[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]

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.