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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The horse shifts against his knuckles. It's quiet here in the barn's shadow, the morning fresh and bright beyond it where the path leads from the yard down through the fields and broad meadow to the wood and creek beyond it. The weather is good, clear enough that it will be sweltering by mid-morning, but in the moment as the dew scent evaporates and the chickens pick at worms in the stable yard it would be easy to forget the circumstances of this place.

It has been easy.

What? he says, so fast that James almost regrets asking the question. He focuses on shifting the lay of the strap across the horse's shoulder, then fixing every strap in its keeper even as Thomas draws close. The horse is between them and the rest of the world. James tips his face toward Thomas by a degree; he wills his hands to keep at their task. "That isn't what I meant."

As the man he'd been yesterday, he might have said 'I'm happy with you too' and leave it alone. Because of course that's true. He's said it a thousand times and is certain he'll say its like a thousand more. Instead, he hesitates for a split second. Then--

"Is this the place you want to be, or is it the one you're in because someone says you must?"

"I know what you're asking me." Thomas lays his hand on the horse's neck, only a few finger-lengths from James's. His voice is very quiet, gentle, and yet frankly re-assuring. He's not side-stepping the question, he's not burying his head in the sand. He's not crazy. It's because he knows that James is asking that he doesn't have a better answer. Calmly, he says: "You're asking me if I'm happy that I'm a slave."

(What?)

Thomas's fingers tangle in the horse's mane, doing nothing. He should be loading the cart but he isn't, he's eating up time he knows is safe because of his years of experience. Finally doing so has a worthy purpose, greedily stealing and burning every spare second to be alone with James, even if they're just silently standing near each other.

"Do you really think it's because someone says so?"

The decade between them has shaped them into strangers in so many ways, and so Thomas has no way of knowing that in this they share something so similar. When Silver asked of Captain Flint, would you give up your war for your lover, he couldn't answer because - why? Because it wasn't a real choice. That's some other life, some timeline long-dead. Do you like the pink or the green dragons better? What would be more pleasing this weekend, tea with Pharaoh Cleopatra or digging for worms? Are you happy here? Do you want to be here? Thomas could scream. He has before.

He doesn't. He moves his hand so that his fingers can tangle in James's instead, and presses along the flexor tendons of his hand, so strong from ropes and wheels and swords but unused to the way farming makes them bend. Later when they break for water, he thinks he'd like to sit with James's hands in his and work out some of this tension.

When he says it like that, it's like it's meant to sound metaphorical - a concept, not reality. He's supposed to think of the fact that no, it's because they are on an estate with a vested interest in keeping them exactly where they are. That this estate has men, guns and dogs and that presumably it lives in association with every other plantation and farm surrounding it under the shared mutual understanding that if one man runs then it's in the best interests of every landowner to find that man and put him back where he belongs.

Belongs being the part that scrapes even under Thomas's reassuring candor and the warmth of his hand. Or because of it. He shouldn't have to explain himself. Thomas should meet his thought exactly where it begins to thin. The fact that he doesn't or can't and has been told enough times not to feels like--

Something best not to dwell on. He isn't angry. He's just aware.So instead James wraps his spare hand around the cheekpiece of the animal's bridle and sets his thumb against Thomas's small finger. "I think," --there is an urge to not allow his face to do what it wants to, which is for a muscle in his cheek to jump at what he wants to say-- "That you deserve to decide what's done with you. And if it's to stay here to have a bed and food for as long as there is work to be done, then I will find a way to get you every Sunday newspaper. But if it isn't," he says, pressing his knuckles against the horse's broad cheek. He looks to Thomas, shifting his thumb. "Then I would find a way for that too."

"My Odysseus." Thomas raises his hand to James's cheek, and for a moment it's like there are no years between them, like they aren't half-strangers; Thomas has always lead with his heart, he's always been too reckless with his expressiveness. He lets himself right now because he can, and because everything about James seeks to twist something in his chest so painfully he can't bear it silently.

"I wish like nothing else this wasn't the home you've found your way back to."

Of course Thomas isn't happy here, of course he hates it here, of course he would prefer to decide and-- and a hundred, thousand other things, but what's he supposed to do? There are walls and men with guns and dogs and surrounding plantations and headhunters and, and, and. It isn't philosophical. The threat that hangs over him - and now them - is real, tangible, and in no way hypothetical. Elated as he'd been (still is) at their reunion, it broke Thomas's heart to know James had reached a place of such lowness that clawing back to the surface could only land him here.

He twitches in toward the contact, but for a moment it does nothing to settle him. The set of his jaw and the pressed line of his brow doesn't shift. What was done to Thomas Hamilton to make him so careful?, he wonders. --And then supposes maybe it's equally that he's gone far enough in such a direction that it only seems like caution from where he's learned to stand. Thomas's hands is at his cheek with no trace of fear (that much is a constant); perhaps it's just him talking around the shape of something dangerous. Maybe it's just him baiting the cyclops to no end.

"If this is selfish, just say so." But if it isn't? If they have willed themselves into sitting around a governor's table where some tension is waiting to snap - to crack like a pistol shot or a cane across bare thighs -, then what good is there in simply waiting for something to fall to pieces around them while they pretend otherwise? "Tell me why it's impossible and I won't speak of it again."

Talk him out of it.

Improbable as it might seem, as contrary as it is to the pain of knowing how he's suffered, Thomas loves who James has become as much as he loves the man he first met. He can read the years of violence in the set of his shoulders and the clench of his jaw, his scars, the way he's made a mirror's flip of the moods he had ten years ago - the darkness that sometimes snapped out from behind his eyes is now the factory default, with wisps of gentleness and that reserved lieutenant only appearing when coaxed or caught unaware. That's an awful reality, surely, but at the same time he's so strong. God, seeing him there in his black clothing stained with blood, defiant even through the awe, Thomas had experienced the world in color again for the first time in a decade. Something wild sparked inside him, and though it died down under the weight of reality he's held onto the memory of the feeling, so close at hand now.

Hope. Expectation. Desire. What can't the most feared pirate captain in the world do? Isn't it a laughable idea that this place, any place could hold him? Unbidden his mind had supplied the image of this James coming to free him from Bedlam, and it was the fantasy he'd refused to allow himself all these years. Never. For as much as he'd wanted it he never, ever let himself imagine it or hope for it because it would be--

It'd be so easy to give in to madness. This restraint is how he's survived.

"Don't ever hold your tongue to try and spare my feelings," he says in a whisper. "I can't stand the thought of it. I want-- I need all of you."

Whether they're clinging to each other or arguing, Thomas wants it to be honest. It's with that thought in mind he steels himself for this admission, one that should be easy but catches in his stomach and throat as he tries to get the words out.

"I tried, once."

All of him is a man with a a piece purposefully slashed away. Flint would be a detriment to them in a place like this; if there is any ghost of that left in him, he has determined to exorcise it. Flint is a man who brought a war into his home and watched it burn away; he won't do the same here. But revenge isn't the same thing as running away; toppling the world isn't the same thing as simply opting to withdraw from it. It isn't the same thing at all.

Maybe that's why it's so easy to be so abruptly resolved. 'I tried once,' Thomas says, a James makes the decision to do what's necessary even before he asks: "What happened?" Not how he did it, not why he did it. What happened when he did it? What series of events kept him here? What occurred to make him hesitate now?

He has gone very still - his hand at the horse's bridle and neck, his attention fixed on Thomas's face. This isn't restraint at all. It's the sensation of a compressed spring or a lever loaded with tension by a hand reaching out of the darkness behind him. It's not violence, but it's like bracing for it. It isn't his. It doesn't belong to him. But to be aware of the possibility is to have some measure of self-preservation, and isn't that a novel concept? It certainly seems like an important accessory to this, the part where they've come to stand close enough to touch.

The potential for violence, like the sea drawing its breath in preparation for a great flood, is a tangible thing between them, beneath Thomas's hand. He doesn't shy away from it. This, too, is beautiful, terrible as it is. When's the last time he felt like someone gave a damn about him? Lifetimes ago. James worries his line of questioning is selfish, but Thomas is the selfish one in this moment, raising his other hand to the other side of James's face, the look in his eyes one of poorly-restrained desperation.

Please.

And then something flickers though his expression, a small pained startle, and his eyes flinch with regret and frustration. He closes his eyes and presses his fingers against the back of James's neck, some shallow mimicry of hugging him, and withdraws his hands. When he opens his eyes there's resigned apology on his face. "Tonight," he says quietly, as he turns away.

Not a breath later the dull echo of approaching hoofbeats bounces from the side of the barn, pace lazy still at this early hour. It's still another moment before the mounted overseer appears. "Lollygagging already?" he asks, though his tone isn't hostile. This man is one of the more benign ones; Thomas is grateful. He's been so careful, but it's only a matter of time before one of them ends up in a position to be reprimanded for something. Will he be able to watch James be punished? Will James be able to watch him?

"As it turns out there aren't many horses waiting to be tacked on the high seas," is his answer, perfect mix of deference and business-as-usual honed over time. The overseer finds it funny.

The heat of Thomas's hands lingers, but the part that sears itself is that open, wild look in his face. He's had ten years to be tortured by the possibility of what had been done to him - a list of potential atrocities long enough that when news had arrived of Thomas's suicide, there might have been a part of him that thought it might be true and not just the lie told to cover Lord Alfred Hamilton's last act of assassinating his own son. But what it might have looked like in Thomas's face hadn't resolved itself until this moment. James finds himself having to turn away and duck his head to the task of securing the horse's noseband when the overseer appears in the yard; he can't clear his own expression fast enough for anything else.

In no hurry - or having taken some passive interest in seeing that their work is done - the overseer waits for them to be finished and rides down to the lower fields alongside the cart. James is surprised that his hands feel steady at the reins, but he can't manage what he should (small talk). Instead he works the day alongside Thomas, acquainting his mind with what his eye has already recognized: that there are two men on horseback here to see that they do what they're meant to; that they have rifles behind their saddles, but that the likelier weapon is blunt force. That there are a dozen men like them, then twice that in legitimate (ha) slaves.

They take their water from a bucket in the shade of an oak dripping with spanish moss and James sits on a stone and considers the distance from the bunkhouses to the wood beyond the back pastures. He thinks about running and dismisses it. He thinks about becoming a trusted friend and likes that less.

But he says nothing about it. They work in tandem and rather than Faustus he talks about Spenser's Arlo and the Titaness Mutabilitie as they chip stones from the field ahead of the plow. "You two," says Mister Browder at the plowhorse's head. "Are giving me a headache." James laughs, all teeth.

KLANG!, the sound of metal striking stone.

No, he decides, observing in peripheral the way James turns and hide his face from the overseer. They will not be able to watch each other be punished. The realization is a cold stone in his stomach; Thomas knows very well what kind of physical abuse he can live through, and he does not fear it, or death. Death is laughably un-frightening. Being struck another ten, forty, four hundred times, taking weeks off of work to let the lash-wounds heal and scar is at this stage tedious. But this is something else entirely. A monster he's never glimpsed so much as the shadow of before. For ten years Thomas has been alone, and free of the most effective form of torture for any human: he's never had anyone for them to threaten. He's seen it happen a hundred times, a child being beaten for the parent's mistake, siblings, paramours. He knows that it's crippling.

If James looks like that in this quiet moment, Thomas doesn't believe there's any remote possibility of him maintaining control if Thomas were to be tortured in front of him. Maybe there is, maybe James has grown colder than he expects, or maybe he's weathered something like it. (Miranda. God, no, don't think of her now, in the middle of the workday, when succumbing to sorrow in a frozen stumble would bring about the thing he must avoid at all costs.) He knows himself, regardless, and if James were to be threatened he'd do anything. Comply with anything. He would cease to be human if he had to.

What have I done to us.

With effort, he works around the disorienting black hole of revelation, and coaxing blood from stone becomes easier: speaking with James, the smiles they can win from each other, even from the people around them. This is the part like quicksand, because giving in for the sake of the tolerable moments, the ones that can be fogged over and be labeled 'normal', sounds so preferable to the alternatives. They have this, the faerie queen and Thomas's still-knife-sharp memory reciting verses (the dire ones, but the ones accused of eroticism, too), they have time to rest and their work is done at sundown. They get one day off a month, they may end up with their own quarters like some of the other 'family units' do, and when they are too old to toil in the fields, they will be given retirement and only made to peel carrots in the main house.

It is a heinously untenable situation that is compared to every conceivable alternative, paradise. Dinner is communal and Thomas sits by James and says nothing of the internal struggle over the childish feeling that if he looks away from him for too long he might vanish. He's barked at the help with the cleaning-up, because of course he is, today will just have to be like that, but for all the world Thomas appears as though it's fine, leaving James for another hour is nothing to blink at, neither of them wish to walk up the mountain to the moon and demand heaven surrender and sink the world to chaos.

In the artificial privacy of nightfall, when he is finally done, Thomas finds James in the inky shadow of the bunk house and does right away what he should have done that morning, and takes his face in his hands and kisses him. It's harsh and it's loving, it's the desperation he can't voice, it's apology, it's acceptance. This conversation is going to be awful and Thomas has to tell him - has to - how much he loves him, how much of his soul is James.

A day's worth of hours should be enough to lift the weight of the thought that's taken root in the center of his mind. The itch of sweat under his clothes, raw hands, the ache in his lower back, the smell of dirt and bodies but most of all Thomas alongside him in it should be a perfect distraction. But the resolve sits there like a star to navigate by even when the day in the fields is over, through supper and after when he's left to make the walk to the bunkhouse alone - not visible, but felt. It's something he could almost turn over in his hands. It doesn't matter what Thomas will say to him. He's already seen it in his face and figured out what's true from it. This can't last. Something will be need to be done.

Strange, how just that somehow lends clarity to the night around him. The muggy air seems less dense, the sagging line of trees picked out in great detail even in the dark, and the path that he follows from the longhouse is clear in the sliver of moonlight. He finds in the insulation of the dark that there's nothing at all frenetic behind his ribs. That must be Thomas, he thinks. When was the last time he had decided on a course of action that didn't somehow burn as well as cut? This is just certainty. Not a sword's edge - something steadier and more solid. It doesn't feel dangerous even if it is. Maybe that why he doesn't find it difficult to sit and wait for Thomas in the darkness alongside the bunkhouse even if his skin should be itching for him. Instead he listens to the low sounds of men settling themselves in for bed beyond the sturdy wall of the one room house, watches the path, and thinks on what can be managed until he spies Thomas coming up through the darkness.

For a second he's content to mark just that. Then he is close enough for James to parse the stricken look on his face again and suddenly something like anger rises in him. For not lingering farther up the path. For being made to skulk in the dark. For the fact that someone forced them to separate. For being less sharp. For burning less.

But Thomas kisses him and that stone in his belly turns. Is honed and heated, then cracked open and poured out. How much desperation can he swallow? How can anything be smoothed enough to cover that? How can he steady Thomas at the sharp curve between neck and shoulder even as he leans into the shape of Thomas's hands and Thomas's mouth and Thomas's love and Thomas's need? Because it's like a hand in a glove; all of Thomas matches him, even the hastily gutted parts. They have to.

There. His arm shifts between them across the width of Thomas's chest. He curls his fingers in the shoulder of his shirt. It's as much to keep him there as it is a way to convince himself to stop kissing him. But that takes some time and he can't bear to stray far even once he's managed it.

"Forgive me," he says, parted but not moved back any. His gaze his unfocused and he lowers it to see the edge of James's hand in his shirt, moving one of his own down over the other man's heart. "It's been so long since I've been with someone I care for. I see the way I should behave so clearly in my memory, but I fear that I'm..." he trails off for a moment, at a loss. Thomas shakes his head.

Ten years with no one. He's had tentative friends and alliances, and god, he's had nothing resembling privacy, if you want to get technical about the concept of alone. But there's been isolation, too, and it's been brutal. Emotional and psychological isolation that's left him damaged, and he knows he seems strange but-- he's trying.

"I fear I'm not making it any easier on you," he finishes, and gives James a small smile. Because he's self-aware of the whole mess. (At least he likes to think he is.) He squeezes James's shoulder and steps back. "Come. Sit with me."

There are old boxes piled in strategic places, planks like benches, and if they claim a dark corner for themselves triangulated between their barracks and the noisier, still-working ranks of the African slaves, they won't be overheard and they won't look suspicious. They're allowed to be here. (Until someone tells them they're not.)

Edited 2017-06-15 04:37 (UTC)

He doesn't want to sit. He doesn't want to forgive (for god's sake, there's nothing to forgive Thomas for). He wants to stay in lockstep with Thomas with the line of his arm across him, with the warmth of Thomas' breath at the corner of his mouth. But his grip relents. He looses him from his hold then follows where he's bid.

"Believe me,"--he takes a seat, touching his hand to his own forehead as if to dismiss the thing that's furrowed his brow--"Nothing you could do or say would be a hardship to me." He knows what that looks like and there's no conceivable way in which Thomas could twist himself into such an shape. If something isn't easy, it's a position they've been forced into as a pair.

The night hair is dense, muggy, but it's natural to sit close enough that his leg bumps Thomas' and their shoulders brush. It should be exactly the thing to settle this sudden spark of tension rollicking around behind his ribs. Instead James finds himself with his fingers in Thomas' short hair, blunt nails scuffing against his scalp in a way that's more compulsive than meditative. It's meant to be comforting. For what and to whom exactly, he couldn't say.

Thomas allows it to be comforting for himself. Maybe, if James cannot take any in it as it is, he can appreciate that Thomas appreciates it; he leans his forehead in against the other man's when they're sat down, a silent thank-you. He doesn't stay bent in like that but keeps himself angled slightly to James, his hand resting on his leg above his knee, fingers moving absently against the worn fabric of his trousers. Sitting down is not so much like calling a committee meeting, but an insurance policy to combat the potential for feeling like he's going to vomit on James's shoes - Thomas has never spoken about this before. He could be fine. He could not be.

It's a little while before he says anything.

"A few times a month, they allow men of god in here to preach to us and hold sermons," he begins. "Some years ago it was every Sunday, and it was an effort made by the Religious Society of Friends, who've dug their heels in here in the colonies." Quakers, as they'll someday be known more commonly, of course find it easier to get on with their leftist Protestant agenda without the conservative Protestant Church of England and all her politics looming. "Their minister was a woman named Ida."

Why is he telling this like a story, he wonders. Perhaps because impossible talk like this, after it's gone round and round, leads him to think things like Even if I could get out, how could I live with myself in hiding, reading books somewhere and keeping a low profile, how could I not devote every further breathing moment to abolitionism. There is some cosmic justice in the fact that he's here, having been so wealthy and so capable and spending his time worrying about ships and the philosophy of justice in a far-off land instead of the laws of human trafficking being made and shrugged off by peers.

(He'd probably just have been imprisoned quicker.)

"Security was a little less, then. Ida provided us with the right supplies for one man to impersonate an overseer at distance glance, and we incapacitated another. Two of us looking very convincing on horseback was enough to make the man at the gate hesitant long enough for us to simply walk out, leading a few others. It was myself, three other men here indentured like me, and half a dozen of our significantly less fortunate counterparts. Ida's congregation hid us."

A few years ago. What had he been doing then? He'd been captain of the Walrus already. His mind flits over a dozen prizes, then settles involuntarily on the Maria Aleyne. Depending on the year, the month, the day maybe Thomas's attempted escape had coincided strangely with its capture. It's both a ridiculous thought - no, likely they weren't close at all - and a viciously acerbic one - there is no ounce of him that regrets it. Especially not now, knowing that what Alfred Hamilton had offered him was a fortune rather than the whereabouts of the only thing that might have stayed his hand.

He listens, fingers shifting through Thomas' pale hair while his spare hand finds the one brushing at his knee. It's a delicate touch, as stuttering as James' attention is sharpened: eyes slightly too bright and breathing a fraction too short under the sawing sound of the cicadas.

"Go on."

It will be interesting, when he learns of his parents' fate.

Not now.

"It took us almost three weeks to get to the harbor," he says, flexing his hand beneath James's. He's glad the marks on his wrists are almost invisible these days; for the first year after the hospital he thought they might never fade, worn-in rings from metal restraints. (There's nothing to be done about the ones on his ankles. Permanent mementos.) "Mostly hiding for days on end beneath floorboards. I spent three days, however, in a walled-in garden with Hector trying to teach me how to punch someone properly." Whoever Hector is, he doesn't say, but context suggests a fellow prisoner, and Thomas's tone of voice says he was a good man.

"When we got to Charleston... you'd think, I suppose, getting out of here would be the difficult part, but painstaking hiding and moving so slowly, avoiding search parties. Looking back that was the easy part. Because in Charleston the slave trade is so dominant that even the 'masters' look nervous. Our party split, as the African men and women with us had passage to the Spanish West Indies. I'm not sure of their fate. We were to go to France, because..." He shrugs. "The emancipation decree there, the nature of reinstating proof of life and personhood legally. New identities." Logical and compelling arguments were made for it, and they all sound like fairy tales to Thomas, now. But it's not like they were spoiled for choice. No one had anywhere to go. "A man with us, Jacob, vanished completely in between arriving and getting to the ship. I've no notion of where he went, either." Not captured, because he was never returned to the plantation. Escaped? Murdered? Swallowed up by the earth? Who knows.

"There were bills describing us posted, with generous return rewards offered, and the captain of the ship we were to be on decided to take it." Thomas gets that out, businesslike, because there's no other way to do it. There are no surprises in this story: they failed. It is what it is. "I think, too, the pressure of having illegal passengers made high profile in the harbor shook him. He was... nervous. It made him dangerous. He attacked Ida when she shouted at him."

Mm. Thomas stops and watches their hands, curls his thumb against James's. He's getting ahead of himself.

"..Left were myself, a man called Clinton, and a man called Stephen. Ida, and her sister and sister's husband, who were to go with us to France, having made the journey twice before. I was in a cabin with Ida, Stephen, and the captain, trying to.. I don't know what." Bitterness seeps into his voice, there, but he gets it under control. Everything is fine. "Ida was doing what only infuriated ministers do, informing him of his moral flaws, and he struck her hard enough to knock her back against the wall. Stephen got in between them, and he shot Stephen in the leg. I think the others were at the door then, and his first officer, but it was locked. He hit Stephen with the other end of his pistol and threw Ida down again, and struck her in the head with it. I took a letter opener off his desk and jammed it into his neck."

He can feel the lines of his face shifting involuntarily the longer that Thomas speaks - some measure of the dread in his belly rising to show there in the twitch of his mouth and the set of his brow. Charleston. Charlestown. What a miserable fucking place. For what feels like the first time in a long time, something in his chest unfolds and he recalls what it is to be nakedly angry about a place and it's people - about cowards and a world which enables their ability to subjugate. Every piece of Thomas' story fuels it: people gone missing without a trace, the taste of freedom at the edge of the narrative's curve and so desperately out of reach, a woman struck in the moment she's most decisive. There is a tinge of darkness to the sound of Thomas' voice in the night that's so foreign he shouldn't recognise it.

But he does.

And it makes the part of him that has decided to bury all that violence go jangling and desperate with the effort before Thomas even mentions the letter opener. What the fuck did they do to him? Who the fuck had put a weapon in Thomas' hands, his beautiful long fingers, and then demand he use it? How fucking dare they.

"Then they," --his voice cracks; he snarls through it-- "Brought you back here." Instead of hanging him in the square. Instead of murdering him quickly.

Edited 2017-06-16 06:36 (UTC)

James's mood is a tangible thing radiating from him, even so still as he sits there. Thomas adjusts the positioning of their hands, folding his over the other's and holding it securely. He is distantly grateful that the tremor he is sometimes plagued with (another souvenir of Bedlam) is absent today. A beat of silence before he confirms:

"Yes."

Eventually. But it adds nothing to the tale to say that blood poured over him, that the captain staggered away only to be dragged to the ground by a shrieking mad Stephen, that while Thomas dropped the blade and rushed to Ida the other man had pinned the captain down and forced him to bleed out while his crew struggled to break open the door. Maybe the captain would have lived if not for the intervention.

"Ida was arrested. I don't know what became of her, or her sister and brother-in-law. The three of us were returned here. Stephen... something in him broke during the ordeal. He would not quiet, he could not cope with returning. Even days after we were reprimanded," that's the word he's decided he's going to use, here, yes, because it's the gentlest, and he has a slight worry that James is going to raise his voice, "he would not be calm. It made it impossible to treat the wound in his leg. And they can't-- they won't kill us. Because we are profitable investments."

In Thomas's case, as in Stephen's, annual payments are made. If anything ever happens to his parents, he's been informed there is a lawyer with the bank instructed to carry on. How many years? He has no idea. Maybe it's lies; maybe they just enjoy having them here, purely to feel powerful.

"One morning, I was pulled out and brought to the main house, along with Clinton. They had Stephen with a doctor and I remember thinking, 'Do they need help with bandaging his leg', stupidly." His hold on James's hand is too tight; he cannot manage to get himself to release it. "There's something I'd only heard of in Bethlem, a procedure to quiet a mind without killing the person. I'd never seen it. They-- drill. Holes. Into the front of the skull high on the forehead, through the skull into..." Into. He feels dizzy. It passes. "Into the brain. Until it's enough that Stephen was calm."

Tak. Tak. Tak. The sound of shovels digging out a stone and of the imagined beat of a physician's thumb on the shaved forehead as he marks exactly what he means to do. Does drilling through a man's skull sound like tapping a cask? How is it sealed up after? How do you change a person that way and then still consider yourself humane? It's delusional to the point that nothing can ever be done to shift it. It would be like trying to convince the sky to change color and the tide to stop. Thomas's grip might as well have all the weight of a thread for all it does to ground him.

"Then we won't leave." His voice is gravel, is shale, is flint - so low that it's choking. "Not to France or to the West Indies"--or to the sea--"We'll go inland."

There's something feverish in his face. His hand at the base of Thomas's skull shifting to his shoulder where it can float erratically without closing him in a vice grip. "They'll expect the reverse. Where does a pirate go when he slips his shackles? The natural assumption will be to repeat a mistake."

There is no place that exists where they can trust to be safe. So make a new one. Go somewhere men have never been. Build a maroon island without water.

The way James is so barely-restrained and the shattered, furious texture of his voice should be alarming. Thomas should turn to him and say 'You don't know what you're talking about', because he doesn't. He doesn't understand this place and he doesn't understand the colonies. Thomas should try to rationalize to him that he's not telling him this to try and break him but protect him.

All he can think is You've become such an optimist.

Thomas looks at him. He isn't afraid. He's saddened enormously by what happened, disturbed by what he witnessed, most of all just disappointed-- with humanity, with England, with himself. The world could be so wonderful but men are so determined to make it brutal and divisive. And in all that, here is his pirate captain, his force of nature, telling him Fine we'll just go the other way.

"Will you heed my counsel if I tell you that you should wait until you know every routine and personality, before acting and doing something that forces me to watch you be punished?" -- is the kind of thing Miranda would say, except in a bullet-point list with her hands clasped to keep from taking him by the shoulders. Thomas is all gentleness as he looks at James like he's beautiful, like the terror anyone should feel gazing into the abyss doesn't occur to him.

Edited 2017-06-16 19:53 (UTC)

His hand twitches between Thomas's though the lines of his face are set - the angle of his shoulders solid. "Of course," he says, like a thousand ideas aren't already filling any empty available space. Like there aren't parts of him trembling and flooded with the urge to...-- do something. "But I won't see you brutalized."

Maybe he recognizes that Thomas isn't afraid, isn't repulsed. Or maybe he doesn't. Maybe he'd be this fervent regardless. In the moment he cares less about what Thomas thinks as what he deserves which is: everything. A world that can be changed, a society which is kind, a place where the people who had hurt him would ask for his forgiveness instead of just facing a violent kind of justice. But he can't expect civilization to know how brutal it is or how impossibly unfair it's become. Better to shield Thomas from it. If that means following the rules of this place for some time, then fine. But he can't stomach the thought of what it could do. What it will do. They just have to slip away before it comes to that.

"I won't make you do anything you can't tolerate," he says and means it with every piece of him. Are you happy here? he'd asked and had meant it. If Thomas hadn't cracked from just the question, maybe they wouldn't be here now. But a world that expects them to adapt to misery doesn't deserve Thomas.

Thomas does not need to be protected. He can endure things that can break, even kill, other men; if there is anything he can offer Bethlem twisted gratitude for in the life after, it's that it educated him thoroughly about physical pain. There's so much he can weather with a quiet mouth and dry eyes, with impassive consciousness. Thomas does not yet know what would be enough to make him crack.

It's on his tongue to say it. I can tolerate anything. It's you I don't want to see hurt. But that would be circular, wouldn't it, and it occurs to him - with something wrenching his heart it occurs to him - that this is the first time since before his arrest, when Miranda fluttered her hands over his chest and begged him to be cautious, that anyone's said anything at all like that to him. That anyone's felt anything like that for him and the feeling of it in return is almost overwhelming. He feels like a child but Thomas pulls at James's hand and takes it between both of his own so he can press a kiss to his palm, and just holds it there against his face, head bowed between them.

His stubborn, stoic lieutenant, so pragmatic and skeptical, telling him that they're going to get out and that he's going to protect him even though it's impossible. For Thomas, optimism has been treading water to keep from drowning, but for James it's this angry willpower and it's--

Heartbreaking. Beautiful. Horrible. They could have the rest of their lives to work in the fields and talk about books and lay down together at night, or they could do this insane thing, and die challenging the world. Thomas loves him so much.

Edited 2017-06-17 03:09 (UTC)

It's not that the heat drains out of him. But given time - a moment of Thomas's head bowed between them and his cheek under the rough callouses of his fingertips -, it can be folded over itself and take some different shape than the one made to minimize the number of people standing between them and the gate to this place. Thomas's long fingers and his breathing and the unflagging pulse of his love even here in the dark with James's anger held in check by bared teeth tempers in the way of steel. There's a fundamental quality to it. It's the reverse of being unmade. It's the antithesis to the thing that was created by two people's grief as they fled from London to Nassau.

What was done to Thomas? How has he been changed? It matters, but not here. They can't touch or alter this fundamental unmovable part. Rational creatures exist for one another, and to endure is a part of justice.

James exhales. The sound is harsh in the dark, the loudest thing between them in hours, and with it he sheds the wire taut adrenaline so he can lean his forehead against Thomas's shoulder without trembling like a horse poorly paced. He can touch his face and his side without feverishness and be quiet at last for the continuity of this. Eventually he can turn his face and murmur against Thomas's cheek too: "Come to bed with me."

It's late. There's work to be done in the morning.

What must it have been like, to go mad with the desire for vengeance, to hold the broken pieces of what they had but be unable to put them back together? How must it have felt to hear the lies and have to believe it for lack of ability to prove otherwise? Thomas can only imagine; yes, James and Miranda had each other, but they had been lost in a storm of unanswered questions, tormented, unable to progress. Thomas was simply apart. No one ever came and told him lies about his wife or his lover, no one tried to force him to live thinking about their deaths.

Thomas presses a kiss against the side of James's mouth. Come to bed with me. It sounds like they're real people.

He stands slowly, one of the other man's hands held captive still. Even in his sleep, he doesn't let go.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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

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