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

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

The bread that is over-baked so that it cracks and bursts asunder hath not the form desired by the baker; yet none the less it hath a beauty of its own, and is most tempting to the palate. Figs bursting in their ripeness, olives near even unto decay, have yet in their broken ripeness a distinctive beauty.

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"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."

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."

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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.

"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.

Edited 2017-11-06 20:09 (UTC)

Less painful.

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.

The small bundle Thomas brings to the bedside with him doesn't go unnoticed, but its contents could be nothing, anything - some small useful artifact recovered during their escape, a bundle of papers, or some valuable trinket that might be exchanged for a sum of money. His own thoughts have trended toward the question of their funding in the past few days, a piece of him regretting whatever unnatural aversion had gripped him long enough to leave the Oglethorpe with so little to support their bid for freedom. There must have been some hard currency to be had from the house or belongings nondescript enough to sell without suspicion. The possibility that Thomas might have been more calculated than him that night doesn't surprise him. Thinking of it, he honestly can recall very little of that evening between when they'd first passed into the house and when they'd left it.

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."

He looks surprised at first, half-expecting a dozen reactions but not this one, apparently, blue eyes wide and for a deceptive flicker of a moment, so much younger than the rest of him, watching someone he adores do something impossible. And so- and so--

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.

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

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