and it deserves to be said again

asexualizing:

god it didn’t even hit me last night how long silver had known where thomas was, that he brought the possibility up before flint to gauge his reaction and saw his face at that moment and his desperation in insisting that it is impossible that thomas is alive, that he heard flint say how thomas would not let him give up the war for his sake and saw how badly flint needed to hold on to that, then resumed to do what he had done, thinking it benevolent.

thinking it a solution, thinking it the thing to end flint’s pursuit of righting the wrongs of the british empire, instead of seeing it as it is: flint’s anger is not specifically about losing thomas, it is about the system that made it impossible for him to have thomas.

silver broke the trust of the person who, despite knowing better because life taught him better, trusted him wholly. and he knew that that’s what he was doing, he talked about exactly this to madi. and he believed he was different from all the other people because he did it out of a sense of rectitude, he gave flint his thomas back, and he kept the world calm.

but he still held that same system against flint, sustained it. he found a loophole and thought it enough. he always thought about “being enough” and couldn’t see that in this world, enough is not enough. he still took away from flint the possibility of reclaiming the history, truth, self that the system took from him and from thomas and from miranda and from countless people.

he gave flint an ending to his stolen story. he did not give him his story back.