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

[katabasis]

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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[aletheian]

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.

[katabasis]

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.

[aletheian]

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.

[katabasis]

"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."

[aletheian]

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.

[katabasis]

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."

[aletheian]

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.

[katabasis]

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.

[aletheian]

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."

[katabasis]

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.

[aletheian]

Burning down a plantation and escaping slavery isn't enough of a point?

Honestly, McGraw.

James touches him and Thomas moves so that they're both comfortable, so that he can reach out and drape his arms over his shoulders, fingers laced together behind his head. He's so beautiful when he smiles. Thomas likes this-- being so surrounded by each other, closer even inside this room. He thinks he'd have loved James still, loved Captain Flint, though surely he'd have been afraid. Wounded, probably. He wouldn't understand.

It's an awful understanding, but it's one they share. Only one or the other, he knows he would be happy James hadn't suffered; he knows James would be so relieved, for him. But in this brutal paradox, uneven suffering leaves them unable to communicate, or worse, never returning to each other.

All or nothing.

"We can't go back," he says, murmured. Not unhappy. Thomas looks in his eyes, his fingers find the nape of his neck and trace over his skin, through short hair.

"I believe that-- even if we were intolerably angry with each other, we'd still be here in this same room together. And I'd be glad of it.

Thank you. For telling me."

They're a mess. It'll be all right.

[katabasis]

It's easy to give at his fingers, head bowing under Thomas's touch. What would the point of any of it be if he didn't tell him? Not because he needs the man's validation, just-- that he can't stand to be a stranger to him.

He doesn't say any of it though. Instead, he shifts his thumbs at either side of Thomas's face and leans into the circle of his to touch their foreheads. If Thomas didn't have his height or were he not so upright, James might kiss him there too - smooth the lines in his skin, the gray shot through Thomas's pale hair prickling at his cheek. Things being as they are, he huffs out a laugh near Thomas's mouth and kisses him after. That's a fine alternative.

"But only a year," he says, very close. "After that you'll just have to live with me."

What a wholly unexpected possibility.

--Not so different from the soft knock at the door seconds later. It opens just a moment after, Bettina's there in the narrow gap between it and the frame. If there is any measure of relief in her face at finding them there, it's thin enough that it might just as easily be about not finding them more compromised behind a closed door. The pointed look to the window with all its sunshine and her raised eyebrows are perfectly clear however. It's very late in the morning. Someone might be forgiven for thinking something might be wrong.

[aletheian]

"Nothing amiss besides my ability to estimate time today," Thomas says, giving Bettina a small smile from where he's turned to look over his shoulder. Hands still on James - having loosened his hold enough to move (after an initial moment of tension, ingrained response) but not enough to withdraw from him. Something about it touches him, though, that they all still find each other so important; that any absence is noted, no matter how brief. "Thank you for checking on us, sweetheart. Do you need help in the kitchen?"

Abigail doesn't employ servants, looking after everything herself - though haphazardly in some cases. Meals are a group effort with so many boarders, and it's the least they can do, anyway. She says she has the expendable funds for it not to be a worry, and certainly it's true, but sooner rather than later they're all going to have to decide what comes next. They cannot stay here forever. Or even for too long, he suspects.

Bettina ducks her head in a way he takes to mean they're probably going to get stuck with the washing up, and after another glance at them both, withdraws. The door clicks shut and Thomas exhales, comfortable, turning back to James and transforming that loose hold into a proper hug, cheek against his.

(Wherever they end up, they'll have to make sure the bedroom doors lock.)

"Someday I'd like to do nothing but lay in bed with you until sunset," he says, voice low and warm, "and then go out and walk and watch it, and listen to you tell me about what the stars here mean in the dark."

[katabasis]

Decisions will soon have to be made. Likely they will be neither easy or comfortable, though the possibility for them being unexpectedly secure seems-- well, at least at present while they're shrouded in the comfort afforded by Abigail Ashe's respectability, it seems like they might make their way free of Savannah without harassment. Maybe that's too foolish a thing to hope for, but in this room he can't foresee a set of obvious circumstances that would see them so terribly undone. Not unless someone is especially careless, and he can't picture any one of their company being so dangerous (not even Sophie, however prone to talk she might be).

That said, the relative safety of this place might as well amount to nothing without some concrete direction in which to travel from it. That's the part that makes him pause. Where are they going? What are they going to do when they grt there?

The questions unwind from the back of his mind, crawling over the stacks of bulletins to sit there at the forefront even as he's tangled up in Thomas's arms. Luckily it's very easy to lean into him - to grasp him by the soft neck of his nightdress and bury his face into the crook of Thomas's neck and shoulder. He smells soft like oil and honey; James breathes it into himself and holds it there in his chest from some time.

"Easily done," he says against the soft underside of Thomas's jaw. Wherever they go, such a minor thing seems attainable. It isn't like promising the moon (though maybe he'd find a way to do that too if asked for it). "Today even, if you feel like answering the door every other hour when someone suspects we've run off in the night."

What a phenomenally stupid thing to laugh about. He does anyway, teeth at bare skin and his hands so gentle.

[aletheian]

What a thought. Thomas hums, pleased, and presses against James's ear, brushes a soft kiss against the curve of his skull and the fuzzy hair there. Part of him wants to say, joke or not, yes, yes-- but it's the part of him that wants to stay in this room forever, cocooned away from the rest of the world and the progression of time. Unrealistic, even if they - deserve it? Do they? Does Thomas believe in that sort of thing? Does he actually want to hide forever or is it just a trembling, exhausted desire, elated with being free and being with James, frightened of what is no longer familiar?

All questions he needs to answer; he needs to learn so much about himself, now, in this new world (hah). He needs to do that, he needs to get up out of this bed and get dressed and see to the laughably light responsibilities he has in this house-- but not yet. He can spend another long minute holding James, breathing in the smell of him, soaking in the comforting weight of him in his arms, feeling the ache of near-overwhelming tenderness that he has for him. Thomas loves him so much. He thought he'd understood the depths of it in London, shocked at the intensity even then, the way it altered him. And now it's so-- it's more and it's different; he is not complete when he's with James, because people aren't made whole by others, but there's something else. Something greater than both of them that manifests because of this feeling. It is so beautiful.

Even after they're up and with the others, joining reality again, Thomas is reluctant to stray too far from James, like a magnet is drawing them to each other. The day feels strangely soft to him, fragile not for weakness but for the fine lovely details of it. Ida finds them to speak about the state of the plantation - the local excuse for a magistrate is baffled, apparently, so off-the-record Oglethorpe's domain had been, on top of how loosely organized the region is in the first place. This far away from the Carolina colony's main port, half the farming operations are wholly independent, set up at random outside anyone's purview. Which suits them fine. The only documentation of Oglethorpe's was in Charles Town with the later governor's things, and they've long been confiscated by young Lady Ashe in her investigative efforts.

It doesn't mean a survivor won't walk out of the smoke and char and point fingers, it just means that they will find no support, left adrift by the same lack of oversight that allowed the place to exist at all. The whole thing, turned to dust, only remembered by the marks on them, within them. (Thomas finds his hand drifting to his shoulder sometime after that conversation, to the brand there.)

Later, it's their turn to be tasked with preparing supper, left to their own devices in the kitchen. "It's remarkable how many positively idiotic things I remember," Thomas says, surveying the resources at hand. "Such as the fact that the one and only time in England I'd come across corn, my mother forbade me to eat it because then my hair would go dark like a Spaniard's. Now it's the only thing I know how to cook." Because of the plantation, of course; he'd never learned how to prepare much of anything in his charmed aristocratic life, and education of the sort in captivity was of course limited. He only knows what he was forced to know, through brief stints in the kitchen when injured or ill.

[katabasis]

"I don't think that's so uncommon," James says. He's halfway through slicing a small pile of apples, sharp knife edge snapping through tough skin and granular flesh. "Remembering positively idiotic things must be some element in how people recall the important ones."

It's early yet in the day, so near the midday meal that the coals are still hot in the hearth; the burden of kitchens in proper houses is to never be very far from use, even when the number of mouths its feeding seems so inconsequential. Elsewhere in the house, music is being played which just reaches this room. It's a limping duet that pauses at intervals, returning to retry previously broken bars before beginning again from the piece's start. It's repeated over and over; both women are out of practice, though whether it's Bettina's rusty sight reading or Abigail's inability to play with a partner is unclear from just the sound.

James uses the heel of the knife to sweep the sliced apples into a growing pile then begins cutting another. "There's a pawnbroker in London by the name of Davis who I owe for a pair of borrowed pistols. Of course, I imagine it's been resolved by some matter of half pay already, though I carried the ticket for some time." By accident - just one in a series of artifacts that had followed he and Miranda from London.

"Most cooking is simple enough once you've moved past worrying over poisoning anyone. I can tell you what I know."

That's more useful information than learning stars or the navigation of them by far. Eventually, they may find themselves in such circumstances to have no more use for reckoning their position by the world around them. Most people don't. But as it turns out, food is something of a requirement.

[aletheian]

(Most people, most people. Neither man in this kitchen has ever been within a hundred, a thousand miles of most people.)

Thomas pauses in opening a cabinet door to listen to the anecdote and its ordinariness, and then there's soft footsteps behind him, gentle hands on the wings of his shoulderblades, up to the base of his neck. James can't see his smile, how impossibly fond it is, and that's probably for the best-- it's so ridiculous, how Thomas always thought he could do everything, how warmed he is seeing that it's still true. Any little thing. Tell time from shadows and song notes, make dinner, captain a ship, challenge an empire.

He wants to write it down, he wants the whole world to know how incredible this man is, how much like a hero of antiquity made real. He wants the whole world to accept it, to marvel in the beauty and feel humbled by how lacking every spiteful and cowardly person is by comparison.

"I'd love to learn," is what he says before stepping away. He knows where all the pots and pans are, at least, having been employed earlier to stow them on high shelves thanks to having more literal spine than anyone else in the house. "You can set me to the busywork safely. I can even manage to sharpen pens without endangering my fingertips, these days."

[katabasis]

The rock of the knife slows in response to the slide of Thomas's fingers (the prickle of small hairs at the back of his neck is some natural, uncontrolled response to the scrape of his calloused palms), rythmn only regulating once he's slipped away. Though James shoots a glance after him - a slow crooked smile-- "You really have come a long way," he says, hacking the apple under his fingers into its last narrow pieces.

He leaves the rest to Thomas however, trading the shallow pan from the high shelf for the knife with a "Don't cut yourself," that's so dry it can be nothing but humor. These parts come easily too: flour spread across the block so the ugly block of dough made earlier can be pressed across it under the heels of his hands; larding the pan's sides and bottom and pressing the dough into it with his first knuckles as Thomas slices apples, then pork soaked so long that most of the salt has been stripped from it.

If there is some thought from the afternoon that should be weighing here in this room - Richard would like very much to travel north and find a ship on which to trade book passage back across the sea (do they too go North? Do they find a ship? Do the young women do the same?) - he displaces it in favor of discussing the finer points of layering Thomas's handiwork into the pie's base and--

"We did this. Miranda and I." The thought occurs so suddenly that it just pours out of him, unstoppable. He seems surprised by the sound himself. And pauses, expecting to be somehow wounded on the edge of it and yet finding himself strangely unbloodied. After a moment, James resumes pressing out the rest of the dough into a shape large enough to cover the filled pan.

"At the start, when we first were finding our bearings." And sometimes after, during long stretches where they had been happy to be in each other's company.

Could it be unkind to speak of her when they should be taking advantage of this purposefully removed brand of contentment? Does that somehow undo this? It must not, he thinks. He's tired of not speaking about her and the can be no harm in saying her name here.

[aletheian]

Thomas doesn't mind speaking of Miranda, though he does feel wrong-footed about it sometimes - like he's stirring up things from so far in the past that all he's doing is rubbing salt into the wound of whatever ill temper she and James shared together. (He isn't a fool, he-- would love to have to be devout in exchange for his plea to the heavens, he doesn't want to know the details, but he isn't a fool.)

And so he smiles, just a little and unbidden, looking at the other man's profile as he molds dough to pan. He wants to hear James speak of her with affection, he wants to know there was some still. He wants to know something, anything, of his wife before her death. Her murder.

That's why Abigail can't look at him for too long, he thinks.

"So you're experienced at instruction in this manner," he says wryly. Two peas in a pod for their charmed lives; Miranda was as bad as Thomas, on an average day. On a good day she was much better at sorting loose tea than her husband. Poor James, stuck with two people so thoroughly useless at all things practical.

"Did she like it?" Thomas remembers some fleeting conversation, sitting in the grass on a blanket, Miranda saying she'd learn one day -- plenty of women of her station did, only to find themselves swindled out of their knowledge, published by enterprising men in cookery books. Plenty of women also found themselves extraordinarily bored on a day to day basis, left alone and neglected in their houses, nothing better to do than culinary alchemy. Miranda was never so still.

[katabasis]

He huffs out a small sound, near enough to a laugh that it must count as he presses out the remainder of the dough under his hands. "I believe she enjoyed the challenge of it and found some pleasure in the newness. New Providence may have been lacking in the kind of intellectual stimulus she was accustomed to, but it was very generous with others."

How to cook; how to lay out and best plant a garden; how to prepare a house for storms in a landscape where the rain and wind was so free to cut; how to tend to a horse and goats. It was so radically a different kind of house management, leagues removed from what she had done in London. And maybe that had been good in some sense - maybe there had at some point been some pleasure derived from the experience of things that could in no way be a reminder of the place they'd been removed from. Or maybe she'd just been bored already and anything had been preferable to the quiet and idleness.

"She learned quickly," he says. From what he remembers, that's true. Or near it. He had come and gone so frequently that it had seemed so. "I'm afraid the bar's been set rather high."

With the remainder of the dough half pressed out into a sheet, he withdraws from the task and surrenders that too to Thomas. There's a stool there near the open door (left so in a desperate bid to draw some heat from the hearth out of the room). He fetches it over and sits, so low that he can comfortably prop his elbow at the edge of Thomas's inherited workspace.

[aletheian]

"Shall we both keep our expectations middling, in that case? There's very little I could best her in." Perhaps untrue - everyone has their strengths and weaknesses; Miranda could never quite manage Thomas's stubborn optimism, just as he ever lacked her ability to gauge risk. And a thousand other things in each direction, and-- he wonders what her cooking tasted like, which is an impossibly small, stupid thing to wonder about.

(Did she understand how much he loved her. It was so intense with James, and he knew they were so distracted with each other sometimes to her detriment, but whenever he noticed he thought, this will even out soon, it's just new, and, but..)

He thinks about saying You don't know how grateful I am that you had each other, but he knows he won't be able to get it out without courting tears, and he doesn't feel like leading the topic of Miranda down that road right now. He allows the feeling to touch him then pass through, imagining her hand at his elbow, like he so often does. He slices fruit with ease that he didn't have a decade ago, no trace of the skittish discomfort around blades he once had. Before he begins to press pieces of this and that into the pan left on the bench he reaches out and touches James, fingers light against his cheekbone, his chin. Smiling.

[katabasis]

"I'll do my best," he swears, laying his hand over the crook of his elbow and settling there to watch as Thomas works his way slowly but steadily through the task laid out before him. He is surprisingly reliable in this - deliberate in ways James wouldn't haven't expected in a different life. Maybe Thomas wouldn't have been so sure with this at the plantation either. Maybe this is all reliant on this place, the two of them being here while in conversastion about the woman who had linked them from the start.

Maybe Miranda's hand guides Thomas's or maybe they are just so much alike that they respond to strain in so many of the same ways: grounded and determined to be capable.

He turns his face up into the brief touch, but otherwise is content to observe Thomas's handiwork with only the occasional interruption or correction. The limping duet meanders in from the house, a breeze stirs dust in the open doorway, and Thomas is-- James can't think of a single word, but holds the shape of this basic pleasure in the center of his chest as a substitute for a misplaced heaviness that has lived there for so long.

"When Richard goes, who do you expect will travel with him?" Maybe a deceptively mild turn, but if so then even he isn't sure which direction he means to drive with it; it can be just a question. It doesn't need to be anything else. He rubs loose flour between his fingers then idly brushes it off against Thomas's hip.

[aletheian]

When Richard goes is a when and not an if, something Thomas knows despite only giving the plans some are making peripheral attention; it's strange how close he feels to the younger man despite barely knowing him, stranger that said feeling doesn't make him worried about the inevitable departure. People are not meant for this half-life any more than they're meant for captivity.

"I don't know," he admits. "What I knew of anyone in that place could mean nothing, now."

But: "I don't expect that they know, either. At least not yet. We will all have to go, sooner rather than later, we cannot stay so close to what would-- take us back, or see us hanged. Traveling to Europe to help Richard seek out his wife might seem very appealing from here, or it might seem terrifying, but whatever it is it'll seem different from the vantage point of a town where we aren't required to be in such strict hiding."

Thomas isn't trying to be vague or evasive; no, he's working out the answer and how he feels about it out loud, even if he's rusty at this. Like pacing back and forth in his office, except - a different shade. He is at once jaded and unsteady for the relative newness, sometimes hitting the mark like he should, sometimes struggling against the long-ingrained survival tactic of remaining silent. After a little while,

"I don't know if I could go back to Europe."

Regardless of vantage point. He knows it goes against what he was just saying, but his perspective is somewhat unique. Maybe-- maybe, somewhere not linked so or attached to England's island, maybe on the continent; when Ida had tried and failed and their plan had been to go to France, he of course had not objected, even though the whole time in the back of his head there was a sick blackness that stirred, terrified of getting so close to Bethlem, even though France is in no way close.

(And what would he do, if he came across some lord on holiday, some unwitting ally of his father's? A relative, god forbid? He doesn't - he can't guess.)

[katabasis]

He thinks maybe this is why he posed the question in the first place - to hear how Thomas works his way through it and hold that up to the lines his own thoughts draw. Not that he needs the other man's reassurance or confirmation, just that he has fallen away from the habit of explaining himself - has allowed himself to settle into the trap of letting his decisions lay inarticulate under the surface. Hearing Thomas sort through the particulars is strangely grounding. Solidifying.

He doesn't know if he could return to Europe, Thomas says, and immediately James knows the answer to the question he's been asking himself for at least the length of time they've been under Abigail Ashe's roof if not since before that: Does he want to go away? After all, he knows for certain he can make no return to the Bahamas; that much he has been sure of for some time. So if there is some comfort to be found in places like France or elsewhere deeper on the continent, shouldn't he care to seek that out? Surely that is possible with the resources presently at their disposal.

"I'd rather not," he says, not quite clipped to the point of sullenness but very near it.

After a moment, he unfolds his arms and begins to assist Thomas with layering the last of the meat and apple pie's filling. "I'm not sure what ends that leaves us, and maybe we will come away from this place and it will show itself to be the most sensible path, but--" But. "If it's all the same to you, I'd prefer never to lay eyes on that half of the world again."

There are a hundred perfectly sensible reasons why. There are people who must know him - not just threadbare associates from his time living there, but god knows how many aggrieved merchant captains and displaced sailors. There would be no telling in what hour he might turn a corner and find himself facing someone who somehow knew him. Being recognized as either Lieutenant McGraw or the Captain Flint seems dangerous enough without any thought for the deplorable state of the world which put them here--

(--In this room, smoothing salt over the top of the stacked pie.)

It feels like too significant a thing to give away.

[aletheian]

Thomas listens to that gloomy tone, considers his words, watches his clever hands put together the pie he hopes won't make him nauseous. (Probably not, but he suspects it'll be something he has to keep an eye on for the rest of his life, however long or short it turns out to be.)

"Mm." - Not quite a laugh, just an exhale that carries some thread of warm affection. His fingers are sticky from fruit and the remains of flour but he brushes them over the back of one of James's hands anyway. "Thousands of ends, I think." The world is so vast. Even if they strike chunks of it off the list of whatever future they make for themselves - Europe, anything touched by Caribbean waters, even the Americas - there's so much left. It's overwhelming for Thomas to consider in any detail given how small his own world has been for so long, but he thinks ... he thinks they could go anywhere. If they wanted to. How can anything be impossible, after all this?

"What do you make of it all so far?" he asks, deciding against wording it What are you thinking?, for some reason uncomfortable with sounding so pleading. "I know we should be thinking about it, even in this transient state where no stable plans can be made."

This morning, and his desire to never leave that room, never engage with the rest of the world ever again - it still has such allure, and part of him may always think so. May always want. But they can have both. He knows they can. They have to.