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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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.

He makes a low, confirming noise while navigating a particularly nasty piece of the roadside: stepping up where the summer grass is still making some effort to keep the dirt where it belongs. But of course there's more to it; out here, with the rain at their backs and the road before them, there's no difficulty to it:

"Plenty. The young woman who ran Nassau's trade wasn't much older than her; the same could be said for Madi - the woman who led the maroons on Nassau. Shockingly," -- ha -- "It turns out women know what to do with themselves just as well as anyone else does when given the option. All things considered, there might be an argument to be made that some of them do considerably better at it." But surely that isn't actually surprising; most of those women had learned to manage their accounts in far less forgiving circumstances than men in the same position. It seems entirely reasonable to assume that Anne Bonny hadn't been born with a knife in hand. Women with some power in Nassau had acquired it by demand in a place where so much had been relatively free in nearly every other circumstance for nearly every other person.

More or less.

(It must still be like that. The street might be flexible, but that lends it a quality resistant to the permanent shift of sentiment. Even given the worst case scenario he can imagine - some wild instance in which every captain and freed slave in the Bahamas could be convinced to pardon Woodes Rogers and his ilk (there had been guarantees the man would be dealt with after his capture, but what had that really meant?) with little more than some reassurance of safety on the other side of an aborted war -, he can't imagine that the street has really changed so dramatically. Not unless it's been forced to, and he can't imagine such a state to be tenable for long.)

Shockingly. Indeed. Thomas glances at him, his smile wry. He'd always believed a certain way, about women; past tense because his current belief is something else. Not a radically different something else - just a step beyond or, perhaps, a better understanding of the practical end of his theoretical ideas. It had been very easy to say he wished for women to be afforded the opportunities of men, and very easy to cover for Miranda and allow her to do as she pleased. It's another order of thing to know that men are hurt just as bad as women by the imbalance, and to know that even if this fact was revealed to every man on Earth, most of them would still not wish to change.

Lost in his own head, for a short while.

Thomas notices: when he asks James about Nassau in specifics, he has nothing but tired contempt for the place, but when James relates tales of incidents or persons from his time there, he sounds happy. Or if not happy, then at ease, speaking in some language he feels more at home with than English.

Perhaps there is some world out there where they were there together. The two of them, the three of them. Is it a language Thomas would have been able to learn?

"Given every woman I've ever known, barring my mother, I'd say that argument is a strong one." Miranda. Annie and Hannah. Bettina, all the others. Ida, who no man of God will ever so much as equal, in Thomas's eyes.

Abigail.

"I think--" What does he think. Hm. "That I'd be disappointed if there were no women in that life. Because we have to exist in the margins, with each other."

Radicals and abolitionists, women and sodomites, slaves and every other victimized, ground-down group of people.

"Mm." There's the shape of something divisive in the contemplative hum, though for a moment that's all there is. He says nothing, instead bending back the reaching stalks of sweetshrub grown along the muddy ditch of a road so they might pass on dry ground. It is a practiced, habitual silence: the sound of a mind turned toward some definitive, fully-formed thought and simply choosing to say no part of it. Because it is too broad, or because it has no bearing on this moment where they find themselves on the road moving toward very real danger, or because it's a thought so detached from the reality even beyond this road that there is no conceivable instance where it might be useful to the conversation or to--

What? Convince Thomas to follow him? Stupid. But they have spoken of England and Nassau, of where they might go and how they might live; what had been done and what would be necessary to do both for survival and in the name of very immediate principles. There's a difference between, say, debating the utility of wretched men in the destruction of a deplorable institution of which they were all victims and this, just as it's divorced from talk of Virginia or the comfort of a shared bed.

(Once upon a time, a man had carried an image of the world like a portrait kept at the bottom of a sea trunk. After a long voyage, he unwrapped it and found he'd misremembered or that the sea air had changed the shapes and color. Once upon a time, a man had stood on an island and said exactly what he believed and been killed for it. And for a time, he'd forgotten what he'd known because there had been no capacity for it - no unused space. Don't speak the true parts aloud, says the world. Precious things get taken away.)

Which is reductive and too cruel and has no place between them. He dismisses the reservation out of hand as easily as letting the shrub's leaves slip from between his fingers. "I don't see the use in it - living so discarded." There's no heat, no sharp edge. He might be talking of how soon the rain will catch them, whether the heat of the days to come will be broken by it.

"As long as people can be told to draw a line between their place and someone else's and for as long as it's understood that only one side can be true, there won't ever be a reason for anyone else to think these lives are legitimate. One side is blinded and the other damaged. No good can come of being unseen," he says, fully aware he's currently leading them into the fucking wilderness.

Maybe Frances is exactly where she should be after all.

Thomas recognizes that tone, that silence. It's different now, because they are both different now, but things like this are the same, just viewed plainly, instead of through colored glass. His own mood is perfectly amiable as James mulls it (whatever it is) over.

And then:

"Yes."

He doesn't bother dissecting that literally - does James think Thomas, who has been unseen since before they ever left London, doesn't understand? - or picking at it otherwise. He's right.

But:

"What else should we be doing in the mean time?"

If there is no use in living discarded, then either there is no use in living, or there must be a way to shift their living to something else. Because they are discarded, they are in the margins and shadows, forgotten or willfully, cruelly ignored. Certainly, it's abysmal, but more certainly, giving up because it's too difficult or too beneath them would be worse.

Worth noting that there isn't anything resembling a trace of smug turnabout in Thomas's voice. Perhaps it will be as recognizable to James as that silence was to Thomas. Opening the floor for discussion and debate, and being happy to do so, because nothing is more pleasing than thinking something new.

It shouldn't be disarming, but it is. He exhales a laugh and all the unreasonable tension in his chest with it. He doesn't know what he expected - certainly not disagreement -, but not such an easy rhythm either. "Just this, I guess."

The easier thing to have done in this situation would be to flee North, or to disappear into the trees in any other direction, or to spend the week that the detachment would spend rooting out undesirables from the wood building some compartment in Abigail Ashe's cellar where someone could be kept perfectly secret should anyone come to the house to ask questions. Instead here they are cutting a path directly ahead of whatever men are coming down from the Carolinas. It's an incredibly stupid thing to be doing.

"Which is evidently just making sure people on our side of the line live long enough to muddle the damn thing. Afterward--" he pauses. After? What the fuck comes after that? He studies the length of the road before them, mentally calculating at which point it's in their best interests to leave it. Maybe Miranda's ghost whispers it in his ear: "It's a different time. And the colonies are by necessity self reliant in most ways. It's possible that a few good friends and the reminder of a barely contained rebellion in the Bahamas might mean certain people are allowed a degree of latitude to keep the peace."

Does he actually believe that? No, he thinks, though something in his gut and muscle and fingernails lingers over the shape of the idea.

Surprise flickers in him at how quickly James shifts - was it not the topic precisely, then, that had him so at odds? Is it just that he's used to being argued with, or being unheard? But there's happiness, too, at being able to cast that mood away from him. If there's any kind of emotional feedback glinting between them, it's something pleased. Thomas considers reaching for his hand again but decides against doing so; it would be very silly to have campaigned to leave the safe house with soft beds and then want to spend the entire time out in the woods with James pressed up against a tree.

"I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'peace'."

Severing the colonies from England would not free any slaves, it would not dismantle religious morals. Peter Ashe did nothing for the empire, he did it for himself, and Thomas expects every governor or man of power in the New World is the same, no matter what mother country he has been installed by. Oglethorpe, too, acted for himself alone. He thought what he was doing was peace.

"I don't think that there will be a time when we retire to a little house somewhere and live quietly, unless that time is one that necessitates it through age or injury," Thomas says after a while. "But I think if-- if this is peace, forcing it to be because pacifism is like an illness for all the good it does, then I understand it."

It's as reading in a second language. Forzada is both forced and enforced; peace can be a complex thing. He takes it is with all the pleasure and comfort of a knife set into the hand: to put to flesh, to cut apples with.

"That's it precisely. Man is motivated by comfort. And if there is one person in society to keep the door cracked long enough for the rest to become familiar with the gap, then that space can be leveraged by anyone outside it. A margin is tolerable if it's really a foothold." If it's a place where new rule of law is to be ratified, where flames are lit in dark places and carried back to the world saying, See? It must be done.

They are eight strong from the ruin of the Oglethorpe plantation and some of them will find lives inside civilization though it's unprepared for them. How many does it take? At what point does the invisible balance of understanding tip? There must be one. And how they act until then is both necessary to their survival and for what must follow. Again and again and again, Silver had said and he hadn't been wrong. Repetition is how things are renamed, how going out onto some dangerous dark wood can be called keeping order.

(Thomas strips him of him edge; Thomas sharpens him. All these things can be true all at the same time, he thinks.)

And he pauses there alongside the roadway. After a moment James touches Thomas side with just the tips of his fingers. "We should leave the road now."

Thomas wonders at a few things, but says nothing about them, for now. As of yet unsure how to word them - he was better at it before, able to pull abstract feelings from the chaotic realm of thought and vision and make them into clear and fine words. After so many years in silence he's out of practice; always engaging himself in his own mind, but the translation outward is-- another order of thing entirely.

Walking side-by-side, Thomas is near enough to catch James's hand with the side of his when he brushes his fingertips against him. Just for a moment. He makes a noise of agreement, and spares another look to the horizon before they turn.

"Three or four hours until it rains?" is his estimation, stepping off the edge of uneven earth, still arranged strangely thanks to the poor weather. It'll be good to be away from it and onto terrain made firmer by roots and age.

It's a while before he speaks again, comfortable in their easy quiet.

"I used to wonder if I should be ashamed of what's happened to me," he says, his low voice calm, the sound of it coiling close, as if there isn't enough treble in it to carry out through the thickening trees. "I didn't know how, I realized, sitting in Bethlem. I didn't know how to do a lot of things. I didn't know how to hate anyone. Learning that was sometimes worse than-- the rest of it."

Plenty of people are ashamed of things done to them against their will. It isn't uncommon. It would be uncommon - and too strange - for Thomas to feel nothing about the whole ordeal, to have been abused and violated and simply shrugged it off. But it's there, some unsteady, jagged-edged thing that still makes him hesitate when he pulls his shirt off, that makes him touch his hands to warm skin and pause, like he isn't sure if he should be allowed, anymore.

"Now I wonder if I was less human before I learned those things, and I don't know what to think about it."

He also wonders: is James ashamed of living in this margin? Is what he wants the same position as before, but named differently, set inside a different set of rules? He doesn't know how to ask. He doesn't know exactly why he would need to. And so he rolls the notion over in his head like a stone between his hands, considering.

The weather will hold, he thinks - at least long enough for them to leave the road well behind them. Of course, they'll want to find a likely spot to ride the rain out before it reaches them; even with the benefit of oilcloth and sturdy shoes, keeping dry is better than getting soaked through. And here, grasping toward the end of summer, whatever storm finds them is likely to break violently then blow quickly beyond them. Whatever hours they lose in the afternoon can be made up by night so long as they're not so drowned that the evening air chills down to the bone.

He's weighing the logistics of that - an eye for what the sway of the treetops have to say about the wind's direction and some thought reserved for being on the lookout for animal foot paths that might make their progress from the road easier - when Thomas speaks into the companionable quiet between them.

(It's so radically different - this silence. Days ago, the stillness which had characterized the absence of Frances, Richard, Charlotte and Sophie had seemed crippling and oppressive; rationally, this should be similar. But it isn't.)

His stride doesn't break and he doesn't reach for him. They merely move in tandem through the walnut and ash, prickling brush and summer withered sweetgrass. James's ear tips toward Thomas, attentive to the shape and sound of him as if he too somehow indicates the future of their shared trajectory through the wood.

"You weren't less," he says, perfectly stark. "You were just...something different. Naive. But society as it is presently builds itself on the enforcement of that difference." Should he say it differently? Is it better if Thomas thinks of himself as more real now than he was before? "What you feel-- it doesn't make what you were before invalid. Suffering can't be the only way to become fully realized."

What would be the point if it was? Why fight anything? Why claw toward a world where things might be different? Why be in this wood at all? He could add 'In theory,' because maybe that's all it is. Maybe right this instance, in this version of things, the only way to be true is through some awful tribulation. But how to divide an aspiration from the present without underming the former totally? He doesn't know.

A ragged growth of brush reaches across their make-do pathway. James uses his body to bend it backward, holding it with hip and shoulder so Thomas might pass-- in theory. He catches his elbow, gentle fingers and the steadying press of his thumb meant to arrest them here for just a moment.

Spurs on the bent branches prick through his clothes to his back. He hasn't asked a hundred questions; saying them makes it flinching and helplessly real. But-- "What you learned from those places - it shouldn't all be justified."

Maybe they are better this way. Maybe they are more true than they were in London. Maybe he wouldn't trade what has happened (even what Thomas has suffered?). Maybe, maybe, maybe. But: there are parts of this that are still deplorable. There are parts of this that can still be called undeserved.

(How can both things be true? It doesn't matter; they are.)

Naive is such a funny, small word. Thomas, with all his education and experience tolerating the way his father tried to manage his life, still so unwitting. Thomas, who regularly participated in at least half a dozen practices that should have seen him hanged - did see him imprisoned and tortured - so innocent. (He would be surprised, to know how James saw him, then, angelic and soft. He always thought of himself as a bit of a corrupting influence, no matter that he was cheerful about it.)

He must admit there's no other word that fits, at any rate.

Suffering can't be the only way to become fully realized.

James catches his elbow and Thomas, as he listens to him, and looks into his eyes, curls an arm around his middle - naturally, automatically. His hand situates itself between thorny protrusions and his lover's shirt, pressing against his back. There's no conscious thought to shield a part of him from the prickling discomfort, or really any conscious thought about the small pain of it against his own fingers. He's long forgotten to register hurts that rank so low. He's never forgotten how to gravitate to this man. He's not sure he ever knew anything different, even before they met, somehow. They were stardust, waiting to be formed, finding the same orbit.

"It shouldn't."

But here they are.

"You know, I... feel more like myself, out here. Whoever that is, anyway." Thomas smiles at him, wry and lopsided. "I don't know if it's because I'm no longer capable of something as fundamental as living in a house or if I just can't stand to be idle in this world."

Something in his face seems to briefly sharpen; it's as steel turned in the sunlight, the reflective glint lending an unhoned edge the illusion of some razored quality. A flicker of-- not frustration, but maybe a neighbor to it. It slips away just as quickly, obscured by the shadows between Thomas and the overgrown, unfruited blackberry bush. And maybe he softens on purpose because it's kinder, or maybe it's involuntary, or maybe he doesn't know which it is himself.

You weren't idle before, he wants to say. And If the world was just it would have seen the value in the things you tried to do in the way you tried to do them. But what bearing does either have on this moment or any that might follow it? Can there ever be any point to it except masochism?

(Yes, he thinks. Because someone should still want the version of reality where those people they'd been could be legitimate instead of blind. Maybe it isn't a place where they get to stand, but fuck it-- someone should.)

Instead, James says, "Good to hear it." That's just as true. It might actually be harder to say; arguing with the man would be easier. But his hand steadies at Thomas's elbow, light touch turning secure at the shirt sleeve. "You'll need to. Further--" (He's better on the brink of places like this too. There's some raw edge under his flesh that makes anything less uneasy difficult to translate as more than temporary.) "--I find the part of you that can't be still appealing."

There. That's straight forward enough.

If the world were just, Thomas would never have had to try, would he? And in the end-- no, not the end. But at some point, some vital, point of axis, a man was just where the world could not be. Thomas didn't change the world but he changed James McGraw, and through him, Captain Flint reached his hand out and disturbed so much. Touched so many. The shape of Thomas's fingerprints was ever there, within his.

It is awful but it must be good enough. It is, because they are here.

Thomas kisses him. Not the soft or sensual affections of everything they've had so far, nothing even indicative of chastity despite the lack of outright sexuality in it. A little harsh and almost biting like they're sealing a pact. It's Good and Thank you and What a fortunate coincidence, I find a similar part of you appealing, too.

(He always has.)

"Maybe," he says once he's stepped back, hand still perched solidly at James's side, "you should describe to me the philosophies of aiming a pistol, while we're on this outing."

Just in case. They've got some time, after all.

Thomas is so-- brilliant. He is bright and sharp and shining even here, as they've fallen from the road and are pursued by foul weather. Nevermind everything that should cast its shadow over him. Forget the part where maybe the man has lost some capacity to recognize his own vitality; it's as if James could still close his hands around him and feel the shape of Thomas's importance in the world he's been estranged by. As if he has some radiant quality that transforms into weight and being and creates places where there should be none. And how sharp his kiss is shouldn't burn away James's lingering frustrations, and yet. And his hand at his side shouldn't seem so steady, and yet.

This is how people should care for one another, he thinks. If there's a piece of him that wants to take Thomas by the shoulders and hold him here until he sees himself, then there can be an equal part that just wants to keep him here to kiss him in a way that's better and kinder and some other kind of heated. He can also let him go - let Thomas step back -, and he can laugh out loud though a moment ago it didn't seem likely.

He does laugh - (christ) -, a hoarse sound as his fingers slip from Thomas's elbow. He touches the small of his back instead, a gentle encouragement to move on from this place. "What's there to say? Point and pull the trigger. That pistol shouldn't be trusted to hit what you mean to unless you're over top of it." Practice is the real answer, but that's hardly productive.

"--Though mind the line of your arm," he says. "There can be a moment between pulling the trigger and the discharge. Keep steady through it and you'll practically be a marksman."

As he knew he would, James finds some scrap of practical advice in a request whose answer should be 'practice'; initial dismissal followed by something Thomas would never have thought to keep in mind, that gap between attempt and actual launch. He smiles, walking alongside him once again.

(Maybe the burden of I wish you could see yourself how I see you has has changed hands. Thomas carried it for so long, over his dear sailor. There is a possibility that he'll never accept his own worth again after everything that's been done to him, despite the way he's been able to hold himself together, and that James now carries it. Is it somehow fitting? Symmetrical?)

"You are so uniquely beautiful when you laugh like that," Thomas tells him, accompanied by the quiet rustle of leaves shifting in the open air, the crunch of growth beneath their feet. "It does something to your eyes - the same thing that happens when you try not to smile. I think-- you should hope we don't come across any wildflowers, because I'll ask to tuck one behind your ear."

Thomas stahp.

Anyway.

After an hour of walking, the sound of a rifle in the distance followed by a dog barking breaks the serenity-- not so distant that they don't catch the aftershocks of birds trilling their alarm, flying away, but not so close that it's any birds near them. No further commotion can be heard, which makes Thomas think it's a hunter, but corrects himself internally; it's not like he'd know. He looks over at James, quizzical.

"Would anyone who lives in Savannah proper be out knowing the weather's about to turn?"

It's all nonsense. The philosophy, the sentiment, the fairly useless question of how anyone becomes a crack shot having last fired a gun decades ago - every piece should have very little hold on them as they travel through the wood. Or maybe they do. Maybe it's the place which is incidental and these questions and their shared fondness are the points by which the rest is tethered. The shape of being kissed is as solid as the trees around them, the question of what comes after as the smell of encroaching rain in the stale late summer air. And Thomas, though he is easy and brittle by turns, seems more true than the gunshot.

CRACK! The report murmurs afterward, a hum of the sound lingering in the air. James realizes his own stillness only after Thomas speaks. He turns his face to him, ear cocked still toward the hole in the afternoon punched by the sound.

"It's possible."

Though unlikely? He isn't certain. What does he know of hunting or the habits of people who live in real, proper places? Next to nothing. There's a fleeting thought for the fact that they might have brought a rifle along so as to craft a better lie for their presence here, but he can't imagine it would really lend them anything but the smallest measure of legitimacy.

So: after a moment, he walls on again - along more or less the same line they've been traveling. "We should keep moving." They'll either find out or they won't.

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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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