[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]

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.

[katabasis]

"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."

[aletheian]

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.

[katabasis]

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.

[aletheian]

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."

[katabasis]

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.

[aletheian]

"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.

[katabasis]

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.

[aletheian]

"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.

[katabasis]

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."

[aletheian]

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."

[katabasis]

(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.