It’s Done! Chapter 7 is Done!

Ding dong, the chapter’s done, which chapter, the stubborn one! Ding dong, the stupid chapter’s done!

*Cough* Sorry. I’m maybe a little bit happy that the stupid chapter that’s been plaguing my existence for the past several days has finally fallen into order. In celebration, here – have a present.

Also – this fic is now on Ao3, for anyone that wants to leave kudos or a comment! It’s here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/8200756/chapters/18786778

To the Upper Air: Chapter Five: Nob and Nobility

Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four

He had forgotten how much he hated society parties.

It was unavoidable, of course. The promotion of Lord Hamilton to Governor Hamilton could not go without recognition, and with it came recognition of his own recent (and long overdue, Thomas had muttered) ascension to the lofty rank of Captain McGraw. Still, it was – beyond odd, being back here in Whitehall. Everything about it felt wrong, from the crisp uniform to the odd feeling of cloth around his neck to the very smell of the place. Though he knew that he had no reason to fear it, he could not quite help the sense of trepidation that filled him at the very sight of the building, as if at any moment he might be recognized and carted away to prison, and he had to steel himself before walking through the ornate double doors, abruptly glad that full military uniform at least included a sword, although the one at his side would not have passed muster for a battle of any length over five minutes. He found himself wishing for the sturdy blade that had served him through ten years of life as a pirate, and he silently resolved to replace the one at his side that stood half a chance of surviving an actual engagement, even though he had no intention of becoming involved in one any time in the near future. Or the distant future, for that matter, God and the fuc – bloody British Empire willing.

He had argued with Thomas about this aspect of the plan. Granted, the argument had not lasted long, for while James was perfectly willing to dispute Thomas’ plans with him, in the end, he could not help but be grateful that he was alive and there to have the argument, which tended to defeat even James’ most serious attempts at denying him what he wanted. He had, at least, made a more resolute attempt this time. He was determined that his fondness was not going to overcome good sense – not again.

“It’s only for a time, James!” Thomas had argued. “It will be over before you know it, and we’ll be away from here, free to do as we please in our own colony!”

“Not free, Thomas – you know better. It will be a British colony, guarded by the British Navy -”

“Not forever,” Thomas argued. “If we offer the men on that beach pardons, by necessity, some of them will still need an occupation at sea. It’s all they’ll know how to do – that’s half the reason there are pirates to begin with. I propose to start our own Navy, one made up of common men, and run the ships as they are accustomed to, with proper pay -”

“If you allow them to run the ships in the way that they’ve become accustomed to, half of them will spend the large majority of their time too drunk to perform their duties,” James pointed out dryly.

“- and captains that are agreed upon by the men, with you in charge of the whole enterprise to impose order,” Thomas finished, shooting James a reproving look. “Really, James – you’ve become quite the cynic. Have some faith!”

“I suppose drunk and happy with their lot is better than beaten and mutinous,” James allowed, and Thomas smiled.

“We won’t need British Naval support, at least not for long, and they can hardly object with the war on, or indeed after it when they will presumably need Naval support to clean up the mess. Think of it, James. It will start out as a British colony, yes, but it will finish up as something quite different – an example of the merits of good governance to be followed, and in time perhaps -” He looked around and lowered his voice, “- in time perhaps a free, independent republic like you always wanted.”  

James stared at him. He wanted to argue – wanted to rage and scream and refuse to go along with the plan. Nassau had been so many things to him over the years. Exile. Prison. Home. The site of his greatest crimes, and yet –

And yet what Thomas proposed would be none of those things. The Nassau that he held forth in front of James’ eyes was a thriving port city – the place that James and Miranda had worked so hard to achieve, and had they not made an incredibly similar proposal to Peter Ashe once? Had they not dreamt of doing exactly this?

“James,” Thomas said more softly. He came forward around the desk to wrap one hand around James’ own, his blue eyes full of concern. “If you truly cannot support this plan – if it truly does sound like madness of the first order, or if you feel you cannot return to New Providence in this capacity, say it now. We will work it out some other way that will not – tempt you, into becoming who you were once again or force you to confront him in your memories. I won’t be the source of your pain, not again.”

The most difficult part of becoming James McGraw again, he was rapidly realizing, had nothing to do with his mannerisms. It had nothing to do with the way he walked, or the way he talked, or the clothing he wore. It was in moments like this, where he wanted so desperately to hold onto the hurts of a past life – to return to the rage and the heedless, stubborn, familiar recklessness that had enabled him to go through eleven years without putting a bullet through his head – in choosing instead to allow himself to move on and live.

He closed his eyes for a moment. He was not certain he could do this. The prospect of it loomed before him, overwhelming in its immensity, and he felt his breathing quicken, his hands beginning to shake at the prospect. He clenched them, trying to control the reaction, to find equilibrium again before –

“James,” Thomas’ voice penetrated the fog of his thoughts. “Talk to me. Tell me why this worries you so.”

Before what, exactly? With a start, James opened his eyes. He could talk to Thomas. He did not have to keep this to himself – did not have to conceal anything from the man sitting across the table from him. He did not have to pretend – not here, not now. He breathed out shakily, gaze focused on Thomas.

“You’re not alone,” Thomas reminded, and James nodded.

“No,” he acknowledged. “I’m not.” He gave Thomas a half smile, which his lover returned. “I’m not concerned about Nassau,” he said at length. “Not solely, anyway. Neither Miranda or I have many good memories of the place, but you’ll be there this time, and with a little luck we can keep it from becoming the hell-hole that it was while we were living there. No. It’s -” He cast about, searching for the words. “I’ve been a pirate for the past ten years, Thomas,” he said at last. “And while my life in the Navy may have lasted longer than my exile, it didn’t end well. I’ve hated it for so long – fought against it, taken ships from it, heard the stories of men who were tortured in its service, or forced into in the first place. I can’t go back and ignore all of that. I can’t pretend that it’s not happening. Asking me to go back to serving -”

“Not serving,” Thomas emphasized. “You’ll be in charge of Naval operations in Nassau. All of them. You’ll be a great deal more than just a captain – you’ll be a garrison commander, with the right to interfere if you see injustices being perpetrated on ships that enter our waters. And with Peter overseeing the Admiralty court in Jamaica -”

“You truly trust him to do anything other than hang pirates?” James asked.

“I trust him to be wary enough of me and of my allies here after this to do as I say for long enough to effect real change,” Thomas said.

James sat, still mulling the idea over in his head. It sounded good, but then all of Thomas’ ideas tended to do that. Still, though – this particular idea sounded good. It sounded right. A new Nassau. A place where he, Thomas, and Miranda could be together, and one where he would not be expected to turn a blind eye to the goings on aboard Naval ships that came through their port. It was far from fixing everything that was wrong with England, but perhaps they could at least give refugees from England’s tyranny a place to go. Still –

“If it all goes to hell and I strangle Benjamin Hornigold on sight -” he started.

“You won’t,” Thomas said firmly. “Besides, in the worst of all scenarios, we can always leg it for Paris.”

James snorted, and Thomas grinned.

“Alright,” he agreed. “I’ll do it.”

“Excellent.”

Three weeks later, he had found himself here, in uniform, watching lords and ladies mill about the room like the pack of vultures he privately compared them to, wondering just what on Earth had possessed him to think that he could speak with the men and women that had turned their backs on Thomas so blithely and gone about their lives as if nothing had changed. Thus far he had narrowly avoided scandalizing three young women and had very possibly managed to shock one of the older men in the room, although he was not quite certain how. Perhaps it was his bearing – try as he might, he found that he could not quite seem to lose the trace of the pirate captain in the way he held himself and he suspected that the look on his face had much to do with the way that the few party-goers who had drifted his way intent on having a word had thought better of it, scattering like so many frightened cats. It was more than a little frightening to realize how much of Flint had become unconscious – to find that the mask had instead become the reality, from his scowl to his pessimism to the way he held his hands. James had had to remove his hand from his sword hilt more than once tonight after catching himself standing as if ready to do violence, as indeed he would have been had a large number of pirate captains ever agreed to meet like this, and the less said about his attempts not to fidget and pull at his collar like a small child, the better.

“You know,” Thomas said from behind him, amusement in his voice, “if you stop standing there with a face like a thundercloud, you might actually be able to enjoy yourself.”

He was scowling again. Thomas was right, he realized, and felt irritation well up in him. His face, it seemed, was not entirely on board with this attempt at a return to, if not polite society, at least basic civility.

“Damn it,” he muttered.

“And stop swearing like a deckhand,” Thomas continued to tease, and James barely held back a groan.

“How the hel – devil am I going to make it through tonight without managing to get us all exiled?” he wondered aloud, and Thomas laughed.

“You’ll be fine. You’re already doing better than you expected!”

“If by that you mean that I haven’t actually murdered anyone, then yes,” James answered sarcastically. “You see that man over there?” He gestured briefly in the direction of an older gentleman with an expression on his face that looked very much as if he’d been sucking on lemons the entire night.

“Lord Bremerton?”

“I smiled and he looked as if the Devil himself had appeared and ran off. He’s stayed on that side of the room ever since.”

Thomas snickered, attempting to muffle his laughter at the aggrieved look that James shot him.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “It’s just that I don’t think I’ve ever seen the man when he wasn’t offended by something. It looks as though you’re the lucky miscreant tonight. Don’t worry about it, James. Lord Bremerton would be less than pleased one way or the other and at least this keeps him well away from the company worth talking to.”

“At least you don’t appear to have lost your charm with the ladies,” Miranda offered from his other side. She held out a drink, which he accepted, only just remembering not to toss it back in one go as he would have a glass of rum. He snorted.

“If I didn’t remember to mind my manners around the women in the room, my grandmother would rise from her grave and box my ears,” he said dryly. “I can still hear her scolding me if I concentrate hard enough.”

“A formidable lady?” Thomas asked, and James nodded.

“Remind me to tell you about her when this is over,” he said, and Thomas grinned.

“I shall look forward to it,” he answered. “Come with me. There are several people here who would very much like to meet you before I spirit you away to Nassau with me.”

James allowed himself to be escorted through the crowd, and thus it was that twenty minutes later, he once again found himself free, listening to the musicians play as he watched Thomas and Miranda circulate with a fond eye. Miranda looked a bit strained around the edges, he thought, and silently wondered if she found all of this as trying as he did.

He had been surprised, at first, at the change in her.

“I can’t bear it anymore, James,” she’d confessed one night, after Thomas had gone to sleep. They had once again elected to stay together for the night, as they had done as often as was feasible given the need to hide and maintain the pretense that James was still staying at his lodging house and not moved permanently into their house.

“It’s a facade, all of it. I knew it before, of course, but I -” She made a helpless gesture with one hand. “I knew my place in the dance,” she finished at last. “Or at least I thought I did. I used to have so much patience for this sort of thing – the maneuvering – the lying, and now I -” She shook her head.

“And now it seems like such a waste of time you can hardly breathe with the stupidity of it all,” James finished, and she nodded.

“I feel like a blind person who’s suddenly gained the ability to see and discovered that all of his acquaintances look vastly different than he had imagined, despite fancying that he knew their faces through feeling them with his fingers,” she confessed. “How many other lords and ladies have I vastly underestimated or read entirely wrong before now? How often was I utterly wrong about someone?”

“There was no way you could have known about Ashe,” James offered quietly, and Miranda clenched her fist.

“Peter,” she half hissed. “How could he? How could he do such a thing to us – to Thomas? How did I not know, James?”

“You couldn’t have -” James started, and Miranda shook her head, cutting him off.

“It is my job to know,” she said sharply. “You and Thomas – you never paid much attention to the undercurrents. You didn’t have to – you had me there. I was meant to know what was happening – to keep you both from stumbling into situations like this, and I failed you. I failed you both, and I -”

“Miranda -” James started, and sighed. “You warned us,” he reminded her. “You tried to make us turn course, and we ignored you. If anyone’s to blame, it’s Thomas and I. You may not have known what direction the danger was coming from, but you tried to tell us. You can’t be held to blame for that.”

Miranda gave him a look, and he frowned.

“It’s not just that, is it?” he asked, and she shook her head.

“No. It’s not.” She took a deep breath, looking to the side as she did so, out over the rooftops of London below their window.

“I loved this city, once,” she said. “I loved the people here. I loved our lives here. When we ran from London – when we moved to Nassau – I missed it terribly. And for all those years, I never quite gave up on the notion of returning to this, I suppose.  Rescuing Abigail seemed like a last, shining chance – a sign that our exile was over. That I could come home.”

He did not speak the words on the tip of his tongue. Did not insult her by stating the obvious. The memory of that awful night in Peter Ashe’s dining room hung in the air between them, and he reached out to take her hand, silently rubbing his thumb across her knuckles waiting for her to regain the ability to speak.

“I can’t do this, James,” she said at last. “I can’t turn a blind eye and pretend that I don’t hate every one of them. I can’t go back to being Lady Hamilton – not now. Once, perhaps, I might have, but now -” She took a deep breath. “I said I wanted to watch Charlestown burn. Imagine, then, how much more I want to do the same to London.”

“About as much as I did, once,” he answered, and she turned to him, with a strange look in her eyes, half pride and half haunting, desperate unhappiness.

“When I – when I left you -” she started, and he shook his head.

“No,” he interrupted. “Don’t dance around the truth, Miranda. You were murdered. Saying you left makes it sound as though it were voluntary. It wasn’t.”

“Very well. When I died, you were ready to give up. You’ve told me of what followed my death – what it drove you to. And yet the man I see before me -”

She raised a hand to touch his face, and he leaned into it, one corner of his mouth lifting in a smile.

“You’ve changed,” she said. “I look at you and I see -” She trailed off, trying to quantify what she saw in James’ eyes. “I see the man I fell in love with, all those years ago,” she said finally. “What happened? How did you -?”

“How did I give up wanting to burn England for what it did?”

She nodded.

“I didn’t,” he answered baldly. “I look at this place and I see the same corruption, the same blithe unconcern for the lives of others as you do. I’ve spent the past ten years railing against it – fighting it at every turn. Every time I cut off another head it seemed as though ten more grew in its place and the cutting off of each head cost me something in the end – something I couldn’t afford to lose. Not and still remain human. After you died -” He shook his head. “You’re not going to believe this but it took Silver to show me how much of myself I’d lost. How much I’d thrown away, and to start to reclaim some of it. I’d only just begun, and then -”

He gestured eloquently to the room around them as if to indicate their changed circumstances.

“Finding myself back here, back in time -” He shook his head. “I don’t know how it’s possible. I suppose it’s conceivable that this is all a delusion of some kind, but if it is, I don’t intend to test it. Before – even if I had wanted to give up being Captain Flint, I couldn’t see a way to do it. I’ve done things I didn’t think could ever be made right, but now -” He stopped, looking for the words. “Now, it’s all undone, and I can’t – I don’t want to keep cutting pieces off my soul anymore. I’m done, Miranda. I can’t go back to being who I was – not for you, not for Thomas, not for anyone. I don’t know if any of that is helpful, but -”

She nodded.

“It is,” she said quietly. “I – thank you.”

It was not going to be enough – not on its own, James knew. Miranda was not as stubborn as he, but her anger ran no less deep, and she had been granted less outlet for it over the past decade. It would take her time, and yet he could not help but hope that she would not follow his example. He well knew the power of the rage that she was feeling, and he was pondering the practicality of giving her a physical outlet in the form of fencing lessons when a voice intruded on his thoughts.

“Might I have a word, Captain McGraw?”

The voice came from behind him, and James started. He had not seen or heard from Admiral Hennessey in over a decade and yet the sound of his voice still caused James to jump in his skin for all the world like the nine-year-old boy he had been when Hennessey had first taken him under his wing. He turned, and found the older man looking at him with one eyebrow raised, a look that was caught halfway between amusement and an almost paternal fondness on his face. (And oh God – James could not decide if he wanted to embrace him or punch him. The two urges were equally strong, equally born of both anger and joy, for here was yet another person James had never expected to see again this side of the grave, standing before him, unchanged and whole and how dare he be so after what he had done – would do? How dare he stand there, blameless and yet so very guilty, such that James could not even rail at him for his crimes? How dared he?)

No. Hennessey had done nothing wrong – nothing at all, thus far. The man that stood before him was not the one that had stood in his office and so effortlessly condemned James, destroying both his life and his spirit all in one fell blow. With an effort, James stuffed the anger away. He was done with vengeance. Had he not said so himself?

“Admiral.”  He could not quite bring himself to call the other man Sir. The word would not come, and he decided at the last minute to avoid it altogether if possible. The memory of the day his life had changed forever was still determined to haunt him, it seemed. Hennessey raised an eyebrow.

“Well. It seems you remember how to stand to attention, even if you’ve made yourself scarce of late. Good God, lad – what on Earth does Lord Hamilton have you doing?”

Fucking until I can hardly string together a coherent sentence, James wanted to say, wanted to rub it in Hennessey’s creased, care-worn face. It had been a wonderful three weeks that way – indeed, he, Thomas, and Miranda had spent more time in bed than he could recall ever doing before, despite the manufactured argument between Thomas and Miranda, “resolved” within the first three days by means of a very loud argument held in a hallway in full view of the servants that had ended in Miranda forgiving her husband for his supposed crime, the details of which James could not recall, as both Thomas and Miranda had spent the entire masterful performance trying not to grin at one another. James, for his part, had forgotten entirely what it felt like to be so utterly sated – to be touched with such affection, to feel Thomas’ and Miranda’s fingers running through his hair and then over the rest of his body, to be able to touch them in turn – and he was finding the sensation to be amazingly relaxing.

Not so relaxing, though, as to make this encounter any more pleasant.

“I think it’s fairly obvious,” he said instead, making a gesture toward the room in all its splendor, thus encompassing the progress celebrated therein.  Hennessey’s eyebrow raised even further if possible.

“Impertinence does not suit you,” he observed sourly, and James took a deep breath. He was not here to offend the Admiral. He was not here to recriminate, or to alienate someone they might one day need as an ally, no matter how he set James’ teeth on edge.

“Apologies, Admiral,” he managed at last, and Hennessey nodded.

“I must say,” he observed, “they’ve spared no expense for tonight.”

“Thomas has been declared the Governor of New Providence and the surrounding islands,” James said, turning away, his eyes seeking his lover in the crowd. “He’s in no danger of falling into debt over any of this.” Hennessey’s presence at his back was a prickling, uncomfortable burden, and he suddenly found himself wishing for Thomas to turn around and come to join him, for Miranda to somehow sense his need for a buffer between him and the man he’d once thought of as a father and come to give Hennessey the verbal slapping she had often promised in Nassau. Anything rather than James having to stay here and face what was, in some ways, a worse betrayal than anything Alfred had done before he was entirely sure he was ready.

“Yes, it would seem his little scheme for the redemption of Nassau has gone over quite well, despite the odds.” There was an edge of – something, to Hennessey’s voice, something that James was tempted to call dissatisfaction. He turned back to face the older man, his heart sinking into his boots. There was no getting out of this, plainly.

“Is there a problem, Admiral?” he asked. Hennessey did not answer, instead looking him up and down. He frowned, and then motioned with one hand.

“Come,” he said. “Walk with me. I feel the need for some fresh air. These ladies and their perfumes will be the death of me one day.” He turned, heading toward the garden, and James followed reluctantly, a sinking sensation accompanying him on his way out of the ballroom.