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[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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"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.)
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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.
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"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.
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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?"
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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.
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"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."
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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."
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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."
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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.
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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?"
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Thomas's laugh is as genuine as it is exasperated, for all anything in this room, in this situation, could be anything near the realm of painful. Boots off, shirtsleeves rolled up, book chosen - he lingers as he does these things, contemplating the potential survival of something shoved in a bag (what feels like) eons ago; he can't anticipate what James will think. But then, he doesn't know what he thinks, and they have all this time and the space in this overwarm room in which to work things like that out.
After only a short while of dithering he removes a bundled up something-or-other from the unsorted remains of their trial through the wilderness, and sets it still wrapped on the table near the bed. James reaching out to him is too tempting and beautiful a thing to pause over. He kisses him, because he can, because he wants to, one hand pressed to the wooden headboard and the other at James's shoulder, flush and solid and grounding, like the kind of thing that should lead, further, more-- but the thread of that is still undefined, and so Thomas ties the end of it just here, for now. He sits with their legs tangled, smiling. It's not a broad and silly expression, but sometimes his mouth still aches with it, tiny tendons and other things he hasn't moved in years.
"I'd forgotten," he says after a moment, looking at the bundled left on the side-table. It is so insignificant in size. "I don't know why I - well. I probably do."
It's not hesitation, exactly, that makes him slow to pick it up and put it in his lap, pull off the makeshift wrapping that's done very little to shield it. (He had been thinking of something in that dark burning house, thinking of someone dying, glass giving way under fingertips, bitten into by points of finely shaped metal.) Dented, the central mechanism flattened to uselessness, wholly demoralized and telling no time at all: both spindly metal hands and one whirled gear of the clock that sat in that now-charred office, a gift from a girl trying to send a message.
He isn't certain if it's sentiment or morbidity.
"It came all that way, like we did," he says, sounding like he thinks it's sort of foolish.
And Miranda had recognized it.
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What he doesn't suspect despite a thousand pieces of evidence to the contrary (books with inscriptions and being read to and a painting behind a piece of furniture; chipped teacups and the brilliant green ribbons Miranda had brought with her from London which lived for so many years in a box below her bed, unsuited to the look of a Puritan woman but cherished anyway; lives led in quotations, in letters, in too warm rooms and shared beds, in wanting things) is something so tender.
--Like Thomas touching his face; like a bruise--
Which is riduclous. He knows it the moment Thomas unwraps the pieces of the machine in his lap. Of course this is what Thomas carried from the Oglethorpe house alongside pistols and fresh clothes. It siezes something in him that's both relief and vitriol: thank god not every piece of it burned and thank fuck that it's finished working. But more importantly - most importantly--
James touches Thomas's knee. He laughs, exhaling - sounding wounded even if the reality is some sharp brilliant thing like happiness punching out rather than into him. "You know, you're very like him," he says. "The person I loved."
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Thomas throws his arms around him and laughs, bright and ridiculous and without a care for anything else in the whole world. Just for this moment, physical embodiment of stopped time between them, drifting between idle responsibilities as if pushed along by the breeze, sun-warm and safe and inseparable. He doesn't think he could put words to the emotion if he were pressed to - joy and love, beautiful and true as they are, doing nothing to encompass the way James is transformative and sheltering at once. It isn't about machine parts or wanting to hold him or thinking about a pirate's war it's - everything. Everything, and just sitting here simply.
The book is poetry, and though it turns out to be a mediocre kind, Thomas will read from it anyway, with commentary and with one arm looped protectively around James's shoulders, and they will let hours slip by them so sweetly until it's time to return to the kitchen. The Earth will turn, bringing the moon until they find the sun again, and maybe Abigail will finally speak to Thomas. Or Ida will come and sit everyone down to make plans to leave for Virginia, or they will spend a few more rotations of this strange planet doing nothing (everything), and Thomas can learn to stitch a lopsided and ugly flower on a bit of white cotton with Sophie while James reads aloud to them.
The best part of it is there are no maybes, and it all happens, and dinner is only a little singed.