"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
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
"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.
no subject
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.
no subject
"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.
no subject
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?"
no subject
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.