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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And just like that, the room is just one off a flooded garden where mud is tracked in on the bottoms of boots, where soaked coats drip on the floorboards, and James's face tightens at being addressed then closes like a vice for the doctor. He tips his after him as he passes into the room, attention briefly rapt on some spot between where the man's shoulder blades must be and thinks about... the shape of something that he won't name. He suspects Benjamin's condition has rather more to do with being beaten until bloody, but fuck. He isn't a doctor, now is he? He looks to Thomas, raises an eyebrow, then cedes his ground.

And continues to give it, though sluggishly to the point that as the second overseer replaces his hat on his head to go back out into the rain he says to Marshall, "Have him put up the horses." He meets Flint's eye, then shifts out into the sheets of weather.

With a question about the mule - should it be stabled? No, clearly not - Marshall puts him to it. "Mind you don't get any ideas while you're alone with them," he laughs.

There's nothing to be done for it. With a glance to Thomas, Benjamin's head steady in his hands, James ducks out into the flooding garden. He's decided to be quick about it, but the horses are unhappier in the rain than he is and leading them across to the dry barn is like pushing a rope. It's quiet once he has them there though, not a soul in attendance of the place, and he's quick to wrestle the sullen animals into their stalls and strip the tack from them. When he's finished, he does what he wouldn't have a week ago. After a long moment of listening to the quiet, James tries the small door to the adjacent storage room.

There's no lock, but he's somehow still surprised by the fact that the door opens and for a split second he's convinced someone must be here after all. But the room beyond is empty and he's allowed to observe from the doorway the arrangement of hammers and tongs, files and assortment of small tools there. None of it is particularly sharp, but as far as blunt instruments go they sit closer to the bunkhouses than the shovels and pitchforks and-- It would certainly be easier to steal and bury a file or a hammer than a rake.

When he returns to the small room, he's soaked through enough that there's no real point in moving farther than the doorway. The air isn't especially cold and there's no more room inside than there was before he was pushed out.

Thomas doesn't put up a fuss about this kind of work because as much as the overseers think they're bullying him around, finding it funny to see whether or not he'll squirm as the doctor rails on about homosexuals, Thomas gets to learn about treating illness and wounds. Sometimes it turns his stomach - it can't not, uncovering bandages to find rotten flesh, or bumping into something that makes him think of his time in Bedlam or, worse, remembering the sound of holes punctured into Stephen's forehead. But he doesn't shudder away.

(Not even when James leaves the room, which is always an interesting sensation in the pit of his stomach, one he has no name for.)

It's decided, after scraping away discolored flesh from Benjamin's back, that he needs to be moved somewhere next to a fire to sweat out his fever, and bled. This means a graceless production of moving him to the house with the kitchen in it and trying not to get him soaking wet in the process, which is-- mostly impossible, yes, but they make a noble go of it. By the time that's done and Thomas and James are discharged in favor of the house girls looking after the rest of the effort, it's nearly pitch black out. The rain is lighter, but lightning strikes are sometimes visible, crackling in the distance.

At least standing in the rain is convenient for washing away blood; the front of Thomas's shirt and his sleeve cuffs are doomed to permanent discoloration, but it feels good to get it off his skin.

"Maybe the whole plantation will just be rinsed away," he says quietly, picking through mud puddles.

Edited (noticed a typo hours later bc i never closed this tab) 2017-06-24 07:57 (UTC)

He shields his eyes from the rain as it spits down at them as they wind their way slowly down the path in the muggy darkness. The clouds are still so heavy that the barely half moon has no hope of any of its light penetrating.

"Wouldn't that be convenient." There's an easiness in his tone afforded by the security of the night. Something in the look of Thomas with his shirt all bloodied had troubled him when they'd first set out together and it's simpler to talk this way when it's black enough out to make everything else - like avoiding stepping into ankle deep puddles, swearing softly - difficult. "Have the whole valley basin fill with water and then see it all swept out to the sea."

Turn it into so much driftwood and debris. The thought of a piece of this place following the trades and southerly current to eventually washing its way up on a Caribbean beach is more amusing than it should be. He turns the thought over in his head for a moment, but out loud he says:

"We'll want witch hazel and mint a week from now when the mosquitoes are swarming."

It'd save them an awful lot of trouble. Just float away. Is that a fanciful appeal of piracy, he wonders, and thinks he likes the mental image of it - and of James, no, Captain Flint, sinking skeleton boats filled with overseers and the rest.

"It'll be a plague of Egypt," he agrees. And then, "Ugh," back at the room; a rare complaint from Thomas who's usually too stubbornly resilient to so much as pull a face at anything. There's just something about all the muddy tracks, blood, and scraped flesh balled up in a ruined blanket. Ah, well, there's nothing to be done for it besides clean it up - at least the rain means there's no shortage of water. Before they're done, one of the other slaves arrives with jerky and hard bread, which is all anyone's getting to eat tonight on account of everything being flooded and miserable. He asks how Benjamin is and Thomas tells him calmly that he doesn't think he'll survive, but if he does he'll have a whole strip from his back missing, and they've all seen less likely cases pull through. Who knows.

"What a strange day." Quietly, later, in the light of a single candle (a luxury not afforded to the black slaves, rationed to them to remind them of how well they're being treated here). Peeling off wet clothes and attempting to get dry enough to warrant putting on clean ones. Thomas is always somewhat cagey about these moments, but it's difficult to detect in group settings; he wonders if it's clearer, here, though he hopes not. It's one thing to be older and worn, it's another to have the scars of a hundred lashes and to be branded. An unpleasant ordeal he hopes they continue to forget about with James, given his unusual method of internment.

It is, isn't it? It's the first day in recent memory where some previously unknown part of him hasn't been stiff or knotted. The hardtack's hardly pleasant, but there's a familiarity to it that satisfies, and in counter to the natural state of the world he feels as if the path before them has suddenly become clear. This is the easy part; knowing how to achieve an end has never been a weakness for him. With a point in the horizon fixed, the problem of navigating there seems a thousand times simpler.

His hand pauses at the cuff of his sleeve, button undone. He tips his head toward Thomas, but finds himself studying his ankles instead of watching as Thomas strips out of his wet, filthy clothes. He knows what's there - of course he does -, but it's different the see the dark marks on Thomas's ankles in this light than it is elsewhere. And maybe it's the weather. Maybe it's the bloody shirt. Maybe it's the marks on him, but it occurs to him that Thomas is somehow removed. It's like looking at a man who's come to stand beside himself instead of in his own skin.

(Had he looked like that? To Miranda every time he'd come to the interior.)

James undies the last button of his cuff and peels out of his own filthy shirt. "This?" He can't take Thomas away from this place tonight, but he'll talk about something that has nothing to do with it. That's almost the same. "If this is strange, then I won't say a word about Alexander Brown."

Bait. Obviously.

He doesn't mean to be removed. He will re-learn how to be with someone, he will navigate emotions he's never had before (when has Thomas Hamilton ever been self-conscious; but when has Thomas Hamilton ever before been reunited with this man after over a decade of torture). He will, and there's no question, even if it takes missteps and slow movements.

Love's the easy part.

"Alexander Brown?" An eyebrow goes up. Bait, obviously. Alright then, mysterious sailor. Thomas pulls a shirt over his head and gives James a fondly curious look, indulging him and enjoying doing so. He can't help but scan his memory for the name, lords and pages and officers whose names he all remembers like he's got a written log in his mind he can reference in an instant. Corner poets, actors he wasted time on..? No, nothing. He dresses, forces himself not to rush it, because he won't be ashamed of anything no matter that parts of him won't mend.

(Even if he dies tomorrow, he's won. He can still smile.)

"A Scot," he says, the line of his shoulder curved forward in the meager candlelight. "Who was part of the crew I later came to captain."

Had his name really been Alexander? Or Brown? He honestly can't recall, but it sounds right enough to his ear. And what does the actual name matter? Not at all, he decides.

"During a spring storm he was struck with a loosed block and came to speak only to the monkey he'd won in a Port Royal card game. Now, Mister Brown had never been a particularly sharp fellow, but after being cracked in the skull he related a number of predictions of behalf of his monkey that happened to be true."

It's a stupid story, equal parts superstition and happenstance, but there's something about telling it to Thomas that seems... fine. It's somehow kinder than discussing their place here or talking about poetry as if London had never rejected them.

"In the winter before I was voted Captain, Brown's monkey estimated that we would come across a rich ship who would - if we weren't careful - sink us. And in two weeks, we did meet a merchantman armed with bow guns and twelve pounders who landed a considerable amount of shot below our waterline."

Edited 2017-06-29 01:23 (UTC)

Thomas listens.

A sweet-sounding story, despite the head trauma (would that be how I shall become?), and he should ask about the merits of winning a monkey. Surely that's actually a punishment. He lets James paint a picture and comes to admire it in this private gallery of their own labors. Less obvious, he admires the shadows and the second story told in negatives; Flint, before he was captain, winning the respect of his peers enough to be voted to a position where he held all their lives in his hands. The years between that moment and today, when he'd burned so many bridges those same peers were happier to shackle his hands and deposit him here.

What happened, my love.

Despite the initially skeptical eyebrow about the monkey companion, Thomas is attentive and charmed. When they're dressed - or close enough - and the story has come to waterlines he reaches out and trails his fingers against James's wrist, coming to tangle with his own. A little coy but not from shyness - instead there's something almost playful.

"Did it dissuade you?"

"Nearly. Most merchantmen run or surrender. Almost none of them can organize firing two guns at the same time, much less the six gun broadside that found us. Somehow we'd found the only merchantman with teeth in the West Indies two days after a monkey had predicted it." He turns his wrist over under the passage of Thomas's touch, baring his calloused palm. There. That look on Thomas's face and the edge of good humor in the sound of his voice is worth every ridiculous part of this.

"Luckily, sailors are superstitious. And that block may have knocked Brown's sense of self preservation out along with the part of him that might have regulated putting all his faith in the smallest mind for eight hundred miles. So when Brown said that the monkey said we should close, not a single man argued." He makes a sound low like a laugh. "Granted, I believe the captain knew running then would've allowed the merchantman to put another load of shot into us. Getting alongside and boarding her was probably the only way to avoid being crippled.

"So we did that - took the ship, its cargo and its guns because a monkey said so and the men had been put into the right mind to believe it. Honestly," --he does laugh then-- "I was lucky the got fed too much rum after or it'd have been voted captain and god knows where I'd be then." It's another bloodless, generally mild story. His hand not tangled with Thomas's touches moves to touch his wrist, thumb against the skin James knows is still mildly discolored from what was done to him either in Bethlem or here or somewhere in between.

"It's funny," he thinks out loud. "How isolated men can be convinced of anything given the right parameters - how rationality can be made into something entirely flexible."

Someday there'll be a philosopher or psychologist who could look at what passes between them now and say it's codependency and a lack of father figures instead of what it is, a miracle of humanity in the simple act of empathy, which is so stripped from the world within this plantation's walls. Thomas's turn to gentle amusement lets James laugh, and that laughter curls in Thomas and looses some small knot of anxiety he hadn't known how to name.

"You'd be quartermaster to Captain Monkey, is where you'd be," he says, smile on his face. What a tale, even if it certainly involves dozens of dead merchant sailors and pirates alike. (Is it so bad? People taking at the point of a sword what England takes with taxes? More end up dead at the feet of starvation and debtor's prison alone than pirates could ever kill. To say nothing of slavery, asylum, war and conscription...)

Thomas is sure his insides are a mess to put his outsides to shame, a china dish shattered a dozen times and glued back together, fissures and cracks to trip over everywhere. He's sure, too, that mines and knives lay beneath Odysseus's waters, even if he hasn't stumbled directly onto one yet. He smiles and he means it, with more lines around his eyes than ten years ago, his fingers splayed against James's hand as he touches him, without shying away.

"Mm. Rationality is just the application of logic, so isn't it flexible by nature? As logic is. She gracefully adjusts herself to whatever context is present. Which is why isolated men are susceptible to.. ghost stories and politics, in equal measure."

"The mind leans on principle every moment, even if it can't distinguish the distinct truth in it," he says, a coy joke in fumbling the particular words of the quote.

It's a purposeful lightness. It's perfectly possible, he thinks, to ignore the sharpest parts of this place for a handful of minutes if necessary. If there's some end to achieve by doing so. And steadying Thomas's hand or making him smile seems like a good enough reason. This may be a transient kind of pleasure, but there's certainty under his fingers and in the gentle heat of Thomas's touch; anything can be shifted into a state of reality. Like this - alone in a preciously quiet room -, this is the most solid thing in the whole world and it has been for ten years.

"Personally," --he lifts Thomas's hand, but is too close to smiling to really kiss his knuckles-- "I'd prefer being done with both of them. For right now." They're a thing meant to be shed. Give him a week. Two weeks. Give him a month and they'll have put themselves in the position to never think on ghosts again.

"Maybe reason is an evolved trait, one developed to deal with cooperative living, instead of solving abstract problems." Which would arguably render rationality meaningless, and set every debate in human history on the same level as someone doing shadow hand puppets-- "Cooperative living with monkeys and their seafaring advice."

Thank you for telling a ridiculous story. The way James takes his hand is almost unbearably sweet and he thinks it's been well over a decade since he felt - what is that feeling, flustered, flattered, touched? They're slaves, reality horrible and suffocating, and James can do that to him.

In a voice that won't reach past the two of them, "What would you like, right now, then?"

He breathes out, a sharp crooked little laugh across Thomas's knuckles. Maybe he's on to something there. Maybe this is how they're meant to sort peoples by cross sections, filing them into ranks of similarity so that they can be happy with each other. Maybe that's how they've ended up here as just two people; everyone dissimilar or incompatible has been sorted away.

It should be an oppressive thought -- (How much blood was drawn in that sorting? What was buried? What was burned?) --, but it isn't. Those things happened to another man who doesn't exist and in a world they've been removed from. Are removing themselves from. If that version of the world doesn't belong to them, then this one where Thomas is smiling and all his parts are overlapping to briefly make a person who seems temporarily whole doesn't belong to anyone else either. That's fine. He'll take that.

So what else does he want? Right now?

There's a pause as he studies the fraying cuff of Thomas's shirt, then meets his eye. He doesn't-- know. Some part of that must show in his face: a moment of being at loose ends or standing in the familiar doorway of a dark room without a light. It's been a long time since he's been in this place and he doesn't trust himself not to bash his shins on something.

It should be an easy thought. If you don't like how I live, just go stand somewhere else; everyone whose preferred method of living involves harming others can go stand

in a volcano, or something.

The two of them stand right here.

(In purgatory.)

It shows and Thomas sees it, able to - somehow - read him still, no matter how many years it's been, and no matter how short their time together before that was. He steps in close, leaving his hand in James's care and moving the other to circle his shoulder, palm coming to the back of his head. Protective. More illusions, because what can Thomas protect him from-- nothing, not even the things going on in his own mind, removed from the constant physical peril they are in here with men who control their every minute. But he wants to, he wants to reach in and shelter him from uncertainty and dark thoughts and the echoes of the past and the encroaching talons of this place.

"Alexander took Tyre," he says, his voice low, as steady as the overseers tell him his hands are. (Despite the tremor that sometimes haunts him; but that shows how close attention they pay, truly.) "And it was such a frustrating battle that, in the aftermath of his victory, he executed thousands of men. Slaughtered them in the streets and crucified them on the beaches, out of nothing but spite for the trouble it cost him to have to build a bridge to break them. And then he marched to Gaza, where again it was so frustrating a victory that the survivors were massacred. When he finally reached Egypt, he held festival games, and honored his lover, Hephaestion, who while also a warrior, had spent most of this time designing those bridges, and convincing Persian liaisons to capitulate to the advancement of the Macedonian army."

Thomas's thumb describes gentle circles against the short hairs on James's head, rubbing with slow affection, fingers of his other hand squeezing his. "They loved each other joyfully and had nothing to say about the paths they walked because that was just life, it was a part of them, those things painted on like the color of a shirt and not like anchors, and I... I don't have words for how I love you, not in any language I know, but before I saw you there, again, every inch a pirate, bloody, I thought I was still alive purely because I'm stubborn. Now I think it's my love that's kept me alive, some unknowable force reaching through time and across oceans that put a hand on my heart and-- stilled it-- until I saw you again."

He doesn't care what James has done. He doesn't care who he's been. It doesn't matter how long it takes for them each to learn how to be people again, even if they never do. Thomas just loves him.

There's nothing to regret. What piece would he have changed in the person he had been? None of them, he thinks. Is sure. It certain, even as the candor of Thomas's voice and the shape of his hand at the back of his skull scrapes back something unexpectedly discolored in him - leaves him abruptly raw and exposed to the air that stings and is better for it. He can feel the line of his mouth twitching and stares, glassy, at Thomas's shirt collar. He thinks without meaning to of Benjamin's fever and being bled free of it. Or how on an island there is a burned place where a house had been and a broken teacup was and he breathes in past that too: draws a breath that's deep enough that the damp heavy air feels like it belongs.

He's holding Thomas's hand against his chest more tightly than he means to. Thunk, thunk, thunk - his own pulse against his ribs and under Thomas's palm. He loosens his grip considerably. "I knew." He sounds uneven. A second ago he'd been solid and now he's shrapnel and parsing why slips between of his fingers as he forces his grip to soften. "I knew because I recognized it."

Because Flint had been a person made up of three ghosts since the day he and Miranda had left England. The pieces of those ghosts had driven Flint before them - bound by some vicious kind of love that was incapable of gentling while possessed but always certain of its course. Leading him inexplicably here and with the tools to make it as right as the world would allow it to be. James McGraw couldn't have come to a plantation North of Spanish Florida and lever Thomas out of it.

That is somehow tempering. Catches whatever's about to shake loose and fixes it so that when he bows his head and breathes out into the narrow space between them, it isn't crooked. It's just present.

"I see in your face what I've felt every day since we left you."

Fuck, he's so glad they both made it this far.

James splinters into those sharp pieces and Thomas holds him - his hand doesn't flinch away from that too-hard grip, his gaze doesn't falter. When James eases up, he curls his fingers against the fabric of his shirt, hard and so very real and here. He isn't afraid, no matter how dark or cutting it seems like it might be. He isn't now, and he wasn't then, when he first fell in love, when most people who saw the fire hidden beneath Lieutenant McGraw's stoic face backed away for fear of being burned while Thomas thought How wonderful to be so warm beside you.

We.

The pain of being taken from his wife and his lover had been crippling, but Thomas had never let himself wish to see them, knowing how completely severed he was from the real world and knowing how it would endanger them. He saw them in his dreams regardless, and prayed, how he prayed to anything and everything that they were happy together. Oh, Miranda. If he and James are one soul in two bodies then there's a piece still gone from both of them, ripped away and left untended, never to heal.

Thomas presses his forehead against James's. They're both in shambles but they have each other, more than either could have ever believed possible. Looking back it seems obvious, if no less torturous-- why else would he have kept on, if not for this end? He is so thankful. Not to God or fate or a universal power, but to James, for burning.

He lifts Thomas's hand in the narrowness between them, kisses his knuckles then takes two long breaths. And then it's fine. He's fine. They're both fine. He can feel his pulse in his own throat, but it's a negligible point. He can straighten the curve of his shoulders and take account of Thomas in front of him for the six thousandth time. He can unravel their fingers and take Thomas's face in both his hands and ask him, all frankness:

"What do you want? Right now."

(Was that a question Flint had ever asked Miranda? It must have been. It had to have been. --Or maybe he hadn't needed to ask. Surely he'd known her mind like his own.)

Thomas wouldn't have had to ask Miranda, either. They had all those years together. All those years as husband and wife, and then after, James has all those years as pirate and companion. She knew them both, best of all. If their heart was ripped away when Thomas was taken, then without Miranda, there are no moving joints, no depth perception, no center of gravity in the dark.

What would James take with him? Blood and teeth, perhaps. Could they have survived in another combination? James and Thomas together, Miranda spirited away? James executed instead of dismissed, the Hamiltons in exile? Maybe this is the only way-- maybe there is no misstep to retrace, and it is this or total annihilation and nothing but the emptiness of unmaking after, barred from heaven, with the kindest outcome still demanding their suffering.

Thomas's hands find James's back, arms around him, moving into that touch like he needs it to survive.

"You with me," he tells him, eyes clear. "You against me as we sleep, so I can feel your heartbeat, and your breath."

An achievable, heartfelt goal. Does he want to burn this place down, does he want to step into some other reality, does he want to convince James their flighty plan is suicide. Yes. But those are abstract desires and-- he can't, just like he can't say I want us to be back in my salon together and expect it not to taste like ash in his mouth. They're here and they're together. They're going to be alright.

I believed your darkest thoughts somehow had the ability to manifest themselves upon our reality, he'd been told. Here's the concrete proof of how wrong that had been - such a simple want had been an impossibility then and yet here they are, infinitely capable. No darkness in him could've made this. So he laughs, small and low and absolutely justified.

"Done," he says as his fingers shift through the short strands of Thomas's hair. The light here in this room is so gentle it's as if there's no gray in it at all.

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

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totally codependent..............................................

https://68.media.tumblr.com/01e6aa06839827a06fd5d9529bca7920/tumblr_os4mj1hkjW1td5kqzo2_1280.jpg

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