[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]

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.

[aletheian]

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.

[katabasis]

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."

[aletheian]

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.