From Full of Grace:

Hennessey is thinking one thing right here: murder. how do I murder him
and make it look like it was an ordinary carriage accident? because make
no mistake – Alfred is out for blood, here, James’ or Hennessey’s or
both. He’s a vicious, horrible spider of a man, and he’s trying to
provoke Hennessey into doing something stupid, something that Alfred can
use to get his claws into the Navy as a whole. He’s sitting there in
that carriage practically daring Hennessey to do what he wants to do,
and Hennessey knows that he absolutely can’t if he wants to have
anything left of his career or any chance of helping James or any
respect for himself given that he’d be betraying hundreds of men under
his command. If you’re looking for a mental image for this, imagine one
of those crisp December days where it seems like it could snow and
everything’s far too bright somehow and yet there’s something very dark
going on inside that carriage. I wanted to dive into what’s going
through Hennessey’s head and the political reality that he deals with
day by day where he has to make a hundred horrible decisions for the
sake of saving as many lives as he can. I didn’t want him to come across
as someone cold and unfeeling, just someone who’s under far, far too
much pressure and has so very little he can do safely in public and this
gets into that a bit. I also wanted to give everyone a glimpse of the
monster that Hennessey, Miranda, James, and Thomas face in this setting,
since we weren’t going to see much of him in the rest of the piece. I
wanted to get across the lurking, malevolent thing that’s sitting in the
shadows, pulling the strings, making the end conclusion almost
inevitable because there’s just no other way to deal with someone like
that sometimes.

From Cup of Their Deserving:

When I first started writing Madi, I remember feeling this sense of overwhelming relief, actually, because her mind is an organized place. It’s quiet and calm in there, and she takes no shit and gives none in return. When she gives an order, she expects it to be obeyed without delay, and I love writing her because of all those things. That said – this is a frisson of disquiet, the sound of footsteps in the library that don’t belong there, Madi realizing that something is wrong, badly so, with that little shiver of foreboding that you get sometimes when you realize that something has gone terribly, terribly awry. There’s a sense of urgency here, and of course we all know what she’s going to arrive in time to avert, but in terms of the story, this is just a little bit of backstory to where we start off. I chose to do this as a flashback because the image of Madi stepping into the cabin to tend to James is one that grabs you immediately, whereas this feels like an extension to a scene that we’re not seeing. The partner to this, if it had one in a linear narrative, would be James having a truly horrifying conversation with Silver and then getting the shit beaten out of him and… well, hasn’t the man suffered enough on camera without adding more?

As to what Featherstone’s thinking – I think, just for long enough, he forgets that he’s not supposed to take Madi back to the island, and by the time he remembers, it’s too late and he’s going to take the blame anyway so he might as well do what she says.

From To the Upper Air:

What’s that saying? Give a boy a fish, and you feed him for a day, teach a boy to fish and find yourself feeding him and at least three other people and running around keeping them out of trouble for the rest of your career? That seems to be Hennessey’s general experience here, and he doesn’t mind it nearly as much as you’d think, although in this case I’d imagine he’d really, really like James to stop kicking over hornets’ nests that are quite this big and important. On the other hand, though – from what I’ve seen, George Churchill can’t have been very popular among the other admirals. He was an effective army officer but didn’t really do much in his office as admiral, and the aforementioned Ned Russell fell out with him over a dispute about rank. Hennessey is pleased to finally be given a reason to see the asshole removed from his branch of her Majesty’s service. James and company are no doubt just relieved to have at least one powerful ally in the form of Hennessey, and to have a place to go where they’ll be at least safer than they are at present. They’re all running on fumes at this point, and a brief respite is just what the admiral ordered.

This might, in retrospect, be the first time anyone’s shown Thomas anything resembling paternal care – that’s got to be quite a change for him and Silver both. James, meanwhile, is surprisingly the one of the group that’s had something resembling an acceptable childhood and has gotten kind of used to this.

From To the Upper Air:

You know – every time I write Hennessey, I find myself thinking, “oh. so that’s where James gets this bit of his personality.” Hennessey may not be his actual father, but he was James’ mentor and the next best thing in James’ own words. James respected him, which is to say that he probably fit the pattern of the other people in James’ life that he treats as equals – stubborn, with a feisty temper, intelligent as hell, and willing to treat James like he matters. And yet, Hennessey is an admiral – that speaks of a level of self-control that James can only dream of. Still – I can very much see Hennessey having risen to a captain’s rank and later earning an admiral’s pennant through action, not through money exchanged, and James learned a lot from him, so yes, I do in a way see him as an older version of what James might have been, had things not gone the way they did. Thomas knows James enough to recognize that when James talks about Hennessey. James would deny it all to hell and back because he’s had ten years to think some very unflattering thoughts about Hennessey, but if he tells the truth, he probably knows that it’s more than a little bit accurate. Silver here is doing his usual thing, which is to say getting a mental map of a person before he meets them if possible, because if ever there was someone who emphatically did not like surprises when it comes to interactions with people, it’s Silver.

From To the Upper Air:

So – I very much see Admiral Hennessey as one of those men in an exalted position that didn’t get there through buying his way up through the ranks. I see him as someone who’s a bit more rough around the edges than he likes to admit in polite company, born a commoner and got to where he is through hard work and no small measure of shrewdness, so he generally knows what he’s about, and yet here – he has absolutely no clue what’s going on. He’s more than a little bit scared – he hasn’t heard from James in weeks, and the last time he did hear from him, they were having a kind of argument that wasn’t quite resolved. He knows that James has gotten involved with Thomas, and he doesn’t trust Thomas one tiny little bit. He’s afraid that the sudden breach that’s opened between himself and James might push his son to do something reckless, and he can’t for the life of him figure out what he’s done that has caused James to mistrust him, although he knows there’s something. In short – he’s feeling strong emotion, and so his accent slips just a bit and shows a bit of the man underneath the wig, so to speak. I kind of wanted to show a bit more of his personality here, because we don’t get to see too much of him as a person in the previous scene, other than that he’s not a total ogre and has heart enough to take in a frightened boy who had nowhere else to go. He doesn’t mean a word of this, of course, but under ordinary circumstances he’d be having a sharp word with James because there are rules, damn it!

In the larger story – idk, this is just a short little character beat that functions to show us that Hennessey is searching for James so that his later appearance doesn’t come completely out of the blue and ruin the flow of the story through too much exposition.

From Apologia ad Iphigeniam:

This is blatant releasing of tensions that had been building in this fic and now they’re done and we’re making chicken jokes. That’s it – four-year-old mispronunciation of a name leads to James and Hennessey starting to relax around each other again because damn the kid’s too cute and they didn’t actually want to fight with each other in the first place, although James was up for that if that’s what Hennessey was there for. Gods help Hennessey if he ever agrees to feed the chickens to help Miranda out – Thomas and James will never let him hear the end of it!