John breathes through it, watching as Flint's finger leaves a bloody impression on his skin. It's appropriate. Surely the spell will mark him just as thoroughly.
"Is it enough?"
Nothing will be enough for either of them. They're hungry men. John has been starved even in his very earliest memory. And Flint hungers for something so specific that he's gone ravenous in the pursuit of it. The air around them has gone heavy and dense, as if all that they crave is pressed into the room here, observing as Flint coaxes blood from John's arm.
Suddenly, certainly, John thinks: We can destroy the order of the world like this.
Strange, how all this time has passed and John has never realized how inevitable that outcome has become.
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He does no such thing for himself. Instead he takes up the flint stone and rises to stand, the blood running sluggishly from the slash down the length of his forearm. Snap! Snap!, as the blooded knife strikes the stone. A spark jumps between the two in the copper scented room, and there is the weight of something like a stone on the tongue. It is strange and real and natural in a way that makes the blood in him and on his skin and smeared on his fingers hum. There is power, true, but comfort too: it seems right to be bound this way to someone. Maybe man by his nature longs for it. Isn't a version of this is a want so honest that God himself once answered it in Eden?
Snap. The spark falls into the bowl, smokes for a moment in the bed of straw and metal, then catches. The knife sizzling with a sympathetic heat, the blood on its edge rapidly blackening as the yellowed grass burns. As the room swallows the smoke. As the distinct scent of salt and and sharp air and green growing things rises from the bowl. It smells nothing like burning - just sweet and clean as ocean air for a pure, perfected moment before the six threads of grass are swallowed by fire and the flame collapses to ash and ember. It leaves behind a fetid stench of rot and brackish water which fills the room as black blood flakes from the knife's edge.
The wooden bowl is untouched by the fire and the rings too are cool when Flint draws them from the ash.
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What have we done?
There are droplets of their blood on the table. The bowl has survived, unmarred, and their rings do not blister Flint's fingertips as he handles them. John's breath has gone shallow. In all his senses, the awareness of having shifted the world to their liking is singing there. It's deafening. He leans an elbow on the table, linen loosely draped over the slash on his forearm as he watches Flint's ash-smudged fingers.
"Finished?"
It felt finished. But this is not a ritual John knows, and it rarely serves him to assume anything where Flint is concerned.
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He blows the clinging particles of ash from the metal, then divides them: sets John's ring there before him with a small tak on the table top. Or it should be small; it is, after all, just a loop of metal. But the appearance of it there is heavier than it had when he'd first removed it and as it had sat in the bowl. The power which melts from the air and clings so invisibly to the ring's surface seems as if it should pin it there to the table, nevermind how light it had been in Flint's palm. His own seems the same as he slips it back on his finger. It's a presence both unchanged - a familiar weight and shape - and impossibly, perceptibly more dense.
It is both small and simple. Things that matter often are. Without further pretense, Flint tips the remaining traces of ash from the bowl into the crack between two floorboards.
"There will undoubtedly be more to be done when we reach Nassau, but nothing in such direct relation to this." To them. Magick is certain to play some part in what they must do, as the wind and weather and the dirt and sea will. But this thing between them at least is as two ends of metal forged together on the anvil. Heating it again would only serve to reopen the seam.
Can a commitment of this kind be altered? He knows the same spell on two people can be perceived as different creatures (he feels that box in the ground like an animal hunger, a companion beside him in the darkness; but he thinks Miranda had felt it like a cold stone held in the fingers - something that had once been alive that had become inert and worn by everything that surrounded it), but thinks there is no changing it. He can imagine no use for doing so and has no idea how he might begin to complicate or undo the stark design of the thing they now both share.
"If you dream, it's normal that they might be disturbed after this," he says. There is another piece of scrap linen in the kit that he presses to his own wound long enough to slow the bleeding to an ooze. "It'll pass. Whatever you see shouldn't come again once we put our plans into motion on the island."
The ring on his finger is already comfortably warm from the heat of his own flesh.
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Slowly, he lifts the ring from the table. It's deceptively light for the enchantment it carries. Weighing the ring in his palm, John wonders what it will feel like to wear. A shackle? John knows that feeling and he doesn't care to know it again, but flex of Flint's power hadn't felt as if it promised the sort of binding that shackles symbolized.
"Disturbed by what, exactly?" John asks, though it's hardly the most pressing question. "Visions of what's to come?"
Or of shared memory, passed between them in the night. John prefers the vision, unsurprisingly.
Cautiously, he takes the ring from his palm and slides it on his own finger. There's blood still streaking his forearm now the the linen has been abandoned. Rather than a shackle, it feels like a comfort. Like an awareness of Flint beyond anything John has carried lodging in his chest like a knife. It knocks the breath from him momentarily. He opens and closes his fist as if to flex the newly awakened sensation.
"You should know, there are things I could offer. Beyond this."
But Flint must know. John's refusal to talk about who he had been had been as much confirmation as anything else about the kind of power that sparked, carefully hidden, in his veins. There are things he won't say. (I hunted men like you. I was a bloodhound. I would have the scent of you across oceans.) But there are things and powers he could offer, and it feels remiss of John not to address the possible advantages they could grasp between them.
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If there is anything similar or secret in what they will see, there can be no telling until it comes to pass.
--But the second thing, the one beyond this. That warrants some answer (and examination, but not in this instant and only because he won't be able to help himself from it). He pauses in the task of scratching the last dark flecks of blood from the knife blade and looks at John squarely.
"Oh?"
Of course he knows. Not since the beginning, no, but there is an uneasiness to the world around John Silver which he has long known the look of. At first he'd mistaken it for some omen, a manifestation of his own blatant disregard. But the truth of it is something more simple and strange. If there is latent power in every article of the world - the soil and shoots of grass and the ocean's salt evaporating into the air - it can only sit against John's skin, not be drawn out of it. He is an inert shore against which magick might somehow drive itself against and be broken.
He tucks the knife back in its place though hardly looks away.
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"You aren't the only one who knows the old traditions. Our...enemy might say they're above dirty superstition, but in the hold of their ships they'll have someone who can weave protection for them out of thin air."
Among other things. Disgust catches in his throat. John's hands closes into a fist, watching the ring gleam on his finger as the blood streaks his skin. He thinks of the way the world could be warped. It's not as hard as the stories say. Two men, a little blood, a little metal, a little fire, and it would all come to pass just as Flint envisioned it.
They sent me to find it all. They used me to root out the knowledge they needed before they set it all to the blade and the flame.
Maybe someday he'll give Flint that truth. But not today.
"I know a way to steal that from them. If you're interested."
And John knows because he'd used those spells once, to break the wards and safeguards of people like them. There's no poetry in this. It's just the wielding of something blunt and ugly; all John can hope for is to use it without enough for to shatter the cycle along with everything else Flint is changing around them.
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Interested? He almost laughs. "Let's hear it."
Not just because they can use any advantage available to them (they could), or because he's surprised by their enemy dabbling in the old traditions (he isnt - though how Silver knows is another matter). But because if John can do what he's implying-- Well, why hasn't he done it before? Not that he's doubting him. If the man says he can do something, there's some merit in believing him. Only that there have been a dozen instances since they met where the things on Flint's agenda have relied or been supported by luck charms and spells, by blood pressed into oak and poured into the sea. Why never bend those?
'You shit,' he thinks. He cinches the kit closed again by its leather cord. The ring on his hand flashes in the lantern light and the urge toward humor lingers there in the crooked line of his mouth.
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"You told me what you were, before you were Captain Flint," John begins, stalling by habit. "Well, poetically, you're not the only one with some experience with our enemies."
The finer details die in his throat before John can put voice to them. He isn't as brave as Flint. He can't spill his demons out so easily. He'd intended to up until this moment, and finds he can't drag the old wounds out into the open.
"I can break every spell they spin. I'm good for...sensing that kind of power," John admits, breaking with a tense smile as his fingers curl into a fist. The ring is warming to his skin. "I'm sure that doesn't come as any surprise."
Reading people the way he did was a natural gift. But the ability to see the way power was woven through the world? That was a different sort of boon.
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It doesn't - surprise him. He's been canny from the beginning. But John's clarity, his fixation on his ability to snap those bonds, must raise the question:
"Why now?"
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It's a very general "them." John trusts Flint can differentiate without needing John to delve into all the different factions who would be happy to chase John down and harness him to do their bidding. He presses his palms to the table, traces the grain of the wood with his fingertips while he lets that simple, honest statement settle.
"And as we've already begun the process of tipping the scales, tipping them a bit more between the pair of us can't hurt."
The time where John could have simply walked away is past. He'd have done this without telling Flint, perhaps. But they've shared a fair number of secrets at this point. John doesn't need to shroud himself in shadow to spin out his will anymore. Flint's brought him into this. John feels he owes him the same in return.