[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.

Comments

[aletheian]

The rains let up, aftermath a hellscape of mud and mosquitoes and never having clean clothes; Thomas writes words in the soft dirt and, occasionally, paints them on the inside of James's forearm with his fingertips and the wet earth that won't be banished, though the latter is all private whimsy. There is something of his old recklessness in the way he steals moments and cut corners in favor of James's head in his lap as he recites poetry from memory, of their fingers laced together, of speaking quietly in the dark. And there is some political wiliness, too, in the way he times things and slips them out of the trajectory of potential punishment. It's not just the overseers - this is a prison, after a fashion, of course, and most of them are not wrongfully incarcerated.

For a while, Benjamina Gunn seems to be on the mend, and then one day he isn't. There's no service - the near-flooding put everyone behind, and (so they're told) it would be a waste of time, and besides, it's not like he'll be buried anywhere respectable. A few of the men that night at dinner make noise about holding their own memorial, even just a few words, and it turns into an argument in hushed tones between those who'd like to and those who fear reprisal for further wasting time. Thomas doesn't weigh in, and the look he shoots James is one that suggests getting involved would be inadvisable. Not in a dire way, but a this will be a headache way.

Alas, their opinions are then polled directly.

"Anything you have to argue about is self-evidently a bad idea," Thomas says, and then as the lead agitator angrily gets in his personal space, "but you could have done it by now if you weren't. Sit down, Barnaby." --Barnaby takes a step back and sits down, looking half-confused at why he obeyed. (Thomas almost never tells any of them to do anything, but they're so used to the way he nudges people this way and that for their own good that on the rare occasions he does, they tend to comply.)

Thomas looks at James, a silent query.

[katabasis]

It is while limping between Je ne comprends pas and Parlez plus lentement, s'il vous plaît that he more fully considers the usefulness of Benjamin in his sickbed. A man given to one idiotic attempt at theft might be the type of man who could be convinced to be foolish again. Never mind the beating. Let him get back on his feet and enjoy a month or two of sweating in a field again and the immediacy of that would fade considerably. The fact that there's a distinct edge of cowardice to the idea doesn't stop him from thinking it, but it does keep him from mentioning it to Thomas. It would work for as long as they'd need it to.

--Or it may have had Benjamin ever gotten upright again. He doesn't and James finds himself absolved of any creeping sense of guilt. Thank god for dead men, he'd thought. As the murmuring creeps down the length of the table and Barnaby does exactly as he's told, it occurs to him again.

James licks the brine of salted pork from his thumb, meets Thomas's eyes sideways, then says to no one in particular and to no one's surprise, "He's right." Then: "Discussing it wastes more time than doing it. There's nothing wrong with saying a few words in each bunkhouse tonight. If you feel differently, don't speak. Then remember who did what so the same respect can be given him when he's buried and we'll never debate it again."

When. Not if.

In the shifting quiet that follows, he washes the salt from his mouth with a drink of water then resumes his meal. That evening in the hour of thin candelight afforded them to make their beds by, he's hardly begun to untuck his shirt before one of the men they share a room with stands up, clears his throat and quotes clearly from rote memorization as a boy, "'For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord's.'" A punctuating pause. "That's Romans," he explains, then sits down at the edge of his bed.

[aletheian]

It is strange, but also bolstering in a surreal way, how the other men look at the two of them together. Some are inclined to find their relationship more revolting than they're bothering to say, but no one's forgotten that the former aristocrat is the only one among them who's tried to escape, and their curiosity about the pirate captain is a burning thing. He realizes, sitting there at dinner, that they could convince - hell, just instruct - most of the others to do just about anything, and that he knows exactly which ones among them would go along unquestioning.

The danger is that he knows which ones would never, too. But there's no time to exchange words between them, no scrap of privacy left in the evening; it would be too much to ask for that they not be shuffled between quarters, as Thomas suspects they're trying to keep the two of them specifically tired and wrong-footed until the staff have a better understanding of how to handle Captain Flint in the long run. Sitting on the edge of a cot in his nightshirt, listening to stilted scripture, he has an unbidden memory: I want you to talk me out of it.

James hasn't asked. Thomas doesn't think he will.

More men speak quietly, and Thomas feels a kind of wryness, almost bitter, that he usually denies himself. These men, two of which he knows to be child rapists, one who drowned his mother and sisters over money, one who delights in mutilation and to this day cannot be left alone with any of the animals... He isn't bitter that he's being forced to be on their level, no, he's long made his peace with that aspect, he's just. Something. Bible verses in the dark. Humans are incredible.

"Listen, I tell you a mystery," he begins. "We will not sleep, but we will all be changed - in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When it is so, then the saying that it written will come true: 'Death has been swallowed up in victory.'"

He knows more scripture now than ten years past. Reading material is limited. In the silence that follows Thomas leaves off the next verse that speaks of the glory of God, having no actual belief, and having no stomach to pretend. An older man who's expressed fondness for the couple's academic nattering (his words) in the past says, not unkindly, "Benjamin thought you were a cunt, Mister Thomas."

"He was allowed."

It wins a muted laugh from a few.

[katabasis]

He won't ask, but he does listen. To the way Marshall speaks to the men and how sometimes they speak back; the inflection and variants of Thomas's pronunciation as he schools him through the most basic French; the murmurings at the dinner table and who talks here tonight, and who says nothing at all. Head bowed, he listens to Thomas, and he can feel pieces of himself giving pleasantly under the sound of his voice. It's hearing his own mind spoken aloud. That the mood breaks towards humor after is a blessing. Otherwise, he'd have to hide the slip of his smile against his shoulder.

"I didn't know him well enough to know who or what he did or didn't like--"

"Not when you only look in one direction," chimes in Romans 14:8, who goes so immediately quiet after it's like he's choked on the last syllable. But there's a breath of laughter from the room for that too and James takes that for what it is - a good sign. At least some of them have become comfortable with the idea of talking in the dark instead of whispering at the dinner table.

He glances after Thomas and flashes him a grin blatant enough to make both himself and anyone else in the room already prone toward it chuckle. It's not how James McGraw would smile; there's too much in the way of teeth.

"--But, I know he was a thief," he says to the half lit shadows of men in the room. It isn't a lie, so that too is met with with a few sniffs of humor that sober as James goes on: "Benjamin robbed better men in England, then came here and stole on three separate occasions from these people he'd been delivered to."

He counts off on his fingers: "First: four eggs for the plantation master's considerable breakfast. Second: a pound of smoked pork which would have eventually been fed to him. And Third," he says to the bone quiet room. "He was made by men who I'm told are good to steal a number of years of his labor and sweat from this place which is said to be entitled to it."

For a moment he studies his fingers - the callouses and swollen knuckles and the dirt that's turned the nails black -, then regards the room. "I can't fault a man for being what he's expected to be."

[aletheian]

It is absurd, truly, that such an accusation just makes Thomas flush with pleasure. Lucky it's nearly dark, lucky he knows better than to reach out and entwine his fingers with the other man's until the candles are snuffed. But he sees that smile, like the serrated edge of a knife, and his one in return is warm. (Or whether shall I say mine eye saith true, and that your love taught it this alchemy, to make of monsters and things indigest such cherubins as your sweet self resemble, creating every bad a perfect best, as fast as objects to his beams assemble?)

The pause which follows James's statements is nearly comical as the collected gallery process everything, following the logic and morality of it; Thomas thinks it's beautiful, and dangerous. Inciting talk, worse than scripture as it lacks the inherent aim towards guilt - and for all that it's mild. Brushing towards innocent.

A voice from the other side of the room: "We're expected to be grateful for something besides the gallows."

It's hard to tell if this is an endorsement or condemnation of their conversation. Thomas gets up and blows out the flame of the nearest candle, his footsteps eerily silent over the wooden floor. One creaks as he makes his way back. As he joins James, one hand on his shoulder to avoid bumping into him uncomfortably as they bed down, sounds of a horse clopping its way through the dirt materialize, a guard doing his rounds. Others follow suit, and true darkness settles over them.

The sound of looming danger fades, eventually, and a man says barely-audible: "Here's to all us thieves, then. Amen."

[katabasis]

Which is how it begins. In the days that follow, James carries no low conversations with other men to or from the fields. There are no pointed looks down the length of the dinner table, and certainly there are no evening addresses standing before the bunkhouse in that hour of scant candlelight. Part of it is because to do anything of the sort would be unbelievably reckless. But the larger, more significant factor? He doesn't have to. Men like this are won as much by useless conversation ('For fuck's sake Lee, drink less or walk farther to piss. You're flooding this whole fucking furrow.') and performing back breaking work in tandem as they are by suggestions spoken in the dark. But if his goal was to lead them and whispering in the night the only way to do it? He might find it in himself to be so reckless.

Luckily, they - he and Thomas - have no need for either. He has no interest in either of them leading a slave rebellion. It requires too much faith. Rooting out the particular man who might and encouraging the rest to follow him, however? That he's considered. At length. How difficult is the job of quartermaster? He honestly has no idea. But there are two of them to share the burden of it and he trusts Thomas to know the things he doesn't - French conjugation and these particular men.

TING! is the sound of shovel cracking a stone. His hand slips on the handle and scores down the length of it, catching and driving a splinter under the nail of his thumb.

"Fuck!" He recoils and drops the shovel into the broken dirt of the field. The arrhythmic sound of men at work around him stumbles as a few of them pause to look in his direction.

[aletheian]

It's normal, but it's not. Back to the routine - except that James has never been part of this routine, and Thomas doesn't know how to fit him into it. Far from a complaint. Sometimes he's not sure if he's dreaming-- once, he wakes in the middle of the night and presses his hand against the side of James's face as he sleeps, terrified that he's back in Bethlem and has imagined this whole thing. This place has made his reality one that must question anything good.

Thomas is at his side quickly after he drops the shovel. "Let me see," he says quietly, holding his hand. Oh. He knows all too well the vicious pain of something so small. One of the overseers has begun the trek across the uneven rows to their position to investigate.

"Think you can pull it out, or do you want me to?" --Sometimes pain is best when someone else isn't manipulating the thing that hurts. The wood fragment is deep, though, and Thomas knows if it breaks apart it'll have to be dug out, the thought of which turns his stomach in sympathy. He doesn't know why. He's seen the scars on James's body, even across his face, and knows he's been through hell. Maybe it's just seeing it happen.

"He's not dying, get the fuck back to work," calls the overseer a few yards away. It's one of the more volatile men; he wishes it were Marshall, or someone else with an easier moral compass. Thomas's hands still on James's, and the struggle he endures between knowing he needs to obey immediately and finding it unthinkable to step away is nearly tangible. Heavy footsteps as the man gets closer, menacing, and Thomas does force himself to pull his hands back and step to one side-- anger like heat from him for a moment before he gets it under control and blanks himself, practiced, battered, into nothing.

[katabasis]

It isn't the first time he's been barked at and not the first time he's seen Thomas snapped at either, but for some reason this time it digs - feels as petty as the sliver of wood jammed up under his nail. They've decided to do something about it, so in the moment the waiting has become fucking intolerable.

If Thomas hadn't already ceded ground, he tells himself, he would've pulled away. But he doesn't have to so he picks up his shovel with the hand he doesn't currently have held palsied at his side first, then turns some attention to seeing if he can't catch the edge of the--

"You're wasting everyone's time, Captain," the overseer reminds him - all clipped and blunt as the rifle under his arm. James shakes his hand like he might knock loose the sting. Taking up the shovel back up in both hands, he drives it back into the dirt. The rythmn of the work resumes. As the overseer turns and picks his way back across the uneven furrows, one of the men - McNair - spits casually after him.

As far as hurts go, this one's laughably minor. But it's an annoyingly present discomfort in every pause and shift, and he's still picking reflexively at the damn thing when it comes time to put away the shovels in the failing light. The overseer asks if he'd like to just cut it off and be done with it. James doesn't grin with all his teeth at him. Instead while they make the long walk from the fields, he worries at his nail with his teeth - spits dirt - and asks Thomas from between his fingers, "What did McNair do? To get here."

[aletheian]

Thomas pulls James's hand away from his mouth, a frown still on his face. (It's been there all day.) Sailors. For heaven's sake. "You need to wash that out," he says, which is not a brush-off of his inquiry - rather, direction to where to discuss it.

--Maybe. Marshall is hanging around making sure everyone shoos off appropriately, and asks aggressively what (the fuck) they think they're doing. "Let me get the damn splinter out of his hand," Thomas says, exasperated, but he knows just how far he can push this one. Marshall ends up coming over to have a look, bringing lamplight and all, and remarks with sympathy that such things are worse than 'getting kicked right in the balls', and then proceeds to tell a genuinely terrible story about such an incident, including vivid detail about the state of his organ after. He laughs loudly at Thomas's withering look in response, and claps him on the shoulder once the wince-inducing procedure, carried out huddled over a basin, is through. Like they're old friends. It's a very strange game for a man in his position to play with slaves he has ultimate power over. Sometimes Thomas doesn't think it's a game; sometimes he thinks Marshall comes from so little good that he pretends this is fine so that he has people to talk to day to day.

Wholly aware that he's on edge and that it's unhelpful, Thomas lets out a long breath as they head off, willing himself to unwind. The problem with feeling more like himself as days go on - like rust scraping off iron - is that he is less dead inside, is that he cares more, is that everything seems a thousand times more infuriating.

He's fine.

"Do you remember - it must have been almost the new year in 1699," he says, "the scandal over Lord Slater's murder? It was chalked up to friends fighting over debts, officially. That's certainly all I'd ever heard of it."

[katabasis]

It's a particular kind of relief - the splinter dropped into the basin and the low throbbing ache it leaves behind, Marshall being dumb as a post alongside of them instead of any of the alternatives, yes. But it's Thomas, a little raw and bristling, that strips some of his own bab temper away. That isn't how it should be. Thomas's frown and his impatience and the sharp looks he doles out should sharpen James.

They don't.

He must be distracted by it though. Or maybe the killing of Lord Slater has just been so long buried at the back of his mind as utterly inconsequential. Either way, at first he honestly can't recall it the murder. He tries to place the image of the McNair as he is here backwards into a place he doesn't seem to fit now - London, years ago, as remote and impossible as a dream.

"I thought the name was familiar." Right. Lord Slater with a knife between the ribs. Terrible. Dramatic for how common an end it was for a person who was supposed to be anything but and remarkable for almost no reason at all. 1699. He would've passed his examination for lieutenant a year before and been languishing at anchor in Spithead, bored out of his mind with land in sight and news packets from it every other day.

James hums thoughtfully and nearly sets his thumb back between his teeth before he diverts his hand to tug at his beard instead. "What do you think about him?" And what did everyone else?

[aletheian]

"I didn't know either of them," Thomas muses, finding it much easier to consider his professional life in London than his personal one. Different sides of the aisle, so to speak, but back then, virtually no one had anything in common with him politically. His reputation of madness arose from those early days and his opinions therein, wildly impossible and scandalous things like maybe letting people starve to death is a shit idea.

"Most people like him well enough." He's quiet for a moment as they walk, and when he speaks again, his voice is gentler: "His sister lives in the main house-- she doesn't speak, hasn't in longer than I've been here. Slater had assaulted her. Awfully. And McNair killed him for it."

The tragedy that the man who runs this hellhole speaks of when he waxes poetic about needing to take care of those no longer fit for normal society isn't a real moral tragedy. There are no paupers imprisoned here, no broken men and women saved from starvation and illness in the streets. They all have good breeding and old names, or at least, new money. Because the tragedy spoken of is that they might be treated like the vulgarly poor, their families might be seen to be on a level with ones below their status. Trapped here, 'protected', 'cared for', preserving the veneer of normalcy in London, where news of things like Alfred Hamilton's soon is a queer political extremist and Lord Slater is a rapist or Jonas Barnaby killed seven prostitutes might shock the good people of the right class, or worse, it might not.

"He's a good man, I think."

[katabasis]

"Fair," is his only assessment for McNair and his mute sister. Does the latter complicate matters or simplify them? How many times had McNair stabbed Lord Slater? More than once, would be his guess. Who pays for the McNairs' life here? Their family or Slater's?

He studies the length of the uneven path ahead of them, then squints across the length of the field stretching North. There's a ragged line of trees there, dense and irregular for some distance before they solidify into a wood. What sits immediately behind it is as mysterious as what waits for a dead man. He's seen smoke East and South of here on the most miserably still days, but that means almost nothing. A house might be in a dell. They might have no wild vegetation to burn back.

'How do you like him for the work?' is what he wants to ask, but it's both more obvious than he dares and unnecessary. Thomas must know why he's asking. So instead he makes a low noise of consideration and simply shields his eyes from the sun.

"Glad to hear it." Good men are so much more likely to set a fire and make sure it burns rather than striking the flint and running.

(What does that make them?) (He doesn't care.)

[aletheian]

Thomas follows the line of unspoken thought, but he doesn't have anything to say about it - and not just because it's too risky to say anything about it. He's not a tactician in this respect. They're not going about this the way he did before, and he truly has no idea how it's going to shake out. (If at all, a voice reminds him.)

They have something resembling free time to mill about in preparation for supper, and as always, walking slowly between destinations gives them more time with imitation privacy. For a while Thomas is quiet, just enjoying James's company; he thinks of reaching out to take his hand, imagines doing it, but doesn't. The sight of it out of the corner of someone's eye will draw attention and shatter the illusion of solitude too quickly.

"I'd like to ask you something," he says. "And I'd like you to answer completely divorced from potential or hypothetical context. Just as a singular thing."

It's the kind of lead-up that hearkens back to Thomas's debatable hit single, I'm Going To Say This Incredibly Inflammatory Thing In Parliament, What's Your Opinion (Keep In Mind I'm Saying It Regardless), featuring the less frequently played but still notable B-side, I've Already Said This Incredibly Inflammatory Thing In Parliament, Would You Like To Get Dinner Or Stay In Tonight. Less energetically presented after over a decade of his personality being ground under the world's boot heel, but he remains himself.

"Do you want to leave Captain Flint behind?"

[katabasis]

It would be easy to think of nothing. How much simpler would it be to merely be in his company and be aware of things like the small stones under foot, the buzz of insects, or the pine warblers singing their last songs of the day. Days ago if Thomas had said 'Yes, I'm happy here', it might be the most comfortable thing in the world. But there's no going back. There's no undeciding the thing. Even if they were to take it all back, would he stop thinking about it? Stop considering it? Stop turning the idea over in his head like a piece of Spanish gold in the dark? Thomas must feel the same. Maybe that's why he's so mild when he looks to him and why the question - the one he should know will surprise or sober him - checks him so hard.

He nearly stops. He wants to but his brain overrides it and his feet keeps moving. Someone would notice if he did and ask them what they're doing - what they're discussing - and suddenly he doesn't trust himself with that. Go away. This doesn't belong to anyone. He jerks his head to the side, staring at point on Thomas's shirt that means absolutely nothing, and breathes in short under his top teeth.

"That man," he says, all but spitting. "Is dead."

Would you give up his victory have him back again? Which impossible thing do you choose? A war or the man who knew the worth of it and a thousand other things? Flint picks the war. Flint picks the one that makes the world better. Flint dies on the island. Flint becomes the curse against Everyone else who can't bring themselves to change a thing.

Is that how he's followed him here?

[aletheian]

How anyone could find James McGraw - and certainly Captain Flint, if the world is true to form - unfeeling is beyond him; the way emotion plays over his face, subtle though it may be, is so obvious to Thomas. Has always been so obvious. Even that first day on the tangle of roads to Whitehall, he thought it was beautiful, as easily read as his favorite books. Today he can't bring himself to think it's beautiful but there's something about it that reaches in and holds his heart captive in its grip; agonizing and raw and everything Thomas asked for, because he must know.

He isn't sorry for asking even though he feels gutted about what it reveals. If he ever finds the people who betrayed James to the extent of abandoning him here, instead of just telling him about it, he'll-- god, he'll what, frown disapprovingly? Bloody hell. (Tell them that a choice between death and submission to slavery is not a choice between love and war, tell them that he'd have chosen the war, that love despite and in spite of isn't love, that a war that killed Flint would have seen Thomas free, connected even if they never knew it.)

What's the price of freedom, then, measured in things he can count. What damage will be wrought if he has to tell James that he's known about his darkness since before he decided he loved him, that he doesn't see Flint as so much of a stranger, that his love has never ignored parts of him.

Thomas doesn't say anything. He extends his hand between them as they walk, slow and without desire to ever reach their destination, a quiet offer and quieter thank-you. For telling him.

[katabasis]

There's simply no option except to take Thomas's hand. Anything else - hesitating or refusing - is unspeakably cold and too close to how he'd learned to handle Miranda that he can't bear the thought. Thomas's hand in his and the slow walk up from the fields is what makes any of this mean something. Just the contact is enough to smooth the tautest lines of his face. When they're free of this place that the world put them in, he tells himself that Flint can be forgotten altogether. Exorcise his ghost. Shed this place and the dregs of him all at once.

(Which is a lie. What is he doing here? To what end? To simply slip away into the darkness with Thomas while this place smothers whatever revolt McNair might be convinced to lead? To go west and north and never look back in this direction again?)

He's quiet for a long time, thumb stroking the knuckle of Thomas's hand like he somehow needs the reassurance (when that's so fundamentally not the case). What if his answer had been something else entirely? "There's something I need to tell you," he says after so long it might as well have no connection to what came before it, low enough that maybe no one will hear. "When there's a moment."

Certainly not here.

[aletheian]

James's hand in his is grounding and like a lightning strike at once. Even though they're where they are it feels like a triumph to touch him and be loved, be in love - right now it's a hard-won and bittersweet triumph in the face of James's reaction to his question, the clear wounds within him, but weathering it is automatic. This is, they are, unconditional.

Thomas lets himself be comforted, intuiting somehow that James needs to find his bearings, his steadfast support a quiet thing. The open display of affection does draw a few looks, but no one says anything, blessedly concerned with their own business. That James feels like he does about Flint isn't a surprise to Thomas, but the passion of it almost is - and it shouldn't be, because this man is surely incapable of doing anything except fully, be it the embrace of his own rage or the rejection of it. Thomas knows from his heart to the very marrow of his bones that there's no extreme James can push to that will hurt him or make him want to shy away. That's why they're who they are. He just hopes he can find a way to keep James from hurting himself.

"Anything, my love," he says quietly.

Dinner is what it is, and it's their turn to help with cleanup alongside the girls who work in the house - black slaves, mostly, but two women interred as borderline political prisoners, as well. The former are always keen to ask Thomas about literature, and are more than happy to pick James's brain about it as well. One white woman watches the both of them closely, saying nothing.

[katabasis]

Talk of literature bends naturally toward talk of philosophy. The danger of that's easy enough to mitigate though. By the time he's using lines of Pomfret's Reason taken entirely out of context to play devil's advocate to Thomas's points - said so plain it's as if he's serious, punctuated with sly sidelong looks that have the girls laughing and sympathizing with Thomas as plates are gathered and table tops washed -, he's all but put away the thought of what needs to be done. The women have evidently seen enough of the men who make up the convict labor to be ambivalent about the kind they are or their estimation of Thomas and the company he keeps is high enough that James benefits. They don't hesitate to share in the joke, flicking water at him when he makes particularly unpopular points.

"--And so, all but proof for 'Will knowledge dawn and bless the mind? No. It's charms, and undiscovered lies.' You can't just throw water at anyone whose opinion yours don't align with, Bes--"

"That's enough, I think," says the white woman, her ring of keys heavy at her hip. "The two of you should get back before it gets any darker."

Which is an empty point. They might have stayed there all night for how black it is by the time they step out. There must be candles lit in the bunkhouse still - he can see the vague shape of a door left open to encourage a breeze through the thin copse of trees he knows to be between here and there -, but otherwise it's pitch enough that they take a moment to let their eyes adjust to the darkness before going any farther.

The dark swallows the girls' laughter and for a moment as they stand at the edge of the night, James is aware of a liminality before them. The breeze, too warm to be a relief, and the ocean of darkness between them and the bunkhouses inspires a flash of insanity. What if instead of walking the path to the slave quarters, they instead turned out and made their way across the fields in the dark? To stay another minute is to commit to McNair and the incitement of violence. If they leave now, they can live and never think of this place again. He will have no responsibility to any part of this except the one that sees Thomas and him free.

"Comment ça va?"

[aletheian]

Who could leave and live knowing that in the dark behind them, still in chains, are men who killed for righteous vengeance, are women born into slavery who pass down stories of the Bible and Cervantes like oral history, are leeches who profit off of twisting the law to give them slaves instead of mercifully hanging criminals?

It's not a real question.

How are you, meanwhile, is.

On this threshold, Thomas reaches out, fingertips brushing the back of James's hand but not taking it - there's something sweet about it, but teasing, too. A private language of their uncanny connection, crafted of philosophical notes and long looks, deep enough to drown in. He's fine. He's awful. He's happy.

"The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts," Thomas says, en français. A little bleak, given context of their lives at present, and given what Thomas knows he has to push James towards if they're ever going to have a different context. The weight of it is a cold stone in his stomach, but he doesn't let it lower him. He can't.

[katabasis]

Only the first few words require careful listening before his memory supplies the meaning of the rest. He breathes out, black humor and something else in the shape of it. What most people could call virtue and reasonable nature lay in those hills surrounding the plantation and the unknown shape of whatever is between them and New France. He can see the path there rapidly becoming impossible.

Maybe that other thing in his laugh is relenting to what's true. So the darkness becomes slowly familiar to his eye, James moves out through it toward the blacker shapes of the slave quarters. So just like that, there's no need to hurry or choke on the thing that's been stuck in his ribs since the afternoon. They can afford to make their way sedately along the path at night and he can--

He clears his throat. The sound is rough. "The thing you need to hear before we commit ourselves," he starts to say. Pauses. Finds himself grappling clumsily for the right words because they're committed already. Or he is and even the trace possibility of not sharing that frightens him. (When was the last time James McGraw was terrified?)

"Some time ago, a ship called the Maria Aleyne was bound for the colonies from London." It sounds like a story, only this one he tells so haltingly even the pace of his feet drags. "The crew had known considerable success under me, so when I told them that I'd heard from a man in Port Royal with ties in Boston that she was to be rich with silks and silver, they believed me."

She'd carried very little of either.

"We hunted her for months at the expense of a handful of other fat prizes. When we found her - and we did finally find her -, I ordered the gun crews to avoid damaging the hull. They thought it was to preserve the cargo. In exchange, we suffered considerable fire before the ship could be boarded. Men who had followed a lie for months died in pieces to capture her."

This is not a bloodless story. It's true. Stop me, he doesn't think. He says this and it's the end of pretending, but just thinking that means it's already done.

[aletheian]

Whatever James is trying to get out, Thomas can't begin to guess. It's not like the other tales he's told, evident before he speaks his first word. The sound of him, like someone lost in the dark, worries him. When James slows Thomas steps in front of him to halt him entirely, clasping his hands in his own. They're alright here for the time being - curfew isn't for another little while, and no one else is around. Lamps in the main house still burn, a man is sitting on the porch, but he's too far away to hear or care.

Did Thomas not react properly to that declaration about Flint? Is James going to try and convince him of something awful, thinking Thomas is too careless about it? That doesn't seem quite right but he can't think of what might be less wrong; whatever it is, it's doing a number on his lover's head. Thomas squeezes his hands and waits patiently, the slight frown on his face only existing out of concern.

God, does he really not think Thomas understands the depths of horror a pirate captain has gone to, does he really not think Thomas knows what he must have done.

[katabasis]

He allows Thomas to break that illusion of forward momentum, to bring him to a standstill. It changes nothing. No matter what Thomas says, he is going to tell McNair what must be done. He is going to stay here and see it finished. He is going to burn this place to the ground and with it will go that fantasy of New France.

(Thomas isn't responsible for Flint, but he has the uncanny ability to bring him to life with just a few words - the right question.)

"We took the ship. It's crew and captain were chained. And while my men," --his men-- "Tended the account, I went below to look for who I knew would be there." He went looking.

"You see, the Maria Aleyne's precious cargo wasn't silks or silver. What was valuable to me - why we had chased her for months, why no shot could be allowed to penetrate the hull and endanger them - were its two passengers: Lord and Lady Alfred Hamilton."

There is a thing in him that wants to rattle free and he lets it. His hands are trembling and he is intimately, desperately not sorry. "He recognised me even in the dark. I made sure to be the monster he expected so that when I came for him, he knew exactly what he had made before I butchered him and his wife. Then--" There's more. Of course there is. He spits it out. "Then we took what little the Maria Aleyne had, returned her to her captain, and let them go on their way so that everyone would know what terrible thing had finally found the Hamiltons."

[aletheian]

Thomas can see it so clearly in his mind's eye.

Father, whose relationship with his son was ever like tangles of thorn plants; Alfred loomed over him with a dark, oppressive cloud since his birth, in turns neglectful and aggressively abusive with his demands and expectations, possessed of a hate so incurable it led to bending the world to give him Thomas's orchestrated, deliberate suffering. Mother, whose lukewarm affection - the absolute peak of feeling for her child - died when he became ambulatory enough to be something more than a cherubic accessory. Thomas's earliest clear memory of her is not hearing a song hummed or playing but of crying, desperately begging her for deliverance from Alfred's rage, and feeling her weak, clammy hand push him away by his bruised face.

He can see them dying. He can see James's awful visage coming to them like a grim reaper, like a horseman of the apocalypse. Butchered, he says, and Thomas can see that too, flesh split open on the blade of a cutlass, James's strength behind every brutal move. He can hear it.

Thomas hadn't known they were dead. Distantly his memory fetches absent remarks from the man in charge that in retrospect seem to imply it, puts them together, building him an image of the timing. Why hadn't Alfred just told him, he wonders-- but only for a heartbeat.

He knows why.

Perhaps James is waiting for grief and horror. At least shock, surely. Thomas, as he holds James's trembling, unrepentant hands, is not. He knows those things won't come and for a brief moment he hopes that something like somber respect comes instead to allow him a moment's further charade of maintained innocence, at the very goddamn least, he hopes that he has the capacity for it and not what he feels which is-- not grief.

He's closed his eyes and he forces them open, refusing to be ashamed. Fire, like he could scream, hateful satisfaction and anger only because he wasn't there to see it himself, to experience it in every dimension and color and sound and smell, because he suffered Bedlam for those people, he suffered this fucking plantation for those people, Miranda lost her life and James is shattered, because his father, his father, had nothing but sooty evil in his veins, in his heart.

(Bethlem was the school where Thomas learned to hate, but perhaps it was in his blood all along. His real birthright.)

"All you've done," his voice is a harsh, alien whisper, his knuckles white where they're gripping his lover's hands, certainly to the point of pain at this stage, "is spared me having to ask you to do it."

[katabasis]

Silver had been right. There are people who can bend reality to them, whose shape in the world Nature twisted toward. Only, he'd mistaken Flint for the man with that capacity. Had killed him for it. Had willingly become the part which bent, but was unwitting of to what end. It's a vicious, unspeakable justice. If it weren't for every other part of this - Thomas's grip crushing his hands and how incandescent he is in the revelation of this violence -, he might laugh.

This should be the kind of thing that breaks a person: the man in front of him bears very little resemblance to the one made uncomfortable by a public hanging and gone pale over news of blood in the street of Nassau, the man who could forgive but not condone violence. Yet Miranda reaches out through the dark to them and the impossible knot in him unravels. How alike they are. How recognisable they remain to each other, even removed by time and distance and death. Even when transformed into these dangerous things.

He doesn't make any effort to loose his hands or temper the heat between them. "There's a version of the world where people can be principled and happy. Where the truth isn't something to be ruined for and there are no broken men so there's no such thing as necessary violence." He believes that. What would be the point otherwise? "But this isn't that place and I can't leave it this way."

Does he mean the plantation or everything else? Arrangements could be made - he could send Thomas away. See him off safely. But he knows that's not happening either. So Silver is right again: it will be this, again and again and again either until he's dead or satisfied.

[aletheian]

"I know."

Thomas presses closer to him, hands still clasped so tightly, near enough to lean in and touch their foreheads together, though he doesn't. I know. That there is a better world, because they've lived in it and seen the shining edges of it, that this is not it, that James can't endure walking away from it and granting it continued life.

Can't issue it a pardon.

"You told me that if I wanted to stay you'd stay." His low voice is quiet, just for them, but there's an urgency to it. "You told me that if I said it was impossible you'd drop it. And that's-- it's not good enough, if your conviction can be banked by anything, even me, then this has already failed."

Case in point, he feels, is that it's taken him so long to say so. Thomas hasn't been a person capable of making choices or thinking about abstract problems-- Thomas hasn't been a person since he was ripped from James and Miranda in London. James cannot use him as a north star for any of this because as much as he's coming back to himself - coming into whoever he is now, scarred and burned and fortified in the worst ways - he is fundamentally incapable of having appropriate perspective. It galls him to accept that, but it's the truth.

"I'm not what I was."

Now he does touch their foreheads together, his eyes closed. If he has grief over anything it's for the both of them, the lives that have been claimed, the way their hands are both in the other's and not split between a third.

"I don't know yet what I am now. But I know you. God, James. I know you. And you aren't dead."