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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

In which case, the book could be filled with nothing more than a series of disconnected words and he would still find some unrepentant joy in it: the rise and fall of Thomas's voice, as regular and true as a heart beating; the rhythm of his side moving against him; the soft rasp of his fingers turning pages; the warmth of the room that will mean all the soft bedding is too hot to sleep under, but for now is just an indicator of an understood intimacy. It is a mirror of a place divided, both near and distant. Every chill breath of air has been replaced by weighted humidity. Salt and tar and smoke smell is substituted by clean skin and fresh sheets, the mingled scents of oil and mint and birchbark salve. And this is the strangest sensation: to think of a drab room in London and not hate the shape containing the memory of it. To be unwounded. To taste nothing bitter. These two places can touch one another, connected by the sound of someone else's words that Thomas makes true. Surely that's what loving is -- to see the use of uneven things (the cold, the dark, years, Shakespeare on the page) in translation.

He is so much more capable of supporting the book between them than reading from it. Between them they turn backwards and forwards through it, a reconstruction that must in part be as accidental as it is significant. Cesario becomes Viola. The dead are just misplaced. Antonio, O my dear Antonio - how have the hours racked and tortured me since I have lost thee, says Sebastian, divorced from the laughable context of his marriage. James touches Thomas's wrist, the damaged skin of it, and contents himself with listening for longer than should be possible for all that he is so wordlessly tired.

There is dirt under his fingernails that can't be forgotten. There are questions which lurk beneath the mirror bright surface - they can't stay here, so in which direction will they go? What of the young women in their company? Richard? How far does the generosity of Abigail Ashe's self inflicted guilt by association extend? - but let them be the undercurrent to this instead of the other way around. He can be more than happy with that.

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.

In the morning there is breakfast for stomachs ruined on salt and grain and wild apples. There are fresh plain clothes too, fitting only approximately but welcome for how clean they are. "There is a chest with things that might be more suitable," Abigail Ashe tells Thomas in the the morning in the sitting room. She is standing at the head of the road patterned sofa where Bes lies in a nest of embroidered pillow, her leg propped up under Ida's examination. Abigail doesn't touch her - she holds her hands high against her middle, ready though should Bes cry out as the wound is redressed in daylight. "You're welcome to anything in it if you care to look, but they came from my father's estate."

The hours that follow seem strange, abbreviated and gentle. The other four of their companions have already been tucked carefully away into temporary houses - sympathetic homes where a guest or two might go unnoticed for a week or more. Though at Bes's request, the next time Ida returns it's in the company of Charlotte and Sophie. Charlotte holds Bes's hand in the parlor and Sophie bursts into tears at the sight of them. "Oh Mister Thomas, you look so beautiful," she cries, smothering her face into her fingers. "Please let me show you how to stitch those flowers like I said I would. I know you don't need to learn it but I want to."

By day, they float through the house and it's series of perfectly respectable rooms and for a time the most difficult question anyone applies in their direction is How are you feeling today? Bettina mends a pile of clothes in a chair warm with sunshine. James studies the world from a series of windows. They are secret people here. Not ghosts, just-- removed. And that's fine. More than. It is unspeakably soft in a way that defies questioning. At night, they read from books selected in the afternoon. In the company of other people, James touches sometimes Thomas's shoulder or sits so near that their legs touch from hip through knee. When they're alone, he kisses him. He strokes his fingers through Thomas's hair. He sleeps tangled with him.

Until he doesn't. Until he wakes up while the house is still, grey pre-dawn leaking through the narrow space between the curtains. In the dark, the house seems like it belongs more to the tenuous land it's built on. It's just a house, not a sanctuary. On Abigail's writing desk near its window, there are neat stacks of correspondence to prove it. And--

He isn't gone long. Minutes, maybe. He's careful not to disturb Thomas when he climbs back into bed, though sleep eludes him after. When Thomas does finally wake, James touches his temple. Draws the line of his brow with his thumb.

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.

It's a deceptively simple shift - Thomas pulls and James does nothing to alter his trajectory though it means all but pinning Thomas there -, but it turns the direction of his thoughts toward more pleasant ends. Thomas is sturdy under him, warm from sleep. It makes reconsidering the purpose of the things he'd brought back to the room with him easy.

He breathes a low hum into Thomas's neck to match and lingers there with all his weight. A series of small touches follows: his hand at Thomas's side, breathing near his cheek over a series of meandering kisses. Eventually however his elbow finds the mattress so he can actually look at the other man rather than simply crushing him. Regarding Thomas there under him-- he finds himself abruptly self satisfied and unable to temper the slow, smug smile that draws at his mouth.

"I have something for you."

(It's not innuendo, though Christ - it could be.)

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.

He pauses. The shape of that - Captain McGraw - strikes some strange, previously untouched chord in him. It's an odd note in his ear; it feels both like it both does and doesn't belong to him. But it's just a flicker. He can decide later if he cares for it or not and what either means.

(James McGraw never would have been a captain. The thing that made Flint one either wouldn't have existed or mattered.)

Instead, James's grin grows reflexively wider. He hums, "Not that," low like a laugh and thinks about but doesn't actually shift his hand to smooth the disparate angles of Thomas's hair. Thomas sounds so sleep rough, so very much at a kind of pleasant half capacity that he imagines not disturbing it. He's seen the man so near to sleep more times on this side of the world more than he ever did on the other now, but rarely so content. What a shame it would be to sharpen him in any significant way.

He does though, rolling up from beside Thomas to retrieve the the 'gift' stolen from Abigail Ashe's writing desk. He deposits it in parts on Thomas's chest: newspapers from Boston, Virginia, South Carolina. Most are dated well before their escape, and either Savannah has no press of its own or Abigail has no desire to hold onto back copies of it's local trade. He'd seen no mention of the destruction and subsequent burning of the plantation in the few pages he'd looked at. There are no obvious advertisements calling for the heads of thirty to forty escaped convict slaves. Not yet. No,he'd brought them up intending to comb through for mention of the Caribbean, of trade in Jamaica, any murmur of what must have come to pass there in those lower latitudes in the intervening months since being made to quit them. And maybe those things are in there somewhere. But maybe Thomas will have some better use for them - all the newspaper articles he could ever care to read.

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.

A moment's searching reveals the small passage that's caught Thomas's attention; it hardly takes a minute to get the gist of the piece. "Huh," he says. Then: "I've never seen the benefit of a person being made with so much height."

(Get fucked, Billy Bones.)

"Did he attend your salons?" He's unfolding the next paper, picked entirely at random, and thumbing through it until there - at the bottom of the page some familiar sequence of letters catches his eye. It's nothing. Notice of the arrival of the brig Skyward in Boston from Barbados, fat with cotton and tobacco. Or is nothing? He checks the date again, measures the distance from New England to the West Indies in time. Maybe that is cargo whose transport could have been interrupted had circumstances been-- something else entirely.

"Is he good looking? Alexeyevich." Had he asked it when it had first occurred to him and before finding the shipping notice, the question might have been punctuated with a healthy dose of razoring humor. But it's fine as a distraction as well. James turns the page.

Edited 2017-10-20 01:41 (UTC)

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.)

There is a series of seconds there where they are both in distant, separate places particular to only themselves (as far as anything they are can be divorced from the other). Thomas, transported to rooms characterized by the bounding, vibrant conversation held in them rather than lovely wallpaper or rich furniture; James, to the deck of a ship looking down from the quarter deck into the face of a queen who understood-- everything.

Strange, to be so divided and yet paired in some mutual, cognizant desire to know.

"Too bad," he says over the rustle of paper. They are flush against one another, shoulders and hips touching. Breathing on similar rotations. Matched in both things that matter (what they want, the desire to be so near, the elemental divide of attention between the person beside them and some persistent, unspeakable appetite for information under their fingertips) and ones that don't (the wear on their secondhand clothes, the similar temperature of bodies after sleeping in the same bed). His eyes skim down the pages open across his lap. "It would've been a good story."

"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.

Both names are familiar to him, though neither for the colorful reason it's come up in conversation. "No, I don't believe he is. It's some Scot now - a member of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, I believe. Whether that speaks well of your lover or not, I can't say." He pauses, idle as he thumbs through a few more pages then dismisses the issue entirely, trading it for one across Thomas's knee. "The society owns a significant number of slaves on Barbados whose work funds their missions."

Because of course they do. James shoots him a sidelong look, wry quirk of his brow communicating his feelings on the extent of such ludicrous hypocrisy.

"I don't remember hearing about Governor Cornbury being ridden out on a rail though. Very likely he was simply recalled him after he was made rich like Bellomont before him." Holding such positions really only seems to end in one of an extremely limited list of ways and he knows trading on the account had been a shockingly straightforward affair in Jersey for some years when he'd first began.

He begins to page through his most recent selection. Should the easiness of this be more surreal than it? "Tell me if you see any mention of New Providence, will you? Or Spanish ships."

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.

There is an article in the Boston Gazette discussing some manner of the state of Bahamian trade that seems-- not out of the ordinary, but perhaps that's why his eye lingers. If there is any veracity in the concept of spirits, maybe this is how the world seems to them. It's as the after image of a flame that lingers after looking into a fire. It's-- intimate, somehow. To be so invisible. And shouldn't that bother him? Shouldn't the reason he's looking for any trace of what they'd done, even the empty space where some whisper would have appeared had it meant anything, be to galvanize some sharper, more dangerous thing? There should be some restlessness, some scratching in him that extends beyond an inability to sleep through dawn.

But he sets the article aside (it's nothing after all), bends his head to read what lies under Thomas's fingers, and finds--

He doesn't know. That the uneven, hovering sensation extends there too; that perhaps the only place it doesn't touch is this room and the point where Thomas is beside him (how at ease he seems, the shape of his body under the sheet and quilt, the natural scatter of paper around him).

"Dead," James says. He blinks, eyes on the page but his attention wandering past it. There is something there that has nothing to do with Teach and everything to do with him - or what he had been or how the world had known him. The urge to paint the dead as some irrationally romantic figure looms between lines of print, which is phenomenally ridiculous. He'd tried to kill the man on a beach himself. "Months ago now. I'm surprised it isn't in every paper from here to New York."

How the fuck will anyone know what was true a year from now? Two? Ten?

(They won't. But he'd known that already.)

His thumb moves absently along the edge of the page under his hand. Over and over. After a moment, he asks, "Would you like to know what we did?"

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.

It should be as simple as turning his hand over under Thomas's fingertips. He knows the shape of this already, the place it began. He knows the purpose (because it's his). But distilling a decade into its most vital parts--

"You roughly know the state of Nassau as I found it when first we arrived on the island. Over the course of the next ten months, I found myself a crew - a ship - connections. My initial thought was to gain enough wealth or influence with which to broker some manner of exchange. However, when it became clear that had become an impossibility - when there was nothing left in England but its latent, unclaimed brutality-- I knew them it would never be finished. The thing that England, that Spain, that the civilized world is can't abide places or people that exist outside the illusion of decency its people force each other to labor under. To maintain that lie requires the ruin of things and when next it came to burn Providence Island, I was determined it would face an alternative possibility."

He laces their fingers together, touching Thomas's wrist with his other hand - tracing his knuckles and the small bones. The ruined skin, but the unscarred flesh too. There's no heat to it. Not yet (there will be).

Instead, James huffs out a laugh and closes the bulletin across his knee. "But you're well aware of the resources that would demand." They had spent hours, weeks, months discussing what a Nassau capable of sustaining itself would require, and the breadth of this - the radical divorce from an empire so determined to keep what it believed itself owed, a world balanced by its definition of monstrosity - was so far beyond even that. "Which meant either convincing the pirates of Nassau to take an interest in their own future, or acquiring the means to purchase it for them."

If even now he can't completely grasp the hypocrisy of it, the damaged patriarchal demands he'd made not just of his own crew but the whole fucking island (necessary or otherwise)-- well, it's unlikely he'll piece it out here in this room.

"Lacking the latter, I aimed for the former. But then a contact in Port Royal told me a story about a Spaniard."

It's not so complex a truth, really.

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.

"Not at all," he admits readily, raising his eyes from the intermingling of their fingers to Thomas's face. He smiles at him; it's as true as any other part - the absent, continuous shifting of his fingers, the lurching desire to make this kinder than it is countered by the immediate need for Thomas to know this to its smallest detail, it's most minor moment.

What a gift, to find him here. To know they have not yet reached the end of this - that there must be some use to a thousand broken pieces after all. They can't stay in this room forever and what lays beyond it must be altered to allow them. Some day, they are going to make something together.

"Luckily, he died well before I would have been required to hold a conversation with him - and after passing along a secret so valuable that even a fraction of it might fund the most unlikely resistance. You see this Spaniard, who had tried to turn his superiors from ruin and had been rewarded with a knife, was one of only a handful of men who knew the intended course of the Spanish treasure galleon made fat with profits from the Americas and prepared now to make a mad dash for Spain. Perhaps driven by his imminent death, he told every detail to an English merchant captain, who wrote it all down in his ship's log book."

That's where the story ends. Everything after must be a recounting of fact, exactly as he knows it: an unhappy crew, a secret, a thief, a young woman with her hand at the neck of all of Nassau trade (who he believes Thomas would have liked, in a world where circumstances had been different; Eleanor Guthrie had been so ready to be formed), a boatswain who enabled a lie, the bloody politics of that place and its disparate crews and how keen he'd been to turn it all into his own weapon.

(If anything slips into obscurity by the telling, it is a house built on the island's interior. It is a woman's loneliness and what damage had been done there. Maybe he doesn't think of it, or maybe it's easiest to reduce complicated regret into its simplest terms: that the crew came to mistrust him.)

The rest can be relentless - five million Spanish dollars on a beach, a mutiny, a murder, the capture of the Man o' War and the persistent narrowing of the world in the aftermath. How England had come to them and demanded either ruin or a united front in the form of such violence and terror to make a people which had believed themselves invincible for a thousand years begin to doubt. On and on and on.

"Tell me," he says. "If you'd like me to stop."

Edited 2017-10-22 16:28 (UTC)

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.

In which case how can he stop? How can he not say everything? There's no instance in which he can stop himself once committed to a decision, a path, a narrative. He cannot fundamentally alter himself as easily as the world around him; that's someone else's purview. It must be.

Pardons. England and all its bloody agents. A storm, casting a ship so violently off its course. A beach. A queen. Her daughter. An unlikely union. An oath sworn between himself and an old enemy turned ally across. A partnership, strange and absolute and an island where all this blood must still be buried. Where for a moment, he knew the shape of a place beyond England and all it understood to be true. It was there in the cup of his hands. What a near and beautiful thing.

His hands are soft, gentle as he traces Thomas's fingers, his wrists, touching his knee through the sheet. If his voice is rough, it's from the demand of talking-- and talking-- and talking-- It's so many words. They pour out of him like blood from a wound, a decade of secrets as water filling a pierced hull. How many syllables fit into the mouth of a single person? A hundred. A thousand. Enough, enough, enough.

"For so long, I did this thing because I thought it's what you would have wanted. I told myself that every act of violence, every murdered man or woman or child, every lie was necessary to create the thing you dreamed of. That all of it was mutable if it meant assembling a version of the world that matched how you understood it. But," he says. They are so looped together - their fingers and the rise and fall of their breathing and the places they've found themselves.

But.

"It wasn't true. I came to realize I didn't care if what we did matched your desires in any way. All that mattered was the shape of what was left behind us - to uncover the eyes of anyone looking. To destroy what ruined not just you and your dream for the world, but a thousand other people's. Her's. Mine. My war. What I wanted."

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.

Is it possible to make a person understand why this needed to be done? Madi had grasped it, but he isn't stupid or egotistical enough to think he played any significant part in shaping how she knew the world. Who else? If nothing else was altered by what they did - ships still come from Jamaica and Antigua, there are still slaves on New Providence and Barbados and a hundred plantations here in the colonies -, is there a single person left who was given something instead of having it stripped from them? Had anyone known what the point was?

(Charles Vane, but he's dead.)

He touches the back of Thomas's hand, reflexively securing it there against him. "I don't expect you to understand or love the necessity of it. This doesn't belong to you." He doesn't care. Thomas doesn't need to look at columns of shipping, pounds of cotton and sugar, and be erased by it (anything but that; James can't bear one more thing undoing him).

"We don't need to be so exactly aligned. It isn't required."

He can be appalled or wearied by it. He can wish for something different or better. They aren't in a position where being disunited is tantamount to killing all or part of themselves. It's fine. All that matters is thst the words have been said and that Thomas has the option. After all this someone should be able to make whatever choice they care to and still be happy for it, knowing that no one will come in the night and ruin them over it. That no one will pull the things they love or what they created apart because of it.

Edited 2017-10-23 15:12 (UTC)

For a while Thomas looks at him, and doesn't say anything. His expression is more neutral than it was a decade ago when he would be searching for how to say something, but it's similar; James will still know it, even if only from their months together in this part of the world.

"It's-- interesting. A few things are."

He doesn't have the eloquence of those days. Maybe he's lost something irreparable, or maybe it's simply that he's out of practice. Interesting doesn't seem the be the right word (he frowns a little), but after another too-long pause he can't come up with a way to redo that, so he moves on instead.

"I can't tell the exact extent to which you think what you've done is fine, and to what extent you're miserable over it. So I don't know, precisely, what it is you think I'm aligning myself to. But I-" and here he stops, gaze slid sideways, unfocused at some point across the room. Focused inside somewhere. He shakes his head.

"I know that I am not the person you fell in love with anymore. I see it sometimes after I've said something, or not reacted to something you've done or said, and a while later I'll think, 'Oh, I've done that wrong.' I'm sure sometimes I don't notice at all, because I'm trying to think now about what that man would say to this and-- I can't picture it. I'm sorry."

Thomas is so sincere. James and Miranda loved him for how good he was, and he's sure he isn't, anymore. He thought he understood emotions and the depth of them and Bethlem taught him otherwise. He had never touched such darkness in himself, never thought it possible, and never really understood the whole human race as a result. Until then, in that dark place, when that grotesque thing peeled back the face of itself inside of him and made itself known, unable to be exorcised. Anger, and despair, and hate. God, how he hated. It had horrified him. His father's son after all.

"I don't need weeks to decide how I feel about it. I don't need to placate you, or change myself to fit something. I don't-- I don't have the capacity, right now, to maintain anything like being disturbed. I'm tired of it, James. I'm not going to force myself."

His fingers curl against the other man's. He still isn't looking at him, struggling to find the right words. His memory abandons him, refusing the timid option of selecting some poignant quotation.

"If you like, I will leave a caveat here, that if in a year's time something shifts, I reserve the right to be angry with you."

Despite everything he knows, there are still expectations - habitual, practiced, the requirement of so many years pinning a thousand decisions both small and large on the imagined fortitude of the man's opinions - that Thomas should say only exactly what he means to. That he should be somehow immoveable, a point by which to navigate when nothing else is as solid. Because Thomas is right. James has no idea which parts of this history he's proud of, which are dark decisions validated by a goal he still believes to have been worthwhile, and which simply weigh on him. It's a tangle whose body has mattered too much for too long that sorting the pieces is impossible when the whole of it has already been buried. He expects to be done with this. Thomas is somehow meant to say the thing that makes it finished. Or rather, he's supposed to say the thing that enables James, who has grown used to reaching conclusions, to fix the point from which to draw one now.

He waits. There is something high and crooked in his ribcage under Thomas's hand and for a moment it feels like all he needs to do let his attention linger for Thomas to become more--... something he doesn't have a word for. Then the feeling will regulate. It will become a line on a page he could read or refuse to.

But eventually the quiet lingers long enough that when he next draws in a breath, it's a laugh - crooked and bewildered, unsure sure which parts are because this is ridiculous and what is frustration and who he could be angry with. It's a long list. He finds himself unable to pick a name even as he takes Thomas's face in both his hands.

Sunlight is coming strong through the curtain now. It's late in the morning and the light of it reaches across the floor to the foot of the bed. "You're right. You aren't him," he says, so bizarrely content to say it that he almost laughs again. "But I'm not sure he would have cared for me like this. Who he loved would have wanted to return to-- to an earlier state. To undo it."

He would rather that bloody corpse in the ground, he would rather have tried, he would rather know than be stumbling in the dark though there are parts of that which are so viciously selfish that James doubts Thomas Hamilton in his fine house or a quiet garden could forgive him. Miranda dies for it. Thomas does too. Vane and Eleanor and Gates and Billy and DeGroot and Teach and the wild, dangerous hope and the temporry but happy security of an entire maroon island are the casualties of being unwilling to picture a version of himself where all this rolls itself backwards. Maybe it would be justified to hold on to that understanding if more than just who they are had been altered for it, if any part had been successful. But it wasn't.

But he doesn't regret it.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject