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

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

The bread that is over-baked so that it cracks and bursts asunder hath not the form desired by the baker; yet none the less it hath a beauty of its own, and is most tempting to the palate. Figs bursting in their ripeness, olives near even unto decay, have yet in their broken ripeness a distinctive beauty.

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There's work to be done in the morning, and the next, and the next. Taken without context of the wider world, it is almost hypnotic; it's easy to understand (if not accept) why men would prefer this to trying to leave. If one doesn't consider that there's anything better, and appreciates the shelter and food provided, perhaps puts value on humble living for God or some other damn thing, it's a life. Thomas rubs James's hands where they're tense, he speaks quietly about the identities of the other prisoners, he shares what little of the African language he's picked up that's spoken by some of the black slaves. In private. They are all of course forbidden from speaking it, or any other language besides English.

Once a week if a man wants a shave or to cut his hair, they're permitted - Thomas is 'allowed' to do this now, he explains, as his hair's got enough grey in with the blonde these days that there's no value in forcing him to grow it out again to be sheared off and sold. He leaves his still-short hair alone and shaves his beard off, and though he doesn't say so, it's not because he has any particular desire to (it's sort of a pain to keep up with, honesty), but because it's worth James getting a look at this part of the plantation and how unobserved they are with scissors and straight razors.

He muses that it's a miracle James hasn't ended up with his head burned; perhaps he needs a hat.

They're shuffled into a small and drafty room at the end of one of the barrack houses, with a door leading into the inner hallway of the structure and another facing out at the vegetable garden buffering the main house from the first of the fields. It counts as a family unit, though for the trouble, Thomas has been given the task of making sure Benjamin doesn't die in his sleep-- an infection in one of the wounds left by the whip has stricken him with a terrible fever, but the weather is too bad to fetch the doctor. Unconscious from sickness and laudanum, he's here deposited in a cot against the wall, breathing but dead to the world.

The rain is coming down so hard that the outside world is awash in blurry grey, even with the door cracked open to circulate the muggy air. The sound of it on the roof drowns out the rest of the men in their own crowded quarters, and if not for the third wheel, it could be just them existing here. Cut off and adrift, some world that ends when the water begins.

After days spent tuned to the habits of those around them - the other prisoners, the African slaves, the overseers, the half a dozen deliveries coming and going from the plantation, the master of the house and his infrequent guests, the family's two children who are learning to ride up and down the lanes between the fields -, the insulation of the downpour feels like a respite from more than just the labor expected of them. It's not quiet, but it is restful (even with Benjamin, the poor bastard) and he can't help but be lulled by it. The air is dense, the damp smell thick, and as he runs his hand over the short bristle of hair across the top of his skull it occurs to him that this may be the first time they will be left to themselves for more than a moment. They'll be here for more than just the time it takes to fit a horse into harness or for the minutes they might be allowed to linger in the yard after nightfall before someone comes to see them tucked safely away. Excepting their friend on the cot of course, they're alone. God forbid he ever wish to have everything.

How closely do they count those razors after they've been allowed to use them?, a piece of him wonders. Who long would it take for someone to notice a pair of shears gone missing? What would he even need them for? Wouldn't it be better to slip away in the darkness or on a day like this one where the rain would mask their route? The rest of him shifts from the doorway, turning his attention from the weather making lakes and rivers of the garden and its paths to Thomas.

They should take advantage of the opportunity to speak where no one will hear them. If leaving here is the easy part (and he believes it will be), then plotting their course beyond the gate deserves more thought than figuring out how to slip away. They'll need horses or a wagon. They'll need supply and the coin to come by them legitimately unless they want to add horse thieves to runaway slave on their inevitable warrant. They must secure someone outside this place to supply them or, better, they must figure out a way to take whatever they need from this place before they leave it. Speak to no one. Trust no one but themselves. Put no man or woman in danger and leave no witness when they disappear.

It's a long list. It should be broached. Instead James drifts to Thomas. scuffing his fingers through his own beard as he goes. He'd neglected to use he razor either to shave his cheek or the prickle of hair on his head - the former seems like a lost cause and the latter will need to be grown out to avoid easy recognition from a distance - and now he's regretting it. He's sweat in these clothes. If he'd done more than wash and scrub his face, there might be less of him to smell like stale heat and work.

"How far is the doctor? When the weather clears - do you know how long it will take to send for him?"

"They may well have sent someone already," Thomas says mildly, rising from his kneeling position next to Benjamin - making sure his airway's clear, and that he's still not conscious. It would be nice if he and James were truly alone, but it's not to be today. Still, this is a marked upgrade. "I can barely see the house." If a man on a horse went out the gate, there's no way they'd know from back here.

Satisfied that they're as alone as they're going to get, Thomas lays a hand on either of James's arms, slipping up to his shoulders. "An hour from the time someone is sent until the doctor turns. He lives at one of the neighboring plantations, though I don't know in which directions. I get the impression he's slow-moving, as he always arrives on a cart pulled by a mule to the tune of the overseers complaining about him. So perhaps not too far away."

There's something funny about the fact that he met James when his ginger hair was long and his face clean-shaven, and now this. Thomas finds him just as handsome, no matter how intimidating the effect; it doesn't exactly make James look friendly, but he can't imagine that was something Captain Flint was trying to aspire to anyway. He runs the thumb of his right hand over James's jawline.

"There used to be a better doctor who came, a younger man, who resided in the town we're east of. I'm not sure if he moved away or if a political disagreement finally came to an impasse. He was very Irish."

He finds himself hoping they have sent someone. Not because this time with the illusion of liberty is intolerable, but because to do so would speak to some measure of Benjamin's value. The kind of value that demands a doctor in the middle of weather like this can be leveraged.

"Was he a better doctor or a better man?"

--He hopes they've sent for the doctor because the man on the cot sounds like his breathing is sawing through something vulnerable. It's brittle enough to carry over the hammer of the rain of the roof. Not that it stops him from touching his fingertips to Thomas's elbows or tipping his face against the idle press of his thumb. He's spent too much of his life in close quarters with battered men to be entirely fixated on their present company and leaning into every possibility of contact isn't something he's remembered how to moderate. He touches Thomas's shoulder in the field with the thing pretense of steadying him; he sits near enough beside him during meals that their knees and elbows bump; it's common practice in the evening to take up residence at the foot of Thomas's bed to discuss Donne and Johnson then never leave it.

"Both."

Thomas has a certain understanding of doctors, these days, and has always had a certain understanding of men. That does not make the Irish doctor good, given that it's not hard to be better than the men who run this place, but still, slightly elevated. He could explain the doctor that visits nowadays, but James will experience him soon enough. He slips one arm around James's shoulders, other hand staying where it is at the side of his face - unable to refrain from open affection when he's allowed to give it. He does not yet trust the world enough to assume James won't be taken away at any moment; perhaps he won't ever. Trusting the world is a tall order.

"It's not the first time I've been required to play nurse," he says, "and I doubt it'll be the last. But he's out, I think even if he were awake he'd be delirious."

They can speak freely. Or they can just hold each other-- though they haven't strictly shied away around others. Thomas has gravitated to every stray touch and brushed knee, as inevitable as the tide, and pulling river water out to sea.

The lines of his face soften suddenly and for a moment he flashes a crooked smile, exhaling a low noise like a laugh under his teeth. "So I'll twist an ankle or eat something raw the next time we need to talk," he says, punctuating it with the slightest eyebrow quirk.

Maybe if circumstances were different he'd slip out from under Thomas's arm and away from the palm of his hand then to discuss more serious things. But how different would they need to be? Enough that they might have never been in this place at all - so vastly opposed to this small room in a storm that their version of serious conversation would have nothing to do with escaping captivity. As it is he places his hand over Thomas's against his cheek, turns his face to kiss his palm, then leads him by the hand a few paces from Benjamin's terrible rattle to where they can sit and look out into the garden as the rain comes sheeting down into it.

(So they can see if a rider or a mule-drawn cart arrives there long before anyone comes to stand in the doorway.)

"If we're to go inland, we'll either need horses the moment we leave here or a place nearby to wait until anyone looking thinks we're gone already." He can do both: touch Thomas's hand and wrist and talk about what's necessary. He doesn't think he can afford to waste the opportunity for either. "Either way, we'll need to have a bearing." A direction in which to run in. Simply saying 'to the interior' isn't enough, as much as he might want it to be. He runs his thumb across the peaks of Thomas's knuckles.

Don't you dare is in the rise of his own eyebrows, lofty aristocratic bent even after all this time. But there's no heat behind it-- hearing James make that sound, so near to laughter, is balm enough. Thomas bumps their noses and foreheads together. Hmph.

When they're seated he stays close, the whole side of him against the other man's, and it's both natural and necessary. In the past he had a habit of abandoning his chair to pace while they talked (discussed, debated, argued, laughed), but time is too fleeting of a thing to use carelessly now. The idea of chatting across the small room from each other is unlivable.

Thomas takes James's hand and turns it palm-up, and draws his index finger down his lifeline, the crease nearest his thumb. "If this is the coast," he says, "and further back is inland. We're about here. Consider how long it took you to get here from the ocean. Four times that west is disputed territory, with England, France, Spain, and the native peoples here laying claim to it. The same distance south along the coast is Spanish territory. Further west and north is all French."

With his invisible map drawn, he splays his fingers against James's palm, twining them between the other's. Thinking. "If we rode out of here we'd be easy to spot," he says. "We'd have to know exactly where to do and what the conditions of the roads were. And I'm not sure we can secure that knowledge." He would be willing to bet they cannot, in fact. "We'd have to try for another plantation or the town."

Not South, he thinks. His Spanish might be better than his French, but the temptation to meander further and find their way back to the Bahamas on the favor of a few easily reminded friends might be more powerful there. There is a war besides; it seems foolish to whisk Thomas, who is many things including undeniably English, away there. Not that New France is really any better in that regard, but at least he doesn't have a history of stealing French warships. He studies the invisible map Thomas has drawn on his hand until it's covered by Thomas's palm.

"Early in my captaincy, we happened across a Dutch fluyte sailing from the Carolinas. She had the wind in her favor and was travelling along the same route used by Royal Naval frigates eager to lend support against St. Augustine, but the season was right for her to be heavy with indigo and tobacco and I was in no position to refuse the crew a prize." The hunt, he might have said, but saying that here in Thomas's company seems strange. Language that belongs to someone else, he tells himself. "She ran for some time, but we were able to follow her because the Dutch captain sailed almost exclusively at her best points. When her wind died, it was simply a matter of charting the most reasonable line and following it.

"When we captured her, she was indeed filled with tobacco and indigo and all manner of silks." His hand is gentle under Thomas's warm palm. It had not been the first haul he had given the Walrus's crew, but it had felt like an accomplishment. Something won by tenacity and by knowing a stranger's mind. "Most of it had been shifted to our hold before the frigate was spotted clawing for us under every scrap of sail it could carry. With night falling, the sensible thing would have been to run. We made a show of doing so, then under the cover of night tacked across her bow and beat our way against the wind in the hope that she had given way to chase us in the direction of easiest sailing. Come morning, she was gone."

And it would be some time before someone questioned his spirit again, though that's hardly the point here. "The road or the town will be the assumption. No one will expect us to go to another plantation. Further, any landowner recruits to the search will likely assume his own property is secure."

What an elegantly bloodless tale. Thomas wonders if James is trying to spare him the thought of how many people he's surely killed, remembering how always mortified he was at news of murders committed by anyone. He wonders, too, if James is trying to put that horror behind him and become - if not the man he was, then someone new, and less brutal. Thomas was so crushed at the thought of a governor's wife and child being murdered by pirates, but since then he's seen first hand the kind of slaughter and execution England sanctions en mass so very thoughtlessly, and he knows well how much of a fool he was. He could try, he supposes, to be that man so held apart from violence and death, to be touched not by resignation and only distant sadness but by the shock he once was, to be an idealistic innocent again. Thomas runs his thumb over his pirate captain's and thinks Oh, James, I'm not sure I can.

Still. It is a marvel to hear him speak, his low tone tailor-made for storytelling, whether it's for dramatic purpose or strategic practicality. Always the consummate sailor. If he hadn't been so unlucky as to become entangled with the Hamiltons, where might he be now? Captain of some navy ship, out there raining down hell on Spain. A cold and patriotic officer. Thomas squeezes his hand.

"There is an agreed-upon alarm system between plantations," he says. "I don't know the details of it - how they alert one another, or how long it takes. A year and a half ago word turned up here somehow about an escape from a neighboring plantation, and we were confined to quarters and the whole of the grounds searched. It was around midday."

Takeaways being: no path will be without enormous peril, and if the escapees in question went at night (as is sensible), then it took several hours for word to have circulated fully. But then, maybe they went for the unexpected and made their break for it in the morning. There's no way to know.

Surely not every plantation conducts their operations in exactly the same way, but it's so sensible a thing to do that he doesn't doubt at least a handful of the neighboring plantations must do the same. So they will have to slip away from this place without detection, then avoid the same for however long it takes to cross the miles between here and-- wherever they choose to go. Their best bet is to delay the search for as long as possible, to give themselves the longest head start available to them. A man on a horse would overtake them even with a day's lead on foot, but that would give them a day to find somewhere secure and dig in.

His attention strays to the doorway and the gray gardens beyond it. This weather will ruin the roads and leave the fields flooded for some time. Tomorrow and the next day will be difficult, filthy work. All the irrigation trenches will need to be re-dug and the drive built back up to dry. How long until the ground dries? Until the sun burns through the standing water? He turns Thomas's hand between his own, something meditative in the set of his fingers.

"It will have to be night for us." If things were not as they are, he might suggest running in the day - going their separate ways and meeting at some agreed upon place to split the search. But here the thought is absurd and the risk unbearable. "Do you know," he asks, "What happens when something catches fire?"

James looks out at the world beyond and Thomas trusts him to it, laying his head on his shoulder and letting his eyes slip closed. Even in sleep it's been impossible to relax, the past ten years, but he can manage moments like this with James - no matter that they're illusions, that someone could walk in and pull them apart at any second. It doesn't matter to Thomas that the security isn't real; with James, it doesn't have to be. He's happy anyway.

"Mm." A low noise of agreement. Planning for this often feels so much more dreamlike than anything else, even James - Captain Flint - appearing before him, haloed in the sun, hands outstretched.

"There are water caches with buckets on the ends of the buildings every acre," he says. "There's effort at organization, but the last time it happened, the overseers were split between ordering us all away and ordering us to get water. Not quite chaos, on its face. But some could be encouraged."

He makes a soft understanding noise, but otherwise finds himself quiet under the weight of Thomas's head on his shoulder and his easy breathing against his neck. Near the door, the rasp of the rain almost covers that of Benjamin's breathing. He should work this out aloud while they're able. Instead James sits silently for a long time and considers what an ideal night for burning a plantation looks like. The weather would have to be warm and dry. A wind would need to be moving through the valley. Particular men would have to be made to do particular things.

(What's wrong with just slipping away in the night? It's impossible, he rationalizes. This has nothing to do with wanting to see this place reduced to a cinder.)

"North," he says. The urge to press West into the gut of the continent's wilderness is so extreme he can feel it under his skin. But in the days since he first proposed this, he has been thinking about the rationale of Mister Scott's island kingdom sustained in large part by what came to it from Nassau. He has thought of going far enough North that no one will know them and finding a hill to build something on or a boat on a river to take them farther still to the Quebecan fisheries that must not be so different from the trade his grandfather had once plied. "Unless you prefer to disappear in some other direction."

Unless he prefers some other direction. Like this is possible, like they won't be caught, and-- James will perhaps be killed, he can't know what financial terms were levied by his fellow pirates, and Thomas will be mentally crippled, unless he finds a way to do it himself before then. He probably could. These are awful thoughts. Possibly the worst ones he's ever had. It's not that he doesn't trust and have faith it's just this is the world now, the whole damned world, and the Thomas Hamilton who recoiled so delicately at a public hanging has been beaten out of him, and surely whatever hope and good will the universe had left was used up in James being here at all. Suddenly he misses Miranda with an intensity that takes his breath away.

Maybe James will plan for the next ten years, instead, and it'll never come to fruition. Thomas opens his eyes and looks unfocused at the rain through wooden slats. They are very fortunate; the roof of this structure was tarred only six months ago. When he has his voice again,

"North."

To the fortresses of New France, native tribes, lost English settlers, wandering fur traders, and worse weather. He kisses James's jaw.

"I still speak French." Of course he does.

He chuckles, shying from the tickle of Thomas's mouth only to turn immediately back to it. Of course he still speaks French. And Spanish. And knows lines of poetry and philosophy by heart. And somehow James thinks Thomas must still know him too - that they have spent ten years in some immutable darkness only to discover in the gray morning that they've travelled parallel to one another all along. That's true. It must be. Otherwise how could he be so brilliantly happy for even a split second while sitting in a slave house, the sky falling down around them and a dying man's breathing acting as some irregular tick of a clock?

They're going to leave here. The men the world knew them as will be swallowed up by the things civilization feared and no one will know how to recognize people who are happiest with whatever waits on the other side.

"I only know how to ask for surrender." Merde, enule, brûle en l’enfer - all as fundamental to a midshipman's education as the difference between sheets and halyards. Then he kisses him, quiet and gentle and full of promise.

Somewhere watching them Miranda covers her face with her hands, because all it takes is James laughing and the dreary clouds looming in Thomas's head clear like sunshine has cast them away. He'll figure it out-- Thomas will figure out how to explain to James why this is suicide, he'll figure out how to voice his concerns. Right now, though, he's going to let out a quiet huff of his own laughter and return that kiss.

"La crainte n'est pas dans l'amour," he says, quiet, practically against James's mouth, a familiar air of recitation, "mais l'amour parfait bannit la crainte; car la crainte suppose un châtiment, et celui qui craint n'est pas parfait dans l'amour." He presses another kiss to his mouth, one hand slipping to the back of James's head.

Whispered, "You don't have to ask me." To surrender.

Miranda was right: men like Thomas need grounding, reasonable voices to keep them connected to reality. But James was not that man. James is a man like Thomas hiding in the costume of a carpenter's son, an officer, a pirate. What they need is a voice like Miranda's. And it's up to Thomas to work that out, he knows it is. Outside the rain has reduced its violence by several degrees, though it's still coming down as if to meet Noah. By the gate, several men struggle to wrench it open and shove one of them on a horse. Well. It'll be more than an hour, still.

The cadence of how Thomas talks is as important as the meaning of the words, of which he only knows a few. The verse rises and falls between them and it isn't as if he's returned to a decade ago in a room overlooking London; no, it's an anchor here in this place with Thomas's hand warm in his hair and the air thick about them. Surely that initial kiss a moment ago was sweeter than the ones which came before it. This second one surpasses that and tomorrow's will be better still. Not on account of the circumstances that brought them here, he thinks, but because each time Thomas kisses him it somehow moves them farther down an invisible line. Eventually this place and everything that led to it will slip beneath the horizon.

'I know that,' he could murmur under the relentless drum of the rain or the muted squeal of the gate as it's forced closed again. It will take only seconds for the rider to disappear into the sheets of rain. Instead he touches Thomas's neck and strokes a thumb across the smooth skin of his freshly shaved jaw. James says "Good," against his mouth in a voice so low and small that it's barely there. This feels like a necessity more than an indulgence. "I wouldn't want to."

And now, after this long, he must have a clearer idea of what it is he does.

Like this, it's almost possible to believe that the plan they're making is real and that there's a world left outside these walls. James fills him with sunlight and burns away all potential for fear or doubt, makes him reckless and hopeful. That, and the feeling of desire warming his blood is-- unearthly, ice cracking, frost dispelling. Sensations he thought he was no longer capable of.

He wants to tell James about how he measures deaths and rebirth; how when children are small life moves infinitely slowly, every moment lasting days and days, and how that's how he's felt every time he's been forced to shape himself into someone new to survive. He's been in the darkness for decades, centuries, and now for the first time he hopes that agonizingly slow adjustment lasts, so that they are immortal. But it's so much more important - vital - to say nothing and kiss him, to hold James and be held by him against worn wooden planks, listening to rainfall, mapping out the men they are now and soothing with hands and tongues what's familiar and embracing just as lovingly what's not.

Benjamin keeps breathing. Thomas keeps a thread of attention on him, and another on the watery realm just outside the door, but they are distant, faded concerns. His curls the fingers of his other hand in the fabric of James's shirt and feels like it would be so easy to exist with him as one person.

It should be obvious that this is just one in a succession of liminal moments, that everything lives in a state of transition. But it's easy (no, necessary) to instead think of the moments when he's not in Thomas's company as the shifting sand over the stone of this. How do you motivate a man to do something impossible? You tell him something familiar and better is beyond it.

So he leans into Thomas's hand in his shirt and smooths Thomas's worn shirt collar. Touches his knee, then his hip and kisses him until pieces of himself thought to be dead prove to have been in hibernation and begin to come alive high in his belly. And when he is breathing like he's been running he takes Thomas's face in his hands, admires all the gray in his hair then touches his his forehead to his. Darkness must either not be so far divided from the light or he's right to think that between them they can create something different; this is good.

Regardless of what the future has or doesn't, they have this: holding each other close, breathing each other in, heartbeats next to each other a stubborn victory against a whole world that said no. If soulmates are fairy tales then that's what they are, a fiction to be lost and retold; dreams, star-crossed lovers, valiant women, pirates and ghost stories.

Time gets away from him, and Thomas lets go of his usual vigilance about it like kite string slipping from his fingers. The entrenchment is disturbed by Benjamin's breathing choking off, a watery, unpleasant sound, and though he recovers after Thomas forces him to his side, the watery quality of his strained breathing is worrisome. It reminds Thomas (rather depressingly) of an injured bird he found when he was a boy and insisted on caring for, and he tells James so as they sit back down, as Thomas reaches for his hand with his own to thread their fingers.

It's impossible for him to guess how long they've been waiting, the rain outside still coming down, but the quality of light has changed a little. Perhaps the doctor will show soon.

He does. They sit in the company of a man who sounds like he's dying for maybe ten minutes, perhaps fifteen, before a ghost materialize out of the weather and into a horse. A rider. A mule. A cart and it's driver. The gate is forced ajar and as the mud splattered cart draws to the edge of the garden, James unravels their fingers. He stands then offers his hand to haul Thomas up after him as the doctor makes his way slowly down the side of the cart, his broad brimmed hat streaming water.

"About time." Strange, how an hour ago he had hoped the doctor closer for what it might mean for their longterm welfare and now... Well, he isn't unhappy. The man on the cot is in need of more care than being rolled onto his side or watched, however attentively. But James can't claim to be satisfied. Were circumstances even slightly different. If there were no Benjamin, for example--

But this is what there is for the moment. The world returns to this room and though he's loathe to do it, James moves to open the door wider for it. Tonight, he thinks, they can have a whispered conversation. Tomorrow they can do the same. Thomas can write French words in the mud with a switch from the budding hickory near the bunkhouse and James will learn them without having to speak one. And maybe in a few weeks time and if he recovers from this, Benjamin could be persuaded to be of use to them.

Thomas allows himself to be levered up, one last fleeting moment of this enclosed bubble in appreciating James's strength against his own. He lays a hand on the back of his upper arm after, his touch-- bracing? Calming? Some message he can't put into words, though whether it's for a lack of knowing how to word it or because they're soon to be in earshot of the approaching doctor and two overseers, who knows.

Their illusion of privacy is shattered quite spectacularly by the noisy parade that bears down on them, the first overseer - a man named Marshall - yanking the door open the rest of the way and stomping inside. "By your leave, Captain," he says to James over the sound of the doctor's stream of complaining, more than a little sarcastic. Of all the men who coordinate work on the plantation, Marshall is the least likely to assign punishment, but he's an arse - in a strange way where he seems to think that's just how everyone talks; occasionally, a slave will mildly back-talk him to no effect. He begins telling James to either go stand in the back hall or outside in the rain, but the doctor speaks over him.

"See your problem right here," the old man says bitterly, "anyone would fall ill being locked up with all your bloody sodomites." Thomas spares a barely-there glance at James, slipping under the attention of both laughing overseers, his look wry, as if to silently communicate that this is why he said both in answer to James's question about the other doctor. The doctor demands they all clear out but Marshall overrides him, saying Thomas has to stay on account of being steady-handed if something goes awry.

"He's right," says the other overseer from where he's leaning against the door frame. A man more genial sounding than Marshall, but much more cruel. "Nobody's seen Lord Hamilton so much as flinch in nigh on four years."

Thomas doesn't react. The doctor is still crudely muttering as he inspects Benjamin, and grudgingly instructs Thomas how to hold his head to facilitate breathing when he's rolled this way and that to inspect his wounds and assess his fevered state. Marshall, meanwhile, is still ushering James away to give the doctor room to work, and after he barks at his fellow overseer to go do something useful instead of stand around and admire everyone ('you repressed ponce').

Edited 2017-06-22 10:10 (UTC)

And just like that, the room is just one off a flooded garden where mud is tracked in on the bottoms of boots, where soaked coats drip on the floorboards, and James's face tightens at being addressed then closes like a vice for the doctor. He tips his after him as he passes into the room, attention briefly rapt on some spot between where the man's shoulder blades must be and thinks about... the shape of something that he won't name. He suspects Benjamin's condition has rather more to do with being beaten until bloody, but fuck. He isn't a doctor, now is he? He looks to Thomas, raises an eyebrow, then cedes his ground.

And continues to give it, though sluggishly to the point that as the second overseer replaces his hat on his head to go back out into the rain he says to Marshall, "Have him put up the horses." He meets Flint's eye, then shifts out into the sheets of weather.

With a question about the mule - should it be stabled? No, clearly not - Marshall puts him to it. "Mind you don't get any ideas while you're alone with them," he laughs.

There's nothing to be done for it. With a glance to Thomas, Benjamin's head steady in his hands, James ducks out into the flooding garden. He's decided to be quick about it, but the horses are unhappier in the rain than he is and leading them across to the dry barn is like pushing a rope. It's quiet once he has them there though, not a soul in attendance of the place, and he's quick to wrestle the sullen animals into their stalls and strip the tack from them. When he's finished, he does what he wouldn't have a week ago. After a long moment of listening to the quiet, James tries the small door to the adjacent storage room.

There's no lock, but he's somehow still surprised by the fact that the door opens and for a split second he's convinced someone must be here after all. But the room beyond is empty and he's allowed to observe from the doorway the arrangement of hammers and tongs, files and assortment of small tools there. None of it is particularly sharp, but as far as blunt instruments go they sit closer to the bunkhouses than the shovels and pitchforks and-- It would certainly be easier to steal and bury a file or a hammer than a rake.

When he returns to the small room, he's soaked through enough that there's no real point in moving farther than the doorway. The air isn't especially cold and there's no more room inside than there was before he was pushed out.

Thomas doesn't put up a fuss about this kind of work because as much as the overseers think they're bullying him around, finding it funny to see whether or not he'll squirm as the doctor rails on about homosexuals, Thomas gets to learn about treating illness and wounds. Sometimes it turns his stomach - it can't not, uncovering bandages to find rotten flesh, or bumping into something that makes him think of his time in Bedlam or, worse, remembering the sound of holes punctured into Stephen's forehead. But he doesn't shudder away.

(Not even when James leaves the room, which is always an interesting sensation in the pit of his stomach, one he has no name for.)

It's decided, after scraping away discolored flesh from Benjamin's back, that he needs to be moved somewhere next to a fire to sweat out his fever, and bled. This means a graceless production of moving him to the house with the kitchen in it and trying not to get him soaking wet in the process, which is-- mostly impossible, yes, but they make a noble go of it. By the time that's done and Thomas and James are discharged in favor of the house girls looking after the rest of the effort, it's nearly pitch black out. The rain is lighter, but lightning strikes are sometimes visible, crackling in the distance.

At least standing in the rain is convenient for washing away blood; the front of Thomas's shirt and his sleeve cuffs are doomed to permanent discoloration, but it feels good to get it off his skin.

"Maybe the whole plantation will just be rinsed away," he says quietly, picking through mud puddles.

Edited (noticed a typo hours later bc i never closed this tab) 2017-06-24 07:57 (UTC)

He shields his eyes from the rain as it spits down at them as they wind their way slowly down the path in the muggy darkness. The clouds are still so heavy that the barely half moon has no hope of any of its light penetrating.

"Wouldn't that be convenient." There's an easiness in his tone afforded by the security of the night. Something in the look of Thomas with his shirt all bloodied had troubled him when they'd first set out together and it's simpler to talk this way when it's black enough out to make everything else - like avoiding stepping into ankle deep puddles, swearing softly - difficult. "Have the whole valley basin fill with water and then see it all swept out to the sea."

Turn it into so much driftwood and debris. The thought of a piece of this place following the trades and southerly current to eventually washing its way up on a Caribbean beach is more amusing than it should be. He turns the thought over in his head for a moment, but out loud he says:

"We'll want witch hazel and mint a week from now when the mosquitoes are swarming."

It'd save them an awful lot of trouble. Just float away. Is that a fanciful appeal of piracy, he wonders, and thinks he likes the mental image of it - and of James, no, Captain Flint, sinking skeleton boats filled with overseers and the rest.

"It'll be a plague of Egypt," he agrees. And then, "Ugh," back at the room; a rare complaint from Thomas who's usually too stubbornly resilient to so much as pull a face at anything. There's just something about all the muddy tracks, blood, and scraped flesh balled up in a ruined blanket. Ah, well, there's nothing to be done for it besides clean it up - at least the rain means there's no shortage of water. Before they're done, one of the other slaves arrives with jerky and hard bread, which is all anyone's getting to eat tonight on account of everything being flooded and miserable. He asks how Benjamin is and Thomas tells him calmly that he doesn't think he'll survive, but if he does he'll have a whole strip from his back missing, and they've all seen less likely cases pull through. Who knows.

"What a strange day." Quietly, later, in the light of a single candle (a luxury not afforded to the black slaves, rationed to them to remind them of how well they're being treated here). Peeling off wet clothes and attempting to get dry enough to warrant putting on clean ones. Thomas is always somewhat cagey about these moments, but it's difficult to detect in group settings; he wonders if it's clearer, here, though he hopes not. It's one thing to be older and worn, it's another to have the scars of a hundred lashes and to be branded. An unpleasant ordeal he hopes they continue to forget about with James, given his unusual method of internment.

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