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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His head is bowed to search the lines of the topmost letter again - it's the kinder of the two and she's writing with enough formality to go on about the town and how pleasant it is despite the density of the weather. He feels like if he reads well enough, the words will somehow become a cipher by which he can determine where specifically in Savannah the girl is and how they might find her if-- "Apparently the late Governor of the Carolinas wasn't very creative when it came to disposing of his problems."

The texture of the quiet between them eventually penetrates, a mute counterbalance to the buzz of conversation behind his shoulder. A pause. Roman is winning the straw game. He keeps talking then, something in him gone crooked over the particulars of the way Thomas has gone so quiet and so still - both bizarrely distant and so close he can hear the sound of him breathing. "It might be possible," James hears himself saying, something slow and off-center about the sound. "To have one of the girls write a note and slip it in with the other letters. If Abigail's so determined, it won't take much to confirm her suspicions. A line or two at most."

Maybe that's possible. Maybe there's some validity to the whole concept (only three of the women can write and it would be dangerous to so much as ask except for maybe in exactly this moment when the master of the plantation is away), but he hasn't actually thought that far ahead of himself. Instead his hand shifts, fingers brushing faintly at the worn soft fabric of Thomas's shirt then shifting in under the edge: touching warm skin. Come back.

Problems to be disposed of.

His focus is brought to the point of James's palm against him, like tugging on a drifting kite string. He looks up, eyes on the other man's, and his expression hedges on apologetic. He should say Forgive me, I don't know where I was for a moment, but he doesn't have the heart. This is a rare opportunity, being able to speak this way, their quiet voices lost in a crowd of others. He knows that even those sitting close enough to hear them are deliberately tuning out, either out of discomfort or respect. He can't waste it drifting.

Thomas lifts his hand from James's shoulder to the side of his face, thumb against his jaw, fingers splayed across his neck. Some silent communication, or attempt at it-- sorry about that, thank you for taking a moment for me, I love you so much. He hopes the distant sadness he can feel clinging to him doesn't show in his eyes, and wonders where he'd be if not for James coming to him and reminding him that he's alive, and a person, and capable of breathing and loving.

(Of being loved.)

It's another long minute before he says, "They don't send or receive mail from here directly, I expect he took any to be sent with him when he left." Too easy, otherwise. She could just send a man to peek over the gate and report to her what this place is. Anyone could. They are very well hidden; such is the point. "Wherever they do the post may have a record of her address."

Strike the possibility of reaching out to Abigail Ashe while confined here from the list then. It's not terribly heartbreaking. This morning there was no such thing as an acquaintance outside of this place; this evening there's some slim possibility of one (--Thomas is one thing but who knows how the girl feels about the man who killed her father - despite other failures of character, Peter has clearly cared for the girl; that must translate somehow into grief). It's still a considerable step forward from where they were even six hours ago.

He keeps his hand where it is on Thomas's side, thumb drawing the faintest circle on his skin - a small, incessant reminder to keep Thomas present or some animal fear under his own skin: don't leave him, don't leave him, don't leave him.

"Then we'll go to Savannah, find her address and you can speak with her directly." As if there's no obstacle to that at all. "It's possible she might be able to see us safely away and know of houses where the others would be welcomed without too many questions." As if he and Thomas along with a half dozen women will simply take a walk into town.

(There's another kind of strategy that has nothing to do with outwitting an enemy in the dark or a series of feints. It's to go straight at a thing with enough ferocity that it's surprising.)

As if there's no obstacle to any of that at all, yes. Thomas shifts as though to move closer to him-- but there's not much room to move, and he doesn't want to rustle the papers too much, doesn't want to draw attention to a strange noise. He hasn't doubted escaping this place. Technically. He's resolved to it with the alternative being dying in the attempt, with death more likely than survival. This doesn't bother him.

He just hasn't given much thought - actual, real thought, not absent reveries - to what life might still be like. What's out there? Who is out there? If they're not going to huddle in a cabin somewhere remote for the rest of their years (and surely they won't), what will they do? Where?

A young girl desperately clawing at the mysteries left by her dead, strange father might not translate into a savior. Then again, he's laying in a narrow bed with Captain Flint. What does he bloody know about the universe.

"Liam who works in the fields at the other end of the plantation said hello to me today," Thomas tells him. The other end of the plantation being where the black slaves labor, trickier work and longer hours. Excepting the housework, there's little overlap in their populations; fraternization is discouraged by way of keeping them largely apart, though plenty mingle in passing or in hastily thrown together crews to tackle problems as they arise. "Some conversations travel, I'm sure." Co-ed housing for the others, in much closer quarters. If any of the black women in the house have taken a liking to James, stories have made the rounds.

There is also something else Thomas thinks - hopes - he may have set in motion, but he can't risk even alluding to it here. (Maybe he should wish for telepathy after all.)

"I have no concept of what the world is like out there," he says after a while, trying to keep his voice light. Out there. The colonies. The New World. Things beyond a list of lifeless facts. "I knew London. The countryside, sometimes." And Bethlem. And this. Neither of which qualify as any proper part of this, or any, world. "You found a home in Nassau."

The name of the island on Thomas's lips strikes a strange, unexpected chord of homesickness in him. It reminds him of a very old dream that had haunted him crossing the Atlantic, or like the six hundred times he had pointed a ship's bowsprit toward the horizon and watched the island come up out of the sea. There are a thousand reasons to desire to be in Nassau from this bunk in a slave house, but he doesn't know if it's really the place the longing opens up for or if it's just Thomas saying it. He misses what it might have been. For a moment, he misses a dead thing so violently it's as if it isn't gone at all.

(What has become of Madi?)

"There are towns and cities and ports all the same as in England. Where trade thrives is most like it, at least as far as appearances go. But I believe there is a certain flexibility here that's afforded by the governors and their limitations that breeds independence. The appeal is that, given the means, it might be possible to simply do what you care to." A pause. He makes a face, mouth twitching toward something that might not be a smile but at least has some measure of good humor. "Within reason. And as long as the rest of the world can somehow profit from it."

Framed so, Nassau hadn't been so different from Jamaica or Barbados, neither of those places so far removed from Boston or Providence or maybe (unbelievably) other towns not so near the sea and all its winds to England.

He shifts his hand at Thomas's side. "But I only know it by commerce." By what came out of it and onto the water. By the shape of the coast. "I can't say I really know much about the rest."

None of which has anything to do with why Thomas is bringing it up, he suspects. What is living like after pretending to for so long? After a moment, James draws his hand back to quietly fold the letters between them.

"Does any of that matter?"

"No," he admits, adjusting his arm so James has room to fold he letters, "I don't know what I'm trying to ask. All of my thoughts on the world outside for so long have been.. abstractions. They've had to be. For many years I couldn't even let myself remember anything."

It would have been too much. Whenever he began to think of James and Miranda and the life that was taken from them, it would tear at him, and he was already trying so hard to stay fortified against-- torture, abuse, starvation. And then the twisted, sickening thought of having to be grateful for slavery. Adding grief to it, adding the wretched feeling of opening his eyes from a daydream to meet where he really was, felt like death closing its hand over his heart. Thomas has kept no mental record of things he'd like to do or projections on what he thinks society might be like. And now to think of it feels so unreal. Like one of the dreams that would take him and leave him so devastated.

James speaks of Nassau and he wants to chase that almost-smile. To what end, he doesn't know.

"Forgive me. I promise I want to be making sense." He musters up a small smile, though it's wry.

"You make sense," he murmurs, shifting to tuck the letters up under his shirt into the waist of his breeches. They'll have to be disposed of, but not tonight in such code quarters.

He doesn't know how he would begin to live in society again - he can see how there's an extension of that where it could be possible to not really know how to live unregimented at all. For over a decade Thomas has existed at the demand of others - plantation masters and transport ship captains and men at Bethlem who must call themselves doctors even if James imagines that's the wrong word entirely. If Thomas were to ask what they will do after this, he isn't sure he has an answer. He just--

"I wish I knew what to tell you." He means it. There should be something he can say to settle Thomas. To reassure him. "But I imagine we'll be busy for some time after quitting this place. I expect the rest will come naturally."

People are meant to be happy. There must be a way where eventually that makes itself true once everything else has been done.

"Having a plan for it is an impossibility," he says, and does in fact shuffle slightly closer once the letters are away. A little pointlessly. There's no room, what does he thinks he's doing, exactly. He curls his fingers in the thin texture of James's shirt and brushes their noses together before settling down, just looking at him in the dying candlelight. "I don't expect one. I think your Abigail just left me reeling in surprise."

And his reeling takes him to unavoidably dark places. It's just something that's a part of him, now. He knows James has his own shadowed hallways and things he sees in his mind. Thomas presses a kiss to his mouth and thinks about saying I don't care where we are or what happens, as long as I'm with you, but decides it sounds too much like he's saying this place is a tenable situation when it is most assuredly not (when he has visions of shoving a pen knife into the neck of the man who'd chained James, when he remembers what that feels like when he looks at the man who'd beaten him). The sentiment, though, is genuine.

"Do you think the girls will miss you?" --is a little teasing, but also a real inquiry after any bonds he might have formed. Has he spent enough time with them to have a solid idea about where they stand? The act of guiding him to these letters is something very significant, to be sure, but is it everyone?

They might already be so close that shifting nearer is really more theoretical than real, but he's glad enough for the idea and Thomas's fingers at his shirt and being kissed and how solid and unambiguous Thomas is next to him that it doesn't really matter. If he could forget completely about the low noise of conversation in the room, the hoarse sound of muted laughter behind the curve of his shoulder, the lock on the door, it might be possible to be permanently content like this.

But temporarily is fine.

He huffs out a low noise near Thomas's cheek. "Not at all. I've been slowing them down for days." He used to be better at mending than he is now. "But I believe they're sympathetic."

Hannah walks from the main house in the evening and sleeps in one of the slave quarters. She's allowed to do it because her mother and brother who work in the field are there and family is second to God, but also because Charlotte and Annie are at beck and call for anyone's needing water fetched or a child soothed at midnight. Hannah just cooks and scrubs and folds until they decide she's good for more. Then she won't be allowed to sleep anywhere else. Where's your father? "Home," she says and shrugs. Two days ago he had stood next to Bettina, stripping feathers from pheasants and said, "Your brother was wrong." Cleaver in hand, she parts the pheasant's head from its neck with such force that it makes the room jump.

"But I'd prefer have an agreement," he says, hand returning to Thomas's side. It's a dangerous thing to want - a risky thing to ask for when the mere idea had been enough to spook George McNair. But this doesn't work if they're all just assuming to be on the same page. "At the very least, we'll need a shared signal. I'll try and talk to one of them at midday."

Thomas makes a humming noise and strokes his palm over his chest, warm amusement at the idea of James clamoring after the women like a puppy at their ankles (not because it's funny to juxtapose it with the idea of a fearsome pirate captain, but because it's James, who Thomas thinks is charming and sweet no matter what). They must have enjoyed his presence anyway, though, if only for a change of pace. It's good. Being invested in him helps.

"Are you well enough?" --For soon. It's a practical question. The marks on Thomas's wrists have scabbed over and his burn will either scar or it won't; bruises have begun to fade to yellow-green with purple dots in the centers. James's injuries were so much worse. A timeline is as necessary as a signal.

Amongst the noise of conversation behind them, George McNair's voice lilts over something Thomas can't quite make out. A man who feels a certain way up to where it might endanger his sister. Thomas understands him, even if he doesn't agree. Like he understood Peter's wretched insistence it was over threats against his daughter, sitting in a dark room with chains on all his limbs. Has he given thought to what Thomas told him the other day, he wonders.

(They'll find out who did it eventually. They'll know you lied, and they'll know why. It almost killed me, watching that happen to James.)

"In a week. Maybe less." But that would allow enough time to manage the details. Right now he'd buckle under a strong blow or two, but give him a week in the fields and he'll be fit for the work that matters. Everything might still ache, but he can ignore it under the right circumstances. Like this one, lying on his side so close to Thomas that they're nearly flush. The shape of Thomas's hand warm through the thin cotton shirt and the heat of his breathing. There's some wild, unattached urge to kiss him then - to kiss him well enough to mean something by it - but it's there and gone again in the same moment. Some random frenetic spark in a dark room that doesn't find anything to burn.

"Christ," says Ellsburg, a dull complaint among the murmur of conversation. "Can't a blanket be pinned up between us and them?

"Getting ideas, Lawrence?"

Fuck off. Fuck you. James's hand on Thomas's side goes heavier as he wills the bickering to become background noise. He grumbles against Thomas's jaw, "It's not too late to leave them."

Thomas's gaze cuts up briefly, something cold and uncharitable, but it melts quickly down to wryness and then returns to half-lidded inattention. It is what it is. They are comrades, all of them, but that doesn't mean they're universally accepting of each other. They never will be. Probably, some of the women, too, don't approve of what clearly exists between Thomas and James, but have decided to prioritize.

Can't a blanket be pinned up between them. Wouldn't that be nice. Thomas sighs a little, casting away the bristle up his spine, and nuzzles until their foreheads are together. What would they even do behind such a flimsy barrier? Nothing, realistically, even though there will always be some part of him that wants to hold him and press kisses to him. It is an uncertain fantasy. One that wishes for James to paint over the touches he last experienced, for him to burn it all away and leave him new, with nothing lingering. He wants... he wants to want.

This is no place to try and heal what might make that a possibility. The thought doesn't quite solidify.

"They can find their own way to Savannah," he murmurs.

Or off a ledge, if they're going to continue to be intolerable.

He laughs, a low rumble in the fundamental lack of space between them. Fair enough. He can't say he has the strong inclination to take anyone along excepting the women from the main house and whoever they might possibly be invested in. But that would be true no matter how much of an idiot Ellsburg is. Even if they were to rally every man and woman on the plantation, their number wouldn't be enough to stand against anything for long. They'll have to splinter away after - make their own way with a small company and not be among the recaptured.

It's a grimmer, more mercenary thought than should be present here while wound up in Thomas to the sounds of something that might easily seem very much like leisure - where if he closed his eyes and pretended to feel the rise and fall of the sea, he could mistake the noise for the buzz of idle crew. But he can't quite do it. Can't dismiss the constant urge to be question their readiness. Even like this, there's something foreign sitting under his skin over this place that demands to be picked, picked, picked at--

He slides his hand from Thomas's side to wrap around his shoulder, to create some narrow circle of space with the line of his arm that exists separate from the rest of the room. There he can murmur Donne to him - where can two better hemispheres be found? - until the candles are extinguished.

Edited 2017-08-14 15:26 (UTC)

James's voice as he drifts to sleep in the dark is a balm to anything bruised, his touch an anchor in the sea. It's his own fault that his unconscious mind stirs up less pleasant images; he dreams that he's lost in a crowd in a place like he'd never seen, never imagined, and he sinks in it like quicksand, reaching out but never managing to call for anyone. He awakes before the morning bell, when everything is still too-quiet, and clutches at James as if to make certain he's still there and breathing.

Fear is not something he knows how to carry, and it leaves him unsteady. Thomas doesn't remember the details of whatever he saw in his sleep, but the thought that it isn't the world's fault, just his, because he doesn't know what to do out in it.

The lazy tone of the evening without Oglethorpe carries on into the day, though they are none of them excused from work. Thomas is bitterly grateful for it, physical exertion and paying attention to who can speak where and for how long pulling him out of the strange state he'd been in. There's no room for floundering. He tries his best to keep an eye on James, and keeps a closer eye on anyone he sees watching him at midday.

Liam says hello to him again, taking advantage of the lax treatment-- but the both of them know better than to think security is lax in turn. No, it's increased, if anything, cognizant of the inevitable turn to lollygagging within. Taking him by surprise, the younger man asks him in French if there's anyone on the outside from when he 'tried before' that he knows to still be in the area.

"I'm not sure," Thomas admits, wondering about how just how plainly things are being discussed in the other quarters. Very, apparently. "The woman who headed the effort used to come in on Sundays, and she was never permitted after. What I know of her makes me think she was likely forced out of the area."

He can't imagine Ida staying and never hearing so much of a peep from outside. Unless she was hurt terribly, which is a possibility that Thomas tries not to think of. If anything happened to her, it's not like he'd be on a list of people to inform. They speak for a little longer, about nothing, though Liam watches him with a piercing kind of care that makes Thomas think he's being assessed-- does someone with this kind of spine really need two battered white men to kick anything off?

Maybe. Maybe not. If they wake up tonight and all the walls are on fire, well. Could be worse.

There's not much time left in the midday break by the time James returns from the main house, and Thomas just raises his eyebrows at him in silent communication. What a day already.

What a day. Yesterday he'd seen no difficulty in returning back to laboring in the fields, but today he finds himself slow and limping and exhausted before they'd even come up from the fields for water and a moment in the shade. If circumstances didn't demand staying on his feet, he might take the whole break they're given to lay in the dirt and feel every muscle, every bruise. As it is, James merely cuts up toward the main house where Annie is pumping water into buckets. Something must need boiling - for cooking or laundry or a thousand other things. He spends the midday hour helping her ferry buckets back up to the kitchen over and over again, making idle conversation under the squeal of the pump and gush of water as she creaks the lever up and down, up and down. It isn't until they're nearly finished that he starts to ask what he's meant to. Annie beats him to it with her own question.

It gives him pause. Water pours into the waiting bucket. The smell of ash from the burned barn lingers still. "That's doable," he tells her.

"Good," she says, lifting the pump's handle to choke off the dribble of water. "If it isn't, other arrangements will be made."

He's nearly forgotten the twisted tight feeling in his back as he makes his way back from the main house. There's something stark and drawn in his expression, mirrored somehow there in the raised eyebrows Thomas sends his way as he closes the distance to his side. The air's thick with humidity, swimming in heat, but for a moment James finds how oppressive it is as easy to ignore. There isn't much time left to them and this isn't something to be discussed in the bunkhouse - not even in the dead of night under the low dragging breathing sounds of men sleeping.

"We've been pressed," he says when he's near enough to do so in a tone so low it has no chance of carrying in this dense, still air.

"Mister Flint - were something to be changing here, we would need assurances that the convict laborers you're with are friends. Or they will need to be removed. Put away. We thought you and Mister Thomas might see if they can be swayed by voices like their own before that. Is that possible?"

"I've recently gathered that," is his response, just as low. Thomas raises blistered hands to touch lightly on James's shoulders, his touch only there enough to be a presence, and not burden his sore form. Those who might strain ears to overhear them will abruptly tune out if they think it's something romantic-- and, god, watching James struggle today has made him feel just as wounded, somehow. He wonders if now would be an appropriate time to see just how much sway he has with Marshall in the name of getting some kind of ointment for the other man's bruises. Probably. It'll be best to know, and soon, by the looks of how things are beginning to come together.

"What do they want of us?"

Thomas keeps his attention on their surroundings, for anyone approaching, for a breeze that might carry their voices. He thinks, standing there, that it might be much easier for everyone to calmly walk out of this place without opposition and without an alarm being raised, if half those inside were already dead. It's a terrible thought, and one he's not sure he should voice for fear of making it real.

"To make sure the other white men are of the same mind when the work here changes. I gather if they aren't, we may find ourselves on the wrong side of a bolted door." At best. His face is tipped toward Thomas, near enough that he could be murmuring something entirely different. Thank God for being repulsive to polite society, he thinks without any shred of regret.

"I'm under the impression it's believed you and I have more in common with them and might be able to bring them around or sort who's likely to raise the alarm." It's not a bad instinct. What did the African slaves really have in common with the convicts beyond working the same fields? The black men and women are people ripped from their homes; the white men here are almost universally capable of supposedly (or honestly) deplorable things. And if George McNair is any indication, clearly some of the convicts think it's possible to ingratiate themselves with the masters and overseers.

He touches Thomas's side, leans quietly into the shape of his hands at his shoulders; it makes for a pleasant kind of pressure, a gentle counter to the uncomfortable knot high in his back--. "Apparently we've caused enough trouble to make ourselves seem useful." To think he'd been on the verge of asking Annie (and everyone likely she knew) to join them. Just them. It seems like lunacy from this end of the matter.

A pause. James wets his lips. Frowns. "--'recently gathered?'"

Good Lord. Things are coming together quickly. A small frown stitches between his eyebrows, but nothing more; it's unnerving to be on the outside of intricate planning, but far from the most unnerving thing to be going on in their daily lives. Thomas instead decides to hold fast to the idea of this dream becoming a reality, and the fact that they have allies, and that those allies are competent enough to be doing this, united enough to have a strong front, and either pragmatic or compassionate enough to be extending their hand to the two of them.

Footing changes all the time. They must keep balance.

"Liam spoke with me and asked about my failed attempt," he murmurs. "He said nothing so direct, but matched with what you've said I can draw no other conclusion."

Thomas thinks about their fellow convicts and dead men. Not all of them can be trusted. Plenty of them would sell them out, especially after watching what happened to James-- a few would sell them out cheerfully, even without the looming threat of punishment, purely because of hatred and petty grudges. (Even the ones who don't care one way or the other about the evils of Greek love, even so far away from London, some men will always be bitter to see another happy.)

They'll all have to be separated. Mechanically possible, to be sure, the bunk house has different sections but-- but, but. How to herd people, how to close it off. When. It seems impossible, but he's sure it isn't. He just needs to think about it.

He makes an aborted, low noise that's not at all like a laugh - some edge of teeth to the sound. After just a moment, he's evidently made some decisions: "We need a time table - a deadline by which to make all our hard choices so we can deliver it to them and make an argument for why nothing should happen before it. If we don't, we may find ourselves scrambling to meet whatever arbitrary cut off they've chosen." This is too dangerous to go into without some measure of agency and they can't afford to be on their back foot for longer than a moment, however benevolent the rest of them people committed to this might be. Better to set expectations while they still have the opportunity to do so. Before anyone realizes they're doing the two of them a favor and they've almost nothing in the way of leverage except for maybe the dim hope of some girl in Savannah that has no responsibility to anyone except for what she might imagine.

"Three lists then - anyone you believe to be in hand, the hopeless cases, and the ones who fall somewhere in between." Then what? Then they ply the men in the middle until they see which way they're likely to bend. The ones likely to back them will either be truly friends or fold to the pressure of numbers in the moment and aren't worth the time hand picking or risking the slow leak of information by being honest with them. The lost causes are just that.

(There's a prickling sensation in his skin that has nothing to do with aches or bruises. It's a strange, vertigo feeling - the adrenaline spark of realizing he's on an edge and the decisiveness of knowing it demands clinging to. The world narrowing to how strong his fingers are.)

Thomas listens and keeps his hands steady on James's shoulders, as though he can feel and absorb his sudden tension, the rise of something desperate. He is calm in the face of it, his own mind putting together this and that and wondering just how cornered James will end up feeling if he isn't holding this thing by the throat for every moment.

It's something he understands. To feel helpless and out of control is like drowning; to accept you are where you are and to have nothing inside that space to hold onto is maddening. Thomas is not broken by it, but he's--

Experienced.

His hands shift from James's shoulders to be gentle at either side of his neck. I'm right here. He waits until he's looking at him to say anything. "I'll make the lists," he says quietly. "They're not going to move before that happens. It would be too dangerous otherwise." No matter what. Any one of them could just kick the damn locked door down, these structures are not built to last the ages. There's no way an all-out brawl between factions is a part of anyone's plan; it would be a disaster. "James. You've lived your whole life outside. Your knowledge is too valuable a currency to be gambled with."

They are not incidental. This is not mercenary. Thomas has seen the way they all look at each other. They are all real.

There's something in the cant of Thomas's voice that sounds to his ear like consolation, an attempt to soften something James knows for certain is sharp. For a split second he balks between the hands on his neck, the lines of his face flattening reflexively into some impassable thing. He hadn't been asking to be reassured. What part of that had seemed so irrational? People cornered by their circumstances do dangerous things all the time. They get impatient. They find an edge in desperation. Safety takes a second place to what is required. Standing here, they're examples of exactly that. Sensible men would be gone by now, slipped loose the night the barn burned to its foundation.

If it were anyone else, he'd have no desire to explain himself. But it's Thomas and it's important he understand. "I know how it sounds. But believe me. If we don't make our position clear then someone will eventually misunderstand it." That feels like the most dangerous mistake he knows. He can't do it again.

(What does he know about this territory? More than Thomas, more than anyone who's spent their life here, more than anyone whose only experience with the colonies is the slave markets and the road here. But how much that actually amount to that can possibly be useful to them in this, he's not sure. This isn't trade routes and merchant brigs dashing out from one safe harbor to flee to the next; what the fuck does he knows about the land surrounding a plantation? The towns or the wilderness beyond it?)

"It sounds fine, my love, I'm agreeing with you," Thomas says, and if he sounds placating-- he isn't trying to be, but he supposes that's the sort of thing that's been ground into him after all this time. The knowledge of it touches something sad in him but he refuses to let it take hold; instead of his gaze flinching away he just lets his expression flicker self-depreciating, and chases it with a lopsided, barely-there smile. He wishes he weren't like this. He wishes James's first response wasn't right to the brink of hostility. Please trust me.

"I don't know what I sound like anymore."

Probably terrible.

"I only mean to ask what their position is before we demand ours, in the event they already overlap neatly."

(Come on now, away from the ledge.)

He is aware of the fact that, in his attempt not to sound so conciliatory, he's more or less doing that exact thing, but there's no way around it that he can see. It's likely a problem, but not one he can do anything about. James is right and Thomas isn't trying to dissuade him, he just seemed so damned angry for a moment, and he can't go back to work that way, he can't go confront one of their peers that way. He'll hurt himself, or they won't understand.

A heavy flicker of his eyelids marks that James is hearing him even if the point just comes to settle on top of his own. Of course. He's not planning to be unreasonable - to back Thomas into a corner where he's forced to become dangerous. A letter opener driven into a man's throat, he thinks, and the image that's conjured is so foreign he can only guess that's what has Thomas giving so. Why he sounds like a bent switch looks. "I'm not suggesting we demand anything," he says, purposefully gentle. It's fine. There's nothing here to fray over. "Merely that we come to the conversation prepared."

He isn't arguing. Thomas isn't wrong. Souring this fledgling relationship is as useful as shooting themselves in the foot. If their position aligns with that of their allies, then there will be nothing to debate. Let this partnership be as happy and easy one as possible given the extreme circumstances. But if they arrive at some disagreement, being ready to counter immediately is vital. Better to seem shockingly quick on their feet than hesitating or needing a moment to confer as disparate pieces have a habit of being shaken loose in these matters. If the women and African slaves expect a united front, then it's in their best interests to be exactly that.

(Not that they aren't. Not that they could be anything but. It's a point that doesn't need to be made. He trusts him.)

Push and pull and they even out-- or they will. No matter what, Thomas has faith in that. They never really argued, in London, not outside sparring over politics that was as much enjoyment as it was frustration, though Thomas has always known of his temper. He knew from the very first time Lieutenant McGraw split his knuckles on someone's face over his wife's virtue. He knew that Miranda and James argued, sometimes, real and heated in a way he never experienced with either of them. But that was something Thomas manufactured for himself. The person his upbringing tried to make him be was something he would never direct at anyone he loved.

(1705, autumn; You beat men bloody over the slightest insult to Miranda or I but the things you say in your own head about what you want-- what am I to do for you, lieutenant? Who do I take a glass to in your defense if you're doing it to yourself? Would you have me do such a thing?)

He joked later, after that first night, asking James if he startled him shouting so at his father, or if it was just a relief to see him strain a little like anyone else.

(1707, winter; Thomas finally masters the art of being completely removed from himself, because so much as a flinch and they force laudanum on him, and choosing to be powerless is better than being forced. The memories, too, are less horrifying when he can piece it all together.)

"We're in agreement."

Just coming at it from odd angles, perhaps. Thomas sighs, opens his mouth to speak, and--

The bell.

"--for fuck's sake," is what comes out in a breath, ever sounding like a teakettle letting off steam whenever he swears. It's passionate, his aggravation as genuine as anything, but Thomas is always too proper for it to be audibly convincing.

He exhales hard through his nose, dredging his hand sluggishly from Thomas's side as men begin to peel themselves out from the shade of trees and the slanting overhang of the bunkhouse's roof. White would-be dead men and African slaves form irregular twin streams of flesh trickling back down into parallel fields and there's no denying the pull of it. But James finds himself compelled to. Just for a second. Just long enough to touch Thomas's face with both hands and say, "It's fine."

Which could mean anything - that he'll make it through the afternoon of backbreaking work; that nothing is going to crumble out from under them while they aren't looking (just never stop looking); that he isn't angry and doesn't need Thomas talking to him like a spooked animal; that he won't let anyone out Thomas is a position where he's unduly compromised (not without being next to him during it) . He strokes his thumbs at Thomas's jaw, nearly kisses him but doesn't, then frees him so they might make their way back down to the work alongside each other.

There's plenty to be done. The ground is nearly dry now and demands breaking before it turns to clay so solid that anything growing there risks being strangled. They dig in matched lines, an uneasy rhythm to the rise and fall of the shovel. Metal strikes earth. Sweat drips from his nose. He works directly behind George McNair who can't look at him, but who sharpens every time James drives the shovel down again. He can't deny that he finds it satisfying: to have something that feels like a weapon in hand again even if there's only one logical direction in which to brandish it.

For the time being anyway. At this rate, tomorrow might turn all their shovels into something fundamentally different.

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