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

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."

It doesn't sink a comforting illusion; Thomas hasn't clung to any notion of Peter because he doesn't know, can't know, is trapped here unseeing, unhearing. I wonder is not so rhetorical. James cutting to it and laying the truth of it bare feels like oxygen after being deprived. He appreciated the attempt to sidestep the topic earlier, but this is not appreciation, this is taking something he needs.

Which James knows how to give him, somehow. Thomas worries about the implications of kindness and James rips the stitches out.

Breathing comes incrementally easier.

Words fail him, for a time. He feels slightly dizzy after brushing against panic, but he is anchored. He doesn't wonder or worry about seeming like he's lost his mind, because he has faith that James will sit with him for as long as he needs - or at least, for as long as they have until someone shoos them back to work. But it won't take such a time. He squeezes James's hand and hopes it communicates his gratitude. Honesty is rarely beautiful or comfortable, but it is lifeblood, isn't it.

Miranda robbed him of it. This doesn't surprise him. Miranda could see through anything, no matter how obfuscated or tangled. The smartest person he's ever met, man or woman, before or since. He wishes she could have known how much it means to him to know she's the one who saw it.

At the cost of her life.

"She was your wife, too."

I'm so sorry.

It's not like being stuck between the ribs - just like raising his elbow and being vulnerable to it. In every circumstance except for maybe this one where Thomas is saying it, it's a sensation to be flinched from. James keeps his hand steady. For a measure of time, it's all he can think to do. Tick, tick, tick.

"She was."

He was her husband. It had been an uneven, irregular partnership - the two of them a house on sand with a cracked foundation where sometimes the only good thing between them was insensible and angry and spitting and the fact that they weren't alone with it. And sometimes they had been happy. Sometimes all the cut ends had set flush together. What would she make of them now?

Stay down, is a voice in his ear, but he's certain it isn't hers. Not in this place. Maybe for whatever comes after (it occurs to him that they haven't gotten that far again, that the last time they spoke about the where instead of the how had been before they'd committed to leave this place only after it's been wrecked).

He's aware of how thick his voice has gone around just those two words and makes an effort to clear his throat. "In any case, I can't imagine Peter Ashe has any further relevance to us."

It's the cruelest thing he can think to say about the man.

Being able to be free of something is a luxury. Peter Ashe falls away, the chains he wove through their lives vanishing, leaving only the real ones binding them to this place in the earth. If a man is remembered as a monster, there are still those who love monsters, and those who might dig deeper. But if a man is forgotten, he has been taken apart, forever.

Pain is worth it. Thomas sits forward and kisses him, apple core at their feet between them, bruises protesting. Do you know what it makes us, he doesn't say. Later.

When he sits back, he feels almost back to normal. His other hand covers James's, and they must make such a picture sitting here in the shade, practically curled up together. It's so improbable that they're both still alive, and that they'd have grown in ways that make them so understanding of the other. Always reaching for each other in the dark, even if they didn't know it.

"I think Bettina started the fire."

By the way.

"George McNair's sister."

And just like that, they change tack - veering far away from anything shaped like the world before this one. James leans down, fetches up the apple core and tosses it clumsily away. It breeds some twinge in his shoulder, but it's easily ignored.

Was that her? isn't a question he needs to ask. Instead he goes with, "Did she do something to make you suspect her?" As intent as he'd been on Thomas in the hallway the day before, he'd hardly gotten a look at the woman but maybe he can trace the resemblance between the woman and her brother. The shape sharp chin. A similar color to their hair--

He pauses, hand shifting reflexively between Thomas's. "There was a woman in the kitchen when we broke in. I thought she'd been sleeping there." He'd hardly seen her then either, incandescent with adrenaline and hungry to say a word and see it followed. But there are only so many white women at work here.

"She was terrified, seeing me." Thomas settles against his knees, shifting his weight; the ground is just damp enough beneath the grass to be seeping into his breeches, but he doesn't mind. It's cooling. He thinks of Bettina, her trembling expression, the way he wasn't sure if she was going to start crying or scream. "I wasn't sure, so I thanked her for giving you water, and... the look on her face." Thomas sighs. There's no smoking gun, but his gut tells him it's the truth.

"I don't think she turned them towards you. Andies had no reaction to her in the hall, or me speaking to her."

But there is someone here who'd do anything for her. Such a hypothesis is on weaker legs than his one about Bettina starting the fire, but it does seem plausible that her McNair may have made a preemptive move if he knew about what she'd done, if he'd been thinking about what James was nudging him towards and decided it's safer for her here, if Bettina wants to leave more than her brother does.

If, if.

Quieter, "The women are handled gentler, but it's the same reality." They're all slaves.

Outlined so succinctly, it doesn't take any particular brilliance on his part to draw the line to George McNair. Something tightens in his face then, a vice closing, and for a moment he's silent as he studies the length of the path back to the main house.

Fuck. He'd been reasonably certain of McNair three nights ago - that if pushed, he might fall in a particular direction. Luckily (debatable) if there's an urge to put his hands to to the man and shake him or worse, it isn't really sustainable given how he's currently one continuous bruise - though he entertains the thought for a few seconds anyway. Then huffs out a breath. Scuffs his thumb and forefinger at his hairline. Weeks before, he'd been convinced of the danger other people might be to them too. Things change. Nothing does. People in a closed environment are predictably infuriating.

"If she did it, she'll be found out eventually." There's some undirected measure of heat in his voice. Things like this have a way of shaking loose in little worlds like this one. Never mind the beating played out in the yard, he can't imagine But who really did start the fire? is really a question those running this place will simply forget if bigger ones don't rise to replace it.

"I know."

Something that worries him greatly. It's only in the specific that her motivation remains a mystery; broadly, things must be a certain way. Either George told her of James's encouragement, or Bettina has been listening all on her own.

Or they all have.

Thomas lets out a half-startled laugh.

"Hannah, the girl in the house I was scrubbing the floor with," he begins, looking at the other man, "spoke to me a little. I think we've completely overlooked something. Everyone who works in the house."

The men alongside them, possessed of imaginary notions of betterment and superiority over the women or African slaves, are all so varied and difficult to predict. They have no notion of unity like the black slaves or, indeed, like the women who work indoors or who are too traumatized to do anything but darn socks. They are observed less, permitted more privacy, and they are ubiquitous. Of course they've been listening and aligning themselves as though they're being considered. Why wouldn't they.

Miranda would dump out her tea over his head about now, he suspects.

His head comes up, brow furrowed hard and-- he pauses while measuring the thought, momentarily baffled by his own incompetence. Hannah, Bettina, Annie, Bes and Charlotte, and the half dozen women who he's spent a day and a half ironing and folding and washing with doesn't even take into account the four or five women and girls working full time in the kitchens to put food on either the main house's table, the slaves' or both. It's nothing like an army, but it's certainly not insignificant. And if Bettina had the freedom to set fire to the fucking barn, she certainly has the lateral flexibility to speak to whoever she wishes.

Or someone in her position might anyway, given the woman's apparently mute and her interests - if she does indeed have a penchant for arson - clearly lie beyond conversation.

"Yeah. That could work."

Under the watchful eye of Mrs Oglethorpe might not be the ideal environment for full sedition, an opportunity must eventually present itself. There's no such thing as a waterproof ship. Tugging at his beard, he's just drawing a breath to say as much when the bell in the yard clangs out twice. They're apparently at the end of their leisure. James starts to get his feet under himself without thinking, then balks at the habit and instead turns Thomas's hand over in his - bares the raw underside of his wrist.

"Your arm looks terrible," he says. "I'll let Annie know."

Life measured by bells and shouts. He wonders if it dredges up echoes of the navy, and just how frustrating that must be. Thomas flexes his fingers and pushes up enough on his knees to press the softest kiss against James's mouth once more-- he shouldn't, some part of him thinks, because it's too much out here in full view of everyone, but to hell with them, and the ache of having to leave him until nightfall is already seeping into his bones.

"You needn't tell stories," Thomas murmurs. "You don't know how charming you are when you're being yourself, still, I suspect."

Stubborn and cranky but with that jagged-edged humor, the way he smiles, the way he listens. James isn't charming like an actor or a con-artist, but in his own way; the sound of waves on a beach at night, a heavy wooden table that doesn't creak. Something like that. Thomas never has the right words for him, precious and burning-- and, anyway. If the girls are already doing things like burning down structures for his quiet propaganda, then things are proceeding rather well, honestly.

(How could those pirates wish him away? How could they not be desperate to keep someone so smart and so charismatic?)

"Until tonight."

(Because which is more valuable: time or change?)

Something in James's face softens so dramatically that it strips back the former - undoes a dozen years in an instant with barely a handful of words. It's as if they're a map on paper and Thomas has folded it so this point and some kinder one - the curl of some crooked smile in a cheap room - can touch. And how James loved him then and how he loves him now spills through, both parts as real and as present as their hands together. That isn't a story like a ghost from the sea or who pirates are or what anyone says the world and what's right in it is or lines of poetry or a book written to make sense of things. It's just true.

"Tonight," he agrees, squeezing Thomas's hand.

Edited 2017-08-09 15:08 (UTC)

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

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