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ƬƠƬƛԼԼƳ ƇƠƊЄƤЄƝƊЄƝƬ ƑԼƖƝƬ ([personal profile] katabasis) wrote2017-06-11 10:27 pm

[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.
aletheian: (𝓼𝓮𝓿𝓮𝓷𝓽𝔂𝓼𝓲𝔁)

[personal profile] aletheian 2017-10-18 06:24 am (UTC)(link)
Thomas curls into him, around him, settling against him with the kind of ease and pleasure that tells a whole story; familiar from learning each other so bright-eyed and besotted in London, practiced from night after night of clinging to each other desperately in a prison in the wilds north of Spanish Florida, natural from being born and meant to be here. He splays his hand over James's chest, over his heart, running from the height of his collarbones to his hip, then finally to his hand to help steady the book laid open, his other between them, tangled in James's shirt, fingers pressed to him.

James doesn't like Shakespeare, can rarely grasp the cadence of it aloud-- still, apparently. Thomas thinks it's fine, more interesting to study as a window in the way the high born are amazed a peasant can write. Wildly irrelevant facts, all. His head is resting on James's shoulder and James is reading to him, and after a while, Thomas moves his hand to press the back of it against his face, making a mess of overwhelmed tears against the soft material of his lover's nightshirt. He doesn't need them to stop or open a window to breathe, he doesn't need to be alone - from anyone else, he would, this small moment of something old and scarred finally beginning to unravel so intensely personal. James is allowed to see it. It's as much his as it is Thomas's.

He doesn't try to choke it back, just lets it pass through him, and when he's breathing normally again and has smudged everything off his face, he tilts up to press soft kisses against James's throat, the underside of his jaw. He is so precious to him. This is-- Thomas thought he would die there. He would dream about it, about being too old to even escape into his own head anymore, his memory faded away, buried in an unmarked ditch at the back of the plantation. As though the universe was making sure he experienced every hollow note of damnation. He had accepted it.

Burned away.

"It's the same iambic pentameter as Donne," is what he says eventually, with such achingly fond exasperation.
aletheian: (𝓷𝓲𝓷𝓮𝓽𝔂𝓷𝓲𝓷𝓮)

[personal profile] aletheian 2017-10-18 11:55 am (UTC)(link)
With an exhale like a laugh, Thomas shifts up enough to touch their foreheads together, the way he likes best. He is so, unbelievably tired. He is bruised and tender and can feel his heartbeat in every piece of himself like a painful, constant flinch, bodily exhaustion like he's never known, his spirit so wrung-out he doesn't know how he can still speak. He curls long fingers around the back of James's neck, laying half across him.

"I've been asleep since we parted," is what he says, murmured into him. That's all. No blood and horror, no bleak misery or crippling deaths. He's been asleep, and James has been a knight wanderer, looking for him, waiting to wake him up. To resurrect him.

What more rest could he want? How can he bear the thought of spending even a moment of time unconscious when he can be spending it pressing kisses into James's skin, holding James's hand, listening to James's voice? God, of course he has to sleep, he will shake apart if he doesn't, but he will hold this moment in his hands for as long as he can.

He settles against him again, after bumping their noses together, a little higher this time. Thomas reaches out to push the book open, then commandeer a hold over it to flip through pages (his fingertips linger over words, opportunities to read so sparse, relieved once again he can still see and understand them). This play is not a standout favorite of his and he doesn't have it committed to memory - Antony and Cleopatra he could find specific passages quite quickly even today, he suspects - and so it takes a little trial and error navigation to find what he wants. But he does remember.

Skimming past major plot points, away from primary twists and mishaps. In the realm of minor characters he finds Antonio, and his unrequited - but genuine - adoration. He dedicates himself to Sebastian with dangerous, selfless abandon, and in the dialogue Thomas reads aloud, seems to reach across the rest of the work, daring, challenging. His is the only great love in this story, the others dishonest and quick to change, trembling seeds of truth cast aside for the relief of convention in the end. Only Antonio is unresolved, left like a beacon highlighting why the rest seem so shallow.

Thomas has recited words from memory for others, he has whispered things to himself to keep from forgetting, but he has not read to another person since the last time he did so for James. If his voice is not steady at first, it becomes so, like no time at all has passed.
aletheian: (𝓼𝓲𝔁𝓽𝔂)

[personal profile] aletheian 2017-10-19 01:59 am (UTC)(link)
Until his eyes are too bleary, until his voice becomes rough-edged with strain (he will be used to this again, soon), Thomas reads to him this out-of-order story and they create something so personal and meaningful for how disjointed it is. What was the first thing you did? I laid down with him. We read together.

Once, books were things that ferried unspoken emotion between them, shared and debated on and enjoyed not just for the pleasure of doing so (because there was such pleasure, in spades), but because they had not yet been able to share each other. It was a way to express something without saying so and now-- it's a part of that expression in itself. The difference is so small, but in this dizzy moment, feels so significant to Thomas. When he wakes he won't remember who turned the lamp down, or if the light of dawn was creeping beneath the curtains, but he will remember the sound of James's voice and the smell of his skin and the way the soft hair of his beard feels against his cheek. Barely coherent he tips the book off their laps, beside them or onto the floor or into outer space, who knows (he used to dog-ear books, it drove Miranda mad) - and pushes James back into the pillows, against the mattress, unwilling and unable to be separated from him even enough to pull sheets and blankets out and over.

It doesn't matter, anyway. It's so warm.

He falls asleep with their faces touching, with their fingers tangled together.
aletheian: (𝓼𝓮𝓿𝓮𝓷𝓽𝔂𝓽𝓱𝓻𝓮𝓮)

[personal profile] aletheian 2017-10-19 07:12 am (UTC)(link)
James wakes early in the morning and Thomas, after the first (which he slept through so soundly and tiredly the house could have been burning down and he wouldn't have stirred), wakes in the middle of the night when it's pitch black and he doesn't remember where he is. The seconds of cold panic before he reorients himself are indescribable, but aren't nearly as bad as the strange, crushing journey he finds himself on when his mind decides that this set of sensations means he is curled around Miranda, and nothing past those days had ever happened, until in the next second everything has.

He holds Sophie as she cries and promises to let her teach him, he sits with Bettina, he listens to the muted conversations Ida has with the other women. She is more blunt than most people, and Thomas finds it almost perversely comforting that someone else in the world understands the wretchedness of Peter's impact on the world. His daughter finds him in the room used as a library and stands quietly in the doorway; Thomas waits for her patiently, but whatever she wants to ask him never gets past her nerves. He doesn't press her. It'll come eventually.

He gets the impression that Ida and her brother-in-law, Cyrus, are watching the lot of them to make sure no one is overwhelmed too quickly. An effort that is silently appreciated.

"Mm." A low hum, contented under James's hand. It's easier to wake in the light, something about it failing to trick his subconscious into time-travel. Thomas sighs and stretches, and curls his arms around James after, rolling onto his back and pulling the other man with (and atop) him.

Somewhat smothered now, he sleepily considers that he's miscalculated this move, but it remains too comfortable to correct. "Mmph," he says.
aletheian: (𝓮𝓲𝓰𝓱𝓽𝔂𝓷𝓲𝓷𝓮)

[personal profile] aletheian 2017-10-19 07:55 pm (UTC)(link)
It could be.

Thomas doesn't know if he can anymore-- maybe, he thinks, though he doesn't know what would facilitate it. Time? Gentle application? Metaphorically tearing a bandage off? He wants to, in his head, unsure if anything else is capable of cooperating; something that he wanted to die off for fear of it betraying him in an awful moment. (He has not yet been captured by the thought of Would James even want me if he knew it all, but it lurks there, like a wreck beneath dark waters.) Surely if he could feel flushed and on the edge of something in a dirty room with a dying man beside them, then he could- they might- but what if? What if, what if--

The morning is too warm and safe, he is too sleep-muddled to overthink it. 'It', James may be talking about something entirely different, and he is not yet coherent enough to ponder on the details, luxuriating in the fact that he can allow himself this instead of the paranoid, immediate alertness of the past decade.

Thomas tips his head back, hair sticking up in all directions, and raises his eyebrows. He drawls, "Do you ever, Captain McGraw."

Look, he isn't awake yet.
aletheian: (𝓯𝓸𝓻𝓽𝔂𝓽𝓱𝓻𝓮𝓮)

[personal profile] aletheian 2017-10-20 12:51 am (UTC)(link)
He can be whatever he wants to be. Captain, lieutenant, soldier, pirate. He is a hero and a poet, he is Odysseus, he is.. leaving the bed. Thomas makes a lazy sound of protest at this development, but doesn't hinder him. He rubs sleep out of his eyes, finally properly awake when James flops a stack of papers on him.

(Is it all right, to let moments change? Is it safe to trust that they will have more mornings like this?)

Thomas sits up against the headboard (still with his side touching the other man's, so incapable of leaving too much space between them), his expression-- curious, interested, a little timid. He has read pieces of newspaper articles, but Oglethorpe would frequently remove the front page, obscuring dates and further lending to the surreal mentality of that place. Seeing it now, the years. God. And then, a little warm ribbon of memory, and he leans over to press his forehead against James's temple. It feels like yesterday, that conversation, the start of this; it feels like a hundred years ago.

Amazing, skimming through headlines and passing fingertips over text of articles and announcements. He's humbled by the passage of time, the industry and passion of people, news about war and politics and births and deaths, the state of fashion, the state of the harvest. Taxes and weather. He picks the farthest away first, having been sequestered in one place for so long, holding it so that James can look as well. He doesn't know what to latch onto first. Maybe it doesn't matter.

After a while, "I met Peter Alexeyevich." His attention on the smallest blip of a report about the distant conflict between Russian and Ottoman Empires (or Sweden? the journalist cannot decide). It is singularly most irrelevant thing to their current predicament in probably all the papers combined-- and yet Thomas knows the emperor it's about. The word is strange. "Half a foot taller than I am and unnaturally brilliant. I wonder if he'll last."

Monarchs seem to turn over like coins in someone's pocket. Thomas is only half-certain he knows who exactly is on England's throne right now.
aletheian: (𝓯𝓲𝓿𝓮)

[personal profile] aletheian 2017-10-20 02:51 am (UTC)(link)
Thomas huffs a quiet laugh about the height complaint; personally he agrees, but generally because he's of a height on his own that anyone towering over him is an alarming change for how rare it is. One hand shifts position to James's thigh, curled lightly over the curve of muscle, thumb describing small circles. Comfortable.

"He did attend my salons," is a little wryly teasing, for seeing that quick succession of pointed questions. And then-- the thought splinters, Thomas thinking of those days in closer detail than he's done in years, of the confidence in debate he had, of colorful rooms and experimental theories in philosophy, of all the things that he'd be unable to navigate now. That he'd try to hold and watch fall and shatter instead. His hand has stopped its small movement on James's leg.

Lost for a moment. But he returns.

"I suppose he was." Dark eyes, darker hair. Enthusiastic. But: "If you're asking if I've interfered with the Tsar of Russia, the answer is no."

You silly goose. (Good humor wrenched back to himself, out of the quiet distance of dissociation.)
aletheian: (𝓼𝓲𝔁𝓽𝔂𝓯𝓲𝓿𝓮)

[personal profile] aletheian 2017-10-20 04:47 am (UTC)(link)
"Then perhaps I'll tell you I did, the next time it comes up."

When on earth would it come up.

There is an article about Boston's first granary, and another about fighting between Canadian French and a Presbyterian settlement in Massachusetts. It is so surreal to think he's lived in America for only five years (it feels long, it has not felt like living), when he's been removed from England for so much longer. Bethlem was nowhere. He is no longer English; surely the dead have no nationality, and if he had he'd renounce it anyway. Is he American? Is James Bahamian?

"I don't know if it's a better story," he begins, "but I did have an incredibly surreal four-day affair with Viscount Cornbury. The Honorable Edward Hyde," and the latter title is somewhat dry-- for the absurdity of it, or because James will probably recognize the name as the Royal Dragoon turned MP who participated in the 1688 power turnover. "Enormously keen on dressing like and being treated like a woman, though he had no interest in acting like one. We talked about the dissolving of Parliament and education reform the whole time. And then he was sent to protect the colonies, here, and was made Governor of New Jersey. I received two of the most utterly mad letters from him trying to decipher the things his predecessor had been up to and trying to avoid being hanged by the Lutherans. I can't imagine he's still installed."

But he could be, and that is a strange thought; the possibility of someone knowing him. I never did write back the last time, he thinks, but doesn't say aloud. It hadn't been a pressing matter.
aletheian: (𝓷𝓲𝓷𝓮𝓽𝔂𝓷𝓲𝓷𝓮)

[personal profile] aletheian 2017-10-22 01:22 am (UTC)(link)
Does anything speak well of anybody he knew then? Everyone varying degrees of toxic pretending they collectively weren't as bad as the Cromwellian nightmare they'd woken from, but all equally complicit in Europe's imperialist destruction of the world. No single Englishman, aristocrat or peasant, can say they haven't benefited from slavery in the New World, he thinks; the Hamilton family certainly did, even if no one had ever seen it face to face. (Until now.) Pirates may be different, but he suspects only by degrees; the illness is simply too widespread.

It would be easy to feel sad and guilty about it, but Thomas is too aware of how unhelpful and superficial that would be. His thoughts turn to the Quakers who shuttled them from the wilderness to Abigail's house, who have among them members practiced at sending the enslaved to northern territories and even Europe. But they are abstract notions. He doesn't yet know what to make of a life that's--

A life.

"I will." Of New Providence and Spanish ships. He can guess why. Thomas tilts his head to touch James's briefly, just a little thing. There is a thread of emotion in him, an unbalanced thing that says lazing around and not getting up and immediately getting to work is wrong and dangerous, and he spends a while inspecting that.

"I don't know that this is either," he says after god knows how long. There's a small announcement, somewhat locally - from the secretary of the northernmost block of the territory, Tobias Knight, offering a monetary reward for any reliable recent news of the pirate Blackbeard.
aletheian: (𝓼𝓮𝓿𝓮𝓷𝓽𝔂𝓼𝓮𝓿𝓮𝓷)

[personal profile] aletheian 2017-10-22 04:59 am (UTC)(link)
Maybe it's an old paper, maybe just not the right one. Maybe in a hundred years every story about every single pirate will be written based on rumor, some forgotten entirely, some pure fabrication and never having lived at all. Thomas is not a pirate, and he'll be forgotten entirely. (He already has been.) History can't remember everyone.

What would it say? He tried.

Not worth keeping a record of.

Thomas doesn't offer any condolences because James doesn't sound like he needs any-- but doesn't sound like he's glad of it, either. Some things are just like that, he supposes. He moves his hand and lets his fingertips brush over the small movement he's making, along his thumb, to the back of his hand. Not stilling him, not restricting, simply being there with him. Does he want to know? Does he want to hear about how James lived without boundary, raged against civilization, screamed, fought, commanded, bled? Maybe it will be all right-- to know James did when he couldn't. To know James screamed enough for them both.

"Yes."

He doesn't clarify Only if you want to tell me or When you're ready. He trusts James to know that already.
aletheian: (𝓯𝓸𝓻𝓽𝔂𝓽𝔀𝓸)

[personal profile] aletheian 2017-10-22 10:58 am (UTC)(link)
He distracts himself, at first. With the feel of James's touch against his skin, such a divine thing, that he never thought he'd feel again; he can remember days when all he wanted was to know what this felt like. Just this. James and his rolled sleeves and his loosened necktie and rough sailor's fingers plying through his books, wrapping around the crystal stems of his glasses. He distracts himself with the aching knowledge of what it became clear that had become an impossibility means - thinking about James holding his sanity together with a deluded thought of getting him out of Bethlem somehow. Thinking about what he and Miranda must have gone through being told he had-- not just died, but taken his own life.

Thomas sets the papers aside and puts his other hand over James's forearm. Linking them together. Edges of puzzle pieces completing the larger picture of both their lives.

Whatever happens in this story, he knows the ending. He can feel it like a knife slicing through his fingers, past desperate resistance to his heart, unstoppable because the wound was made when he first saw James again, standing there destroyed and crying. Thomas had been reborn. It was joyous, and crushing, and beautiful. And yet he knew even then: Thomas had tried and failed, suffered for it, and was sent away to the plantation. James had tried and failed, suffered for it, and was sent away to the plantation. Tied by their hands together now, by how much they've loved each other always, by this fate. You didn't have to, he wants to say. It was my fault, you didn't have to take it.

He doesn't say it. He knows James did have to.

"Had your Spanish improved?" is quiet. The humor does not fully swallow the other emotions in his voice, transparent to this man as ever.
aletheian: (𝓯𝓲𝓯𝓽𝓮𝓮𝓷)

[personal profile] aletheian 2017-10-23 12:08 am (UTC)(link)
How convenient - how impossible, how dangerous. He remembers every instance of James telling him stories of his adventures sailing, aware on some level how sanitized they were (and much more aware now). It's easy to experience this in the same way, though he knows it's more than that. Vastly more. Parts confession and stitching themselves closer together.

"Never, my love." Thomas squeezes his hands.

(Don't ever hold your tongue to try and spare my feelings, he had said to him, months ago. That day before he outlined his failed escape. I need all of you.)

Thomas is not yet used to existing in a state where he does not have to do something (think something, comply with something). But here he is and-- James, too, is free from that; he doesn't have to stop, but he doesn't have to tell him, either. Thomas will accept it no matter what-- even though he knows it might put him in danger, if James ever wants to know his story of their time apart. It'll be all right.
aletheian: hands can mean anything!! (𝓷𝓲𝓷𝓮𝓽𝔂𝓼𝓮𝓿𝓮𝓷)

[personal profile] aletheian 2017-10-23 07:30 am (UTC)(link)
My war.

Flowers, handkerchiefs, rings and tokens, art and old books and lovely pets; so many things lovers bring each other, gifts sent as proof of devotion. He wonders in all of human history - in all true human history - has a man come to another and laid down the skeleton of a war he fought for him. Is the blood of every murdered man, woman, and child also on Thomas's hands? Is every lie his own, too? Thomas has to take the man he loves and hold him up against the sharper picture of the ruinous things he's done, not just tuck them away under the smoothed-over sheet of well, he was a pirate, and I don't care anyway.

Because Thomas does care. He cares so damn much, enough that it's almost crippling to breathe in and truly know. The weight of being loved so much, the weight of his failure, the weight of everything done in his name.

(Do you think less of me for it?

Tonight.
)

Thomas breathes out and -

He doesn't. He doesn't think less of him. All that time, being starved and beaten, tortured and experimented on, violated, bled, brutalized, enslaved-- for every hurt done to him James took it out on the world that put him there. It's awful, it's awful, but there would be no more abuse and no more evil if everyone were dead, too.

For a long time Thomas doesn't say anything. When he moves at last it's slight, shifting just enough (so unwilling to part) to put his hand over James's heart.

What I wanted.

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