[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]

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.

[katabasis]

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?"

[aletheian]

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."

[katabasis]

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."

[aletheian]

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.

[katabasis]

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.

[aletheian]

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.

[katabasis]

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.

[aletheian]

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.

[katabasis]

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.

[aletheian]

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.

[katabasis]

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.

[aletheian]

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').

[katabasis]

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.

[aletheian]

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.

[katabasis]

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."

[aletheian]

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.

[katabasis]

It is, isn't it? It's the first day in recent memory where some previously unknown part of him hasn't been stiff or knotted. The hardtack's hardly pleasant, but there's a familiarity to it that satisfies, and in counter to the natural state of the world he feels as if the path before them has suddenly become clear. This is the easy part; knowing how to achieve an end has never been a weakness for him. With a point in the horizon fixed, the problem of navigating there seems a thousand times simpler.

His hand pauses at the cuff of his sleeve, button undone. He tips his head toward Thomas, but finds himself studying his ankles instead of watching as Thomas strips out of his wet, filthy clothes. He knows what's there - of course he does -, but it's different the see the dark marks on Thomas's ankles in this light than it is elsewhere. And maybe it's the weather. Maybe it's the bloody shirt. Maybe it's the marks on him, but it occurs to him that Thomas is somehow removed. It's like looking at a man who's come to stand beside himself instead of in his own skin.

(Had he looked like that? To Miranda every time he'd come to the interior.)

James undies the last button of his cuff and peels out of his own filthy shirt. "This?" He can't take Thomas away from this place tonight, but he'll talk about something that has nothing to do with it. That's almost the same. "If this is strange, then I won't say a word about Alexander Brown."

Bait. Obviously.

[aletheian]

He doesn't mean to be removed. He will re-learn how to be with someone, he will navigate emotions he's never had before (when has Thomas Hamilton ever been self-conscious; but when has Thomas Hamilton ever before been reunited with this man after over a decade of torture). He will, and there's no question, even if it takes missteps and slow movements.

Love's the easy part.

"Alexander Brown?" An eyebrow goes up. Bait, obviously. Alright then, mysterious sailor. Thomas pulls a shirt over his head and gives James a fondly curious look, indulging him and enjoying doing so. He can't help but scan his memory for the name, lords and pages and officers whose names he all remembers like he's got a written log in his mind he can reference in an instant. Corner poets, actors he wasted time on..? No, nothing. He dresses, forces himself not to rush it, because he won't be ashamed of anything no matter that parts of him won't mend.

(Even if he dies tomorrow, he's won. He can still smile.)

[katabasis]

"A Scot," he says, the line of his shoulder curved forward in the meager candlelight. "Who was part of the crew I later came to captain."

Had his name really been Alexander? Or Brown? He honestly can't recall, but it sounds right enough to his ear. And what does the actual name matter? Not at all, he decides.

"During a spring storm he was struck with a loosed block and came to speak only to the monkey he'd won in a Port Royal card game. Now, Mister Brown had never been a particularly sharp fellow, but after being cracked in the skull he related a number of predictions of behalf of his monkey that happened to be true."

It's a stupid story, equal parts superstition and happenstance, but there's something about telling it to Thomas that seems... fine. It's somehow kinder than discussing their place here or talking about poetry as if London had never rejected them.

"In the winter before I was voted Captain, Brown's monkey estimated that we would come across a rich ship who would - if we weren't careful - sink us. And in two weeks, we did meet a merchantman armed with bow guns and twelve pounders who landed a considerable amount of shot below our waterline."

[aletheian]

Thomas listens.

A sweet-sounding story, despite the head trauma (would that be how I shall become?), and he should ask about the merits of winning a monkey. Surely that's actually a punishment. He lets James paint a picture and comes to admire it in this private gallery of their own labors. Less obvious, he admires the shadows and the second story told in negatives; Flint, before he was captain, winning the respect of his peers enough to be voted to a position where he held all their lives in his hands. The years between that moment and today, when he'd burned so many bridges those same peers were happier to shackle his hands and deposit him here.

What happened, my love.

Despite the initially skeptical eyebrow about the monkey companion, Thomas is attentive and charmed. When they're dressed - or close enough - and the story has come to waterlines he reaches out and trails his fingers against James's wrist, coming to tangle with his own. A little coy but not from shyness - instead there's something almost playful.

"Did it dissuade you?"

[katabasis]

"Nearly. Most merchantmen run or surrender. Almost none of them can organize firing two guns at the same time, much less the six gun broadside that found us. Somehow we'd found the only merchantman with teeth in the West Indies two days after a monkey had predicted it." He turns his wrist over under the passage of Thomas's touch, baring his calloused palm. There. That look on Thomas's face and the edge of good humor in the sound of his voice is worth every ridiculous part of this.

"Luckily, sailors are superstitious. And that block may have knocked Brown's sense of self preservation out along with the part of him that might have regulated putting all his faith in the smallest mind for eight hundred miles. So when Brown said that the monkey said we should close, not a single man argued." He makes a sound low like a laugh. "Granted, I believe the captain knew running then would've allowed the merchantman to put another load of shot into us. Getting alongside and boarding her was probably the only way to avoid being crippled.

"So we did that - took the ship, its cargo and its guns because a monkey said so and the men had been put into the right mind to believe it. Honestly," --he does laugh then-- "I was lucky the got fed too much rum after or it'd have been voted captain and god knows where I'd be then." It's another bloodless, generally mild story. His hand not tangled with Thomas's touches moves to touch his wrist, thumb against the skin James knows is still mildly discolored from what was done to him either in Bethlem or here or somewhere in between.

"It's funny," he thinks out loud. "How isolated men can be convinced of anything given the right parameters - how rationality can be made into something entirely flexible."

[aletheian]

Someday there'll be a philosopher or psychologist who could look at what passes between them now and say it's codependency and a lack of father figures instead of what it is, a miracle of humanity in the simple act of empathy, which is so stripped from the world within this plantation's walls. Thomas's turn to gentle amusement lets James laugh, and that laughter curls in Thomas and looses some small knot of anxiety he hadn't known how to name.

"You'd be quartermaster to Captain Monkey, is where you'd be," he says, smile on his face. What a tale, even if it certainly involves dozens of dead merchant sailors and pirates alike. (Is it so bad? People taking at the point of a sword what England takes with taxes? More end up dead at the feet of starvation and debtor's prison alone than pirates could ever kill. To say nothing of slavery, asylum, war and conscription...)

Thomas is sure his insides are a mess to put his outsides to shame, a china dish shattered a dozen times and glued back together, fissures and cracks to trip over everywhere. He's sure, too, that mines and knives lay beneath Odysseus's waters, even if he hasn't stumbled directly onto one yet. He smiles and he means it, with more lines around his eyes than ten years ago, his fingers splayed against James's hand as he touches him, without shying away.

"Mm. Rationality is just the application of logic, so isn't it flexible by nature? As logic is. She gracefully adjusts herself to whatever context is present. Which is why isolated men are susceptible to.. ghost stories and politics, in equal measure."

[katabasis]

"The mind leans on principle every moment, even if it can't distinguish the distinct truth in it," he says, a coy joke in fumbling the particular words of the quote.

It's a purposeful lightness. It's perfectly possible, he thinks, to ignore the sharpest parts of this place for a handful of minutes if necessary. If there's some end to achieve by doing so. And steadying Thomas's hand or making him smile seems like a good enough reason. This may be a transient kind of pleasure, but there's certainty under his fingers and in the gentle heat of Thomas's touch; anything can be shifted into a state of reality. Like this - alone in a preciously quiet room -, this is the most solid thing in the whole world and it has been for ten years.

"Personally," --he lifts Thomas's hand, but is too close to smiling to really kiss his knuckles-- "I'd prefer being done with both of them. For right now." They're a thing meant to be shed. Give him a week. Two weeks. Give him a month and they'll have put themselves in the position to never think on ghosts again.

[aletheian]

"Maybe reason is an evolved trait, one developed to deal with cooperative living, instead of solving abstract problems." Which would arguably render rationality meaningless, and set every debate in human history on the same level as someone doing shadow hand puppets-- "Cooperative living with monkeys and their seafaring advice."

Thank you for telling a ridiculous story. The way James takes his hand is almost unbearably sweet and he thinks it's been well over a decade since he felt - what is that feeling, flustered, flattered, touched? They're slaves, reality horrible and suffocating, and James can do that to him.

In a voice that won't reach past the two of them, "What would you like, right now, then?"