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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Other than the sawing feeling that comes with drawing breath? He wheezes out a laugh that's part fatigue, relief, and then the smallest measure of something else entirely. Something that can't be spoken of in the company of Annie. "Not at all."

He pats Thomas's knee and thigh as punctuation - as much to reassure him as it is for his own benefit. If Annie's assessment is true, the arm will be fine. Thomas is here and safe. Nothing has gone horribly wrong and he knows in his bones exactly what will need doing shortly. Something will have to be said to the men of their bunkhouse. Something will have to be said to the ones they meet in the field--

Later. He can hardly string the thought together now, capable of little more than being in Thomas's company and sitting upright. They're fine. Everything is manageable.

In this awful wake, even men who thought accepting payment to enslave people for their lifetimes was an excellent moral enterprise can't find it in themselves not to take things slowly, favoring the health of those already coughing and caked in soot. Others who weren't on the front lines are left to begin cleanup, overseers are tasked with heading to the nearest stream to begin replenishing fresh water.

The rest of them are given time to sit away and breathe and as soon as they are, Thomas pulls James into his arms and holds him close for as long as he can. There's plenty to say-- but difficult, not only because of James's abused lungs but because activity is constant and out of order, the schedule and routine Thomas is so good at twisting around thrown out the window to compensate for the disaster. It is dangerous for them to discuss anything but the danger of it feels so distant compared to the immediacy of the fire.

It isn't. That danger is present and close enough to blur, hiding in plain, overlooked sight, as discussions in the main house, doors shut, voices low, begin.

Fires do not start themselves.

There's enough random shuffling of work that it's impossible to keep track of all the usual faces he knows. Half of the men they work the fields with are able to stand and breathe and are perfectly capable of feeding animals, or rigging together a temporary structure for the horses, or turning over the wreckage of the barn to make sure there's no ember still glowing there and finding some familiar, telling item in the ash. There are men fit to find their way to an overseer where they might say something significant and be pulled discreetly into the main house. Given some hours to recover and water to wash the ash from their hands and faces, even they are separated: James to sit in the shade plucking chickens and stripping dry corn from their cobs in the company of two girls from the kitchen and a half dozen others whose breathing still sounds enough like death that they can be trusted with a sharp knife, and Thomas to-- wherever his burn must not be an impediment. James sometimes catches glimpses of him in the intervening hours, the shape of him so familiar to his eye that he has known it from farther distances than across the yard.

"All this and we won't even get to eat the chickens," wheezes one of the men in the shade who had sweat and burned in the bucket brigade, throwing feathers in every direction except into the bag they're meant to fill. James saws out a horrible laugh, glad for the ragged sound of it even if his chest aches. Good. He hopes it stays that way for some time. The effect will be useful to him, especially after a day of ragged irregular work and the promise of real labor to follow it and once the questions that are inevitably being asked in the main house circulate to them. They will tired of being picked over with a fine tooth comb, paranoid about being pegged as the culprit (who must exist).

Then the bell in the yard is rung - TANGTANG! -, the same two strokes that weeks ago had paused work and seen Benjamin beaten. He thinks, Maybe not and That was fast.

There is all manner of work for Thomas to do, and he feels somewhat better that James will be taking it easy at the same time as feeling poorly about having to leave him. He thinks he'll feel something unpleasant every time he has to walk away from James for the rest of his life, though, even if it's to glance out a window somewhere serene. That's just the shape of the world, now. Bright enough that all the monsters are illuminated, decaying and hateful and hungry, always reaching towards to take, take, take...

Marshall, who has a burn and smells of singed hair, hangs around Thomas for a while and is unusually quiet. Something about it walks along Thomas's nerves, not trusting the shift of mood. He goes away for an hour or so then comes back, still quiet.

"Are you going to spit it out or not?" Thomas asks, in the process of tacking up an oilskin sheet over a wooden frame. He looks over his shoulder--

--and Marshall is holding a set of manacles, eyes guilty set in his stone face, two more men behind him. Thomas just stares dumbly.

"It's just a precaution," the overseer says, something off in the tone of his familiar voice that goes beyond the rattle of smoke inhalation. A bell rings out, two sharp notes, and Thomas realizes how far out from the main knot of workers he is, realizes he's been cornered over here so that James won't be able to see him fully. People are being herded to the clear space between the main house and the garden. Marshall is still talking. "You ain't in trouble. We know you didn't do it, and honestly, we know he didn't neither, but it looks like what it looks like--"

He speaks on and Thomas has dropped the hammer and taken a step forward to try and see around him, trying to shake off the hand that clasps around his bicep, trying to do something, anything, except be jerked back and manhandled into irons. Once it's done they don't move him. Thomas doesn't say anything. Marshall looks apologetic and Thomas doesn't care. Distantly he hears noise, knows that it's James being taken like this and dragged forward. Every second that ticks by is torture. He was never on the verge of any real madness in Bethlem but he thinks this is what it must feel like.

A man's voice carries in the still air, explaining that whomever lit the fire is irrelevant, but the fact that someone did at all is not. They all know why it's happening, he says, because the mystique of a pirate, but do you know what happens to real pirates--

Thomas stumbles, realizes he's being hauled towards the main group, finally

--they're hanged, out in public, food thrown at them, and isn't it kind of us to let him be here instead.

where he can see what's happening and he must make some kind of noise, because suddenly he's hit in the throat with a cudgel by one of the men escorting him. Two laugh as he's shoved to his knees at the edge of the line.

"Guess that's how you get a reaction out of Lord Hamilton," one says, laughing, and someone's keeping a hand at the back of his neck, another holding his shoulder, forcing him to stay where he is and cough helplessly.

This is the kindness: there isn't any food being thrown. The sound of the man's voice is punctuated by the metal ring of of a hammer on a bolt as its driven through a link of chain between and then into the ground. The dirt's too soft from the rains and maybe if the man they're holding face down into the dirt while they pin the manacles into place hadn't spent the night running around like a madman that would matter. He still shifts under them, trying to shift his hands where they've been lashed in front of him so he isn't being driven onto his own fists - trying to turn his face so he isn't breathing in dirt and ash. It's like suffocating and has nothing to do with the earth or the knee in his back - Where is Thomas? and Don't bring him here, which is so ludicrous that he can't even be surprised when he turns his head far enough to see them dragging him forward, hands bound.

--Then hit him. And James snarls, lifting himself under some man's sharp knee on his knuckles. Don't bring him here. Don't you fucking drag him any farther. That they don't (yet) is at least half the reason he can be driven back to his belly and how they get the noose over his head and around his neck.

He should stop looking at Thomas then. There is a man with his hand on Thomas's neck and one at his side and he should be memorizing their faces for how much he hates them. Who struck him? He couldn't see. He's going to murder him in the night. He's going to slit his throat, he thinks, wheezing as he gets to his elbows and knees then choking when the man at the end of the rope cheerfully pulls it taut. But he can't. He can't stop staring at Thomas.

The sight of James being fitted with a noose inspires in Thomas a wild panic he's never known in his life, slipping free of the men holding him--

Only for a moment. He's practically tackled to the ground, held by three sets of hands, the response becoming less like laughter now as the frantic desperation doesn't leave him. Can't leave him. Not with James like that. Someone has a hold of his arm where it's burned but he doesn't still, he doesn't even feel the pain as his wrists strain in iron circles, as he catches a knee in his ribs. The collected gallery is left in horrified silence, suddenly afraid they're going to witness an actual execution today.

"If you don't calm down I may truly have him killed," says a voice drifting over the both of them. Oglethorpe, architect and owner of this place. He strides past where James is still being nailed into place to stand before Thomas - stares at him, seems to expect attention, but Thomas is locked onto James. He is incapable of looking away. "Have I ever jested with you where discipline is concerned, Thomas?"

It takes a moment for the words to reach him, another to be processed, but with a lurching sensation in his stomach he thinks-- no, this man has never made an idle threat concerning the state of the people he owns. He made Thomas watch as a man had his brain turned off. Panic worse than before courses through him and the fight leaves him, collapsing onto his forearms. His eyes don't leave James.

"There, now." Like a disapproving parent chastising a small child. "Begin, Mr Andies."

The flogger is heavy and old, punctuated by kicks to keep him down, brutal yanks on the rope around his neck to keep him quiet and winded. Thomas flinches with every blow. Oglethorpe remains where he is, back to where James is being brutalized, his focused purely on Thomas.

"You can't know how disappointed I am," he's saying, his voice low enough to be just for the two of them - or would be, if Thomas wasn't still being pinned by multiple people, if James and the men working his restraints and torture weren't just meters away. "I didn't take him in for the money, or for the fear of pirate reprisal. I took him in for you. You've made such headway since your lapse in judgement and I felt you deserved it. This is your home, and I thought you'd learned to be grateful for it."

Thomas's fingers curl in the earth.

There's a relief so stark in the moment that Thomas quiets under all those knees and hands that it makes him nauseous, but if there's a thought to accompany it then it's too wild to parse before it's strangled out of him. Stay there, maybe. Or don't do anything to make them drag you closer to this. Or ten thousand other things that evaporate into a growling windless noise in his ears at the first snap of the flog.

It isn't bad. His lungs hurt more. The heel of a boot hurts more. The spitting, insane thing in his belly driven to tearing itself apart for how glad he is that Thomas is still and how angry he is that he's being made to be hurts more. The sickly singing noise the flog makes as it swings through the air in the bone quiet yard stings sharper than the impact does. For a while anyway. For as long as he can bear to look at Thomas under the weight of the men pinning him before some lash finds the bare back of his neck and James drops his face by instinct.

For a long time the only sounds in the yard are the irregular clink of a chain against a bolt, the fiber groan of a rope, heels dug into soft dirt, and the irregular rhythm of beating an animal. Then Ogelthorpe says, "Ring the hands to supper if you please, Mr Andies," and he does - one note that sustains for some time before the assembly of men and slaves begin to shuffle where they've been bid.

The rope goes slack and he can finally sag his head to his forearms. "No, Mr Marshall," says Ogelthorpe's voice above him, already moving away. "Leave the bolt as it is, please."

Weeks ago when James asked him if he was happy here, Thomas considered whether or not he'd be able to endure watching James be beaten. He knew it would be intolerable, he knew-- he thought he knew. Experiencing it is so much worse and he doesn't think he'd have words if he had to describe it; everything in him being shredded, like his very emotions are nerves pulled over broken glass.

Finally, silence. The men still restraining him ease up, anticipating release, then that order is given. He sees a man from the knees down, faltering in the process of having been reaching to release James. Must be Marshall - he must have left Thomas as soon as the last stroke fell. He'll consider the significance of that later, but now, all he can hear in his head is a twisted screaming like winds in a storm, what do you mean leave it, no, no.

"He's gonna be useless," says one of the men holding Thomas. The one who'd been laughing the most. (It doesn't take a certain kind of man to work a place like this, given the prevalence of slavery anyway, but sometimes it attracts true specialists.) Ogelthorpe's unconcerned response is, "Confine him for the duration, then, I won't have him be a nuisance."

Pulling Thomas away is a struggle.

The shape of the words is indeterminate but he knows the sound of a man being hauled away against his own volition. He can feel it in his own skin laid below the sting and heat like raw oak under lacquer and polish. James makes some fumbling shape with his hand - fingers flexing - and thinks about what something he could say sound likes--

Then Thomas is gone and it's dark and someone's breathing sounds like a stone rattling in a cup. There's a stone pressing between his ribs. The sky is low, moonlight showing the heavy shape of clouds and no stars at all. A thousand small insect noises fill the night. Later there is a cool hand touching his temple; he wants it to be Miranda more than he wants anything - for her thumb to draw a soft line along his brow. 'James' she says with her dead mouth. 'Look how far you came for us.' Instead it's the white girl from the kitchen, her wheat colored hair a ghost's veil in the moonlight. She pours water over his mouth. She must leave.

In the dewy morning, three men from their bunkhouse are made to lever the bolt from the ground, to unshackle him, then haul him over into the shade of the walnut tree. His hands are freed. "Still alive, captain?" asks Romans.

Mostly, he thinks. The sun seems lurid over the trees. "Where is he?," he wants to ask, but the breath just croaks out of him.

Flint's question is decipherable purely because of common knowledge about the situation, but the men just exchange uneasy looks instead of answering, some unspoken accord about the danger of it - or perhaps they just think a man in his state wouldn't be able to make it across the yard anyway. They get him water, look after him best they can, and help him to the tables when it's time for breakfast. Thomas is absent.

Numerous pairs of eyes observe him in varying degrees of sympathy, nervousness, and anger. (A mixed bag, that last one. So many potential reasons why.) Conversation is spotty and murmured, plenty of voices still too charred for more than a few words.

McNair doesn't look his way once.

It's Marshall who ends up fetching him, because of course it is. The man's looked stricken all day, but kept to his duties. Unbeknownst to any slave or prisoner, Andies has given him a measure of shit over being soft-hearted, and gotten his nose broke over it. Having a conscience is expensive and he knows it, but he's earned enough credit for one at this stage. He leads the battered pirate to the other side of the plantation, beyond the store rooms and secondary housing for black slaves, to where three freestanding wooden structures wait. Four foot square with a chained lock on the heavy door, one has a person inside, visible through the slats of the box.

The only thing Thomas can control in this situation is what he says, and so he hasn't said a word. Even though he resisted, even though he'd made some kind of tortured, animal sound at seeing James hurt. He's leaning against one side of the cage, the shirtsleeves and the front of him covered in dark, dried blood from his wrists tearing against iron, and bruises have bloomed over one side of his face. He doesn't stir when approached.

"Boss said he's in here 'til breaking mid-day," says Marshall. At that, Thomas turns his head, recognizing that he isn't the one being addressed. "I'll be back then. Don't be fucking stupid."

He leaves.

He follows without complaint because he doesn't know where else he would go. No one will tell him where Thomas is or what's been done to him. Either no one knows or they've been instructed not to say anything. Or-- or-- or--. The uncomfortable quiet of it has resolved into a shape that clarifies Thomas's absence at breakfast among two dozen or more other men and mutates now into something horrific as they cross the yard. He find himself thinking of Thomas's collaborator, the one whose name slips his mind, and the description of what had been done to him: tap, tap, tap, a small hammer on a fine pick until nothing was left. --No. Think of other things. Where is Marshall taking him? What work could he possibly be good for? Just fucking tell him what's being done.

There are three wooden boxes at the edge of the cleared grounds. For a second, James doesn't know what he's looking at, then he recognizes fabric and the shape of a figure through the slats. He hardly hears what Marshall says before he's moving to close the distance, his gait all crooked. His throat feels like he's trying to choke down a stone. There's blood on Thomas's shirt, he can see it from here

He puts his fingers through the slats, something hungry about his forehead pressed to the rough wood. There's still ash under his fingernails. Are you-- "--with me?" he asks, the front half lodged in his throat. He can't tolerate waiting for the answer though, sagging down to the ground beside the box - beside him. He tries to force his hand further into the space. "Thomas--" Speak to him.

Edited 2017-07-18 10:15 (UTC)

Worn, bloody fingers press against his like something magnetic has pulled them together, Thomas shifting to the other side of the cage to clutch at him as best he can, desperate--

"James," is broken relief at seeing him alive and mobile, grief at seeing him so damaged, his voice underscored by the clink of metal as no one's taken the manacles off of him. For a moment he can't manage anything but that name, repeating it and feeling like he might cry, tension in his chest and behind his eyes shaking loose like lightning at the sight of him. "Oh, god." He exhales with a strange laugh that's almost hysterical for the emotion that's unwinding, joy and horror. Both hands cling to whatever of James he can through the spaces in the wood.

"I'm alright." It seems important to point that out, and bear repeating, "I'm alright." He looks it-- well, he sounds it. His face is bruised and the blood that's all over him is a frightening thing, probably, but compared to James it's superficial. There was no prolonged beating, and no one took a tool to him in attempt to do permanent damage, just dragged and kicked him into submission and into confinement; he'd gotten a blow to the face with a baton again that left him crumpled on the floor of the box, dazed, for some hours. He's exhausted and cramped but physical pain hasn't been something that really bothers him in many years; nothing he's experienced since Bethlam has been able to compare to what he endured there, and it's like a part of his brain just looks at the sensation and shrugs. Feeling it, but not caring.

What might kill him is watching it happen to this man.

"How are you? Has anyone looked at you?" Memories so fresh of Benjamin unable to recover from an illness that took over thanks to a beating collide with James collapsed on his knees next to him now and grip his heart with something awful.

Edited 2017-07-18 21:46 (UTC)

He can't get a grip on Thomas's hand or smooth back his hair to inspect the discoloration on his poor battered face, but he can touch his fingers. As long as he still sounds so like himself (despite the blood and sweat and the urgency in his voice that's just this side of hysteria), then that's fine. So James wastes no time thinking about what would happen if he somehow didn't - sound like himself. What ends would he be inspired to find if the man Marshall had brought him to had been somehow broken while he'd been lying five feet away in the dirt, determined to do nothing in the hope that it would inspire some grace in the monsters with their teeth at Thomas's throat?

(Never again, he'd told himself after Charles Town. But--)

Instead he sets his face as as near to Thomas's as he's able. The only thing he has room for is this insane relief, so dense it's exhausting. He closes his eyes, willing down the knot in his throat and the stinging behind his eyes; that horrible grinding sound is his breathing. James forces it to regulate.

"I'll manage," he says. It's not the extent of what he wants to say, but he can hardly shape the words past all the unspooling panic, nevermind the ache in his chest. And: "No. Not yet."

What must he look like? Horrific, he imagines, if this is where they put Thomas to tear himself open over it. Maybe that's some piece of why prying conversation out of anyone at breakfast had been impossible. An ugly reminder would account for all that uneasy attention pinned between his shoulders as much as an order from an overseer.

That's what men like Ogelthorpe and the world they build rely on.

"They'll release you at mid-day."

It's such crippling heartache to be so near to James but be unable to get any closer that Thomas feels like he could rip the wooden box apart even if it cost him his fingers, if only he weren't so tired. Not a realistic thought. He leans the less bruised side of his face against where James is pressing his, and he can hear and feel his breathing, his own chest tightening painfully in sympathy.

This should be the end. This, so easy from the men with power over them, done as nothing but a preemptive warning thanks to the actions of an unknown third party, should break the spine of their plans. It should put Thomas in his place, like it's meant to-- but all he can think is that this more than anything else is why they have to get out. He can't endure James living like this. Thomas has suffered and weathered so much worse, he can take near anything these men decide to do to him, but James has been living the past decade free and Thomas can't have him be here, not at all and not because of him. He can't. Bethlem couldn't drive him mad, this plantation couldn't drive him mad, not even watching Stephen and the tak tak tak of taking a chisel to his skull could crush Thomas's spirit completely, but condemning James inescapably to this will do it. He knows it, he can taste it in his mouth like blood, an iron awfulness that won't leave him.

"I'm so sorry, my love," he whispers.

Edited 2017-07-19 03:03 (UTC)

"For what?"

It is, despite all logic, a legitimate question - so honest that it isn't punctuated by the wheezing approximation of a laugh or even the surly quirk of the eyebrow. There is nothing Thomas owns to apologize for and no part of this feels like agony. Yes every part of him hurts, he can't fill his lungs, but the sensation is incidental. Thomas-- will survive. This place is made up of people who believe they know how to arrange the world so that they are invincible, but it is the narrowest conception of how men work and what sits beyond this valley. He's tasted England's old blood, and this infant place is something he feels in his tissue can be broken.

They're leaving. There's nothing but a few wooden slats between them - how mercifully close that is -, and he's going to ruin the men who made Thomas think the world could be this small.

What's there to be sorry about?

What an amazing creature James is, to ask that. It occurs to Thomas, certainly, that he could say some platitude like Because you're hurt, but Thomas isn't the sort of man to mean something like that, and of course James knows it. After over a decade, he still knows, can lift it from every meaningless potential as easy as his fingers curl against Thomas's even now when he's so battered.

For a while Thomas doesn't answer, long enough that it seems like he might simply not, letting it die as a moment of frantic grief.

But that would be cowardly, wouldn't it.

"I know now what England is, unequivocally, I know what the true dangers of the world are, and the thought that I may have gone on living a placid life never knowing the truth is abhorrent to me," he says, quiet. "I have no regrets. What I had with Miranda, what I had with you-- what we had together. I would suffer a thousand times for it, for even half of it." And I know you would, too.

In all those years, did James really never think of it? Did he rage at the whole world, did he and Miranda isolate themselves in their grief and anger, and never once...?

"But sometimes," he doesn't sound like sometimes, he sounds like a man who's lost days, weeks, months of sleep over it, who had years in the dark to be somewhere else in his head while he was tortured and experimented on, thinking of every mistake he's ever made, "I remember that I could have just listened to you in the first place."

And that this is my fault.

There are a thousand questions he's asked himself since breaking from under England, but the two he never has: Is this impossible? and What if Thomas had done differently? He has doubted his own ability; he has felt shame and regret, and he has made countless mistakes in the attempt to protect this thing given to him. He has asked himself things like Is there a way to make her happy now instead of later? and What will come after?, but he can't question the validity of this.

James shifts his fingertips against him, finding himself studying the grain of the wood between them. He draws in a breath, feels the stab of it, then speaks anyway because it's necessary.

"I've wondered at the nature of the world where I never met you and Miranda - what that looks like and who must I be in it." If there's a part of what's been done to them in the last day that can be called the most cruel, it's the one that makes telling Thomas this take so damn long.

"Fundamentally altered, I think. That is a man Hennessey never knew to recommend, who never was commissioned, whose father never sailed before the mast." And if that's all true, at what point is the reality of this simply inevitable? He clears his throat. "Whether it means to or not, the world creates people who are meant to do this."

He breathes out, close to a laugh. "I was made to question your resolve and you were made to refuse so you could shape mine."

Thomas isn't impatient listening. He doesn't have the energy for it, and besides, he's waited for James for a decade. He can wait a few minutes longer to see if a knot that's sat beneath his heart all that time can be picked apart. Even if it can't - even if there's a part of James that knows Thomas made such a critical error in the face of being told plainly it was foolish and can't let go, there's a weight already lifted off of him for having admitted to it. He's never been any good at wallowing in self-misery, and he's too smart to pin every aspect of responsibility on him when it's the cruel, hateful injustice of an empire and its eager sycophants that did this to them, but he's been drowning for so long, but people are complicated, but there's only so much he can do when the darkest thoughts come for him at his lowest, but, but...

(But he cares for James and Miranda so very much that when he has fevered dreams of angels coming to him saying We can go back, and remove you, and they'll be happy without ever knowing you he's haunted by the incomplete memories of his answers.)

James McGraw without the sea, the Navy, ambition. Would that even be the same man? Would he be just as colorless and half-formed as a Thomas Hamilton who was never challenged so? Would they both be pointless, never having the scales torn from their eyes?

It was meant to be. They were meant to be. Thomas phrases it I could have just listened to you but it's a misnomer, isn't it; he did listen, he just didn't buckle, because he couldn't. There is no path he turned away from, no point at which he almost acquiesced. Sometimes when he tortures himself over it that fact is one that scalds him but-- not James.

Thomas presses his forehead against James's fingers and thinks he might be crying. Relief, love, acceptance. Thinks because he's so unused to it - he was never much for crying even in London. His hands slip from the slats of wood, falling to his lap with a dull thud and sharper ring of metal and he says, "Oh," in faint surprise, having paid no attention to the strain of holding tired arms aloft with iron manacles attached.

It's a little bit funny.

"Remember how long you've been putting this off, how many extensions the gods gave you," he says after a while, after he's managed not to sound like he's sniffling like a child. "And you didn't use them. At some point you have to recognize what world it is that you belong to; what power rules it and from what source you spring; that there is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don't use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return."

They're leaving. There's nothing but a few wooden slats between them.

There's something in the way all the tension sheds from Thomas that strikes some foundational spark in him. If they're disastrous in combination, then good. Let them be the thing that shifts this goddamn place on its axis because he can't bear anything but to know him like this. Thomas sharpens the best parts of him. Even now, the two of them unequivocally battered, all it takes is to feel like a person is to be next to him knowing he feels the same. If being alive and satisfied like this is the last thing they can accomplish, that's all even the gods (what passes for them) can ask for.

James make some low noise that must be both sympathy and affection - Thomas's face is so discolored -, and croaks out, "Exactly," in the space between the slats. It doesn't sound warm or bolstered, but God does he feel it. He hopes it translates through the soft shift of his fingertips on Thomas's tender skin or the way he can't bring himself to draw his hand from the box even if his arm is exhausted.

After some time, he tries again: "Your burn. How is it?" Getting off his knees to sit in the dirt like a sensible person takes almost as much effort.

There's a lot to shake loose. In these weeks Thomas has clawed and stumbled into being something like a person again, processing James being alive and his journey and his real, actual presence here, internalizing grief for Miranda he can't express-- and all the rocks and bits of broken glass he keeps overturning in the dark inside of him, products of the way he's had to shape himself to survive, untenable once held up in the light. He's gone from thinking he'll have to tell James all the reasons they mustn't to being afraid James won't push hard enough for it to be reality, and somehow, sitting here covered in bruises and his own blood, listening to James's labored breathing and aching over his wounds, Thomas feels more like himself than he has in years.

"I'm not sure," he admits, eyes tracking the other man's movements. He reaches out best he can once he's still, fingers near the ground to brush against his closest knee. He has to think about it to get his brain to catch up with the pain of it, and he shifts his wrists, shackles making an uncomfortable noise, trying to get a better look at the side of his left wrist. "It still hurts, I think I ripped the blister open." Mm. Clink, tilt. "It'll be all right."

He's infinitely more worried about James, as far as injuries go. Their plans are as inevitable as a landslide, but there can be no move towards significant progress until health is at an acceptable level. James wouldn't survive.

Rather than say anything, he grunts out a fractured acknowledgement. There are objectively worse things than a nasty burn stuffed into a manacle - he can think of half a dozen grislier alternatives without much consideration. The fact that the treatment is abhorrent, that it's Thomas's arm, and that somewhere in him James is keeping a running tally of men who will need to be beaten for it doesn't actually change that. Given a day he'll have the energy to forget that and be actively angry about it, but for the moment? They're just a sorry pair and he's irrationally relieved.

James starts to lean his shoulder against the side of the horrible box - wouldn't it be nice to not be solely responsible for keeping himself upright? -, but the first brush of contact on battered skin reminds him why it's a bad idea. So: sitting as he is. Fine. It's bearable with Thomas's fingertips at his knee.

"You'll have to forgive me," he says, "For not getting you anything for it." And wheezes out a morbid little imitation of a laugh.

"Oh for heaven's sake," is immediate, exasperated-affectionate and a little surprised-- right now, really? but Thomas can't help the smile it brings to his bruised face. Dredging words up out of his shredded lungs to make a stupid joke. Ridiculous. Thomas presses his fingertips against him, huffs out an almost-laugh and shifts his weight, like he's leaning on James and not the wood of the cage he's in.

In his best austere Lord of Whitehall: "I'll note the gracious admission of your oversight in your next review." Five years as a slave and five years a test subject still can't torture that Eton diction training out of a man.

Thomas feels just to one side of lightheaded, and he knows it's because he's in that post-anxious stage still, a strange kind of nearly euphoric. Sitting like this, laughing quietly, he feels as at peace as if he and James were patched up and curled around each other in a soft bed. It probably says something extreme about them. But that's what Thomas loves. He knows it's the same for James.

No one else is around; the nearest workers are planting seeds in the field behind them, their movements and voices muted and indistinct in the distance. Thomas can't get out and James can't get him out and so they've been left unattended, and it makes it the first time they've truly been alone in this place since that rainy day and Benjamin's suffering.

"Did I ever tell you about the first time Miranda and I shared a carriage?" he asks, sounding so at ease, and only a little bittersweet. "Probably not-- she once threatened to divorce me if I told anyone, though I don't think it's that scandalous of a story."

He breathes out, a series of short little noises that must be chuckling as he leans his forehead against the line of his forearm. There. That's an acceptable compromise. With his fingers curled at gap in the wood, he can bow forward without much pull or strain on any particular point. Further, leaned low like this he can't see much beyond dirt and short grass, a swatch of Thomas's shirt through the slats. The effect is strange and comfortably intimate, the already remote shape of slaves in the field so obscured that they might as well not exist at all.

"Go on." Being along in a carriage with Miranda Hamilton had felt like putting his hand in the mouth of a lioness - equal parts electric intrigue and terrifying. Had she always been so fully, brilliantly formed?

(It's strange too to be reminded of everything they'd been before him after ten years of nothing but the constant droning awareness of what the three of them had been and had and seen shattered. Just because they'd defined something for him didn't mean they hadn't known the meaning already - 'Que nunca fue desdichado amor que fue conocido,' the shape of Cervantes on the page as clear as if it were laid open there on his knee--)

The potential for sadness hangs ever-present, discussing Miranda, but Thomas will not let her become a wraith above them, nor some too-fragile thing they cannot touch. Easier said than done-- his own heart isn't ready to think of her in past tense when James is here beside him, but there's no telling when he might be, if ever. He has to push himself. For Miranda, it's worth the tender effort.

"It was when we were just becoming aware of each other," he says. "Trying to converse without supervision was impossible, and talking about anything of interest with supervision was this.. awkward nightmare." God, it was so long ago. He feels centuries old. He'd been in the worst fight with his father at the time over whether it was going to be Oxford or Cambridge (as studying in Paris was off the table, much to his consternation). He'd never been moved by a woman before, not really, and Miranda had captured his attention so effortlessly. A confusing, exhilarating time. "I'd made a deeply questionable decision about spending the night somewhere, and it became absolutely vital that I leave in the morning or - I don't know, I was so young then, I suppose I thought I would actually die." Everyone was a passionate mess at that age, even Thomas. Even James, he suspects, regardless of whether or not he'd been born with that serious set to his shoulders. "At just dawn, I was desperately trying to leave this man's summer apartment and not look like I was doing that very thing, and I walk into a courtyard and there's Miss Barlow. I was so panicked at the thought that she'd guess what I was doing I launched into this cheerful tale of long hours studying university proposals and how lovely it was to see her, what a pretty morning, goodness are you alone, would you like a ride back to your parents' estate. She says yes. We get into the carriage, and I'm still panicking, because now I've oversold this endeavour and we're in a carriage together, unchaperoned, before it's even fully light outside.

I sat there staring at her, with her staring at me, and in a single effort as though it was choreographed that way, we each begin to realize that our mutual nervous behavior isn't because we're scandalized at each other, but we're terrified of the same thing being noticed."

Thomas can still see her face so clearly, wide eyes and slightly flushed cheeks, the both of them socially fumbling around each other long before their near-telepathic language of significant looks and shorthand conversations had evolved.

"After this stretch of torturous silence I said, 'I certainly hope yours was a better time than mine was, that was mortifying'. She burst out laughing. It was--" Thomas exhales in a laugh now, remembering, "It was more emotion than I'd seen a lady ever express in my whole life, or at least I'd thought so in the moment, and a large part of me was in love with her just then. I don't know we didn't end up banished from society over it, honestly, we showed up arm in arm cackling like lunatics while her mother was still abed."

Edited 2017-07-21 06:32 (UTC)

The warmth of it bubbles rapidly to the surface and James, equal parts exhausted and the most amused he's ever been, smiles into the crook of his arm. Sure. He can imagine exactly that oppressive, awkward silence of a carriage between them - the palpable relief when it breaks. "She was right," he murmurs. "That is grounds for divorce."

How many time did they speak after before Thomas proposed their marriage? Or had it been a mutual arrangement? Or-- Or-- Or--? What a strange thing to not have the slightest answer to, given all the pieces of them he does know. He lifts his face from his arm, sluggish and pleased despite a hundred things but most especially the part where Miranda isn't here to be appropriately mortified over his husband's indiscretion.

-- (Only she is, somehow. She's in Thomas's laugh and the quirk of his mouth under the swollen skin of his face, his fingers curled at the wooden slat, under Thomas's fingertips, and in the shadow of a nearby tree moving opposite the sun to cast here while they wait for mid-day)--

"Did she tell you how she trapped me?" That can't have been a secret between them. Somehow he thinks he prefers it if it wasn't. He likes the idea of the two of them in concert, arm in arm and lovely.

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