katabasis | [PSL] in this sense the open jaws of wild beasts will appear no less pleasing than their prototypes

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.

"Is that what it was?" is so arch and knowing, even without the curve of Thomas's smile visible it's clear that his answer is Yes, immediately, and I know about everything else, too.

The frequency of Thomas's own extramarital affairs had decreased to nearly none by the time his career put him in a position to be given things like the Nassau project, content with Miranda - and too busy with work and too uninspired by other paramours, besides. But that never stopped he and his wife from discussing everything and everyone as they'd always done. It was especially engaging to hear about her liaising with his liaison. A man Thomas found so fascinating from the start, who he began to fall and fall and fall over.

(Someday, when they are not so crippled and Thomas's heart and blood can take the poignancy and stirring of the tales, he'll tell James about Miranda coming home from one of their torrid outings and putting his hands over the marks James left on her skin while she narrated.)

"As I understand it she just wanted to go see interesting artifacts."

Teasing. Where would they be without carriages - where would anyone be, honestly. He's sure half the population of every nation with an upper class has dabbled in their illicit use.

His answer is a low hum and a skeptical eyebrow, his free hand shifting from the dirt to Thomas's fingertips. Something like that.

"When we first came to Nassau--" James begins to say, then stops. The sun is warm here and he's so fond of the look on Thomas is wearing right this instant under the bruising and blood. There must be a breeze blowing through the yard to carry the smell of burning and horseflesh away, thinks some distant part of him. He wets his lips. Clears his throat.

"She bought a horse and cart." He can't remember what she'd sold to do it, just that he'd been incoherently angry at the prospect of her pearls or a silk dress like chum in the water of that place. "And we spent two days driving circles across New Providence because she wanted to see it."

There's more to tell - how before it they had reached a point where they were hardly speaking to each other (or anyone) and how after, it was as if the island of hills and scrub had reminded them both of something - but he doesn't know if that's really the kind story he means it to be or if his voice will hold to tell it in the way that would make it so. So instead James lifts his face to smile crookedly at Thomas, hoping that does the work for him.

He can imagine it clearly, Miranda refusing to stay shuttered away after that sea voyage, needing to understand her new context to try and come to terms with her place in it. He can imagine, too, James's unspoken anxiety over her throwing around evidence of former status in Nassau-- his previous visit having only shown him brutality. Their arrival over a whole new kind.

Thomas hopes it became a peaceful moment between them. He sees James's smile, feels his fingertips against his own, and sighs a humming noise, wishing he could lean closer to kiss him.

(It would probably hurt.)

"I prayed for nothing else but that you'd find some measure of happiness together," he says. "I tried to bargain with God that if it happened, I would believe in Him."

That's-- funny. Every part of it. Surely they'd managed in some fashion to find a (very small) measure of happiness? There had been nights where the danger of Nassau town had shifted so fundamentally under the rein they seemed have both their hands on that it was impossible not to believe in this fiction they had created together and be vibrant for it: that this could be done, that they could be people who lived as they did there then shed it for some breed of peace after it was all finished. There are sharply defined moments of joy in his memory: the house that was built for her, capturing the Walrus and sailing it into port under all her canvas and telling Miranda every feverish detail in the dark--

"Well," he says. "Close enough." Sometimes. For all the obvious reasons.

He withdraws his fingers from between the slats and plants his hand in the dirt to steady himself. "After yesterday, we'll have fewer friends. But," --and he's as grateful for this as he is the fact that they are so isolated here-- "There will be no mistaking them."

"Mmm," says Thomas, and it sounds both like he's a little sad at the lack of confirmation and also like he's graciously choosing to believe he's now a man of faith and gladly so. He trusts in their intuition that so much is communicated in one monosyllabic sound.

Good thing he knows so many Bible verses, Lieutenant McGraw.

And then: business. More silver linings, able to speak more or less freely. His fingers curl against the dirt, this thumbnail worries the edge of a splinter.

"We might be surprised," is after a moment's consideration. "Though I wouldn't look to the men among us for a showing of numbers. It'll be the African slaves who'll turn out more, and will be more reliable anyway." Frank opinions. Most of the white men have rationalized themselves half to death with at least not that comparing and contrasting how they're treated; watching James beaten and Thomas hauled away will unsettle plenty of them for that reason alone.

Fair assessment though it might be, it's the summary scrapping of weeks of work. He knows little to nothing of the Africans - who they look to, who can be trusted, who might feel there could be merit in throwing in with two mad men. He'd known those things about the white convict labor. Suspected he had, anyway. Give him a moment - a collection of seconds - to mourn that trajectory they must apparently abort.

"Then the question becomes how to coordinate an effort between us." He suspects that's entirely the reason they're kept loosely divided from the African slaves to begin with - to allow the white men their modicum of privilege, and to restrict the African slaves from believing they might find any support for an uprising in those men. Divide and conquer is so old a strategy that perhaps it's second nature.

Maybe Thomas's newfound connection with the Lord, god of heaven, will produce some miracle for them and they'll have no reason to muddle through this themselves.

James studies the distance to the field, the shape of the labor being done there. The wheeze of his breathing is irritatingly loud in his own ear as he turns his attention in the other direction - back toward the yard and the blackened husk of the barn, the garden and the main house. Nothing comes immediately to mind from looking at it, though he feels there must be something there. Maybe his brain just don't have the ability to link the pieces. Not today.

"It would have been easier yesterday, as I expect they're going to lock us in at night for a while now, but don't worry about communication."

They don't have as much contact, true, but the girls in the kitchen like Thomas - and by extension, James - and their bonds with their fellows surpass the white prisoners by a hundred miles. What's more, they remember that the black slaves who participated in that escape attempt got out, even while Thomas himself was dragged back, bloodied and tortured.

Nearly a martyr.

"And you're forgetting we don't yet know who started the fire."

That has to be one of the convicts, a house worker or - unlikely but still technically possible - an overseer. Thomas doesn't see this as grounds to scrap anything. Efforts worth their salt are always laden with setbacks. An initial proposal always has a different number of supporters than when it gets its first rebuttal, and different still is the number after debate truly begins. A proposal is amended, edited, postponed, taken on and off schedules for reworking and approval.

They have time. James can barely breathe, for god's sake.

And if they ever did? Depending on the course of the next few weeks, he might be in the mood to thank them personally. Regardless of the blood all over Thomas's shirt and the burn the length of his arm, his own full body ache and...however he must look..., the aftermath of the blaze has afforded them this strange lateral flexibility. In the coming days, he suspects quite a few things will change very rapidly. Some of them must be for the better. Thanks to the fire and everything that had come after, there will be some way to measure who might be trusted (and he already knows who had followed orders when he'd given them). The fact that they have this moment to speak so frankly is a gift all on its own.

Bitterly given and won, maybe, but the point must stand. And that doesn't even begin to touch on--

James suddenly cackles, a hand coming up reflexively to brace at his chest.

"I told Andies to fuck off."

Thomas's reaction is a mixture of-- a lot of things. His newfound piousness immediately challenged with a Goddamnit, James in a rushed exhale. He's laughing a little, but only because James is laughing and he can imagine the kneejerk instinct of a sailor's mouth, so extremely exacerbated by a pirate's, snapping out at an overseer. But he knows how dangerous it is. An extra layer to explain such keenness on extracting pain from him, a slight like that would be worth a strike across the face from anyone but Marshall on an average day.

"He'll be watching you like you threatened his family for weeks," he sighs. Oh, my darling.

"Jacobson is the one who got into it, with me. But he's always been like that with everyone."

Distantly he realizes that naming names in such context is putting a mark of death over this particular man's head. He doesn't so much care.

"Good," he says without thinking, still laughing. He should feel threatened. The whip sharp insult hadn't been calculated in the moment, but he can tell himself there's a benefit to it now. Men like Andies sometimes buckle when they don't have every advantage. What would that look like in the middle of ruining this place?

(Bloody, probably.)

Andies. Jacobson. Oglethorpe. A very small piece of him keeps a quiet running list - so low and instinctive that adding another name to it doesn't give him pause. Instead, he takes a moment to recover his breath then drops his hand to touch Thomas's fingertips again. He doesn't need to ask What did he do to you because it doesn't matter. The specifics wouldn't change the outcome and he's seen how Jacobson lays his hand across anyone he cares to. Maybe Good and the certainty that the ground is shifting (has already shifted) beneath their feet are all that needs to be communicated.

"And Mr Marshall?"

Maybe the sun is getting to him or he's just too tired to think in a straight line or the luxury of sitting in the middle of the day is making him uncharacteristically benevolent, but-- But something.

There is a fraying thread in Thomas that wants to tell him Please don't instigate that, I can't take watching you be hurt like this again, but he's so tired and the thought of James feeling like Thomas is reprimanding him makes it so he doesn't have the heart. Fleetingly he considers Miranda, but even her memory seems to agree to just let it go for now.

He huffs something wordless and presses their fingertips together. He must admit, there's something therapeutic in the dark humor of it. He hasn't had anyone to share so much as a knowing look with in so long that he'd forgotten.

"I think," he says after consideration, "that if I told him this whole place is wrong he'd say he agrees with me, but that agreement doesn't matter, as neither he nor any of us have anywhere else to go. I don't know the extent of what I can buy with that, because I've never pressed. If I'm very lucky I think I could tell him to walk away and he'd listen, but there are so many other things to account for that could influence him."

Is that actually what James was asking, he wonders.

Belatedly, "He tried to keep me away from it. He tried to release you when it was over."

But he still put Thomas in chains, he still dragged him back to this, he's still an overseer. Thomas is cognizant of the layers of complicated, here, but occasionally he has understanding without empathy. The product of a decade of abuse.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject