and leave them as they left us: bare-handed in socked feet with wounded hearts and immortal sins and the last enchanted dewdrop still clinging to their hair
okay so imagine the first time james sees thomas naked after the reunion, and thomas is angsting and getting prepared for sadness so he isn’t facing james but the moment he takes his shirt off, from behind him he just hears this squeak
‘i – i didn’t – i mean i should have guessed, but – i – oh wow’
or perhaps just ’………arms’
FIC IT!
Thomas had not been self-conscious of his body in a long time.
Neither Bethlem nor Georgia had held anyone whose good opinion of him he wanted to avoid ruining. The things that had been done to him had made him feel violated, invaded, exploited – but those were not the same thing as self-consciousness or shame. Never had he desired his tormenter’s favourable esteem or thought himself deserving of what cruelties they had inflicted upon him.
He had made friends at the plantation but even with them he had not felt reticent about his body. They all were marked one way or another by their hardships and none had ever known Thomas as he used to be: unblemished, smooth, broad-shouldered but lean.
Then here was James.
There were ants crawling between Thomas’ flesh and his skin, making him twinge and tingle all over; in anticipation and anxiety both. Now that he was alone with his lover once more, he felt the first rush of relief mingle with unbidden thoughts, the insistent questions of what if yes, what if no, what if again, what if no more.
Thomas had to let go of James’ hand and turn away do undo his shirt’s fastenings. His fingers shook and he pulled the shirt clean off in one motion to mask the tremor.
As the warm air hit his skin, Thomas heard behind him a small, wrung-out sound; as of a bitten-off gasp.
For a second he wanted to curl up, or to flee the room. He even considered retreating into anger – he had never shied from righteous fury before, and the past decade had turned him harder than before. For a moment he wanted to defend this trembling, uncertain thing that was his body, wanted to lash out because even though he had done so many times while imprisoned, James was the one human being he was certain would understand, would let him be angry and know. James had always been safe.
In the end Thomas contented himself with wrapping his arms tightly around himself before turning around.
James’ eyes were wide as they alighted on Thomas’ now-bared skin. Thomas tried to read his face, but there was something unpracticed about it. As if Thomas had forgotten some of the nuances, and as if James’ face had forgotten how to show them. As if James were trying to spell a word he had not written in a long time, and fumbled to arrange the letters the right way.
Where words failed them both, James let his actions speak. He stepped closer, hands rising gently to cup Thomas’ elbows. Thomas tensed a moment before he relaxed into the warm touch. James glanced up at him; a quick, almost bashful thing that barely caught Thomas’ eye before hushing back down to his arms. James’ hands ran slowly up from Thomas’ elbows, gliding over the rise and fall of his muscles that had been so modest the last time James had seen them.
James’ thumb paused when it reached the point where Thomas’ scapula rested delicately on the outer edge of his collarbone, where that raven’s beak of a bone curled around and connected his reach with his self. His out with his in.
And with this action, Thomas felt as though he had been handed the key to decipher what James fought so desperately to say. He let his arms relax further as James slid his hands back down, pressing thumbs into the soft insides of Thomas’ elbows, brushing over the stretches of sinew anchored below the heels of Thomas’ palms.
Thomas felt compelled to say something, anything, but all he managed to bring out was, “Yes?”
James looked up at him, eyes wet and ablaze at the same time, and wordlessly pulled Thomas with him as he stepped back against the wall. He brought Thomas’ arms up around him, caging himself in.
“Keep me here,” he said in a rasp wet and rough as a cat’s tongue against Thomas’ clavicle, and Thomas felt the sound all the way into his groin. James’ groin, he noticed, was already a few steps ahead.
Thomas kept James against the wall for a long time.
“I thought you were dead.” “It’s not what it looks like…”
“I thought you were dead,” says James, in a voice that’s barely there. He runs his thumb down Thomas’s cheek, as if to reassure himself that Thomas is no ghost. Thomas knows the feeling.
He swallows. “Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” he says, with an attempt at a smile. That just makes James cry harder, downright sobbing into Thomas’s chest.
“James,” he tries to say soothingly, cradling his truest love in his arms. “James, it’s all right. I’m here. You’re here. We’re alive. That’s all that matters right now.”
“But what about everything we’ve lost?” James asks, and he looks so vulnerable, gazing up at Thomas, and Thomas has never felt taller than him than at this moment. He wonders exactly what the years have taken from James, but now is not the time.
No, now is definitely not the time, not with James’s hands snaking around his back, massaging his back and shoulders. It would feel wonderful, except- “Ow.” Thomas winces, and James backs away immediately, looking horrified at himself. Thomas wishes he would come back, hold him again – even a mere foot away from James, he feels alone again, as if James is just a phantom.
“James,” he says, reaching for him, and James goes back, hesitantly, like Thomas is a horse he’s just spooked. He cocks his head at Thomas questioningly, but a suspicion is forming clearly on his face, and Thomas must quell it, for James’s sake, even if it is not far from the truth.
He shakes his head. “It’s not what you think,” he says, too quickly, and James raises an eyebrow at him.
“What do I think?” he asks carefully.
Thomas just shakes his head again. “Nothing,” he says, and his tone is meek, subdued.
James reaches out for him, taking him very gently in his arms. “Oh Thomas,” he says, and Thomas hears all the unshed tears of the past ten years there, the pain James must have been in. “What have they done to you?”
Thomas snorts. “Nothing that I didn’t let them do,” he says, in a hard voice, and perhaps that is the biggest lie of all.
FIC TRAILER: The Cup of Their Deserving (the wages of their virtue) by DreamingPagan
“If I leave them here, will you bathe on your own?” she asks. Flint does not answer, and she feels something catch in her throat. He will not, she knows – he has not taken the effort to so much as remove his shirt or attempt to deal with his bleeding wounds, preferring instead to sit, exhausted, on the barrel, staring into the middle distance, contemplating God alone knows what. She cannot blame him – there has been much to think on this day. She herself cannot put out of her mind just how close she has come to losing this – to losing him.
Madi decides not to be sent away after her rescue. When she returns to Skeleton Island, she finds a betrayal in progress and takes steps to save her friend and put her people’s choice regarding the war back in their hands.
Just as a reminder, the flinthamilton/flinthamiltons and the wlw prompt memes are now live! Both of them need prompts and fills! Lots of great prompts already! ❤
Remember when he was trading the cache for the fort and he was Eleanor’s insurance? While he’s locked up, they show him reading a red book, which- what other book would he bother carrying during the invasion day? Sure, maybe he grabbed it because he wanted something to keep him occupied while locked up, or maybe after Miranda, he carried with him because if he was going to die, he wanted to die with the last piece of Thomas he had
on the one hand, yes of course that’s meditations he’s reading. on the other… that means that it’s canon that this is the face he makes while watching it burn:
Meg's Mumbles 