sea-changed:

Incidentally, I find it near-canon that Miranda adores Aphra Behn’s works, because honestly, she would love every single thing about Aphra Behn, and rue the fact that she never got to meet her (UNLESS SHE DID, and wouldn’t that be a fic).

She sends her writing to Thomas when he’s at Cambridge in exchange for his Greek textbooks. Six years at Eton, she’d asked him, and did you read a single book written by a woman? He has to admit to her that he had not; he has to admit to himself that this is the first time it had occurred to him.

Thomas reads every book she sends him, and tucks long, multi-sheet letters about them into the books he sends her in return, when he begins to run out of room on the endpapers. This had begun because they were both bored at a party, and Miranda, sixteen and bright-eyed and straining painfully at the bounds of the place she’s been assigned to in the world, had said to him, bitterness tinging her words, that she wishes that she could go off to Cambridge; the conversation had ended with him promising to send her copies of all the books he’s assigned. She’d smiled at him then, and he’d thought, suddenly, that it was the first time she’d ever smiled at him, despite the fact that they’d known each other since they were children.

Seventeen years later, she hands one of Behn’s books to James: I don’t think you’ll like it, she says, but you should read it anyway. She has begun to do this with him, James has noticed: Thomas loans him books almost at random, things that it occurs to him in the moment that James might like, but Miranda does so in a more studied way. She gives him things, not that she thinks he might like, necessarily, but that she thinks he should know, that she thinks will give him new ideas about the world: she’s never offended if he does not in fact end up liking them, though she’ll argue with him about it as long as they have time to. She loans him books the way she hands him glasses of wine at parties the way she takes him to music recitals, a spark in her eye, saying, try this.

He takes it back to his room to read, but before he can even start he opens it to the first, blank page; not blank, in this case. In the slender, slanted handwriting he has come to recognize as Miranda’s, it says: Thomas– To an equal exchange. M.B. He traces his fingertip over one of the letters, ink fading brown with age; he wonders if Miranda had given him the book intentionally, knowing he would find the note. What she thinks he will take from it. Mostly, he feels the odd feeling he gets around them sometimes, something he won’t call jealously and won’t even think of as desire, but that pulls at his chest with a want: he wants the world they carry between them, the beauty and intelligence and softness of it. Wants them, in a way he won’t let himself think about too hard.

For now, he turns the page, pressing the note against the inside cover; then, he starts to read.