Hey everyone! I’ve finally gotten Chapter 9 to behave itself and the chapter after is currently practically writing itself, so here’s Chapter 8 for everyone’s (hopeful) enjoyment!
As a reminder, this is up on Ao3, and I adore comments, kudos, reblogs, and likes as much as any other writer!
Here is the first part on Tumblr, and here is the last chapter in case you need a recap!
Chapter 8: Things that Go Bump in the Night
Something was wrong.
He could not quite place it, but he knew it immediately upon waking. Thomas’ eyes opened, and he sat up in bed, shaking his head to clear it. Something was out of place – a sound, or a smell or –
Or James, he realized, looking around. That was what had woken him – the lack of James’ now familiar weight in the bed next to him. The bed had not yet started to cool, despite his absence, so he could not have been gone long, and yet he was most definitely missing. Thomas shifted himself toward the edge of the bed and, grimacing at the cold floor against his feet, reached for a robe, his hands groping in the pre-dawn light. It was still dark, and he wondered with a dart of worry whether James had gotten any sleep at all, given the apparently still-early hour. If, he thought somewhat irritably, his wife had not smashed the hall clock, he might have told the time, and then repented the thought immediately. He would not have wanted to have the wretched thing in the house anyway – not when it would have caused both his lovers such pain to see it day in and day out and be reminded of Peter Ashe’s betrayal.
Still. He made a mental note to have the timepiece replaced with something suitably different so as to cease relying so heavily on James’ admittedly sterling sense of the time of day. His lover claimed it came from his early days in the Navy keeping watch at all hours of the day and night. Thomas was forced to accept the explanation if only because he knew that James did not possess a pocket watch – something which, he reminded himself, he would also need to purchase before they left London permanently so that he could gift it to James at Christmas. Certainly it would aid him in moments like this one, when he appeared to have lost track of time entirely and strayed from bed at an hour when all sensible people ought to have been deep in the arms of Morpheus, including Thomas.
And speaking of James –
Thomas opened the door to the library almost silently to find precisely what he expected awaiting him on the other side. He had found, in the months since he and James had become a pair, that his lover was, in some ways, one of the most predictable men on the face of the Earth, as predictable in his way as the Sun or the Moon. It was a simple calculation – the sun would always rise in the morning, church bells were always rung on Sundays, and James McGraw would always be found in Thomas’ and Miranda’s library when he had a problem to contemplate.
“James?”
His lover turned, startled, at the sound of Thomas’ voice.
“Thomas. What are you doing down here?”
“You were gone, so naturally I came looking,” Thomas explained, and saw the look of chagrin on James’ face.
“I’m sorry. You should go back to bed. I’m fine.”
“You’re awake at an ungodly hour of the morning and standing in the library contemplating the shelves in the dark. In what way does that resemble being fine?”
James opened his mouth. He was going to argue – Thomas could see it in the set of his shoulders, in the beginnings of a frown forming in the creases between his brow. He could see, too, the moment that James recalled where he was – who he was about to argue with, and just how unnecessary that argument was. He was getting better about that, Thomas had noticed, and felt an odd surge of pride in his lover’s progress toward giving himself permission to be vulnerable now and again.
“It doesn’t,” James admitted. He gave Thomas a wry look, and sat down heavily in one of the chairs. He had gotten dressed, Thomas realized for the first time, at least partially. Had he been less tired from the day’s events, less strung out from grief, he might have taken a moment to appreciate the sight of James in breeches and white shirt. As it was, he simply sat down next to his lover, setting down the lamp he had been carrying on the table next to the chaise longue.
“I talked with Admiral Hennessey tonight,” James said without preamble. His voice was steady, but his hands twitched, his fingers drumming against his thigh in agitation.
“I remember,” Thomas answered. “He told you to take Miranda and I home.” Thomas thought back on the encounter briefly. The Admiral had not seemed angry – on the contrary, he had seemed as shocked as anyone, and had quickly suspended whatever discussion he and James had been having.
“Take them out of here,” he had instructed gruffly. “Our conversation can wait.” He had looked between James and Thomas with an odd, almost resigned expression, and then shaken his head. “Good God Almighty,” he had muttered. “Go. There is nothing more to be done here tonight.”
“He -” James started, and then ran a hand over his face, his frustration clear. “He knows,” he burst out finally. “He knows about the two of us – about our relationship.”
Thomas started.
“You told him?”
James shook his head.
“I didn’t have to,” he answered. “He figured it out on his own, somehow. He knows, and he -” He rose again, pacing the length of the room, and leaned forward, his arms holding him up against a table.
“We would not still be sitting here if you considered him a threat,” Thomas reasoned, and James shook his head.
“I don’t know what to consider him,” he admitted. He turned back, and Thomas patted the chaise, inviting him to return. He sat again, accepting the hand that Thomas placed on his thigh. “I remember it like it was yesterday, Thomas,” he said lowly. “The man all but lured me into his office, called what’s between us loathsome and profane, and now he -” He stopped, looking at Thomas with a lost expression. “He says he doesn’t care,” he finished, plainly bewildered. “He actually said he doesn’t give a shit who I’m fucking, and yet -”
“He used those exact words?” Thomas asked incredulously, and James nodded mutely. Thomas sat back, beyond shocked. “He truly said that?” James nodded again.
“All these years,” he said, his voice rough with emotion, “I thought he hated me. That I had disappointed him beyond his capacity to bear – that he saw me as some sort of abomination, and now I don’t know whether to get us all out of London on the next boat or -”
“Or take the man at his word and stay?” Thomas asked quietly, and James nodded heavily. He ran a shaking hand over his face and took a deep breath, letting it out in a gust of air that threatened to blow out the flame on the lamp.
“I can’t trust myself on this,” he confessed. “I know what Captain Flint would have done – what my instincts are telling me to do now, and I know what the sane, sensible thing is. By all rights, we should be doing it right now, but -”
“What would Captain Flint do?” Thomas asked, his eyes firmly fixed on James’ green ones.
“Run,” he answered without hesitation. “Assume that Hennessey’s lying and -” He stopped, visibly swallowing the last half of his sentence.
“And what?” Thomas asked gently, and James hesitated. He opened his mouth and then closed it, swallowing hard.
“And run as fast and as far as possible and pray not to get caught halfway out of the harbor.” It was not what he had intended to say – Thomas could see it in his face, in the way that his mouth turned downwards, and in the tense little furrow between his brows.
“James -” he started, and James turned, anguish flashing over his face, his hands clenched in his lap.
“What do you want me to say, Thomas?” he snapped. “What the hell -”
“I want you to tell me the truth,” Thomas answered. “We agreed not to lie to one another – not about this, remember?” His tone was rather sharper than usual, and he saw it cut – saw the agony that suffused James’ face for a moment.
“The truth,” he repeated, his voice ragged with emotion. “You want to know -” He stopped, standing and dragging a hand over his hair. “Christ, Thomas!” he groaned. “What the hell do you think I would have done?”
“You are the only one who knows that,” Thomas answered quietly. He did not rise, and James stared at him for a moment.
“You think -” he started, and shook his head. “Christ,” he murmured. “You do. You think there’s a chance that I would have spared him. That I -”
“I think you were not – that you are not – the monster you insist you are,” Thomas murmured. “James -”
“I would have killed him!” James all but shouted the words, his voice rising above the quiet volume they had been using up until now. “I would have killed him – would have done the unforgivable, again, and he didn’t even -” He stopped, his voice catching in his throat. “I would have killed him,” he choked. “My God, Thomas. He – it wasn’t what I imagined it to be at all. What if I had – Christ, what if I had done it?” He turned haunted eyes to Thomas. “What kind of fucking monster -” His voice cracked, and Thomas stood, silently gathering him into an embrace and allowing him to weep into his shoulder.
“I never gave it so much as a moment’s thought – the why of it,” James confessed at last, when his shoulders had stopped shaking and the tears had stopped running down his cheeks. “The man raised me from nothing – gave me a future when I had none. I owe him everything, and I – I assumed that he hated me. That I was -”
“You felt betrayed, and quite rightly so,” Thomas said quietly. “He gave you no reason to believe otherwise.”
“There was no warning,” James said wearily, sitting down again. “That was the worst of it. One moment he was talking to me, calling me son, and the next -” He shook his head. “What if this is the same?”
“What if it isn’t?” Thomas countered, sitting down next to him, and James shook his head.
“I cannot take that chance,” he murmured. “I know what he said. I know what I want to believe, but I won’t risk your safety and Miranda’s on some – deluded wish on my part to rewrite what I know to be true. I can’t -” He shook his head, and Thomas reached out, his hand gripping the top of James’ arm in support.
“James,” he said firmly, “look at me.” James obeyed, turning conflicted, tormented green eyes on Thomas. “You are not a bodyguard,” Thomas said quietly. “Miranda and I do not need to be protected from the world. This has tormented you for eleven years – no, don’t deny it, Miranda has told me as much. If there is a chance at reconciliation – at rebuilding what you had -”
He stopped, his own words hitting too close to home. He envied James – he always had, in truth. The man may have come from nothing, but he had a father figure in Hennessey – someone to look up to and ask advice from, someone who, while he may have had his faults, apparently loved James as a son, while Thomas –
He swallowed hard.
“Still, we will let all this be a thing of the past, though it hurts us, and beat down by constraint the anger that rises inside us. Now I am making an end of my anger. It does not become me, unrelentingly to rage on,” he quoted, and James started, an odd expression flickering over his face.
“Homer,” he croaked, and Thomas nodded.
“Yes. Take the chance you have been offered, James, and trust that Miranda and I can protect ourselves, whatever the outcome may be.”
“Thomas -” James started, at a loss for words, and then he reached forward, grasping hold of the back of Thomas’ neck, his hands warm in contrast with the cool night air. “Promise me,” he said roughly. “Promise me that no matter what happens, where this leads, you will take care of yourself. No matter what happens – what the danger to me or to Miranda. Swear it.” His eyes were fixed on Thomas, and Thomas could not help the shudder that ran through him at the look in his lover’s eyes, or at his sudden understanding of what had brought this on. That other version of him had done James and Miranda no favors when he had flung himself into the fire in their place, he saw, and he moved one hand to mirror James’, cupping the other man’s jaw.
“If I could reach through time and shout at myself, I would do so in a second,” he murmured. “I’m sorry, James. I’m sorry that I did not think of your feelings before throwing myself to the wolves – that I didn’t see -” James shook his head.
“It wasn’t you,” he interrupted. “Don’t apologize. Just promise me. Swear to me it won’t happen again. I can’t do this, Thomas, not if I don’t know -”
“I promise,” Thomas answered firmly, and James stopped, his breath shaking as he inhaled. “No more martyrs. We will trust in one another’s skills and consider each other’s wishes from now on.” James nodded shakily, and drew Thomas closer, kissing him in place of speaking. They drew back after a moment, foreheads resting against each other, hands still holding onto one another, and Thomas took the opportunity to run a hand through James’ hair, gently tugging to work out the snarls. James pulled back further and made a face at the feeling.
“I’m still not used to that,” he confessed, and Thomas raised an eyebrow in a question. “The hair,” James explained, running his own hand through the red-brown locks. “I’d shaved it off before -”
The sound of horrified surprise that emerged from Thomas’ mouth was entirely involuntary, and James stopped talking, one corner of his mouth quirking upward as Thomas sat up straighter, brows drawn together, mouth hanging slightly open.
“Shaved it?” he asked, and James nodded, the quirking of his mouth becoming a full-blown grin.
“All of it,” he confirmed, and Thomas gave him an appalled look. He could not picture it – did not want to picture James’ head shorn of the beautiful auburn mane Thomas so liked to touch. It was iconoclasm – sacrilege of the worst kind – akin to destroying a priceless work of art, and he could not imagine what could have driven his lover to such destruction.
“James – why?” he asked, and James shrugged, the grin sliding off his face.
“It seemed practical at the time,” he answered, clearing his throat. “I wasn’t James McGraw anymore. I was Flint. I didn’t want to look in the mirror and see a dead man looking back at me.”
The words sent a spike of horror through Thomas, and he closed his eyes. Dear God. Of all the reasons James could have given – had there been nothing, absolutely nothing in the past ten years that had not been driven by loss and pain and suffering?
“James -” he started, and took a deep breath before opening them again. He knew the answer to his own question and he did not wish to dwell upon it. “Never again,” he said firmly. “You will never have to so deface yourself again, I swear it.” He was not talking only of James’ hair, although it was the primary concern at the moment, and James knew it.
“Thank you,” he said quietly, and then gave a quiet huff of laughter. “If you could have seen your face -” he murmured, and Thomas scoffed.
“And quite right, too!” he said. “Honestly, James – the drama of the thing! I’m sure you looked like an egg.”
“Not entirely,” James argued. “I’d grown a beard, and -”
“A bearded egg!” Thomas exclaimed. “And worse, your quartermaster let you get away with this travesty!”
James snickered, and Thomas felt a surge of satisfaction at the sound.
“Silver was no more pleased than you are,” he admitted. “I seem to recall him going on about how I’d be impossible to pick out in a crowd or during a fight – something about, ‘how will I know you from any other idiot yelling orders on this ship?’”
Thomas laughed quietly.
“I’d quite like to meet him one day,” he said, and James raised an eyebrow.
“It’s not out of the question,” he admitted. He snorted. “I always wondered what you’d make of the slippery little shit.”
Thomas offered him a smile.
“Perhaps someday we’ll find out.”
*****************************************************
June 24th, 1705:
He had forgotten how fucking loud London was.
It had been six weeks since he had woken, confused as hell, to find himself back amid the teeming squalor that was the capital city of the British Empire. It had taken him all of two minutes to piece together what had happened (pretty fucking obvious, and he’d all but wept for joy to find himself with two whole legs again, and then nearly wept again when he realized that he was not only whole again but in possession of the kind of knowledge that would make him a rich man several times over). He had spent the next week or so parlaying knowledge into coin, and trying not to allow the question of how he had ended up in his own past consume him whole any more than his frustration at readjusting to walking without a crutch.
He had never thought he’d be saying it, but he missed life at sea. He’d known just how fucked he was from the moment he’d woken and wondered why the ground was not moving beneath him, but now, six weeks into this strange new life, he was worse than frustrated – he was positively homesick, and the notion was as strange as any he had ever tried to wrap his head around. He had never wanted to be a sailor, but damn if he didn’t miss the swaying motion underfoot and the creak of the boards and the comparative quiet of fifty men packed into the same space together over the noise and the filth and the press of London. No, John Silver thought – he had not missed the shit hole he had come from, nor would he miss it when he left it once again.
Still – there was some good to be had about the place. It was, for instance, a great deal easier to overhear useful things here than it ever had been in Nassau. On New Providence, useful tidings tended to come with the risk of angry men with swords and pistols ready to kill someone at the drop of a hat. Here, on the other hand, everything he could possibly need to know was bandied about by women at market as easy as if he had simply picked it off the ground, without a single farthing ever needing to change hands.
“Is Lord Hamilton still planning on leaving?”
A case in point – the two women who had just begun talking not five feet from where he stood, bandying about a name that brought him up short. Lord Hamilton? Not -? The name stopped him short, and he realized with a jolt where and exactly when he was. If they were speaking of the same man –
“He is. Says ‘e’s not to be deterred, not even after all the unpleasantness.”
“Rotten luck. What’ll your sister do now?”
“His lordship has offered a bonus for any servant that wants to accompany him, but I don’t think she’ll take it. She’ll be moving on – new house, new position.”
“Smart. He can go to the West Indies on his own – him and his lady wife, too.”
“What’s your quarrel?”
“Well, it was them that ordered it, wasn’t it – what happened to old Lord Ashbourne, even if they won’t say it?”
“Who says?”
“Everyone! Everyone knows they didn’t get along. Mind you, I’ve never heard a word that was good about the old bastard, so I s’pose he had it coming.”
“I don’t believe that. From what my sister says, young Lord Thomas is a gentle sort – wouldn’t hurt a fly!”
“Maybe, but what about Lady Hamilton? She’s an odd duck from what I hear. Moody.”
“That doesn’t mean she murdered him. Blimey! You think the Earl didn’t have enough other enemies without blaming her?”
“Like who?”
Silver backed away, his mind turning over what he had just heard. He could think of an excellent candidate – a certain red-haired companion of Lord and Lady Hamilton, for starters, he thought, mouth suddenly dry, energy buzzing through him. Flint. He was here here, he had to be. It had not even occurred to John, and he silently cursed his own thoughtlessness. Of course he was- but was he truly Flint? Lord Ashbourne had died recently. If Flint had come back at the same time as Silver, why would he have waited? It was unlike Flint to leave loose ends for more than a few days, and Alfred Hamilton was nothing if not that. Perhaps not, then. Still – something had changed and the Earl had paid the price. Perhaps Lady Hamilton? If it was Flint, what was he playing at? He turned down the street, still pondering. If Flint was actually here –
Christ. What if he was? Did it matter? This was a new life, with new possibilities, and the glorious freedom to go where he would, when he wanted, without the burden of being wanted for piracy or weighed down by a peg leg or by James fucking Flint. Whether he was at large or in prison for murder –
He winced at the mental image of Flint in prison, something in his stomach twisting at the notion, and he suddenly recalled the last time he had been in this particular position – the last time Flint had been in serious trouble and in need of Silver’s aid. Yes, he admitted to himself quietly, it mattered, damn it all to hell, or what had he lost a leg for? If Flint were back here in the past, then Silver owed it to him to at least make sure that he wasn’t hanged for a murder that, by all accounts, had been more than merited. The realization brought a sigh to his lips as he scrubbed a hand over his face and through his hair, silently damning the god he didn’t really believe in and damning himself too for his utter lack of the ability to turn back like a sensible person. If Flint was in trouble, then John would help him, because-
Because he had made a promise, and for the first time in twenty years it seemed as though he might have the chance to keep it. He would start with Lord Hamilton’s residence for answers, and tackle the question of how he was to break Flint out of Newgate if and when he reached that bridge. Now the question was how to find the house of the noble in question.
The two women were still talking, and he turned on one heel, heading straight toward them. One of them had a sister in Hamilton’s employ – she would know where he might start looking.
“Excuse me, ladies. I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation…”
Meg's Mumbles 