[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]

Thomas allows it to be comforting for himself. Maybe, if James cannot take any in it as it is, he can appreciate that Thomas appreciates it; he leans his forehead in against the other man's when they're sat down, a silent thank-you. He doesn't stay bent in like that but keeps himself angled slightly to James, his hand resting on his leg above his knee, fingers moving absently against the worn fabric of his trousers. Sitting down is not so much like calling a committee meeting, but an insurance policy to combat the potential for feeling like he's going to vomit on James's shoes - Thomas has never spoken about this before. He could be fine. He could not be.

It's a little while before he says anything.

"A few times a month, they allow men of god in here to preach to us and hold sermons," he begins. "Some years ago it was every Sunday, and it was an effort made by the Religious Society of Friends, who've dug their heels in here in the colonies." Quakers, as they'll someday be known more commonly, of course find it easier to get on with their leftist Protestant agenda without the conservative Protestant Church of England and all her politics looming. "Their minister was a woman named Ida."

Why is he telling this like a story, he wonders. Perhaps because impossible talk like this, after it's gone round and round, leads him to think things like Even if I could get out, how could I live with myself in hiding, reading books somewhere and keeping a low profile, how could I not devote every further breathing moment to abolitionism. There is some cosmic justice in the fact that he's here, having been so wealthy and so capable and spending his time worrying about ships and the philosophy of justice in a far-off land instead of the laws of human trafficking being made and shrugged off by peers.

(He'd probably just have been imprisoned quicker.)

"Security was a little less, then. Ida provided us with the right supplies for one man to impersonate an overseer at distance glance, and we incapacitated another. Two of us looking very convincing on horseback was enough to make the man at the gate hesitant long enough for us to simply walk out, leading a few others. It was myself, three other men here indentured like me, and half a dozen of our significantly less fortunate counterparts. Ida's congregation hid us."

[katabasis]

A few years ago. What had he been doing then? He'd been captain of the Walrus already. His mind flits over a dozen prizes, then settles involuntarily on the Maria Aleyne. Depending on the year, the month, the day maybe Thomas's attempted escape had coincided strangely with its capture. It's both a ridiculous thought - no, likely they weren't close at all - and a viciously acerbic one - there is no ounce of him that regrets it. Especially not now, knowing that what Alfred Hamilton had offered him was a fortune rather than the whereabouts of the only thing that might have stayed his hand.

He listens, fingers shifting through Thomas' pale hair while his spare hand finds the one brushing at his knee. It's a delicate touch, as stuttering as James' attention is sharpened: eyes slightly too bright and breathing a fraction too short under the sawing sound of the cicadas.

"Go on."

[aletheian]

It will be interesting, when he learns of his parents' fate.

Not now.

"It took us almost three weeks to get to the harbor," he says, flexing his hand beneath James's. He's glad the marks on his wrists are almost invisible these days; for the first year after the hospital he thought they might never fade, worn-in rings from metal restraints. (There's nothing to be done about the ones on his ankles. Permanent mementos.) "Mostly hiding for days on end beneath floorboards. I spent three days, however, in a walled-in garden with Hector trying to teach me how to punch someone properly." Whoever Hector is, he doesn't say, but context suggests a fellow prisoner, and Thomas's tone of voice says he was a good man.

"When we got to Charleston... you'd think, I suppose, getting out of here would be the difficult part, but painstaking hiding and moving so slowly, avoiding search parties. Looking back that was the easy part. Because in Charleston the slave trade is so dominant that even the 'masters' look nervous. Our party split, as the African men and women with us had passage to the Spanish West Indies. I'm not sure of their fate. We were to go to France, because..." He shrugs. "The emancipation decree there, the nature of reinstating proof of life and personhood legally. New identities." Logical and compelling arguments were made for it, and they all sound like fairy tales to Thomas, now. But it's not like they were spoiled for choice. No one had anywhere to go. "A man with us, Jacob, vanished completely in between arriving and getting to the ship. I've no notion of where he went, either." Not captured, because he was never returned to the plantation. Escaped? Murdered? Swallowed up by the earth? Who knows.

"There were bills describing us posted, with generous return rewards offered, and the captain of the ship we were to be on decided to take it." Thomas gets that out, businesslike, because there's no other way to do it. There are no surprises in this story: they failed. It is what it is. "I think, too, the pressure of having illegal passengers made high profile in the harbor shook him. He was... nervous. It made him dangerous. He attacked Ida when she shouted at him."

Mm. Thomas stops and watches their hands, curls his thumb against James's. He's getting ahead of himself.

"..Left were myself, a man called Clinton, and a man called Stephen. Ida, and her sister and sister's husband, who were to go with us to France, having made the journey twice before. I was in a cabin with Ida, Stephen, and the captain, trying to.. I don't know what." Bitterness seeps into his voice, there, but he gets it under control. Everything is fine. "Ida was doing what only infuriated ministers do, informing him of his moral flaws, and he struck her hard enough to knock her back against the wall. Stephen got in between them, and he shot Stephen in the leg. I think the others were at the door then, and his first officer, but it was locked. He hit Stephen with the other end of his pistol and threw Ida down again, and struck her in the head with it. I took a letter opener off his desk and jammed it into his neck."

[katabasis]

He can feel the lines of his face shifting involuntarily the longer that Thomas speaks - some measure of the dread in his belly rising to show there in the twitch of his mouth and the set of his brow. Charleston. Charlestown. What a miserable fucking place. For what feels like the first time in a long time, something in his chest unfolds and he recalls what it is to be nakedly angry about a place and it's people - about cowards and a world which enables their ability to subjugate. Every piece of Thomas' story fuels it: people gone missing without a trace, the taste of freedom at the edge of the narrative's curve and so desperately out of reach, a woman struck in the moment she's most decisive. There is a tinge of darkness to the sound of Thomas' voice in the night that's so foreign he shouldn't recognise it.

But he does.

And it makes the part of him that has decided to bury all that violence go jangling and desperate with the effort before Thomas even mentions the letter opener. What the fuck did they do to him? Who the fuck had put a weapon in Thomas' hands, his beautiful long fingers, and then demand he use it? How fucking dare they.

"Then they," --his voice cracks; he snarls through it-- "Brought you back here." Instead of hanging him in the square. Instead of murdering him quickly.

[aletheian]

James's mood is a tangible thing radiating from him, even so still as he sits there. Thomas adjusts the positioning of their hands, folding his over the other's and holding it securely. He is distantly grateful that the tremor he is sometimes plagued with (another souvenir of Bedlam) is absent today. A beat of silence before he confirms:

"Yes."

Eventually. But it adds nothing to the tale to say that blood poured over him, that the captain staggered away only to be dragged to the ground by a shrieking mad Stephen, that while Thomas dropped the blade and rushed to Ida the other man had pinned the captain down and forced him to bleed out while his crew struggled to break open the door. Maybe the captain would have lived if not for the intervention.

"Ida was arrested. I don't know what became of her, or her sister and brother-in-law. The three of us were returned here. Stephen... something in him broke during the ordeal. He would not quiet, he could not cope with returning. Even days after we were reprimanded," that's the word he's decided he's going to use, here, yes, because it's the gentlest, and he has a slight worry that James is going to raise his voice, "he would not be calm. It made it impossible to treat the wound in his leg. And they can't-- they won't kill us. Because we are profitable investments."

In Thomas's case, as in Stephen's, annual payments are made. If anything ever happens to his parents, he's been informed there is a lawyer with the bank instructed to carry on. How many years? He has no idea. Maybe it's lies; maybe they just enjoy having them here, purely to feel powerful.

"One morning, I was pulled out and brought to the main house, along with Clinton. They had Stephen with a doctor and I remember thinking, 'Do they need help with bandaging his leg', stupidly." His hold on James's hand is too tight; he cannot manage to get himself to release it. "There's something I'd only heard of in Bethlem, a procedure to quiet a mind without killing the person. I'd never seen it. They-- drill. Holes. Into the front of the skull high on the forehead, through the skull into..." Into. He feels dizzy. It passes. "Into the brain. Until it's enough that Stephen was calm."

[katabasis]

Tak. Tak. Tak. The sound of shovels digging out a stone and of the imagined beat of a physician's thumb on the shaved forehead as he marks exactly what he means to do. Does drilling through a man's skull sound like tapping a cask? How is it sealed up after? How do you change a person that way and then still consider yourself humane? It's delusional to the point that nothing can ever be done to shift it. It would be like trying to convince the sky to change color and the tide to stop. Thomas's grip might as well have all the weight of a thread for all it does to ground him.

"Then we won't leave." His voice is gravel, is shale, is flint - so low that it's choking. "Not to France or to the West Indies"--or to the sea--"We'll go inland."

There's something feverish in his face. His hand at the base of Thomas's skull shifting to his shoulder where it can float erratically without closing him in a vice grip. "They'll expect the reverse. Where does a pirate go when he slips his shackles? The natural assumption will be to repeat a mistake."

There is no place that exists where they can trust to be safe. So make a new one. Go somewhere men have never been. Build a maroon island without water.

[aletheian]

The way James is so barely-restrained and the shattered, furious texture of his voice should be alarming. Thomas should turn to him and say 'You don't know what you're talking about', because he doesn't. He doesn't understand this place and he doesn't understand the colonies. Thomas should try to rationalize to him that he's not telling him this to try and break him but protect him.

All he can think is You've become such an optimist.

Thomas looks at him. He isn't afraid. He's saddened enormously by what happened, disturbed by what he witnessed, most of all just disappointed-- with humanity, with England, with himself. The world could be so wonderful but men are so determined to make it brutal and divisive. And in all that, here is his pirate captain, his force of nature, telling him Fine we'll just go the other way.

"Will you heed my counsel if I tell you that you should wait until you know every routine and personality, before acting and doing something that forces me to watch you be punished?" -- is the kind of thing Miranda would say, except in a bullet-point list with her hands clasped to keep from taking him by the shoulders. Thomas is all gentleness as he looks at James like he's beautiful, like the terror anyone should feel gazing into the abyss doesn't occur to him.

[katabasis]

His hand twitches between Thomas's though the lines of his face are set - the angle of his shoulders solid. "Of course," he says, like a thousand ideas aren't already filling any empty available space. Like there aren't parts of him trembling and flooded with the urge to...-- do something. "But I won't see you brutalized."

Maybe he recognizes that Thomas isn't afraid, isn't repulsed. Or maybe he doesn't. Maybe he'd be this fervent regardless. In the moment he cares less about what Thomas thinks as what he deserves which is: everything. A world that can be changed, a society which is kind, a place where the people who had hurt him would ask for his forgiveness instead of just facing a violent kind of justice. But he can't expect civilization to know how brutal it is or how impossibly unfair it's become. Better to shield Thomas from it. If that means following the rules of this place for some time, then fine. But he can't stomach the thought of what it could do. What it will do. They just have to slip away before it comes to that.

"I won't make you do anything you can't tolerate," he says and means it with every piece of him. Are you happy here? he'd asked and had meant it. If Thomas hadn't cracked from just the question, maybe they wouldn't be here now. But a world that expects them to adapt to misery doesn't deserve Thomas.

[aletheian]

Thomas does not need to be protected. He can endure things that can break, even kill, other men; if there is anything he can offer Bethlem twisted gratitude for in the life after, it's that it educated him thoroughly about physical pain. There's so much he can weather with a quiet mouth and dry eyes, with impassive consciousness. Thomas does not yet know what would be enough to make him crack.

It's on his tongue to say it. I can tolerate anything. It's you I don't want to see hurt. But that would be circular, wouldn't it, and it occurs to him - with something wrenching his heart it occurs to him - that this is the first time since before his arrest, when Miranda fluttered her hands over his chest and begged him to be cautious, that anyone's said anything at all like that to him. That anyone's felt anything like that for him and the feeling of it in return is almost overwhelming. He feels like a child but Thomas pulls at James's hand and takes it between both of his own so he can press a kiss to his palm, and just holds it there against his face, head bowed between them.

His stubborn, stoic lieutenant, so pragmatic and skeptical, telling him that they're going to get out and that he's going to protect him even though it's impossible. For Thomas, optimism has been treading water to keep from drowning, but for James it's this angry willpower and it's--

Heartbreaking. Beautiful. Horrible. They could have the rest of their lives to work in the fields and talk about books and lay down together at night, or they could do this insane thing, and die challenging the world. Thomas loves him so much.

[katabasis]

It's not that the heat drains out of him. But given time - a moment of Thomas's head bowed between them and his cheek under the rough callouses of his fingertips -, it can be folded over itself and take some different shape than the one made to minimize the number of people standing between them and the gate to this place. Thomas's long fingers and his breathing and the unflagging pulse of his love even here in the dark with James's anger held in check by bared teeth tempers in the way of steel. There's a fundamental quality to it. It's the reverse of being unmade. It's the antithesis to the thing that was created by two people's grief as they fled from London to Nassau.

What was done to Thomas? How has he been changed? It matters, but not here. They can't touch or alter this fundamental unmovable part. Rational creatures exist for one another, and to endure is a part of justice.

James exhales. The sound is harsh in the dark, the loudest thing between them in hours, and with it he sheds the wire taut adrenaline so he can lean his forehead against Thomas's shoulder without trembling like a horse poorly paced. He can touch his face and his side without feverishness and be quiet at last for the continuity of this. Eventually he can turn his face and murmur against Thomas's cheek too: "Come to bed with me."

It's late. There's work to be done in the morning.

[aletheian]

What must it have been like, to go mad with the desire for vengeance, to hold the broken pieces of what they had but be unable to put them back together? How must it have felt to hear the lies and have to believe it for lack of ability to prove otherwise? Thomas can only imagine; yes, James and Miranda had each other, but they had been lost in a storm of unanswered questions, tormented, unable to progress. Thomas was simply apart. No one ever came and told him lies about his wife or his lover, no one tried to force him to live thinking about their deaths.

Thomas presses a kiss against the side of James's mouth. Come to bed with me. It sounds like they're real people.

He stands slowly, one of the other man's hands held captive still. Even in his sleep, he doesn't let go.