katabasis | [PSL] in this sense the open jaws of wild beasts will appear no less pleasing than their prototypes

[PSL] in this sense the open jaws of wild beasts will appear no less pleasing than their prototypes

The bread that is over-baked so that it cracks and bursts asunder hath not the form desired by the baker; yet none the less it hath a beauty of its own, and is most tempting to the palate. Figs bursting in their ripeness, olives near even unto decay, have yet in their broken ripeness a distinctive beauty.

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Something dry and stubborn in him insists It's not that funny, and maybe it's not, but it was so unexpected they're all on such an edge that it's become so. Thomas searches in his head for any moment, just a single instance!, in the past of joking about the fact that the love of his life is another man. All he can think of are disparaging, mocking things, weaponized self-depreciation at best. Sophie's innocence about it makes it sweet and affectionate, a safe thing to joke about among people equally punished by the world, and Thomas is almost overwhelmingly touched.

"We're all deliriously exhausted is what's happening," he says, finally quieted down.

The hand that's not on James's knee is folded over his own, and he looks over at him from where he's leaning on his forearm. Did our wife do much needlepoint for you, he thinks, and his consciousness becomes stuck on having the thought of their wife in his head and he nearly laughs again, this time choked up with something else entirely.

He murmurs, "I think I should lay down before I pass out."

"I'm awake," Frances is muttering, peering at Bes in the dark - who, god willing, is teetering on unconsciousness herself, the laughing fit finally draining her of remaining fight-or-flight adrenaline. She continues, "Go to sleep. I'll wake up Richard if I start nodding off."

"Don't take any chances," he says to Frances, hand still there at the base of Thomas's skull. "Wake him up in a hour or two even if you're clear headed. There's too many of us not to trade off often and make sure everyone gets some sleep."

Frances agrees readily enough that he doesn't feel the inclination to stay awake with her. Or maybe it's just that he's hardly slept since they quit that burning skeleton and the desire to lay next to Thomas in the dark is deliriously overwhelming. Sophie curls up like a cat beside Charlotte - still sleeping somehow - and Bes quiets. Bettina draws her legs up and tucks the edges of her skirts around them to keep the warm air in. At last, James gives over: unfolding his legs with a pop of his knee and drawing his hand from Thomas's neck so that he can settle down beside him instead.

What a strange and lovely thing here at the end of a long day - laughter, however delirious, feels like it should be alien. And yet there it sits high in his chest, threatening to bubble out of him for the right word or look. Thank God for the dark, he thinks, hand shifting to Thomas's side as a magnet to a pole. "Daisies," he murmurs, too low for anyone anyone but Thomas to parse and punctuated by a huff of warm breath.

He feels like he should be emanating creaking noises as he shifts to lay down on his side next to James, but all of him is too worn-out for even that. Thomas pauses with his weight on his elbow to lean over him and press a close-mouthed kiss against his lips and bump their noses together-- no audible laugh in response to Daises but he can probably feel it tremble through him. He remembers how he looked in the low lamplight, smelling the herbal scent of the salve for his wounded back, telling him how every small moment they have together lasts a lifetime for him. It's still true.

Once upon a time Thomas was very particular about the state of mattresses; nowadays he is blessed to be able to fall asleep under any uncomfortable circumstance, and is content to lay in the dirt with one arm curled protectively over James's middle. He'll learn how to do needlepoint or knit or any other damn thing James wants, make him a dozen pillowcases, anything, everything. It would be a lovely thing to dream of.

Of course, he doesn't. The cold ground is transporting, every curious insect sting the bite of tiny wounds left by exploratory needles-- it's still dark when Thomas startles away, eyes wildly unable to focus on anything until the faint details of the world dusted by starlight materialize. It's been several hours at least, judging by the fact that Frances is asleep and Richard is up, sitting against the fallen tree - he about jumps out of his skin when Thomas sits up, too awake now and shaking too badly to even attempt to go back to sleep.

"You alright?" is Richard's barely-there murmur. Thomas makes an affirmative sound, and stays with his hip pressed against James's, one hand resting on his leg. Grounded. He sits and just breathes, willing his pulse to quiet to something normal. He doesn't know for how long.

"Shit," he says after a while, contemplating the feel of the air, the way the hair on his arms prickles.

"What is it?"

"I think it's going to rain."

A moment of quiet, then Richard agrees, "Shit."

Some minutes later, thunder growls restlessly in the distance.

Thomas beside him keeps all the heat leeching from his body into the cold, dark ground. Even dead to the world, the solid shape of him flush against his side is like an anchor - secure, sure, a lone point to pin all his confidence in. No dreams find him there - no whispers in his ear, no dark shapes under the surface of some distant choppy sea, no jagged island hungry for broken backed ships.

Eventually though, the chill find him. He shifts over, hand grasping at the empty space next to him. That - the lack - more than the scent of water in the air or the grumble of thunder, is what dredges him out of sleep. James shifts, registering Thomas's hand at his thigh only when he's already fully awake and as aware of the breeze cross cutting through the treetops over head - the call of some night bird - the rain smell at the edge of the air. He rolls slowly over (finding every muscle in his back and shoulders wound tight enough that it feels difficult) and finds his hand at Thomas's hip.

"Thomas--" Murmured low and dense, so raw from exhaustion that it hardly belongs to him.

The growl of distant weather comes again.

It sharpens something in him. He levers himself fully upright. They need to go. Now. There will be no beating the storm, but the weather demands they find shelter immediately or risk getting soaked through. And that could kill them - would kill Bes, certainly.

"Get them up." His body's infuriatingly slower than his brain is; it takes a moment for his weight to shift, for him to start getting himself from the ground. "We can't stay here."

Richard is on his feet before James is, and Thomas sits where he is for a moment until James is up, a solid presence for him to lever himself standing against. He feels like every part of him is bruised deep, but it isn't so bad. It'll be bad later, when the rain hits. It's a bright point to be able to ignore the pain now, in the dark. Thomas wakes Bes gently, Bettina next to him like a ghost at his elbow, roused by some unearthly intuition and already prodding Charlotte awake.

Bes's wound isn't life-threatening as it is, he doesn't think. She just needs to rest and get her strength back, build up humors or blood or whatever-it-is that keeps a person from slipping away in the night after a traumatic injury. There just hasn't been enough time. She is determined, though, and Thomas thinks she looks a little less pale than she did in the evening. They must notice these small things, practical even if they're single grains of sand on a beach, otherwise there's nothing to navigate by.

The sky threatens to hamstring their progress throughout the last black hours of the night and through dawn, morning bringing only dim grey light filtering through the trees. Thunder continues to growl and complain, but does not crack open; it's only a matter of time, really, but thank god or the devil or whomever that Thomas's bloody subconscious woke him up. Waiting and having less time to try and get ahead of it (to where?) would have been worse.

"I swear I keep hearing a horse," Frances says, laboring under the pack she's carrying. "I don't know if I'm going mad."

"I thought I heard it too," Richard contributes. "But it must be the thunder."

Thomas thinks of the feeling of being watched and exchanges an uncertain look with James. He has no idea, personally, too focused on keeping Bes steady against him, too disoriented from the sound of the impending weather and harsh breathing and the way everything is in turns dampened and echoed in the dense forest.

Thunder or exhaustion or it really is a horse. He pointedly isn't thinking about how at this rate, any one of them might see someone killed. There simply isn't another option but to keep going and hope to outrun all three. What else can be done? Hook east, cutting straight toward civilization without telling if they're fully past the fringe of that last plantation. They've been walking for two days, but that hardly means anything when their pace is dictated by the twisting wood and Bes's injured leg. The only rational option is to continue on this trajectory (the cold, starkly logical part of him says that a day of being soaked through by heavy rain won't ruin most of them).

Maybe some fragment of it shows in his face as he glances after Thomas. "We should be so lucky," he says, slashing through the uneasiness prickling at the back of all their necks that only way that's available to him. "If we come across a horse, we can take it. You know how to ride, don't you Bes?"

"A little," she says, breathing hard with her arm slung around Thomas's shoulders - fingers twisting into the shoulder of his shirt. "I think I could stay on."

It's a story. They all must know it is. But maybe it smooths some of the sawing anxiety that the growl of thunder on their heels has sharpened. He studies the land ahead of them, dark trees against an uneasy sky too thick with clouds to parse their exact bearings. The earth runs uneven, shadows split by the broken sunlight, and he slows the length of his stride and finds his hand at the strap of the rifle slung once more on his shoulder. He falls alongside Thomas and Bes, their company strung in an irregular line before them and Charlotte at the rear casting intermittent glances over her shoulder.

He drops his voice. "When we pass into that thicket there, continue on. I'll wait and see if anyone means to follow after. Don't slow - if nothing comes across this path, I can run to catch up."

Thomas is not in love with this plan, evident both because he is who he is and the way he glances over at James-- though there's no reproach in that look. James knows what he's doing and Thomas trusts that above all, he just loathes any circumstance in which they step so distant from the other, no matter how logical or necessary. Thomas stops them but only to shift Bes and the bag on his other shoulder, getting her arms around his neck so he can lift her up with one arm beneath both her knees and give her a break. Too exhausting to keep up for long, but it'll allow him to move quicker if something happens. And at least his posture will like it better for a few minutes.

Another look before they soldier on, this time what's there on his face is as good as leaning over to send him away with a kiss. (I love you, I hate leaving you, good luck.)

Charlotte lingers behind to wait and see if James has any particular instruction for her, her rifle adorned with a bit of sleeve over the flint in apprehension of the weather, and then she does as she's bid.

The wind is picking up now, tugging at hats and skirts, sending leaves and and branches swaying and making it even harder to hear anything over the ambient sound of the wild around them. Bes murmurs an apology about her state, and Thomas squeezes her side. Nonsense. The ground is uneven beneath the crowded bushes and brambles and they have to pick carefully, but everyone keeps moving. Thomas tries to pay attention, catch sight or sound of someone alien around them, but the shifting foliage and thunder mask everything. A wild, panicked thought strikes him, that if they walk too far and James waits too long, he might not see them again in the thick trees, to say nothing of being caught by himself.

Reason feels too exhausting, for a moment, and so Thomas lets himself have that awful thought, the dizzying fearful energy of it at least fueling further momentum. He picks its claws out of himself soon enough-- leaving one or two, perhaps, because it would be willfully foolish to assume no danger is possible. When living in a constant state of terror, a person can become complacent and used to it - that won't do. He has to learn a new kind of intuition.

Up ahead, Richard and Frances have stopped, and Bettina is moving back to Sophie's side.

"What is it?" Thomas asks, regretting the fact that he has to raise his voice to be heard.

Frances looks back at him and shrugs. Hearing things?

He has no further direction- for Charlotte or anyone else. He might say If you hear shots don't come back this way or If you find trouble, call out, but he says neither. Between the seven of them going on ahead, he trusts the sensibility of at least two to hold. Bettina, he thinks, wouldn't tolerate anything else; Thomas, he knows, won't let them fall to pieces. Not if they're relying on him. Not if it's more than just him.

("He made me promise him," she had said. "That no matter what happened next, that you and I would take care of each other.")

So as they pass through the ticket of trees, James touches his side then falls silently behind. Using the sounds of them passing through the wood - rustling leaves and snapped twigs -, he folds himself into the shadow between two trees and takes a knee there. It's not exactly subterfuge that will tolerate close examination - he must trust that if someone is tailing them, that they're far enough behind to miss one absent body until it's too late. He finds himself mentally willing Thomas and the rest to move faster anyway. The sooner they put distance between them, he reasons, the less likely a tracker is to see their backs and spot the ruse. It might be the only thing keeping the knowledge that they're disappearing into the swaying trees tolerable; otherwise it might slash into him. Cut his belly out. Steal away the certain parts of him.

Because he is certain. The world hangs strangely, so intimately near as to be like bared skin. Surely that must mean something. Surely it can't just be the storm after them.

Thomas and the others disappear into the forest. James waits, the rifle primed and ready there against his shoulder if not yet levelled. Every living thing is as a sea shifting in the wind: leaves winking from green to silver and back again, yellowing grass bending as water rises and falls. The sky is so black.

He waits and doesn't measure the time.

And waits.

And after an eternity, something stirs through the trees.

There are no more clock ticks, no more neatly (agonizingly) segmented pieces of time; James waits, and waits, and when something stirs, that something does not immediately reveal itself. The wind comes from neither ahead nor behind but one side, winding through trees to become mingled and off-balance, small moments of cyclones twisting about. Then: like a slice cut out of reality, a horse's foreleg visible through the brambles. Only for a moment. In snatches, would-be steady gait, hooves on dirt and tangled leaves.

Someone following.

Snap.

More than someone. On James's other side, entirely removed from the spot he'd been watching, is a second horse, and upon it, a young man. Without closer education that they all must certainly lack it's impossible to guess if he's Yamacraw or Yamasee, but certainly Creek-- dressed for the ugly weather, he is on the cusp of leaving childhood, and he's looking at Flint with a frown that could mean

anything.

He says something, utterly indistinguishable in its lack of resemblance to any European or African language, but there is some universal thread of exasperation in it.

A chirp-like noise - clearly human-made - tries to catch the boy's attention. He points forward, after where the rest of the party has walked on. Urging. Maybe he thinks this man is lost. He clearly doesn't care about the threat of a gun. Pointing. More words, slower, like maybe if he speaks to the wandering white man as if to a child he'll magically understand.

On the wind are snatches of voices. Just moments, fractured off of something-- up ahead. Thomas's voice?

It's something poured out of a dream - the brief confirmation of what he felt he'd somehow known already followed so immediately by the pistol shot snap of a twig so near his ear. The gangly boy on his dark pony could be made of the weather and James's own lurching paranoia, the patron of some distinct and particular fear. That is: the sudden realization of the world at present piercing definitively into this separate sphere of wilderness inside which they've been pretending to travel. It's a bewildering form of reality. The lack of a shared language is only a small part of why he doesn't immediately parse the young man's meaning.

Then the sound of something else catches in the twisting wind - voices, maybe only in part familiar - and James rises immediately from his knee. For a split second, the rifle is set against his shoulder and his hands are laid on the stock in such a way that it would be easy to--

What? Shoot the boy? Demand his horse? Both seem so divorced from reality that he isn't sure how either even occurred to him. James takes one step back, wary as a keyed up hunting dog, then turns and moves at a clip after the sounds of his companions.

It's not quite running, but it's close. He can't help himself.

He leaves the shadow of his hiding place and nothing reaches out to follow-- no other tracking students materialize to run alongside him, no hoofbeats pounding in pursuit. More experienced woodsmen would have left him there to be adrift in nothingness forever--

(Or they wouldn't have been noticed in the first place?)

The shapes of his companions are not so easily found up ahead, snatches of their voices in the air misleading, offering no distinct clues about the direction they're in. In midday the light should be beaming down but it's dark, darker, and before James makes it across the thicket he'd marked out, the sky finally gives up the water it's been holding so precariously. No ominous crack of thunder or flash of lightning, just rain, sudden and torrential.

Sophie comes into view first, a dirty, pale-faced smudge in the abruptly watery forest, Richard ahead of her and the others in close knot, tension in every figure.

--More than eight.

With a gasp Sophie turns, clutches at James when he's close enough, and nearly all heads turn. Thomas, furthest away, looks for a second like he might faint from relief, and then enormously pained when he forces his attention back to the man in front of him.

Whatever he says to Thomas is lost in the deafening sound of the rain coming down, but despite the scattered men behind him all holding weapons, no one makes a move that looks hostile. It's Frances who turns around and murmurs to the rest of them, "He's inviting us to go with them, he says the 'real hunters' paid for us to share their fire. I think."

The rifle is so solid in his hands that is feels like one of only three things in the world besides Thomas there, ghostly pale in the pouring rain, and then assemblage of men beyond him. There's a lunatic part of him that thinks to raise it when he first staggers back across them, but it's so heavy and Sophie is there immediately clutching at his sleeve and so obviously divided between stark panic and obvious relief. It lodges a strange and completely unexpected sensation under his ribs that forces some measure of sensibility out of him. When was the last time someone other than Thomas was so grateful for his presence?, is not what he thinks in the moment but it might occur to him later around the French trappers' fire.

He slings the rifle back over his shoulder, rain sluicing violently from the wide brim of his hat. "That's kind of them." For what reason? Not that it matters. They don't have the luxury of refusing a helping hand, even a suspicious one. He touches Sophie's shoulder, coaxing her fingers to come away from his sleeve, as all his attention is drawn like a lead weight on a line toward the rain-mangled conversation happening mere paces away.

Thomas is perfectly capable of this - whatever this is. James knows that, but presses forward through the knot of bedraggled escaped slaves anyway: swimming up through the pouring rain to act as shadow at his elbow.

Thomas is perfectly capable of this may be a somewhat rose-tinted view of the capabilities of a man who hasn't conversed with anyone outside a regimented role in over a decade, and whose past-past life feels like some faded dream most of the time. Fortunately, his nerves and stilted, awkward tone are folded in with the rain and his out-of-practice French; none of these men speak the vacationing Parisian dialects he was taught, and none of them are adept at muddling through an Englishman's accent.

Instinct is screaming to reach out for James's hand, but he doesn't dare. He's still supporting Bes, Bettina at her other side, somehow menacing in the way her light hair is stuck to her face, rifle in her hands.

"Come back, come back, if this is everyone there's no reason to stand here and talk in the fucking rain," the man nearest Thomas is saying. Short but broad-shouldered and wearing a wide hat, he has the look of someone who might wrestle a bear for sport. All of them do. There is nothing particularly friendly about them, but nothing overtly hostile, either. Just people-- probably somewhat confused about the circumstances, but apparently curious enough to play along.

Thomas, ignorant of the fact that James is holding the missing piece to the puzzle, remains wary. Someone paid for you is a fundamentally disturbing thing to say to a slave, and he doesn't understand what's going on. A moment of silence as he tries to process-- god, what. What could he possibly be processing. If these men wanted to kill them it'd be easier to try and do it here, instead of regrouping and giving them a chance to breathe, first. Frances murmurs explanations.

"Lead the way."

He wishes he sounded less like someone drowning.

There's a split second between when the man having his staggering conversation with Thomas turns away and when the rest do, a few of the weather worn men with their guns under their arms lingering for a rightfully suspicious moment. James tips his head to Thomas then, angle of his shoulder and the broad brim of his hat shifting to create some invisible dividing line. "Two native boys on horses following us." He'd only seen one outright, but can assume plenty about who had been riding the horse he'd spied from a distance. "With the likelihood of more. 'Real hunters,'" he says, to reuse what Frances had said just a moment ago.

Not anyone after them from the the Oglethorpe plantation or any of the other surrounding farms. Probably. He can't think of a legitimate reason why the boys or anyone in their company would approach these white men looking to provide respite for a handful of escaped slaves, but he also can't think of a reason to doubt the intention of this. It's so utterly detached from any version of reality he recognizes that there's no deciphering it. Not from here anyway. Better to puzzle it out dry around a fire than miserable in the pouring rain.

"What did they say?" Through the heavy rain and the slanting dialect, he'd caught barely a word - two, maybe. Not that it matters. They're moving already. Richard cuts forward with Sophie all but clutching his sleeve as substitution for James', Frances trailing after them with her hand at her belt and there pistol there.

For a moment as they shift to follow where the trappers lead, Bettina lingers there in rain with her rifle in an iron grip. When she moves, it's only once she can fall into the shadow of Thomas and Bes - to set herself behind the theoretical wall formed by them and James and Charlotte.

What? There's who following them? Thomas is completely thrown - by that, by all of this - though later if he thinks back on it, he'll be able to pick apart motivations; children are curious by nature, and the lot of them are particularly strange. Sympathy to be found, perhaps, over the desperate way they've been limping along, especially if they were neutral observers when Bes was attacked.

"Just that we're welcome to rest at their camp," Thomas says, quiet as he can through the rain and sound of them all moving. "When I asked why he'd bother, with or without 'payment', he said it's better for the nerves of their quarry if we're sat down quietly instead of scaring the deer."

Implied shrug. Might as well.

"I don't like them," says Sophie, her voice thin. Richard tells her it'll be all right, and Thomas-- Thomas doesn't know. He doesn't like or dislike these men, doesn't know anything about them other than that they're French and apparently have a measure of good humor to be playing along with whatever theater is going on.

It's a long, cold, wet march to where the trappers are camped, in a makeshift clearing with a lean-to in the center shielding a sputtering cooking fire. There are two men awaiting, one portly man who calls out an inquiry to the ringleader and another swaddled in blankets beneath a stretched hide shelter, ill or injured. Conversation happens in French that Thomas is chagrined to miss, but Frances whispers at him that they're just discussing where to put them.

"If I give you something can you make one of those?" the leader asks Thomas, walking closer. He's pointing at the little shelters tied between trees, slanted thick sheets and hides. Thomas tells him yes and in a few minutes they're provided with heavy fabric that needs dirt shook off of and a measure of rope. Not luxury accommodations, but it might as well be. It's shelter. They can put it together and Bes can rest without water being poured over her, and if these men turn out to be dangerous, at least they can see them coming. Thomas turns to James with the fabric in his arms, a little boggled still, and finds and edge, puzzled for a moment over the worn-out holes.

Old sailcloth.

He almost laughs over it. It's like opening a book that seems unfamiliar and finding a note written to himself in the pages, and for a moment there in the downpour James wants to study it there in his hands. He wants to appreciate this unlikely thing in this strange place, so removed from where it belongs and useful here anyway.

Instead he sends Sophie and Frances to fetch every big rock and broken bough they can find and have the energy to haul back here. Meanwhile, between the rest of them they find themselves a likely pair of trees and he feeds the rope through the worn eyes at the edge of the cloth with a steady, familiar hand. The canvas is rigged roughly shoulder height, the rest angled backward by the loose end of the rope secured to a sapling. The edge if lain with stones and brush and any assortment the two youngest girls scrounge from the wood - dirty kicked over it to bury the edge. To keep it from coming up in the darkness or the wind switching back. Before they're fully finished with the work, Charlotte has helped Bes into the shelter of the canvas. She's checking her wound, the two of them in low conversation among the bags discarded there. They are, all of them, soaked through by the work but Christ the shadow of under the sail is practically seductive. They'll have to lie close to fit all of them and their things, but that's hardly a bad thing with the weather so sour and all of them run through with rain.

It - the lean to, the shuddering fire, the tang of smoke, the growl of the storm and the snap of the canvas for the wind - reminds him so strongly of camping along some stormy beach as the Walrus rolls against her anchor in the bay that his stomach could clench for it. Instead, one of the Frenchmen has come over carrying an armload of badly folded blankets and that warrants more attention as they're unloaded into Richard's arms.

"He says we can borrow them. Just for a little while," says Frances. Dark eyes are watching them from across the camp.

"Tell him thank you." He could manage it himself, but maybe it's better if they don't know about his limited vocabulary.

She does.

James ushers the girl under the sheet with a hand at her shoulder. "Good. Now lets get out of this fucking weather."

Edited 2017-09-28 13:59 (UTC)

Frances smiles at him as she ducks down, the relief on her face not all about being able to have this bit of shelter. Each and every one of them had been happy to find him rushing back to meet them when the rain began, and not only because of his role as an adept survivor and leader in their ragged little band. Hours spent peeling vegetables and mending clothes, talking about literature, watching his kind hands and eyes with Thomas-- how could any of them stand to lose someone, now?

Bettina has been industrious with arranging their packs so that minimal water gets to important pieces (whatever those may be), and pulling out layers of skirts that haven't been cut up for bandages to tie to the other side of the canvas, offering no protection from the rain but a little privacy, unwilling to cede any inch to strange men that she doesn't have to. Of unstrange men, the three of them make up a respectable outer wall with a shared blanket over shoulders and against the trees, Bes in the optimal spot and everyone else squashed in as best as they can be.

When the rain isn't coming down with such force they can speak to one of their hosts better, or they can find something to eat, but for now all there is to do is sit still and rest. Thomas thinks of very tired foxes in a muddy den successfully outrunning a hunt. He thinks of how light James looked handling that canvas. Something about how deft he is in all things puts Thomas at ease, washes away the anxiety clouding him and allows him to sit there next to him without losing himself in thoughts that go nowhere. It wasn't like this last time-- shuttled and hidden, slipped from place to place in secret. In his failed escape attempt he wasn't ever put against the open world with nothing in between, not at any point.

The rain has cleared out some of the blood on his clothes. Or made it impossible to notice, at any rate.

Sailcloth and their pirate captain. Thomas wants to lean his head against James's shoulder and fall asleep, perhaps for the next week. Instead he just takes his hand, because no one can see them do so from the outside (a consideration he will be upset to think on too closely, but not now), and smiles at him. Tired and soaked and muddy. Alive. Here.

"I owe you an apology."

It takes Thomas a moment to register that Richard has said anything - spaced out in his exhaustion and delirious contentment with this should-be-miserable blessing, and finding it almost hard to hear him over the sound of the rain, still violent no matter that they've been sitting for a while, now. He starts to ask 'What?' and the young man, sat in the triangular opening at the end of the shelter, shakes his head, seeming solemn.

"I thought you had the right of it, back at the plantation, but some principle or the other, construct of something I was clinging to like it made me better, didn't let me say so or approach you."

Oh, he feels himself think. Doesn't say anything-- what is there to say? Critique on religion, on the status quo of everything-- it doesn't really matter. He tightens his fingers where they're threaded between James, and at his other side, Bettina stirs, watching Richard. The other girls seem like they're asleep or too far away even in this small space to hear over the downpour, but that can't truly be the case.

"When it happened, it didn't feel real. Like I hadn't come to terms with the possibility. But standing there watching it I thought, I've done nothing to benefit nobody in the two years I've been in this hell, and the only thing I know about myself is that I would dedicate my soul to the devil to get back to my wife. So what an ass I've been."

Catholics and their confessions. What does that make them?

"Thank you for having me."

Logically, it shouldn't feel restful or anything like security. What do they know of the other men occupying the clearing except that they will take strangers into their company for some manner of payment? What other things would they be willing to do if it meant some coin in their pockets? Yet it does - feel like there's some measure of safety here. Maybe it's the simple fact of being out of the rain, or maybe he's just exhausted, or maybe it's the sound of harsh weather grasping against sail cloth. But here in the shadow of their lean to in the middle of the woods North of Spanish Florida, there is some strange measure of comfort to be found in the autonomy of their presence here. For the first time in as many days, he doesn't feel like a convict slave - escaped or otherwise. When was the last time anyone here knew any measure of liberty in conjunction with free men?

The plantation. A ship. A family who cared more about the ruin of their reputation than that of their daughter. The plantation. A ship. Some broken rebellion. The plantation. A ship. An island on which a war was buried. The plantation. A ship. A prison hospital. And on and on and on, a grim litany with a strange conclusion: a forest and a half dozen scraggly men who don't know the words to any of those stories. And so what power is left in them?

Only what they allow, he thinks with his hand in Thomas's while Richard's apology takes shape between the drumming of the rainfall. Where is Madi, he wonders, a last deflection before his mind turns finally toward John Silver.

An island, he knows. A ship, he knows. What comes before that? Does it matter? Silver asks and there on the maroon island it had been a question James couldn't fathom much less answer. Of course it should have meant something, he'd thought. How can a man deny the broken things which created him unless he is complicit in being broken to match? But here with Thomas next to him surrounded by an unknowing world beside Richard, who would trade everything for his wife whom he loves and whose face he wants to see another time, he finds himself capable of understanding. It's some siren song he hears the words to now: Just stay down, Silver begs in his dreams and on that ship from Skeleton Island when he'd been mad with the loss of every thing they (he and Silver and he and Madi and he and Vane and he and Gates and he and Eleanor and he and Miranda and he and Thomas) had built. What a terrible thing to believe, he thinks, and the grief overcomes him sudden and unexpectedly.

The emotion must show on his face though the sound of rain on canvas swallows everything else save the rigidity of his grip on Thomas's fingers. After what feels like a decade but must be only a moment - Thomas would have said something if the pause had spun out too far -, he clears his throat and fixes Richard with a singular look.

"You belong out here," he says, fierce and absolute and fundamental. "For as long as you or anyone else cares to, I will do everything in my power to see that remains true."

Maybe that's just a story. Maybe it's one meant for someone else. Maybe this is how James Flint who once was James McGraw appeared in Nassau and convinced men to vote him captain of a ship in so little time. Or maybe he means it. Or maybe all of that is true all at once.

No explanation is needed for Thomas to understand James is moved by something, stuck on somewhere with it between his ribs. He doesn't think it's Richard himself, achingly honest as the moment is, but whatever he's evoked must be important. He can't guess what wounds and losses lie in the life of Captain Flint, just like James can't know what startles Thomas awake in the night.

He is a solid presence beside him, his hand around his tight, their lifeline together. You belong out here. It is a beautiful distinction.

"We all will."

--Charlotte, from her place curled between Bettina and Frances, head on her hand against the older woman's shoulder. She's watching them with clear eyes, though her skin seems flushed even in this gloom. Bettina's hand on Thomas's forearm shifts, fingers curling. She doesn't sound placating - she sounds steady, and like she's speaking to James as much as Richard. A pinprick reminder that he shoulders nothing alone, not even them.

There is no argument in her wake, and there is some sort of covenant about it in the quiet that follows. Thomas moves his thumb across the back of James's hand, still wet with rain. No one needs to be convinced. They're already here, and they know he means it.

Richard is looking at him almost shyly, nerves apparent still even after James's confirmation, and Thomas just smiles, small and lopsided with how bruised he's feeling, but it's honest.

It's been a long time since he's changed someone's mind about anything.

"Thank you." For telling them, for being here. Every life that's made it out of the corpse of that place (even the proper criminals? maybe) is a light let back into the world again, and Richard is as important to him now as anyone else. This kind of shared experience carves a person and leaves them changed forever, can't ever be explained. No matter how well or how poorly they shift back into the sun, there are fingerprints inside each, mapping out this moment.

"Do you know any good Bible verses for the situation?" is Charlotte again, softly shooing away encroaching cobwebs of strange thought.

Thomas almost laughs. "God, no."

Richard does laugh.

He can think of a few - Thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, but thou knowest it altogether. Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me. That there is no division of light and darkness and that the imperfection of their substance is understood. Cut away the everything else and there is still something sacred in there: being seen. What creature can sustain itself without that? It must be awful being you, is a familiar string of words that seem now so radically misapplied.

He takes one crooked breath and gathers his frayed edges, slowly blinking back the ragged emotion as Sophie asks after Bes's leg and Frances tends quietly to arranging a place for her pistol where it won't get damp with all the care warranted a swaddled child. Next to Thomas, he can exhale out again with such shocking comfort. A broken thing is still ruined, but at least it has no place in this make-do tent. It belongs to someone else, to somewhere else, and he can find no reason except heartsickness to want to repair it.

Christ, what a day it's been.

"Will you take the watch first?" he asks Richard who answers, Of course. Anything. "Try to keep count of them. If one of them disappears for long, we should be aware of it."

But the Frenchmen stay around their fires and under the shelter of their lean to's, bundled against the rain in blankets or furs too damaged to sell or trade, for the duration of the storm.

Beneath their leaking roof and the blankets shared strategically between eight people, Thomas shifts James's hand further into his lap, so he can hold it between both of his. Half-dozing he rubs his palm, the tendons of his wrist and the back of his hand, laces their fingers, just touches him. Out here they will not be afforded the protection of tolerant authority, but Thomas doesn't mourn it. Like he refused to be grateful for slavery he will refuse to miss even the smallest piece of that place; he thinks of the dog he had to kill, its confused trembling as life slipped away, and wonders how often it was beaten and how sincerely it loved the human who did it because the same hands offered food and soothing after.

He's so sick of scripture.

The day crawls on, wet and miserable and everyone content for it anyway, and he thinks he must have nodded off for a while - he's not sure when the rain became less deafening, but it has. There are probably pink imprints on James's wrist where Thomas has been clutching at it for so long, but all he does is smooth his fingers over the skin there instead of letting go.

Across the camp, someone is whistling a cheerful tune. Thomas doesn't recognize it. He wants to ask, suddenly-- awfully-- if Miranda kept playing, if she learned anything new, what her favorite close contemporary piece was. Would James know? Children have grown up and musicians have kept producing work and books have kept on being written. And he's been--

He doesn't know how he keeps from asking. It's an insensible impulse, and so bitter, burned at every edge. The same kind of brokenness that's the foundation of this whole moment, and wildly, painfully beautiful for it at the same time. They don't have to be cleaned or healed or ready for it, they don't have to be anything; it can be bitter. He looks over at James, the damp spiky halo of his regrowing hair, the lines beneath the dirt on his face, his jaw hidden behind a red beard Thomas hadn't had an opportunity to get used to in London.

Smiling like an idiot.

He sleeps for a time with his hand in the circle of Thomas's fingers, the necessary press of bodies near enough that there's no harm in as much intimacy. Even mostly upright, the rest is deeper than he might have thought possible for longer than he could have reasonably expected. As the rain wails then patters against the sail cloth, he drifts in and out of some sharpened state of consciousness and easy, benign half-sleep. Bes dozes with her leg propped up on one of the bags. Sophie tells Richard a song, explaining that her singing voice is terrible but that the words are pretty and later he should try them if he cares to. Charlotte rebraids Bettina's long pale hair, Frances sleeps curled into a circle like a cat on a porch in summer.

It's nothing like being removed from the world, he thinks. Across the camp a man is whistling some sweet, high tune and beside him--

Thomas's smile is staggering. It strikes him like a blow in reverse: his ribs unsnap and breath finds him again. The pain draws out of his skin and James, off guard and exhausted, finds himself mirroring that incandescent look on Thomas's face. He's so brilliant there, a bright star burning in the gray of the day under the shadow of the sail cloth, that there's no option but the mirror him.

If they were alone, he might -- ask what has him smiling so (he must have at least part of the answer, but if it was just the two of them James thinks he'd like to hear Thomas say it); he might use his wrist to draw his hands close; he might do anything. But here in this company, James just regards him with his own sprawling smile and turns his hand. He touches Thomas's fingers and his palm and his wrist and there is nothing in the touch to complicate anything.

"Someone's headed this way," says Charlotte. Richard is dead asleep under the edge of a blanket, a human barricade at the lean to's mouth.

A moment later, one of the Frenchman ducks down with his hands on his knees to peer inside. He's more beard than face and his accent is mangled, fine misting raindrops clinging to the blanket his has wrapped around his shoulders like a cape.

Frances pops up like a dog hearing a whistle. "There's food."

It makes sense this way. To be at the edges of the real world, digging fingernails in under the gristle of it and pulling, like scraping away a politely retouched painting to find the true original beneath. Thomas knows how difficult it will be as they draw closer in, as they move further away from the potential of being reclaimed, he knows he will be disjointed and shaking, overwhelmed, in-adept. But how brilliantly wonderful to be able to be that way.

Richard stirs as Thomas straightens up, somehow managing not to laugh at the way Frances looks so comically interested in the unsolicited offer. It's not funny-- they're probably all some degree of almost-starving, considering how much physical work they've been doing and running on quick mouthfuls of dry things shoved in bags. (A cautionary memory, eating a meal a Quaker woman had cooked up, rustic and beautiful, and then bringing it back violently. Thomas has trouble where the others might not, thanks to the asylum.)

It is very hospitable of the trappers, and Thomas says so. The man looks like he has something else on his mind, dithering, and Thomas tells him that if it's any trouble they certainly aren't obligated to share their food. Dissent among ranks won't bode well for them.

"Not that, not that, we don't mind," he says, peering past Thomas into the little shelter for a moment, eyes narrowed. Then-- "Your lady who's hurt, she's doing well?"

"She is."

"Who's minding her? You?"

Thomas isn't sure where this is going, and apparently neither is Frances, crouched near behind him and looking over at James briefly with a puzzled expression. After a moment Thomas tells him that's so, more or less, though it sounds like there are unspoken caveats.

"Our man here, he isn't doing as well. Would you look at him?"

"Oh," Frances says, sounding a little sympathetic, and Thomas pauses again before, carefully: "I'm not a doctor," but the Frenchman shrugs it off, eager for even a non-professional opinion, apparently. He beckons, and Thomas says quietly to everyone else, "Can you all ask the universe for that man to have a sprained ankle." Really, he doesn't think he'll be able to do much for anything worse. Charlotte does the math and grunts as she moves to get up, intent on going with him. Which is more than fine.

Before he gets up, Thomas looks at James. Well.

"Accept the things to which fate binds you," is quiet, not private because it can't be-- but still personal, the first half of a quote he knows James can finish.

Edited 2017-09-30 23:30 (UTC)

It would be generous to say he catches even half of what's said - how did they think to go disappear into the French territories? The idea seems completely desperate in hindsight - but the collective talk is enough for him to parse the meaning if not the delicacy of the tone. So instead of finishing what Thomas starts, he says, "If you need help - call out," and means it however Thomas cares to understand it. An extra pair of hands. For anything.

Charlotte steps put over Richard and straightens, shielding her face from the fine misting of rain. Bettina watches from the back of the leanto, propped up on her elbow and knife sharp. She hasn't slept, James thinks. Not for long anyway.

"Stay there with Bes," he tells her. Frances is already moving to rouse Richard. Sophie stretches briefly into all the vacated space then rolls back over, burrowing against Bettina's side. "I'll bring you something."

The Frenchman leads Thomas and Charlotte across the camp, pointing Frances and her companions toward the low fire and the bedraggled circle of similarly rough hewn men around it. Trailing after the girl - made some degree of bold by a shared language she must surely have thought lost to her -, James marks the shape of the three of them making for the sick tent with enough intensity to feel like he can still see them even as his attention turns to folding himself into the company at the fire.

"He fell down from a ledge a few days ago," the Frenchman is explaining - slowly. "Hit his head and now the fever refuses to be broken."

Unfortunate, as neurogenic fever will not be identified for a few centuries and is a crap shoot even then. Charlotte puts a hand on the sick man's forehead and gives Thomas a queasy look. He doesn't feel overwhelmingly positive about it himself, thinking back on times when he struggled with illness, experience offering no real insight to elusive internal problems. Rainwater makes it easy to put a cool rag on his forehead, and Thomas speaks quietly with the man observing them, deciding they might as well try getting his temperature down.

"When he comes around see if he'll drink some water," is the best advice he can give, not knowing what a doctor might suggest. (Cutting a hole in the back of the head open and putting dried peas or wooden pebbles in, apparently. Good thing Thomas has no idea.) The man he's speaking to, who calls himself Mercier, is amiable enough, pleased to have run into them for the sake of their ill companion and happy to talk about the area. Thomas watches Charlotte as she makes her way over to James and Frances, trying to stay aware of who watches them the most in return. Their ringleader is easygoing but indifferent, perhaps used to strange events out in the wilds of the New World, but Thomas doesn't particularly trust indifference.

His slightly pessimistic reflection is interrupted when Mercier says something surprising in response to one of his questions, and, huh. They talk a little more and Thomas joins the others at the fire, standing near enough to James to speak to him lowly.

"The northward plantation we were concerned with failed eight months ago and was abandoned," he says, "I'm told it's now 'haunted' and dangerous to travel through, which I take to mean someone unpleasant is camped there." It explains why there weren't more men scouring the woods in this direction, and it's good they didn't end up veering too close to-- bandits, or whatever.

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