[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.

Comments

[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.

[katabasis]

Here, he hesitates.

There must have been other moments where he found himself uncertain of what direction to set himself in, but he can't recall an instance like this: so alone with himself. Not lonely, not separated (it is fundamentally impossible to shake the warmth of Thomas's presence whether they're in the same room or otherwise), but lacking any commitment to anything but the two of them in a very true sense. There is no plantation, no war, no ship, no crew, no Admiralty, no orders, no idea that stretches beyond their most basic shapes.

What do people make of themselves without those things?

He turns the question over in his head for some time, feeling no obligation to answer immediately as he fetches the pitcher from the end of the counter block and sloshes water across Thomas's handiwork. "To steam the apples with," he explains. There are so many settlements and farms along the waterways of Maryland, places mercifully unreliant on some larger commercial hub in a way that a majority of the colonies could never hope to be. Or what of Rhode Island, still undeniably mired by its earliest tacit refusal to bother with moderating what kinds of churches were built there. Or-- or-- or--.

"Barring other diversions,"--as if any part of this qualifies as so minor an inconvenience-- "And depending entirely on how our number chooses to divide itself, I wonder if there isn't some use in seeing some of them away. Richard can no more charter passage on the shipping here than I can speak Spanish, which is to say neither comes especially recommended. Accompanying him and whoever else chooses to go along north seems as good an opportunity as any othee to acquaint ourselves with the landscape." It isn't as if they can reasonably make their way much farther south from here.

He lifts his face to Thomas. "Has Ida said anything of her plans to you?"

[aletheian]

Thomas doesn't rush him, easy in his patience, comfortable in the space it takes James to consider his response. He watches as the finishing touches are put on what will be dinner later, and wonders when he'll begin to be bothered by things like heat and pebbles under mattresses. It should be uncomfortable in the kitchen, fire coaxed back to enough life to cook with, the overwarm Carolina weather laying atop it. He realizes, wiping his hands on a rectangle length of cloth, that he doesn't want to forget this adaptability. What if-- what if something else happens and he can't-- he doesn't think he can go through changing to this again. Breaking again.

No, Europe isn't a much viable option. Especially when they can't just burn down all of London.

"We'll all have to go north at least a little," is agreement. Until the place they've fled from is forgotten, and then - would any of them even want to return? Thomas can't fathom a reason why, right now, but he also can't think of where to go. If they have a home, it is only each other. "Ida has mentioned it, because of the ban Peter put on her and her congregation, but she isn't terribly concerned given ... traditionally inconsistent policy enforcement, and a new governor. We are welcome indefinitely with her people, and you know what they do. And I."

Here he stops, unsure of how to proceed for a moment. "I have thought about it, a little. But never in a context of reality, just... absent, unkind daydreams of life outside. What I might do."

With his life. With his time. Work, projects, goals. Thomas Hamilton was always very busy and driven and carrying causes and ideals in his arms, in his heart.

"I don't know what I'll be like in a month."

Maybe he will find an answer in a burning bush on the road to Virginia. Maybe he'll solidify daydreams. Maybe he'll take to needlepoint so keenly that he'll want to do that forever. Who bloody knows.

[katabasis]

It's strange - the uneasy oscillation between unchallenged, perfect shape of happiness that exists at the sight of Thomas and knowing more or less that the man can do whatever the hell he cares to, which at present involves spending nearly every minute in the luxury of one another's company, and this wild unnavigable untethered state and the low malaise that pervades it. It feels like a pendulum clock trying to keep time on some irregular, tossing sea. One second all he can care about is that they are here at all; the next he finds himself twelve steps ahead or behind their present position, thinking of either what they could do or what they should have done, and both are so undefined or divided from this room to have no concrete bearing on reality.

"Honestly? I can't say that I do either." It sounds ridiculous to say aloud knowing the circumstances leading to their presence here are so wildly different. He briefly labors over the thought, both hands interlinking briefly across the edge of the counter and unraveling just as quickly. "But I don't know that I feel any burning need to commit myself to one thing or the other. Whether that's out of," --what, exactly?-- "Spite or uneasiness or some lack of inspiration on my part, I can't say exactly. Only I know that we are in a better position than I would have anticipated when we first decided to make our move. I'm grateful for it. And can't bring myself to put any faith in it. It seems it could be easy to misstep - to take the breadth of possibility as real freedom when I can make no guarantees that in any way resembles the truth."

That isn't what Thomas is asking for. And at one point he'd had no practice in piracy either, but at the beginning there had been so little room for concern beside the burning desire to shred whatever he lay his hands on that by the time he might have been sensible to worry he'd already become certain. Clear headed.

(--he thinks, knowing there are people who would have argued that point to some extent.)

There is so much space before them and he knows it can't be so unlimited as it seems-- or as stifling.

"I don't know that I yet trust myself to differentiate between what is dangerous and what is good out here." In the world where civilized people pretend to live. "And I don't know if I care to pretend I do."

[aletheian]

"That's very fortunate. As I would like you never to pretend."

With me is unspoken but very much tangible in the way he looks at James, his small smile that's only ever for him. With everyone else - as much as they might care about them now, or might come to - it's different. There can be care and affection and trust and still the need, or just want, to look a certain way, keep a certain thing private. Between the two of them, though. Surely there can be nothing but bare honesty, even if it's shaped strangely.

"How is this going to be put in, then--" the pie they're making. If there's a trick to where it should go in the brick oven, Thomas doesn't know it, and is student to James's instruction again, warm embers catching the backs of his fingers but doing no damage. (Days when he'd flinch back, long gone.)

A long exhale finds him. Still rolling it over in his head.

"Is it too pedantic a loophole to say our plan should be that we have none, yet?" Despite the rules-lawyering (bullshit) phrasing, the intent is serious; Thomas finds James's arm above his elbow, the lovely curve of it there, wrapped in cotton that's never been through a plantation laundry house. They need to give themselves permission to be slow about it, he thinks.

"We can go along, and look, and think about it. And something will manifest to us. I don't mind if it's transient until then - until whenever. I wonder if--" he falters, that odd catch of disordered thought trying to make itself into something Thomas will actually say, unable to imagine how it might sound spoken by a younger man who never had cause to fear the consequences of words. "I find it hard to trust stability. It's been used - so much like a ransom. I'm not in a hurry now and ... next to you I find my footing more stable than it's ever been, anyway. No matter where we are."

[katabasis]

James look at him. Measures the shape of him, the involuntary sweat sheen on his brow from the combined heat of both the oven and the day, how frank he sounds. Could Thomas tell him the most fantastic lie and have it still sound fair and honest? Probably. That's the ruinous part of loving someone. But would he? Never, thinks James, knowing he has spent a decade being rightly uncharitable about the honesty of other men. That's why he loves him. The truth in Thomas Hamilton is perfect and here in this place it feels like he was made to hear him speak it.

Touching Thomas's wrist, he draws his hand back from the glancing bite of the embers. Then he takes the peel from its place on the wall, using the flat side of its metal crook to push the flat bottomed dish into the ash of the fire where the plaster and brick is both out of reach and too hot to touch. He replaces the tool on its hook when he's finished with it.

"Now it sits there for long enough that it doesn't warrant watching," he says. The sounds of the harpsichord have faded at some point during their conversation; the house beyond the kitchen sounds like it must be still, like they could be the only people there at all. "From here it does nothing until it's ready to come away from the fire."

[aletheian]

Thomas felt like that. Having done nothing for so long, sitting in the middle of a fire. (But so much colder. Or maybe it's just that he couldn't feel to tell the difference.)

There are scraps to put away, little knives used to cut up fruit and meat to clean. When it's done Thomas's hands find James's shoulders again like they had when they first began - though this time he does not draw away, instead stepping forward and letting his chest touch his back, arms around his chest. Forehead dropped gently to shoulder.

James is so much like a real person, over-saturated, experienced, possessed of so much life and so many stories Thomas will never know. In the darkest of all dark moments Thomas sat with ideas in his hands that told him James had only known him for such a short amount of time, hadn't wanted to be a part of his idealism in the first place, only wanted Miranda, told him not to proceed with any of it. And from there he thought that if - wildly, impossibly - he ever saw James again, odds were significantly more than even that the other man would simply not care for him anymore. It would be understandable. Thomas ruined his life in the span of shockingly few months. And here is now, empty from years forced into compliance with the obliteration of himself, so unrecognizable, and-- who wouldn't grow tired of it.

It isn't something he's afraid of. He doesn't expect it or think so lowly of James, but it sits and looks at him and he wishes he were something better.

(I will just turn to sea foam, he'd think, if this were a hundred years later.)

For a long moment he stands like that, one palm laid flat over James's heart. He means to ask him if he wants to go for a walk, or tell him that he took something from the house and he's not sure if he feels like a fool about it or not, or ask him if he's ever been to a Pacific island. Nothing materializes.

[katabasis]

There are questions that occur to him to ask as that moment lengthens, but the ones which matter most seem too clumsy to say: How are you? or Are you well? or What can I do? They demand oversimplification of things he knows are to be completely unweildy, or the straightening of matters gone crooked or come apart. They are unfair questions with unfair answers; he can't bear to make either more real than they already are. It doesn't matter anyway. None of it needs to be discussed. If there is good to have been derived from any of this, surely it's that Thomas knows he would do anything for his security.

Instead James finds himself touching Thomas's wrist where it crosses his chest and pressing there to solidify the line of the man's arm against him. He could hold him there if Thomas needed him to. He could drag the weight of him.

In three hours, someone will need to drag the pie from heat of the brick oven then pile the hot ash and embers to the rear of it so they are still warm come morning (Let there be no such thing as a cold hearth in a real home, he thinks). But that's such a distant future. There are so many minutes, marked by the rise and fall of Thomas's breathing, that must tick by in the interim with virtually nothing (or everything) to fill them with. He tells himself to allow that to be as comfortable as standing against Thomas must be (is). That there is no wrong thing to pursue or ignore, just as there is no wrong thing between them. It's fine. He knows that.

"Would you--," he begins to say, feeling the rumble of his own voice against the palm of Thomas's hand. It sounds so wildly uncertain. He amends, clipped: "The heat will be fucking intolerable to lie comfortably in, but would you come upstairs with me anyway?"

[aletheian]

Thomas kisses the back of his neck, close-mouthed and dry and so purely affectionate. It's as if he says out loud, What could be uncomfortable about lying down with you?

From ornate bedrooms, to rented spaces beside the Thames, to a cramped cot in group quarters, and a barely-standing shelter in the mud and rain. Anywhere, under any condition. Thomas steps back to unwind his arms and captures one of James's hands in his own, threading their fingers, smiling softly at him. He keeps that hand as they make their way back through the house and up the stairs, and if Thomas navigates so that they don't run into anyone else, he doesn't mention doing so on purpose.

The world beyond the reach of their arms cannot be so bad, if James can walk back to him from it and still have this love.

Inside the bedroom he looks at the pilfered newspapers left beside the books that they've been working through (together, like children, like lovers), and the satchel from their journey he hasn't bothered to empty out yet. Everything out of a fairy tale. Everything completely ordinary.

[katabasis]

Maybe the women are all at similar loose ends - content to do absolutely nothing as the afternoon becomes slowly more stifling. Maybe if they took a different path through the house they would find Bes with her leg up, an open window to coax the breeze indoors, two women sharing the bench before the harpsichord and halfheartedly fanning themselves with sheets of music. Or maybe not. He doesn't put any thought whatsoever toward it, happy just to be led by the hand up through the quiet house. To follow Thomas is both familiar and an impossible relief.

He thinks when they reach the bedroom that he will unravel their hands and cross the room to open the window as wide as it will go - that though he could lean out and might spy the road from that vantage, he won't linger there long when instead he can remove his boots and strip the quilt from the bed. He will stack the loose newspapers into ordered piles, transferring them to the floor alongside the half dozen books they've amassed there. They will lay shoulder to shoulder and he will fall asleep despite the heat - for a few minutes anyway.

Instead, he closes the door and his hand remains in Thomas's. Rather than drawing away from him, James allows himself to wind closer in the too warm room. The window can wait for a moment.

[aletheian]

Pressure and temperature changes in multi-storied buildings. Thomas had forgotten that, too. It's a little funny. When they push open the window it'll be fine; the sunlight is speckled and shifting, a breeze pushing around through a tree in front of the house. James winds closer and Thomas raises his other hand to touch his chest, his shoulder, higher to curl fingers around the back of his neck. He kisses him.

It doesn't matter where they go. Whether they succeed in maintaining their safety and privacy or whether they're hanged inside a year, whatever they do to earn money, if they both have to learn Russian or Navajo. It doesn't matter. Any skeleton drawn will be filled in with the same colors. (Sea-salt and vodka, ash and warm earth, spilled ink, soft cotton. Blue eyes and green.)

Only the most reckless of idiots would trust each other after what's happened to them.

"Would you like me to read to you?" asks Thomas, low and quiet, as if someone might overhear them. He doesn't pull away except enough to speak, hands staying where they've been.

[katabasis]

"If you care to," is the kind of answer that should be halfhearted and meaningless to the extreme. Is it anything near to whatever half formed thought had occurred to him while standing against Thomas in the heat of the kitchen? No, but he thinks Thomas doing what he likes and very little else is all he can really give a shit about today. He'll teach him how to skin and cut apples, raise and drop topics of conversation as easily as picking up and throwing away stones, he'll listen to the sound of him speaking even if he doesn't care at all for the book. The rest James can't keep straight to save himself this afternoon - feels like grasping at loose ends over and over again, turning coins between his thumb and forefinger, sand slipping through the invisible gaps of close pressed fingers.

He'd closed the door behind them because he'd wanted to partition them away from that, to minimize the scattershot sensation in his belly which comes from wanting things (to walk with him, to know what must wait for them in Virginia, to touch the back of Thomas's neck - his bare shoulder or hip). Now he touches Thomas's side and tells him, "Find something. I'll make this place less painful to live in," before drawing out from under his hands and moving to do what he'd told himself he would while climbing the stairs. James throws open the window. He gathers the strewn papers and displaces them from on the bed to under it. He strips all the bedding save the sheet to the foot of the mattress. It's easy to do. It's a series of tasks which easily run parallel alongside whatever else he could possibly desire and that's perfectly manageable.

A breeze catches through the open window. It's too warm to be a relief outside of stirring the staleness of the the room, but maybe in time that too will regulate. For the time being, he contents himself with removing his shoes and letting open the neck of the shirt before falling into the nearly naked bed. Reaching across to draw Thomas in beside him is fine. It fulfills enough.