[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]

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."

[katabasis]

Don't be Orpheus. Don't look back for him.

It should be an impossible request, but it isn't because-- "Look at me." He presses their hands against Thomas's belly for just that modicum of distance. So he can see Thomas as he is exactly here in the dark with him. "You're my partner. I'm yours."

Because even if everything else has fallen away, that much is true. Because Thomas is right - he can be neither ahead or behind him, neither driving or guiding because he is here with and beside him. That's all he's ever wanted. His war, her war - No, it's been theirs since before he ever stood up in the Hamilton house to say that Thomas was a good man. Nothing shifts that. No circumstances can divorce them from each other and if the only thing their partnership accomplishes in ten years is to unmake just one miserable place then isn't that still worth it?

"That's never changed." No matter who was dead. No matter who was broken. No matter distance or time or how dangerous.

[aletheian]

It's an indefinite thought exercise; Thomas doesn't need to be forced, he's not going to ask James to stop, but the drive needed to do this is one that is so brutal as to not be able to stop. James has confessed this horrific murder and it's as good as Thomas doing it himself for how tied to one another they are, for how their souls have grown and cracked to match. It's awful, and it's good.

They're a mess and they're not. Thomas looks at him and his eyes are clear. "I love you," he says softly, because words are failing him in this moment, almost laughably uncharacteristic-- and so, in absence of a politician's command, here's the truth. On these tangled and shadowed paths they haven't walked before, they've been of the same mind, just stumbling over different cracks in the stone.

"Sounds as though I can't talk you out of it," is even softer, something dark and satisfied in the way it curls between them. I want you to try to talk me out of it was never about wanting to stop, but always about seeking holes in logic, and holes in resolve.

It's not wrong to do this over and over. It's not wrong to seek satisfaction until life ends. That's the point of living.

[katabasis]

None of this is the kind of thing that should make a person happy. They are standing in the ocean of dark between the main house of a plantation and the slave quarters where they live, speaking of bloody plans with the tacit understanding that they are so dangerous that reasonably they could be lethal to one or both of them. But his pulse is quickening and the feeling which blooms high in his chest isn't rage or fear or the unspeakable thing that just hungers for bones to break between its teeth. It's not relief either. Not the cold comfort he's taken in this careful, methodical, evasive approach they've spent so long lingering over.

It's a wild, fervent kind of joy: cracking him open and shining a light through it. He fights down a smile, then stops and lets himself - be happy, love this this between them. --God, he loves Thomas so much and it must show in every angle of him, in the soft noise he makes when he breathes out, in every consonant: "It seems I'm committed."

[aletheian]

Thomas smiles.

Brilliant, honest, lines on his face from age and wear so much more obvious, nothing about it pained or mingled with more reasonable emotions like-- caution, wryness, regret. No. He loves James and he loves the storm in him, that abyss on the ocean, he loves the fire, he loves that he can breathe that black water and be galvanized in those flames.

I will know you even in the dark.

One hand untangles from their desperate clasp, and Thomas raises it to trace rough fingertips over James's jaw, though the red hair on his face to his ear, holding the back of his head. He kisses him. Edging on harsh, this emotion too fierce for anything else, not sealing a pact between them but striking fire in the one they've always had.