[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]

Someday there'll be a philosopher or psychologist who could look at what passes between them now and say it's codependency and a lack of father figures instead of what it is, a miracle of humanity in the simple act of empathy, which is so stripped from the world within this plantation's walls. Thomas's turn to gentle amusement lets James laugh, and that laughter curls in Thomas and looses some small knot of anxiety he hadn't known how to name.

"You'd be quartermaster to Captain Monkey, is where you'd be," he says, smile on his face. What a tale, even if it certainly involves dozens of dead merchant sailors and pirates alike. (Is it so bad? People taking at the point of a sword what England takes with taxes? More end up dead at the feet of starvation and debtor's prison alone than pirates could ever kill. To say nothing of slavery, asylum, war and conscription...)

Thomas is sure his insides are a mess to put his outsides to shame, a china dish shattered a dozen times and glued back together, fissures and cracks to trip over everywhere. He's sure, too, that mines and knives lay beneath Odysseus's waters, even if he hasn't stumbled directly onto one yet. He smiles and he means it, with more lines around his eyes than ten years ago, his fingers splayed against James's hand as he touches him, without shying away.

"Mm. Rationality is just the application of logic, so isn't it flexible by nature? As logic is. She gracefully adjusts herself to whatever context is present. Which is why isolated men are susceptible to.. ghost stories and politics, in equal measure."

[katabasis]

"The mind leans on principle every moment, even if it can't distinguish the distinct truth in it," he says, a coy joke in fumbling the particular words of the quote.

It's a purposeful lightness. It's perfectly possible, he thinks, to ignore the sharpest parts of this place for a handful of minutes if necessary. If there's some end to achieve by doing so. And steadying Thomas's hand or making him smile seems like a good enough reason. This may be a transient kind of pleasure, but there's certainty under his fingers and in the gentle heat of Thomas's touch; anything can be shifted into a state of reality. Like this - alone in a preciously quiet room -, this is the most solid thing in the whole world and it has been for ten years.

"Personally," --he lifts Thomas's hand, but is too close to smiling to really kiss his knuckles-- "I'd prefer being done with both of them. For right now." They're a thing meant to be shed. Give him a week. Two weeks. Give him a month and they'll have put themselves in the position to never think on ghosts again.

[aletheian]

"Maybe reason is an evolved trait, one developed to deal with cooperative living, instead of solving abstract problems." Which would arguably render rationality meaningless, and set every debate in human history on the same level as someone doing shadow hand puppets-- "Cooperative living with monkeys and their seafaring advice."

Thank you for telling a ridiculous story. The way James takes his hand is almost unbearably sweet and he thinks it's been well over a decade since he felt - what is that feeling, flustered, flattered, touched? They're slaves, reality horrible and suffocating, and James can do that to him.

In a voice that won't reach past the two of them, "What would you like, right now, then?"

[katabasis]

He breathes out, a sharp crooked little laugh across Thomas's knuckles. Maybe he's on to something there. Maybe this is how they're meant to sort peoples by cross sections, filing them into ranks of similarity so that they can be happy with each other. Maybe that's how they've ended up here as just two people; everyone dissimilar or incompatible has been sorted away.

It should be an oppressive thought -- (How much blood was drawn in that sorting? What was buried? What was burned?) --, but it isn't. Those things happened to another man who doesn't exist and in a world they've been removed from. Are removing themselves from. If that version of the world doesn't belong to them, then this one where Thomas is smiling and all his parts are overlapping to briefly make a person who seems temporarily whole doesn't belong to anyone else either. That's fine. He'll take that.

So what else does he want? Right now?

There's a pause as he studies the fraying cuff of Thomas's shirt, then meets his eye. He doesn't-- know. Some part of that must show in his face: a moment of being at loose ends or standing in the familiar doorway of a dark room without a light. It's been a long time since he's been in this place and he doesn't trust himself not to bash his shins on something.

[aletheian]

It should be an easy thought. If you don't like how I live, just go stand somewhere else; everyone whose preferred method of living involves harming others can go stand

in a volcano, or something.

The two of them stand right here.

(In purgatory.)

It shows and Thomas sees it, able to - somehow - read him still, no matter how many years it's been, and no matter how short their time together before that was. He steps in close, leaving his hand in James's care and moving the other to circle his shoulder, palm coming to the back of his head. Protective. More illusions, because what can Thomas protect him from-- nothing, not even the things going on in his own mind, removed from the constant physical peril they are in here with men who control their every minute. But he wants to, he wants to reach in and shelter him from uncertainty and dark thoughts and the echoes of the past and the encroaching talons of this place.

"Alexander took Tyre," he says, his voice low, as steady as the overseers tell him his hands are. (Despite the tremor that sometimes haunts him; but that shows how close attention they pay, truly.) "And it was such a frustrating battle that, in the aftermath of his victory, he executed thousands of men. Slaughtered them in the streets and crucified them on the beaches, out of nothing but spite for the trouble it cost him to have to build a bridge to break them. And then he marched to Gaza, where again it was so frustrating a victory that the survivors were massacred. When he finally reached Egypt, he held festival games, and honored his lover, Hephaestion, who while also a warrior, had spent most of this time designing those bridges, and convincing Persian liaisons to capitulate to the advancement of the Macedonian army."

Thomas's thumb describes gentle circles against the short hairs on James's head, rubbing with slow affection, fingers of his other hand squeezing his. "They loved each other joyfully and had nothing to say about the paths they walked because that was just life, it was a part of them, those things painted on like the color of a shirt and not like anchors, and I... I don't have words for how I love you, not in any language I know, but before I saw you there, again, every inch a pirate, bloody, I thought I was still alive purely because I'm stubborn. Now I think it's my love that's kept me alive, some unknowable force reaching through time and across oceans that put a hand on my heart and-- stilled it-- until I saw you again."

He doesn't care what James has done. He doesn't care who he's been. It doesn't matter how long it takes for them each to learn how to be people again, even if they never do. Thomas just loves him.

totally codependent..............................................

[katabasis]

There's nothing to regret. What piece would he have changed in the person he had been? None of them, he thinks. Is sure. It certain, even as the candor of Thomas's voice and the shape of his hand at the back of his skull scrapes back something unexpectedly discolored in him - leaves him abruptly raw and exposed to the air that stings and is better for it. He can feel the line of his mouth twitching and stares, glassy, at Thomas's shirt collar. He thinks without meaning to of Benjamin's fever and being bled free of it. Or how on an island there is a burned place where a house had been and a broken teacup was and he breathes in past that too: draws a breath that's deep enough that the damp heavy air feels like it belongs.

He's holding Thomas's hand against his chest more tightly than he means to. Thunk, thunk, thunk - his own pulse against his ribs and under Thomas's palm. He loosens his grip considerably. "I knew." He sounds uneven. A second ago he'd been solid and now he's shrapnel and parsing why slips between of his fingers as he forces his grip to soften. "I knew because I recognized it."

Because Flint had been a person made up of three ghosts since the day he and Miranda had left England. The pieces of those ghosts had driven Flint before them - bound by some vicious kind of love that was incapable of gentling while possessed but always certain of its course. Leading him inexplicably here and with the tools to make it as right as the world would allow it to be. James McGraw couldn't have come to a plantation North of Spanish Florida and lever Thomas out of it.

That is somehow tempering. Catches whatever's about to shake loose and fixes it so that when he bows his head and breathes out into the narrow space between them, it isn't crooked. It's just present.

"I see in your face what I've felt every day since we left you."

Fuck, he's so glad they both made it this far.

https://68.media.tumblr.com/01e6aa06839827a06fd5d9529bca7920/tumblr_os4mj1hkjW1td5kqzo2_1280.jpg

[aletheian]

James splinters into those sharp pieces and Thomas holds him - his hand doesn't flinch away from that too-hard grip, his gaze doesn't falter. When James eases up, he curls his fingers against the fabric of his shirt, hard and so very real and here. He isn't afraid, no matter how dark or cutting it seems like it might be. He isn't now, and he wasn't then, when he first fell in love, when most people who saw the fire hidden beneath Lieutenant McGraw's stoic face backed away for fear of being burned while Thomas thought How wonderful to be so warm beside you.

We.

The pain of being taken from his wife and his lover had been crippling, but Thomas had never let himself wish to see them, knowing how completely severed he was from the real world and knowing how it would endanger them. He saw them in his dreams regardless, and prayed, how he prayed to anything and everything that they were happy together. Oh, Miranda. If he and James are one soul in two bodies then there's a piece still gone from both of them, ripped away and left untended, never to heal.

Thomas presses his forehead against James's. They're both in shambles but they have each other, more than either could have ever believed possible. Looking back it seems obvious, if no less torturous-- why else would he have kept on, if not for this end? He is so thankful. Not to God or fate or a universal power, but to James, for burning.

[katabasis]

He lifts Thomas's hand in the narrowness between them, kisses his knuckles then takes two long breaths. And then it's fine. He's fine. They're both fine. He can feel his pulse in his own throat, but it's a negligible point. He can straighten the curve of his shoulders and take account of Thomas in front of him for the six thousandth time. He can unravel their fingers and take Thomas's face in both his hands and ask him, all frankness:

"What do you want? Right now."

(Was that a question Flint had ever asked Miranda? It must have been. It had to have been. --Or maybe he hadn't needed to ask. Surely he'd known her mind like his own.)

[aletheian]

Thomas wouldn't have had to ask Miranda, either. They had all those years together. All those years as husband and wife, and then after, James has all those years as pirate and companion. She knew them both, best of all. If their heart was ripped away when Thomas was taken, then without Miranda, there are no moving joints, no depth perception, no center of gravity in the dark.

What would James take with him? Blood and teeth, perhaps. Could they have survived in another combination? James and Thomas together, Miranda spirited away? James executed instead of dismissed, the Hamiltons in exile? Maybe this is the only way-- maybe there is no misstep to retrace, and it is this or total annihilation and nothing but the emptiness of unmaking after, barred from heaven, with the kindest outcome still demanding their suffering.

Thomas's hands find James's back, arms around him, moving into that touch like he needs it to survive.

"You with me," he tells him, eyes clear. "You against me as we sleep, so I can feel your heartbeat, and your breath."

An achievable, heartfelt goal. Does he want to burn this place down, does he want to step into some other reality, does he want to convince James their flighty plan is suicide. Yes. But those are abstract desires and-- he can't, just like he can't say I want us to be back in my salon together and expect it not to taste like ash in his mouth. They're here and they're together. They're going to be alright.

[katabasis]

I believed your darkest thoughts somehow had the ability to manifest themselves upon our reality, he'd been told. Here's the concrete proof of how wrong that had been - such a simple want had been an impossibility then and yet here they are, infinitely capable. No darkness in him could've made this. So he laughs, small and low and absolutely justified.

"Done," he says as his fingers shift through the short strands of Thomas's hair. The light here in this room is so gentle it's as if there's no gray in it at all.