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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There's no such thing as being comfortable in the chair, just as there's not really anything he could possibly communicate to the man behind the desk that will change whatever he's already prepared himself to say. The threat of the Carolinas is an empty one - he has been paid what Flint assumes is an exorbitant fee to keep him from becoming a spectacle and there would be no avoiding it if he were delivered to the hangman there. It must be meant as a reminder of Oglethorpe's generosity along with everything that comes after.

So he says nothing. Never mind that the effort is exhausting on top of useless - that in the drama of this, his cue hasn't arrive yet; James can't imagine a version of events where Oglethorpe could conceivably keep him and Thomas separated for long. Nothing else had managed it.

In the hallway, the girl on her knees continues to scrub the floor. The bristles of the brush against the wood fill what might otherwise be an oppressive kind of half quiet, underlined only by the occasional indistinguishable murmur of voices behind the french doors. Instead the back and forth of the brush overlaps any trace of talking entirely, a rhythmic kind of camouflage interrupted only by the passing of Nunes and the girl dunking the brush back into the bucket of soapy water. She slaps it back down to the floorboards with a wet thwack.

"Your face looks awful," she tells him. "Not that I mean anything by it."

"Thomas Hamilton is an important milestone for the work here," Oglethorpe is explaining. "The way he was when he arrived - well." He smiles at Flint, wry and paternal, the smallest spark of something honestly regretful. "I'm sure you've heard all about it. And on top of all that, complete silence for months. I admit even my own faith wavered, waiting for him to die. But he prevailed somehow."

(A faint crick as Thomas kneels down, knees protesting in a verse he doesn't bother listening to, finding another brush in the basin. He knows better than to stand here like an idiot waiting for someone to tell him to do something. Look busy, speak quietly.

He hasn't told James anything about the hospital, or what it was like arriving at the plantation. There are things he wants to leave buried, things he wants to forget. What if James looks at him and sees-- that.

"You can mean something by it." Swish, scrape. "I know better than to resist them, but here I am.")

Tick, tick.

"He prevailed over being spirited away by anarchists, too, what an ordeal that was. Thank the Lord God that Governor Ashe was still with us, else I don't know he'd have been spared the noose." This said with faint irritation. "All that and Thomas has settled into a model product of this great experiment. I'm sure you don't see it that way, but you will, in time. You'll understand what he understands: that this is how you should behave. There is peace in this work. You are finding yourselves here."

Oglethorpe believes what he's saying, but there's a strong performative element in it, too. He observes Flint closely, seeing just how much of this he's buying, if anything. Option B waiting in the wings if he detects any pushback.

Something in his face closes. He can feel it happening, involuntary and as impossible to stop as the roaring in his ears. The sound of it narrows the shape of everything else Oglethorpe is saying; James finds himself staring at the letter set aside - the upside down shape of the words like if he stares at them long enough, the urge to say something insane will evaporate.

Tick, tick.

"Governor Ash knew Thomas was here?"

(She moves the brush in long vertical stripes and gives him a skeptical look. "Here you are," she agrees. "Looking like that." As far as role models go, he's not a very good one.

For a moment it seems like that's all she has to say about the matter. But it can't be - if she was trying to avoid conversation, there are easier ways to do it than staring directly at him. Instead she pauses, finding her brush and knocking it against the edge to shake out the excess water and soap.

Tang, tang, tang, goes the wood against the bucket's side. It's loud enough to be annoying, loud enough to make a few words of conversation easy to miss.

"How do you feel though?")

He can taste something bitter unwinding in his mouth when he asks it - a latent, vicious heat beginning to set its fingers against his ribs. It's useless and it should be exhausting to be angry over the prospect. Ashe is dead, having already paid for what James understood to be true (killing Thomas and Miranda and everything he'd ever wanted from the world--). Shouldn't this be less reprehensible? To know that Peter was just keeping secrets like the coward he was?

But instead he can feel himself sharpening. Anger might be dangerous here, but it has always been dangerous everywhere. He can't help himself.

Oglethorpe is earnest about his thoughts on Lord Hamilton - been through so much, uncooperative in so many strange, silent ways, but still finding himself shaped. Properly. Or so his words describe the man. His words that are still happening - incidentally, apparently - when Flint asks his question.

His mouth is open, mid-thought, and it closes with distinct irritation at realizing he's being tuned out.

"Governor Ashe is who made arrangements for Thomas to come to us," he says, distinct impatience threaded beneath the pointed words, like speaking to a child. Like Captain Flint is many steps behind. Like perhaps, given it was his own friends who delivered him to the plantation, it should be obvious who sent his lover.

(Thomas makes a noise of agreement, low. Yes, looking like this. On his hands and knees he scrubs the wooden floor, tepid water licking at his worn fingers, occasionally touching the wounds; he forgets to notice the discomfort. Someday, he will find it such a struggle to reconcile this habit - what closes his mind to recognizing pain will close his mind to recognizing the opposite, at least for a time. Relearning how to feel tenderness fully will force him to feel brutality, too.

He gives her space to continue, or not. People change their minds all the time.

How do you feel?

Thomas says nothing, for a time the only sound in the hall the off-rhythm swish of bristles. He realizes he's smiling at the floorboards. Faintly, but he is. When he sits up to dunk the brush in the pail, he lets his weight rest on his heels for a moment and looks at her properly. Smiles properly, too. Gentle sunshine in an unwitting counterpoint to the gathering stormclouds on the other side of a set of doors.

"Human.")

There are many clocks in this house. Spread far enough apart that the noises do not overlap in the still of night, causing no one undue irritation. Whatever one reaches this room is faint, a lullaby of time slipping past. Years, slipping past.

"The late governor was a selfless man. As I understand it, the Earl of Ashbourne was quite opposed and required convincing of the merits of a false demise." Opposed to a real one, the abrupt end of the sentence implies. Or not. Oglethorpe surely knows a dramatic tale for each of his wards, but it would be impossible for him to be privy to every fine detail - particularly of lords so far above his station.

"Like your own."

(Maybe she doesn't expect that flash of warmth from him - not when he's here on his knees in the hall of the main house with his face all battered and his companion behind closed french doors. Or maybe she's just mulling over some unspoken possibility and the smile on his face and how honest he seems complicates matters. Either way, she pauses. Digests it.

"What about your friend?" Asked with some false lightness.)

Arrangements had been made. In what world was it possible for the Earl of Ashbourne to be convinced of anything he didn't already believe necessary - especially when it came to his son? How close must they have been for Peter to have swayed that man of anything? He can feel his pulse in his throat, pounding in time to the tick of that goddamn clock. James closes his eyes for a moment, finding the study and Oglethorpe behind the desk unbearable. Thunk, thunk, thunk. He lets the sensation swallow him up, a buzzing in his fingertips absorbing the ache in his body and the uncomfortable dig of the chair against his bones.

"And now? Who is paying you to keep him here with both of them dead?" Alfred Hamilton hacked to bloody pieces and Peter Ashe splayed across the stone of the thing he'd traded his friend for. Is there an account in England being slowly funneled here even now by some unwitting accountant? Or a willing one? Or-- "Or is this just charity I should be grateful for?"

("I'd be angry if I were him or you," she says. "Not that I am - angry, I mean." Swish, scrape. "Just don't care to see anyone else in trouble."

Humans do all kinds of nasty things to each other. Even ones that smile so nice.)

Tsk. Oglethorpe is dismissive, and the overseer still in the room with them shifts his weight, impatience and boredom manifest. Clearly, it's not any business of this ex-pirate where the money comes from. Maybe it's a solicitor, maybe it's business partner or distant relative. Maybe there's no further funding at all, and he's just that dedicated to his cause of rehabilitating and protecting these wayward souls.

"I must admit," he says, edging on dry, "that of all the tales to come through these gates, Captain Flint and Thomas Hamilton may be the most theatrical. And I don't even know every angle."

("Who am I to be angry at?" sounds a bit rhetorical. "Whomever lit the fire? Whomever blamed the inspiration for it on the person I care most for in the world?" His voice is soft. She knows, he's very certain, how much more agonizing it is watching someone you love be hurt than it is to be hurt yourself.

"They're trying to survive, too."

Feeling human doesn't mean he feels pacifistic. It doesn't mean he doesn't also feel shattered, in pain, or heartsick. He just feels, he's still capable of it and he and James are still capable of laughing with each other, fingers touching through the slats of a cage. Some men can't be broken. Like he did when he first fell in love, he understands more about himself and more about the world when he's with James.

"How I feel about this place and those who keep us here," and now his voice is even quieter, his low murmur barely audible over the rough sounds of the bristle brushes but no less steady, "has not changed since the first day I arrived."

'Angry' is an empty word, in comparison. 'Hateful' pales. Thomas doesn't think he has one in English, or Spanish, or French. This place is not a farm, it is where men and women are brought to be annihilated; not mercifully killed or uncreatively tortured, but to have every facet of themselves worn down into something different, erased and warped, changed. Left inhuman.

Thomas has existed in the smallest of spaces, in the dead air gaps between the awfulness of this reality. He is not a fighter or a military strategist, he is only himself, who has spent months in silence, who has learned how to time authority, who dedicates his attention to ushering others - white and black, male and female - out of the way of the all-seeing eyes when possible. He escaped. Only for a moment but he-- he had it, beneath his hands, and when he was dragged back he didn't let it end him.

He smiles so nice and thinks about the end of this place. At any cost.)

"But I shall tell you my angle, James." Did you know that you are the child here, being remade, did you know that I am the total authority, that 'mister' and 'captain' are titles to mock you. "It is this: for all Thomas is important to my work, he is not more important than the stability of this place. I will not allow you to destabilize, or provoke, or inspire any one man - him, or anyone else - into the same destabilizing behavior. If I find cause to so much as suspect you again, every inch of it comes out of Lord Hamilton."

Just so.

"If that becomes necessary, it will not be a state of endurance. It will be once, and if you press the issue, I will arrange to send him, and only him, to the hospital in Williamsburg. It will pain me, but I won't have myself cornered."

He's quiet for a long moment, attention heavy as a stone on the man across the desk. Bird song leaks in through the open window of the study, Andies shifts in the corner, and the clock tick - tick - ticks.

(The line of her arm doesn't falter, scrubbing just as aggressively now as a moment ago. But she looking at him, ear tipped toward the low murmur of his voice between them. "Good, she starts to say, nearly jumping out of her skin when the door at the end of the hall opens to the outside.)

"I won't back you into one," says Flint. It tastes true. He'll murder the man in the open if that's what it takes to make this moment honest. He won't give him the opportunity to find a corner to hide in, he thinks.

There's a bang from the hall like a clap of thunder.

(Bettina McNair takes three steps into the hall, the bucket of fresh water for the scrubbing weighing hard on her arm. When she looks up and recognizes Thomas, all the blood drains from her face and her grip slips. The bucket cracks against the floor, upturns, and sends a wave of water flowing down the length of the hall to soak the folded carpet and their knees.)

BANG

brings the hallway and the study into the same reality once more. Thomas does not jump out of his skin, even nearly, attention recognizing someone walking in before he looks up-- which he does, at the sound. Bettina, who doesn't speak, who lives in the house and is a good girl. Hannah beside him has one hand over her chest, feeling her heart race and giving the white woman at the end of the hall a look of consternation, but Thomas's gaze is more concerned. Silently worried she's hurt, and seeing that she isn't, worried at what might have spooked her so.

He waits to push to his feet until he hears the door open and Andies's rough inquiry, knowing better than to appear like he's had any moment to conspire with someone who's made a loud noise. (Of all the things. Still.) "It's all right," he says to her quietly, and kneels down a beat before she does to right the bucket. Her hands scramble, unsteady, and Thomas extends one of his as if wanting to check and see if she's harmed - she limply extends one of hers, and he turns it to see the indent of the handle on her palm, but nothing more.

Bettina who doesn't speak and lives in the house, who is well-behaved and trusted, whose brother would do anything for her.

"It's all right," he repeats. Looking at her this time.

"What the fuck?" demands Andies, stuck at the opposite end of the hall for fear of tracking dirt through the water and making mud, a sure-fire way to infuriate his employer.

Thomas looks over his shoulder and Hannah is looking at him, expectant now, knowing she can't speak up if he's there to do it for her. A hierarchy like another set of chains. Calmly, "Gravity got the best of her, is all."

Logically, it sounds nothing like a shot. But James is on his feet anyway, insensible to exactly why except for the last time he'd sat across the table from someone with opinions on how best to manage his relationship with Thomas in a house meant to be fine. Two steps toward the door are all it takes to open the angle there, to see Thomas with the woman and overturned bucket, but--

Andies barks at him to 'Sit down until you're told otherwise', but James - pulse high in his throat and boiling resentment turned abruptly to something bitter and unreasonable - has a hard time following the direction. He drifts back to the chair but can't bring himself to sit down.

(Thank Thomas's God that he didn't reach across the desk and fetch up the letter opener right there in plain view; but he won't be caught again. He won't be pinned that way again without the ability to do some damage on the way down.)

"Don't just stand there and stare at me," Andies growls at Hannah. "Get this cleaned up - the two of you, take that carpet outdoors and hang it where it can dry."

Bettina, hands trembling and avoiding Thomas's eye entirely, hurries to brush past him to fetch up the edge of the water sodden rug closest to Hannah. It allows for a split second where the two women can share a look between them. Hannah starts to open her mouth to protest that she's stronger and would do the work faster than the white woman. Bettina nudges her with the toe of her shoe and simply turns an expectant, inarguably mortified look on Thomas.

"Language, Mr Andies," is Oglethorpe's contribution, overhearing the explanation and sitting back down in his chair from where he'd only begun to rise. He eyes Flint, but doesn't pick at him to obey to the letter - strange, but he's seen a lot of men and women with a lot of ticks come through these gates and into this room. Like beaten dogs.

Thomas, meanwhile, looks past Andies at James, fighting the instinct to reach out to him-- for what purpose, he's not sure, but the look he glimpses on the man's face before he's barked at to step back from the door makes an impulse rise in him to say I'm fine, look, it's all right. His gaze twitches back to the overseer, letting himself take a moment to react; it would look like too-competent acting, otherwise.

Something he's beginning to see the shape of is happening with Bettina. He goes to her side and helps her with the carpet, exchanging a look with Hannah neither of them really know what to make of.

"I'll get some towels," she says, and they part ways, Hannah further into the house and Thomas and Bettina outside. Andies drifts back into the study, letting the doors thunk closed behind him.

Different worlds once more.

Breezing past the interruption, Oglethorpe says, "I'm glad we understand each other. Now, for a few days, you'll do work in the kitchen and laundry. I don't want a repeat of Benjamin."

For a moment his attention is divided - sliced between the doors closing and-- he shifts his hand on the chair back, looking straight back to Oglethorpe. Kitchen. Laundry.

"Of course not," he says, raw and more abrupt than he really means. James searches after the sharp edge of how angry he'd been seconds ago and finds it's gone crooked. Too stitched through by something else - the jangling buzz under his fingers and the ache in his skin - to keep together here.

He make some vague motion toward his throat after; maybe it'll be taken as a reasonable excuse. "Anything else?" 'Sir' should go after that. Let Oglethorpe think he's too off-footed to realize it.

(Is he?)

(No. Fuck him.)

What else could there possibly be to say? Certainly Bettina isn't saying it, steadfastly mute as she and Thomas would the sodden carpet out into the muggy heat of the day. The garden fence is an acceptable place to hang the thing and she pins all her focus there. If she thinks on the task hard enough, it will be as if someone perfectly anonymous is helping her with it.

"No. That's all. Take him to Mrs Oglethorpe, she is aware of the situation." More correspondence, presumably, is slid back to the center of the man's desk. "And don't track any mud through my house, please."

That's all, just an ordinary man-to-man exchange. Andies wastes no time herding Flint out of the room, taking them on a route the other way out the back of the house to avoid the wet floor. Thomas's fate for the rest of the day undeclared, at least to the two of them. There's plenty of work to be done in laundry, less laborious than in the fields but no less tedious, and no less seemingly eternal. The lady of the estate isn't unkind, but she takes her work seriously. A divinely ordained mission. Pious and insufferable like her husband.

In the garden, Thomas searches for the right words. If there are any.

"No-one's going to hurt you just for being next to me," he tries, but intuition tells him that's not quite right. He presses the heavy roll of carpet, water squelching out. Maybe it'll dry in a bloody week, with how humid it is. "...James pushed your brother. I know. I'm sorry."

Edited 2017-08-03 01:03 (UTC)

Tick, tick, tick goes the clock in Oglethorpe's study. James pauses, his hand on the chair back and the sound on his ear - bewildered by its familiarity - and then he's ushered away. He tells himself the next time he's in the room, it will be under very different circumstances.

In the garden, Bettina follows Thomas's example: squashing the water out from the carpet and then smoothing it over over the fence line. It won't ever smell the same, but the only people putting their noses in the carpet can't be allowed to be bothered by any tang of mold. As long as it appears acceptable maybe it doesn't matter that it'll become rotten.

What she doesn't do is look at him or say anything. Instead she focuses entirely on scraping the water from the rug with the angled side of her hand, eyes bright enough that she might be on the very edge of tears and jaw clenched so hard it's visible. Bettina McNair doesn't speak, but fear and frustration and the stitch of something like anger is a kind of language they must both be fluent in.

Thomas, so empathetic as he is, just-- doesn't know what to say, for a moment, so moved by her obvious distress that he feels some of it threatening to creep into his own heart. He swallows it away.

"If you want me to leave you touch my hand," he tells her. He doesn't know why she doesn't speak - if she won't, or if she can't - and hopes that's not a patronizing way of communicating. He's spoken to her before, he's read to her in small pieces, exchanged smiles and sat quietly for long hours in kitchen work. They have a history as best anyone can in this place.

The carpet hangs limply, looking like the sad skin of a dreary animal.

All at once, Thomas feels like an idiot.

"Thank you. For bringing him water." He watches her reaction very closely.

Later, after the rest of a long day for which Thomas is deemed fit enough to return back to work properly, and James is released from his modified duties, Thomas thinks he might actually collapse. Spending the night in that cramped box, the horror of watching James go through everything-- the toll feels unreal. But he waits, accepting sympathetic looks and noting who avoids him. (And it is noteworthy.)

They can't talk at night in the bunkhouse with so many waiting ears, they're locked in as anticipated, and they can't sleep curled up together on a too-small bed with James's injuries. Thomas sleeps beside him with an arm outstretched over the gap, fingers hooked against his hand. It's still like that when they awake.

Waiting until midday rest is a trial.

There are a thousand things he wants to say to Thomas, but by the end of the day even the undemanding work of folding linens has exhausted him. Peeling himself out his clothes is too specific a kind of agony then; James only gets as far as pulling the tails of his shirt free before he lays belly down into his own narrow bed and manages almost nothing in the way of conversation before falling asleep.

In his dream, someone is driving a metal post into the middle of his back - pinning him to the dirt. 'Stay down,' someone pleads. 'I'm begging you.'

Come morning his shoulders and back are stiff enough that the women take some pity on him and give him the task of ironing ribbons and shirts because he can do it mostly one handed, trading from one arm to another when the first begins to ache. The youngest Oglethorpe daughter sits in the room under the eye of her mother and reads aloud from the bible while they work. It reminds him of being a boy and pressing his father's clothes while his mother is bedridden, the man in question there only for as long as it takes him to find another merchantman (anything to avoid being the navy - even another three years at sea).

They're turned loose in the hottest part of the day. He waits for Thomas in the shade of some shedding tree along the path between the slave quarters and the main house, sitting on a chip from the wood pile discarded here. When Thomas comes up from the fields, James holds out an apple to him. He's already had a bite from it.

"Annie's asking about your arm."

The most annoying physical thing, somehow, is how dehydrated he feels. A hundred aches and pains and mending cuts and bruises and Thomas just thinks I'm going to have such a headache for the next two days; something to be said for resilience, at least. Despite everything - and the bruises - he smiles when he approaches, and reaches out to accept the apple.

"Hasn't fallen off yet," he says lightly, and extends it for James to see, flexing his wrist. Still hurts (good thing), the cuts from the manacles haven't helped (less good), but he's kept everything clean and it should be on its way to healing. He sits down at his pirate's feet, just looking at him for a moment.

It's been... it's been.

What a week already.

On a delay, "Tell Annie thank-you for thinking of me." He puts one hand on James's knee, and takes a bite of the apple. A number of questions are swirling in his head, and things to tell him, but-- just for another minute, merely sitting here with him. If finding an unbruised inch wouldn't be an uphill struggle he'd lean to kiss him.

"That's good news," is all dry humor, underscored by the thread of real unmitigated pleasure for the way Thomas smiles. Christ, so much of his fatigue has nothing to do with his split back and bruised shoulders and everything about the intervening hours between now and this morning - being apart from him is exhausting. He laces his fingers together over Thomas's hand there at his knee because he can, careful not to stray too near the raw flesh of the burn and cuts. "I'll make sure she gets it."

He'll need to tell him what was said in Oglethorpe's office (even if it doesn't change anything; even if the things the man had to say that had caught him unawares had nothing to do with the present state of this particular knife's edge they've chosen to walk). But for a moment he's content to just sit. To be still in the heat of the day.

That's true for at least a few seconds. Then the pressing need to say or do something catches up to him, needling through his skin.

'Oglethorpe's evidently writing to the new Governor of the Carolinas,' is where he might start - the part of the threat with the least bite. Instead he asks, "How long has the clock in the study been there?"

Would it be a relief if Thomas has no idea what he's talking about?

Edited 2017-08-04 16:13 (UTC)

Thomas is occupied by a mouthful of apple for a moment. He offers it back to James, and brushes a kiss against the hands over his; eyebrows are knit slightly, considering something.

"That's so strange," he says after a moment, looking up him. "I kept thinking the ticking sounded familiar, yesterday, after I went back in to help Hannah clean up for a while. I chalked it up to exhaustion."

He rubs his nose with his other hand-- the state of his face makes it itchy and uncomfortable to much as emote anything, and he's slightly regretful of having shaved, leaving him with this in-between state contending with bruises. He looks a mess.

"But I have no idea. I didn't see it, and I don't think I've been in that study in... a year and a half, maybe. Why?"

Why?

James takes the apple back and sets his teeth to it as a wheel turns in his mind, cranking some measure of uneasiness out of him. It's a good question. Clearly Peter had some kind of relationship with this place and the man who oversaw it, but how close must it have been for a piece of his home to end up here after the ravaging of Charles Town and his death? Was it really the same clock at all, or had the circumstances just so forcibly reminded him of another place that it was easily confused? Why bring it up at all? It does nothing for them or their situation here. It means he has to talk about Charles Town and maybe could regret asking the question on that basis alone.

He passes the apple back.

"When we--" A low noise. He should clarify. "When Miranda and I went to Charles Town to arrange for making reparations there was a clock in the Governor's parlor that seems very similar to the one in Oglethorpe's study now." He isn't sure. He can't be sure. By the time he might have had cause to study the thing, it'd been too late to give it a second glance. "Miranda identified it as one of the same that had been in your house. In London." His hand has wandered to his beard, smoothing the stiff hairs at the corner of his mouth. Running his thumb meditatively under his lip.

"It doesn't matter. But how did it come to be here, I wonder?"

How can the sound of something like that even be familiar? Thomas holds the apple in his hand, given pause as the topic begins to settle up against that of Miranda's murder. Surely the noise was just some kind of abstract dissociation-- but for them both? He thinks of the things he and his wife picked out for their home in London, every piece of art, every teacup and spoon; it had been lavish because it had been expected to be, and because it pleased Miranda. Thomas, as ever, could have done with so much less, but there was no harm (and all joy) in dedicating time and money to putting thought into it all, together.

Peter had a clock from his home. Of course he did. Thomas's fingers twist on the apple, betraying an ill feeling that his face has become too schooled in ten years to display. He takes a bite, makes himself feel thankful for it. Sometimes, when he needs grounding, he forces himself to recall the feeling of starvation set alongside what is given to him, now. The shock of having to be grateful about slavery usually snaps him out of it.

Peter had a clock from his home. And now it's here.

"If it was ours," he says eventually, "Oglethorpe doesn't know it, or else he'd have made a point to show it to me. But I don't know why he wouldn't know. If Peter left it to him, he would have made sure the man knew. It was very important to him that I remember at all times who put me here."

Thomas's hand on James's knee has gone awfully tense. He relaxes it by sheer willpower, and somewhat mechanically, passes the apple back.

"It could be nothing. A different clock entirely." He takes the apple back. It's something to say more than it is something he means. The whole shape of this has hooked in at the edge of his mind and refuses to be disturbed by simply insisting there's nothing to it.

Though, even if there's some meaning to be taken from it, what good does it do them here? Who cares what Peter Ashe may or may not have willed? Who cares how he had known this place or its master, or how he'd come to decide that the best thing to be done for the man he'd once called a friend was to take him from the first prison he'd help throw him in and stuff him in another? Why labor over it when Peter is dead and there's nothing to be earned from any of it? When Miranda is dead and the clock is just a clock and the only two people in the entire world left to care about the particulars are sitting here now.

Only that he wants to know. Or needs to. Or that he can't stomach the possibility of something true slipping between his fingers. He brushes his thumb across Thomas's knuckles, takes a last bite and then trades what's left of the apple away. After a long moment of contemplation across the discoloration of Thomas's battered wrist, he says:

"What the fuck."

What was the point? Of keeping this secret when he and Miranda had appeared on the doorstep. Of saving Thomas from the hang man's noose. In any of it.

He appreciates the attempt to cast the topic away. It's a kindness for both of them. But it's not nothing, and it's not a different clock entirely, or Thomas wouldn't have felt so oddly about it, James wouldn't have noticed and brought it up. Even if it doesn't actually matter it's a grain of sand stuck in the eye, evading release. Why. You're dead, why must your shadow still be cast.

Thomas lets out a huff of laughter that isn't actually laughter. What the fuck, indeed.

With a desperation he tries and fails to hide, Thomas laces his fingers with James's, feeling like he needs an anchor in this sudden tide, his gaze unfocused past them. If he starts talking about Peter, he doesn't know where he'll stop. He doesn't know what he'll say, what it'll dredge up in his memory, how he'll feel about it. He's not sure he wants James to see some of that in him-- it's not that he doesn't trust his love with all of himself, but Thomas doesn't want to remember some of it. He just wants it to be dead.

"I don't know exactly when it was that he first came to see me," Thomas says after what must be a long while. "Keeping time in that place was difficult. Over a year. More, maybe. They put me in this strange room I'd never been in before, I thought they were going to." Thomas doesn't so much as stop short as experiences his voice vanishing, like it's stolen away by the wind. For a moment he doesn't continue, simply sits there.

It doesn't matter what he thought they were going to do.

"We sat across from each other and he confessed everything he'd done. His hands were shaking, and he was near tears, and he could barely look at me. I don't think it was from guilt."

He thinks it was because he looked like a monster. A wraith. A physical embodiment of Peter's betrayal; gaunt, starved, covered in bruises and sores, his hair too long and matted, skin sickly sallow, his bright eyes dulled. It had taken everything Thomas had to remain sitting upright but he'd done it-- ramrod straight, perfect posture, watching Peter through an imperious gaze and refusing to give him a reaction. Denying him everything, because that was all Thomas had.

"He begged me for my forgiveness. Like he was the one who needed comforting. And I forgave him so that I could see the look on his face, watch the realization dawn that he was groveling in hell, begging absolution from this--"

Inhuman. Dead man.

Thomas shakes his head, tips it back with his eyes clothes, breathes deep.

His hand turns under Thomas's, calloused fingertips scraping gently at the palm of his hand then weaving between his fingers. It's a natural thing to do, as simple as breathing, but it isn't easy. The too still shape of Thomas's hand at his knee is hard won, wildly unlikely and impossibly battered and yet--

James listens, attention a fixed point as the lines of his face slowly compress around the picture Thomas paints him. It's like a darkness swimming up from the corner of his eye, a black shape on the periphery that could be in the dimensions of a hundred different things - Peter Ashe or Woodes Rogers or a man with an iron leg or the ghost of England coming up from the ground they're sitting on. It's a blinder on a horse's bridle: forcing his eye forward to look only at the man before him. He is here against every possible contingency of Peter Ashe's or the Earl's or the world's or the sea's.

The means something too. More than a ticking clock does. More than whatever the fuck a man like Peter might have thought or said or done.

(He believes that. He has to. There are bodies he put in the ground that he has no intention of regretting.)

"He held on to that. Defined himself by it." At some point, Peter must have decided to not be horrified just like he'd decided what he'd done in London had been somehow acceptable. What else could the Governor of the Carolinas have used to legitimize every piece of this business to himself? James finds himself leaning forward where he sits, his grip on Thomas's hand equally firm. He growls, voice low and rhythmic and as insistent as the the tide coming in:

"That's the power you held over him. Even from there. He was never scared of me," --not until those last moments-- "But he was terrified of you."

Peter defined himself by that absolution, but Thomas knows he'd have defined himself by a lack of it, too. A man like Peter Ashe, able to take any one thing and mold it into something appealing and benign; a budget review, a sanctions proposal, a plan to pardon the pirates of Nassau, betraying his closest friend and keeping him as a slave. For his daughter. For the greater good. For his own ambition, covered and tucked in at the corners by a wretched, mundane kindness.

It's taught Thomas a hard lesson. About the shocking, crippling potential of being kind. He saw his father's cruelty so plainly, he saw the imbalances and unfairness of society like Belshazzar seeing the hand of God writing, but Peter's smiling determination and keenness to be his friend came for him as a knife in the dark. And now what? Now he looks askance at everyone who reaches out to him with that softness first. How he thinks of Miranda and James and their challenges and holds onto that, onto the truth of it. He hears Oglethorpe talking about what a mercy his work is and thinks I would see you screaming, I would see your eyes torn out of your skull, for all the good they're showing you.

James speaks to him like a storm.

Hand still clutching the other man's he mirrors that lean, using his presence like a tether to return to the present until he's close enough to touch their foreheads together. His pulse is frantic, and it takes a long moment for it to still, and for the images of a darker place to stop pulling at the edges of his mind. Let it be washed away.

"Is that why he couldn't kill me, I wonder," is a little harsh, strained as Thomas unwinds. Stumbling back from the brink dissociation and panic. It's been a while since he's had one of these.

"No." His answer is immediate, as if letting the question linger in the air between them might make it true when it isn't. It's a solid, squared off syllable. His thumb against the first knuckle of Thomas's hand is an equally firm line.

"People kill the things they're frightened of all the time. Every day. The reason he couldn't kill you is the same reason no one does now." It's why he's not a corpse in the ground on an island of ghosts. "Because he thought he benefited from you being alive. Killing you would have stripped him of his illusion of decency."

If there's a way to say it better, he doesn't know it. It's not a sentiment possible to gentle or to make comforting. But his hand is sturdy and present and there's something to be said about seeing the harsh lines of a thing in daylight - to recognize that the story Peter Ashe had spent ten years telling himself and anyone who might listen had been weaponized to kill him. To know that--

James makes a low noise, his lips twitching back from his teeth. It's an ugly kind of smile. "Miranda robbed it from him. Everyone saw her do it and knew it."

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

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