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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"Get back in the house," anyone else might have snapped, but Thomas just says, steady and low and somehow pulling even Charlotte's attention-- she's more inclined to frown at him, but goes along, staring hard over her shoulder as Sophie drags her by the hand up the porch steps. There's no argument because even if no-one doing laundry in this garden was an escaped slave, this is a lawless, wild territory, and only someone touched very strongly in the head wouldn't send women inside at such an abrupt turn.

By the time the door swings to shutter them away, Frances - who Thomas recognizes perhaps at the same time James does - is scrambling off her horse. He doesn't start off to meet them, just puts Charlotte's wayward sheet up (not very tidily in haste), and turns to head to the house himself.

"What's going on, is that Frances?" Charlotte is insistent, pushing the door open before Thomas gets there. Sophie is behind her, hands over her mouth.

"Go and fetch Ida," he says calmly. The Quaker matriarch is in the kitchen with Bettina and Bes, chores divided up equally, as usual. There is little commotion - they are all too used to the way the world can twist in a heartbeat from smooth to jagged. Thomas can hear hurried footsteps up the stairs, knows it's Bettina or Sophie running to throw things into a bag, the possibility of needing to flee too real and near to risk wasting even a minute to hear otherwise. Ida is in the main room now but Thomas holds a hand up to forestall her rushing out. Inside. They don't know if anyone's following Frances.

He only moves when James is near enough that they can make closer eye contact, and then Thomas goes to tie up Frances's horse at the trough at the far edge of the porch, letting her rush in quicker. He leaves the saddle cinch how it is, ignoring the animal huff of protest - not even an absent pat to its soft nose as he makes his way back, knowing someone might need to jump right back on.

He's not gone for long enough to miss but the first panted lines of France's message. "--getting a brigade together to go out and kill everyone there," she's saying as he closes the door behind him. "In three days. That's when they say the detachment from Charles Town should get here."

"Is it because of the fire?" Ida's voice is serious and her expression fierce, but there is no thread of panic despite the tension - in her and in everyone in the room.

"No, no one could have gotten there and back to give word this fast, it's been planned."

"Fuck," is Bes. "If we were still out there--"

"We are out there," cuts in James, definitive there from where he stands just inside the room. He'd followed on Frances's heels, having lingered only a moment on the porch (to be sure no one was following her immediately down the road; to be certain of Thomas; to be certain--).

"She just said they were coming to clear away scavengers and highwaymen in the country," Bes insists, sharper. Her hand is there steadying her mending leg. "What could that possibly have to do with us now that we're here?"

"As of now, we're shielded by the fact that next to no one knows the full account of what occurred on the plantation or who took part in it. And because no significant force has yet been mobilized to comb the surrounding area for anyone left behind. No matter their original purpose, an official show of force from Charles Town will almost certainly prompt surrounding land owners to beg for a more thorough investigation." He looks about the room, measuring. "The woods will be scoured. Doors knocked on."

That no one has done so yet says more about the piecemeal state of Savannah's surrounding upper class, largely isolated on their farms and plantations, than any intent to let the matter go. If no significant efforts have been made to shake the bush, it can only be for a lack of leadership. The matter will be thrust into at least marginally more capable hands the instant any man in something resembling a uniform appears.

Frances is nodding, but before she can add anything Charlotte breaks in: "Do we go then? To Virginia or something like it? Now - before they arrive."

"Some, yes," Ida says. She has one hand on her hip, her expression holding a slight frown. "You can bet anyone known to be with the Friends will be pushed harder, when the door-knocking starts. And he's right, it will, very soon. Can't have everyone rushing out of town at once together, though, it'll look worse than opening the cellar and finding two dozen lost souls in chains still."

Anxious cross-talk from some of the girls, but it doesn't last long, Ida assuaging immediate fears - they're organized, they've done this before, it'll be all right.

"How many people do they expect to find?" Thomas asks, repressing an urge to start pacing. "If there hasn't been time for word to get anywhere and back about a whole plantation being cracked open, who are they looking for out there?"

Ida sighs through her nose, mouth a thin line. "Could be hundreds," she says after a moment, and shakes her head as Thomas's expression shifts disbelieving. "We've heard tales of hidden runaway settlements in the swamps alongside the Yamasee for years, but never found any. The way some people talk about them-- they must be out there." And now in direct danger, possibly more than any of them, purely for being targeted ahead of time.

She's frustrated when she says, "If they are there then someone in Charles Town knows it, and we bloody don't and can't warn them."

Thomas isn't looking at her - he's looking at James, some realization coming together from splinters. Eight months ago might not be enough time in which to found a whole secret settlement, but it could well be a well-guarded gateway. Or-- is that too ridiculous of a thought? Quietly, "Do you remember - at the hunter's camp, one of them was talking to me about the plantation we were trying to avoid."

It takes him a moment to come about to the point that Thomas is making. Not because it doesn't follow some immediate and blatant kind of logic, but because his thoughts have already cut hard over in another direction: Ida is right. Fleeing North they are more suspicious than if they stay, and doing the former would make them a thousand times more likely to run directly across the very detachment they have every reason to evade. Though they might take to the road now and be well out of reach by the time anyone in Savannah put two and two together, doing so would endanger the estate and the perfectly legitimate young woman who must still be intending to live on it. At the very least, whatever tenuous link might remain between them would be means by which to track them in whatever direction they made their escape. They are preserved by the wild unlikelihood of their presence in this house; being seen leaving from it is as dangerous as being found on its grounds.

What's the easiest way to avoid a question? Prevent it from being asked at all.

He is so entrenched in the matter - what can possibly be done to discourage the people of Savannah and the land which surrounds it from mobilizing whatever men arrive here to put this place back into order? - that his ear nearly doesn't sort Thomas's point from the uneasy cross talk of the girls, the sound of Bettina and Sophie coming down the stairs with things stuffed into pillow cases. But he does: hear him. James turns his head by that half degree. For a moment he studies Thomas as a chart, the line of his brow and the lay of his shirt collar, the look of some thought half formed there in wrinkles under and at the corners of Thomas's eyes.

James hesitates. He knows where this leads before he says anything.

"It's possible there's some connection," he says carefully (to Thomas, not to the room, though there is no avoiding the way some of the girls swivel their attention to the sound). "However, I can't think of how riding out there to check would do anything to help us."

Us unequivocally being the matter of their own safety, that of everyone here in this room. If there are people in that place and perhaps it's possible to trace them to whatever encampments might exist in the networks of bog and swampland beyond it, but-- "If a detachment comes from Charles Town and finds nothing to be done regarding the matter that sent them south, they'll only be more easily encouraged into a show of force toward other ends."

There's no blockade in the shape of the words. Instead they're selective, particular - a question without actually forming one. Because this isn't like deciding to undo the plantation rather than slipping away. This is something different. It is the possibility of going into some place infested with the promise of some unknown entity, almost certainly dangerous, on the slim possibility of accomplishing something that likely can only be a detriment to them.

There once was a man in a far removed study sitting before a large window who might have seen that a reason to be immediately away.

James is right, of that Thomas is immovably certain. He knows the world of England's militarized thinking, he's spent the last decade navigating around her unsteady colonial infrastructure, and even if those two things weren't the case, he's sharp enough strategically that discounting his views would be willfully foolish. And so he believes that subterfuge would agitate and incense the authorities to more aggressive action, and understands the greater potential for risk that sets up for them. It's clear in Thomas's gaze as he looks at him, that wholesale acceptance of what he's saying.

There once was a man in a far removed study who might smile a little and touch his fingers to his mouth, and gently but firmly say Yes, but.

They are not far removed. Thomas does not smile, but he does not say You're right, either. Because there is still a Yes, but, and that is Us. Riding out to check would not do anything to help the people in this room, but the people in this room are not an isolated sect of some heretofore unheard of culture; Us is not just the group that stumbled together out of the ashed, Us is former prisoners of the plantation, escaped slaves, fleeing criminals, victims of the empire. To spell it out like that would - will - no doubt sound high-flying and idealistic, unrealistic with delusions of heroism, but Thomas knows just how brutal and dangerous the truth of it would - will? - be to carry out.

Thomas wants to drop it. He inspects the desire in himself: the want to agree with James and begin preparations to leave, because it would be safer, because it would make his beloved more at ease, because it would avoid what is probably going to end up an argument. Because he wants to be free of this. It's plain on his face, he imagines, the reluctant conflict.

Because he wants to be free of this and-- they can't be. They won't be. Where on this earth is untouched by these things?

"I know that you're right," he says after a while, slowly, and by now Ida has stepped closer to them, gaze going between their faces and waiting with impatience for an explanation of what sounded very much like a lead. Thomas turns to her and details what he knows: that French trappers told them of the ruined plantation north of Oglethorpe's, that it's said to be haunted, that regardless of what spirits may or may not rest there, people are often killed for straying too close, and that those who frequent the area know to stay away.

Ida grips his forearm, grateful and determined. This is what she does. She and her most loyal are not here to be their personal guardians for the rest of their lives, they are people that Minister Ida is helping, not the first nor the last. "Don't either of you look so drawn, Cyrus or I will go and look--"

"You? Have either of you--" (He isn't volunteering, he's imagining Ida going alone, through knots of hunters with questionable ethics and no regard for a woman no matter that she's dressed so distinctively as a woman of God--)

"Thomas. You have to leave."

Thomas turns to Ida, laying forth every minor detail gathered from the Frenchmen, and James knows his own place in the room to grow smaller with each word. Even at Thomas's elbow, he might as well be seeing them through a spyglass. He observes there, the frankness of the conversation - how matter of fact Thomas seems and how intent Ida is to listen -, and the women in the room and doorway absorbing the exchange as if they depend on it (they do). What a strange small island economy they make up. Even now as they straddle some invisible line on either side of which lies only different kinds of danger, as a horse with heaving sides is tied in the yard, as Frances catches her breath, as Bettina winds the cloth of her stuffed pillow case in her fist, it is-- contained. It makes pretending that these are two separate things deceptively sensible: Thomas and the young women and Richard and he himself must go. Then wholly independent of that, if there are people in danger who might be warned, then it's someone's obligation to do so.

Maybe the perspective of distance is what lends him some measure of clarity. Or perhaps he has spent too many years in a place like New Providence, defined by things it aspired to be removed from. Indeed if there is a future to be had north of here, doesn't it come from finding a way to return themselves to society? It dictates that they must leave by twos and threes. Richard will sell himself to a ship's captain in exchange for transport and Abigail will write a series of letters recommending trusted young women for service in respectable houses. This is what the world requires of people escaping its shadow. They must become invisible inside it.

Or from it.

"There is a way forward that satisfies both these things," he says from what feels like a considerable length apart. The blatant inevitability of what it demands must show in the heavy set of his eyes, the uncommonly easy slope of his shoulder and how still he is. "If the plantation is indeed some kind of camp supplying a more secret place of safety and we were by some chance to find our way to the people managing it, then our intelligence might be traded for safe passage into obscurity until the threat passes. We might be reasonably secure, the people who are presently threatened will simply disappear, and this house and the ones of your friends may do as they always have without fear of discovery by any local inquiry."

Thomas is surprised at first, clear blue eyes wide as he listens to James proposing a tactically savvy but honestly very dangerous idea-- to Ida's immediate objections that he doesn't know this land very well, that he hasn't negotiated so delicately with ex-slaves before (how would she know different, anyway), and also, that Thomas obviously can't go.

And those are sound objections. Thomas listens, but as he does, even mildly ruffled at the notion that he'd be nothing but a liability, that initial shock melts away into a thought he's had before: What an optimist you've become. Grim and keenly aware and with his heels dug in, but optimistic still, reaching through the thorns to grasp onto a way to do both. He can't help his smile.

You're so beautiful, he wants to say, which is brilliantly stupid and inappropriate for the current discourse.

He feels a hand at his elbow and it reminds him so much of Miranda for a moment, but it's Sophie, looking up at him with concerned eyes. He squeezes her hand. It'll be fine. They'll meet up with them again, and if they don't-- death lurks beneath their feet at every turn, and they could die as easy out in the woods again as they could die cornered by a group of colonial soldiers.

Ida is so confident and rational - this is what she lives her life doing, after all - but there's a shrewdness to her, too. She knows James could make it and if the man's survived his mad life this far, he could probably talk his way into a camp. Splitting them that way would leave her with more maneuverability to get the girls appropriately situated. It's Thomas she's hung up on.

"Have you even learned how to load a pistol?" she asks him, faintly accusatory even though he hasn't said anything.

"Ida, none of you carry guns."

"Better that we appear to be nearly empty handed anyway. Anything that might visibly connect us to any kind of authority or the likelihood of reporting what we find to one will only do more harm than good. Besides," he says, gaze flickering from Ida to the man beside him. They've had a handful of days where they could have been doing anything and they'd spent it reading books and newspapers, lying in bed, scrubbing laundry, embroidering handkerchiefs. He can't bear to find any part of it wasteful except the one where now it must all be given away. "Loading a pistol can be learned in an afternoon."

(Even by Thomas, who had never sorted how to hold a sword with any seriousness.)

Frances begins to put her coat back on, stuffing her arms back through the too large sleeves of the garment that from a distance in combination with her short hair had made her look very like a young man. "I'll go tell Richard to be ready. He and I should come back here at night to plan what's to be done--"

"This is stupid," Charlotte snaps from the center of the room. All heads turn toward her. Her expression is pinched, jaw very set. She snatches the stick she'd been using earlier to push sheets through boiled hot water, that for some reason she must have carried with her on the way indoors. Charlotte tucks it under her arm now, so very venomous: "You don't have any idea what's on that plantation. You're going to go straight into it and get yourselves killed and no one will even know you've gone."

"If we only ever embarked on things we had clear ideas of, we'd still be interred with Oglethorpe." Thomas's low voice is gentle, as it so often is, but there's something like iron in how steady he is. "Or we'd be dead from the rain, or we'd be arrested already. All someone has to do is search me, or recognize Captain Flint, and we're as dead as being caught in the woods."

"You--"

"Annie and Hannah might be out there," he speaks over her, the rarity of him pushing in any measure not perfect politeness shocking further protests to silence. It's very possible no one in this room besides James has heard him so much as raise his voice before. "But it doesn't matter if they are or aren't or if no-one would do the same for us if our positions were reversed. We have the capacity to do it and so it will be done, because of that capacity, and because every alternative is untenable."

Thomas won't be going on about morals and the right thing to do and living with themselves for not at least trying. They all know it, they don't need him to spell it out or for Ida to preach at them. They're afraid and they care, and Thomas understands that so very much. But these days of reading and holding each other and running fingertips over kitchen counters and fine thread-- they're worth any risk. And they won't exist if fear dictates a single thing.

If he hadn't gone with them in their escape years ago, Peter Ashe wouldn't have put so much into finding them. If he hadn't been so blind in London, none of this would have happened at all. There is no looming figure holding godlike hand over his life now, there are no comforting illusions now. He'll learn to load the damn gun.

He looks at Thomas from under the heavy line of his brow in the moment of quiet that follows as Charlotte grits her teeth around something unspoken. Thomas Hamilton would have made a perfectly respectable governor of New Providence island if he'd been given the opportunity, is what should occur to him. Instead what the world gave him and what James thinks is how good he is at this, and he can't help the small smile that finds him as a result.

Charlotte gathers her skirt up in one hand. "Sophie, come help me put some things together in the kitchen," she snaps. The moment Sophie's hand slips from under Thomas's to do as she's told, Charlotte charges from the room.

"Right," says Frances as soon as soon as she's away. She turns up her coat collar. "Richard and I'll be here at nine o'clock. On foot?" She looks to Ida for confirmation, who can do nothing but agree. James suspects she'll have plenty to say to them then about how to avoid getting themselves killed in the stupidest way imaginable, but knows there's no use climbing that hill in the moment. Not with Thomas having drawn such a line.

So the horse is untied and Frances thrown back into its saddle. Between them, James and Thomas finish putting the laundry out to dry.

Ida does have plenty to say, but she waits until the chores are done (until Charlotte isn't ready to go like a powder keg), and her stern advice is as helpful as anything can be, given the situation. "We're all right here, right now, for a reason," is what she tells them. "Let's make it a good one."

Virginia is not an ironclad safe haven, but it's free of the Carolina colony's legal oversight, and there's a larger, more established network of sanctuary houses. Richard and Charlotte, posing as a married couple, and Bes, easily Charlotte's older widow sister, will book passage and sail to Jamestown. Frances will leave tonight with Cyrus, and over the next week, Ida will prepare the others in her transient group of missionaries to move on, Bettina and Sophie with them, converts. They'll meet up on the road, passing word back through proven allies, and so long as they stay clear of the main lines connecting Savannah and Charles Town, it should be all right.

Which leaves the mission of mercy. There's no safe masquerade and no seamless cover story for them should anyone wonder, and no way of making any kind of clear plan. Ida records the locations of every outpost from here to Virginia on a map for them, and the names of people who'll open their homes. They must be discreet; not all Friends are as radically liberal as these.

In their borrowed bedroom, for the last night, Thomas looks at James and thinks: I want to sit next to him and never move away. It's such a sweet and comfortable feeling. Love is so aching, so transformative, but it is this, too. He sits on the edge of the bed and smiles just so.

"How is a pistol loaded?"

That morning there would have been no reason at all to anticipate that they'd now be packing back into the same bags they'd left the plantation with (except, of course, that it had been inevitable from the start). Certainly there would have been no way of knowing that in the morning they'd be making their way almost exactly the way they'd come just days ago instead of on a road north - or a packet from the port - or virtually any direction but the one they intend to take. He should have guessed this though: that if Thomas had ever learned how to load a pistol, it has been years since he had the opportunity to and a moment would have to be taken to lead him through it. Christ, how had it not occured to him earlier?

--Not that being apalled at some past shortsightedness on his part does them any good. There's enough ahead of them that warrants more concern.

At Thomas's prompting and having just folded and stowed the second of just two spare shirts, James takes one of two pistols from where it sits alongside a short stack of pamphlets on the side table. He hoists his knee up onto the edge of the bed between them and lays the gun there across it. "Forgive me, I could have sworn there was a house in the country. Did someone load your guns for you when you hunted?" There is some razor edge of humor there, a briefly wolfish quality to his smile as he draws the ramrod from its channel.

"Fetch a ball and patch," he says, nodding toward the two as of unpacked little linen bags which Sophie had only that afternoon stitched together for just the purpose of carrying shot and small squares of oil cloth. For himself, he draws the powder flask from the same pile - automatically uncapping it with his teeth. "This should be measured, but I've never known anyone to wait for you while you do, so count to two as you pour. Better to be conservative."

What a rare suggestion.

"Interesting that you think I did any hunting," he says wryly, "as your memory is so clear in all else." Thomas picks up what James tells him to, and watches, and looks at each piece to carefully consider the exact mechanics of this; better to be conservative is almost funny, yes, but he thinks it's better to be precise, too. It is a thing he's capable of now, reshaped as he is.

Considering: "Though perhaps I never told the story in anything besides dismissive asides. Becoming sick over dogs tearing a fox to pieces was unlikely to be an impression I wanted anyone to have of me."

(Anyone, and especially Lieutenant McGraw, who already routinely found him ridiculous.)

The story, because of course Thomas only has one, of course in his infinite stubborn eccentricity he'd have found a way to get out of the abhorrent tradition altogether. Would it make a fine image? His long-fingered hands and keen eyes, aristocratic bearing, on a horse with a hunting rifle. It would certainly make him more useful today. One, two. Not much gunpowder escapes past the barrel of the gun. Hard labor has been good for something, at least. (Said no-one.) He might even be able to hold a sword properly.

"Ah." The low sound he makes is maybe the extent of his understanding. Not that he can fault Thomas his qualms (after all, there are better uses for foxes than in tatters).

He recaps the flask and resumes possession of the pistol, driving the ramrod down the barrel to pack the powder. "Just a few taps will do the job," he explains. It's followed by the small square of fabric over the muzzle, the shot slotted over it and the pair crammed into the mouth of the gun with the wide flat end of the ramrod. He flips the rod easily in his fingers, feeding the oil cloth and lead home with it.

Click, whispers the metal of the rod against the bullet, against the interior of the barrel. He draws it free with a hiss of metal, then stows the ramrod back where it belongs. The pistol is turned, laid there across his knee with its flintlock facing upward.

"From here, the pan merely needs priming. You would bring up the hammer and lift the frizzen. See this depression," --he takes Thomas by the hand, guiding his thumb there to the well-- "Fill that a third of the way with powder. Then cock the hammer completely back and fire." There's no use doing either tonight though.

He releases Thomas's hand, trading the loaded pistol over his knee for the one left on the side table. It's passed to Thomas with the clear expectation he do the work himself. "Have you never fired a gun?" What a question to inspire any kind of tenderness, and yet--

It is so many steps, all for the purpose of trying to kill efficiently from any distance. And, he understands, these steps are being refined and reduced all the time, the steady progress of human engineering. But he watches and commits it to memory, feels where his fingers are put, memorizes that too. He remembers, when he was a boy, being told If it misfires, hold it away and count to ten before you try firing again.

Thomas accepts the pistol, and pays close attention to what he's doing, not trying to look more competent than he is by rushing anything. It's probably important they conserve resources and not waste anything by virtue of him fumbling around with anything.

"Mm." There's an odd twist to his mouth, some kind of unpleasant nostalgia, but not enough to be a proper ill mood. He's happy to be here with James. "Once," he says, glancing up in between stages. "A rifle. I was twelve or thirteen, I think. My mother's older brother was tasked with teaching me. I did one practice shot at the range on his estate, and then refused to do anything else when we were out there. He dragged me off my horse and to where the dogs had something cornered and held me by the back of the neck to see it, so that I could get over my squeamishness."

He withdraws the ramrod, and carefully looks over to find the depression he'd been shown on the other pistol. Becoming sick, he said. Not a glamorous end to that story.

"He was a lot like my mother."

So, you know. Horrible. Thomas holds out the pistol for inspection, and smiles a little. "I probably should have learned. I was so--" he sighs, slow and with an expression that is more rueful than properly self-depreciating. "Very young, I decided that within the reach of my arms there would never be any kind of violence."

There is a version of this where the result - Thomas here at the edge of a bed at the end of a long line of violence barely interrupted now learning to load a pistol from a man who he had loved while half formed, now fully shaped by a decade of warfare - is just sad. Where putting a gun in his hands is a tragedy. The brutality of the world wins by arming Thomas Hamilton. In making sure a man in the wood is dead. In the moment where he stands above a string of captured men on a burning plantation and weighs murdering them. If the only thing that violence begets is more of the same, then it follows that Nature just demands this of him. The apple can't help but fall near its tree.

Then isn't it good he knows that isn't true. Isn't it good that there is value in wanting a thing enough to demand it. Isn't it good that even under circumstances that should require him to be an exact replica of bitterness that Thomas can be-- Apart. Different. Unqualified by the requirements of a gun in hand. Isn't it good that they are made to be bettered.

"Well done," James says and takes the loaded pistol from him. Maybe he means the work with the gun, or in praise of Thomas's younger self, or in consideration of the person beside him now. Whatever it is, one hand lingers at Thomas's wrist as he leans to set the weapon alongside its partner. He touches the back of his hand after: thumb across the ridge line of his knuckles. Over and over and over - drawing a line.

"If we're lucky, there won't be any use for it."

Thomas doesn't mourn the loss of that determination. It was a defense mechanism, a young man needing something to hold onto in the face of the way he was treated growing up. He could not control what was happening to him, so he decided he would rigidly control how he happened to others. And how blindly selfish that was, to think he suffered at all compared to what real suffering actually is. No matter how his father treated him, Thomas was spoiled and cossetted and the fact that he was able to get away with the refusal was a soaring privilege.

He doesn't want to be violent. He doesn't want to hurt anyone. (Now that his father and Peter Ashe are dead.) He doesn't want to fire a gun or slit a hunting dog's throat or hold a man's head into the dirt, he doesn't want to jam a pen-knife into the trachea of-- anyone. But what would have happened if he refused to do any of those things, like he refused to participate in a fox hunt?

He should have learned.

James's fingers on his hand are . Thomas leans forward to touch their foreheads together, nuzzling just so in the way he loves so well. "Ida is right about me," he murmurs, because neither of them have said so, even though he's sure they both know the truth of it. It doesn't matter, because he'll learn-- James has seen now, the way he can adapt, and endure. It doesn't matter, because Thomas can't stand to be apart from him.

"You make me so unbelievably happy, have I ever told you that?"

Like Ida being correct, he doesn't know that there's been a need to say it. --No, more than that. Their happiness in one another is the inevitability of the sun's rotation, cold in winter, or the way cloth becomes soft with wear. Even if everything in the world were different, this part would still be true. Shaded differently, but undeniable anyway.

"Not in those exact words, no." He draws two parallel lines across the back of Thomas's hand with his thumbs. It's a distant echo of something similar done in reverse - Thomas working out the tension in his tired hands at the end of some long day.

"But I knew it," said so near Thomas's skin. He isn't serious. Not entirely. There's an air of a smile in the sound of his voice, a dry humor lingering in the shadow cast by the lamp light. "I recognized it."

Or himself in it. Or--

Or there is some color, some frequency, only they can detect, and no words are needed. (Or no one who wasn't happy would endure a fraction of this.)

Thomas kisses him, chaste but firm, and thinks he'd like to tell him things like that more often. Their connection is one that has grown to an unearthly near-telepathy, as unrealistically romantic as that thought might be, but he deserves to hear it, too, even if Thomas at his most raw and honest in this new world doesn't sound so elegant. He bumps his nose against the other man's and brings his free hand up to curl against the side of his neck.

"There were so many things I was blind to," he says, mouth brushing against James's. "But I saw you."

Standing in the dark, trying to convince James of his own incredible gravity, of his limitless potential - in the face of every disagreement and collision of class and propriety there was that, underlined so vibrant and visible to Thomas, how unstoppable this man was meant to be. James didn't believe him for so long and now, now, they are here together and alive and they're going back out into the lion's den by choice, and Thomas in so many ways has never been happier. It could be a miserable thought if he let it - surely he was happier with all three of them, surely he was happier not knowing the kind of pain he does now - but that doesn't reach him. It can't.

It's their last night in a soft bed in a real house, dawn bringing with it more exhausting, dangerous work, and all Thomas wants to do is lie awake with their faces pressed together, relearning every warm curve and new scar, even though he still doesn't know what to do with that.

In his bag with the most vital of supplies only are dented clock hands, wrapped in a pillowcase with very badly stitched flowers. Sophie cries again in the morning but Bettina holds him the longest, her face buried against his collarbone, hands gripping the back of his coat with her fingers white with strain at the knuckles.

He thinks of the child he was in London, who read too much and refused to practice fencing or learn to use a gun, the young man who thought the world could be such a beautiful and wonderful place. He had dreamed of making a difference and, in less productive, more fanciful moments, daydreamed of some perfect other.

How lucky he is.

So they untangle themselves - from women's arms which have become familiar, from the house and its veranda, from a breed of happiness that has been both vibrant and uneasy in the same breath. After what must be a dozen goodbyes, they trade it for the road on foot. It was decided the night before that crossing overland through fields and yards would be a thousand times more suspect than men on the road walking in the direction from which so much trouble had come. So for a moment as the white face of Abigail Ashe's home and all its people both temporary and permanent fades behind them and after they pass through the gate at the end of the property, they are just two people. And they are alone.

James almost laughs when it occurs to him, the line of his chin rising and something in his face shifting as he studies the sensation. As they move their way out onto the rutted horse cart lane, he touches Thomas near the elbow very lightly as if to assure himself of the reality of the moment. Or maybe just for the satisfaction of it.

How very fucking novel, he thinks, then they turn down to tree studded road to head South. It's such a fundamentally dangerous thing to do that every instinct of his should want to send him in some - any - other direction. Instead he finds himself instead struggling not to set his hand at the small of Thomas's back. There isn't anything but the robins calling and the morning is both dull and far too hot, but for a moment it seems like a strangely pleasant day. Maybe there will be no more afternoon rain; maybe everything will go exactly as it should from this moment forward.

Abigail Ashe appears on the road before them. It's been barely ten minutes since they passed the gate and from the color in her face and the state of her shoes, it seems obvious she ran to catch them at the point where what is nominally her property becomes possibly someone else's. She has a piece of cloth in her hand, though it appears to be forgotten. The young woman appears utterly stricken.

"What's wrong," James begins to ask. He can hear the edge in it.

Abigail isn't looking at him though. She shifts the cloth absently from hand to hand and says to Thomas, halting for her lack of breath or uneasiness, "I just-- I wished to express my regret, Lord Hamilton. To both of you, but to you especially, sir."

Edited (I keep finding grammatical errors holy moly) 2017-11-21 03:40 (UTC)

It's the least dire interruption they've experienced in well over ten years, and yet it touches Thomas somewhere vulnerable. He feels an intangible spot between his ribs catch, looking at her, thinking of all she's done for them - out of loyalty for Miranda. He thinks of her as a little girl, he thinks of Peter's anemic excuse for his actions.

(Lord Hamilton. Sir. Things he finds the sound of unfamiliar and unwelcome, now.)

Thomas steps near to her and extends his hands. After a moment of wringing the bit of cloth with her, Abigail reaches out, clasping his as tight as Bettina had hugged him earlier. He can feel something of a tremor at first, but she rights herself, breathing deep. No words come immediately, even though he's considered what he might say to her, if she ever approached him all the way. Almost, here and there, but never quite.

"My wish for you is that you never hold any regret in your heart." Abigail's expression flinches slightly, looking like she might say something, but Thomas continues: "It's so easy to drown in it, and I know because I have. In the same way where we-- can't reconcile the things fathers do to their own children."

Abigail looks at him, face crumpling in anguish, her hands squeezing so tight that he can feel his own ache, fine bones soaking in her pain.

"I'm so sorry to have no explanation. I don't think that there ever will be for either of us."

Peter was infinitely better to his daughter than Alfred was to his son, but the betrayal had been just as fundamental, and just as personal. Peter used Abigail as an excuse for all the horrors he birthed into the world, but that doesn't make them hers. Thomas squeezes her hands.

"Thank you."

The glassy look of her unshed tears is visible even from his two steps of remove, though he doesn't spend but a moment looking. Instead James allows his attention to cut away down the length of the road to study some distant point in their path as the two of them reach whatever understanding is possible between them. If there was anything for him say, anything that he should speak towards, they had been best said to her father. She's already done everything in her power to help in on more than one occasion. Pretending otherwise must surely cut deeper than simply absolving her of any perceived responsibility.

For her part, Abigail manages to blink back her tears. They might come again later, but in the moment she seems to solidify with the squeeze of Thomas's hands on hers. It would be easy for her to look away too but she doesn't. "If for some reason you don't find your way back to this house, then I look forward to any word of your safety. If you can say nothing else, Just say," --a moment's hesitation as she struggles to find some relevant point they must both remember; what do they really share except for this lack of responsibility? This urge for anything else?-- "Just say your embroidery is improving and we'll both understand that to mean you're well."

The smile she gives him is perilously close to faltering despite what looks and, according to the grip of her hands, feels like stubborn determination to not let it. Then both collapse and she releases him. "Good luck, sir. And to you, captain - to both of you."

"I will," he tells her, of embroidery as code, even though he thinks he could just write We're fine. It's a sweet little thing, and Abigail has done too much for them to warrant Thomas being contrary over anything, no matter how small. As they part: "Don't worry. I think we've run out of bad luck."

(That's not actually funny, Thomas.)

It'll be all right.

He could probably find himself choked up as they walk away again, putting meters, then more, in between them and Abigail, and her house. But Thomas breathes and lets it go-- he still feels so strangely about being regarded as someone real by anyone but James, but he's getting used to it again. Maybe just in time to be killed in the wilds of America, but to experience it at all must be worth it.

No one else is around. Thomas takes his hand and threads their fingers.

Should it be this simple - to walk free, to part ways with Abigail, to take the road and walk so near that Thomas can hold his hand as they make their way out toward some dangerous, unknown place? Maybe. But fuck it. Not everything that seems like it should be complicated needs to be. So they put that place with it's soft bed and books and clean laundry behind them and he runs his thumb absently across Thomas's first knuckle (over and over again for some time as they make their way down the road).

Maybe they have run out of bad luck. He doesn't let himself think on it too hard, but it's the kind of low persistent concept that lingers anyway even as they cut up and around the outskirts of Savannah, never quite straying close enough to warrant concern and coming across no one in the road. It's early enough that traffic to and from the surrounding farms and plantations isn't yet likely. They have the road to themselves for some time, the pair of them walking on what consitutes the high side to avoid slogging through ankle deep mud. They talk of what course whatever ship Bes, Charlotte and Richard engage to Jamestown is likely to chart, what weather they will find in this month, how likely they are to linger there.

Eventually, James unwinds their fingers and draws his hand away. But that too though is a choice which speaks toward some easiness rather than paranoia, a strange confidence that they can afford to not cling to one another every moment. (Which is stupid. They might be walking straight into getting themselves murdered. But-- this is a new and different threat of violence; he doesn't need to hold Thomas's hand or touch the small of his back to feel like they're pressing this point together.)

"Ida's brother will have his hands full with Frances," he's saying, hat pulled low. The scent of rain is heavier now and the sky to the north looks bruised. "That girl belongs well South of here."

"Did you know women like her?" Thomas asks him. In Nassau, of course; he imagines if James ever knew women so elemental and independent before (before before), he wouldn't have been as blindsided by Miranda. Thomas remembers his wife detailing their first encounters, smiling to himself imagining the stiff-shouldered lieutenant looking like he'd been hit in the head with a plank made of impropriety.

It will inevitably rain, he thinks, but not immediately. The wind isn't pushing it quickly enough - it won't be kind enough to catch them while they're still on the road. Once it's dark, probably, and they're in the woods and unable to see fuckall. But even that doesn't quite count as bad luck, since they have the appropriate hats and oilskins for it, and even though it will be miserable, the canopy will lessen the downpour on their heads.

Being outfitted properly feels like a luxury. It's honestly incredible. And it feels more real, too, something he thinks he should find strange. As beautiful and perfect as those days in Abigail's house had been, a small part of him was always waiting for the tranquility to be shattered. He kept having to check over and over, reminding himself that it was where they were; he was grateful and happy, of course, and appreciates it so much. But paradoxically Thomas finds no creeping need to glance over his shoulder, out here, precisely where he should worry.

Something to wonder about.

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i just noticed i accidentally deleted like 4 sentences from the middle of that last tag

whatever it's wonderful

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