#my favorite scenes r the ones on the boat its like. so smooth. like a dance | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

a-nassau-reclaimed · 5 years

Text

how am i to face tomorrow / after being screwed out of today

he had a dream when they learned that thomas had died. he had wept, some, when miranda told him, shocked, shattered tears falling like bits of glass from a shattered window as she stormed and raged and held onto him too tightly, a hurricane in force to compliment the howling in his head. he had held her, and every time he tried to speak a sob broke out of him instead, and eventually miranda was tired and he held her tight as her whole-body, gutteral sobs wracked her, and remembered that shushing was supposed to help. she cried harder when he did, but her hands loosened in his shirt, and he held her, even though the only place he wanted to be in the world was wherever thomas was, to touch the sides of his face, feel his pulse, rest a hand against his heart and say, please don’t leave me. but thomas was dead, dead maybe for months, and james, james could hold miranda and remember, though he tried to stop it, the flood of memories of london he’d been fighting back, repressing, thomas backlit by the fire, smiling, thomas in his bed, softly illuminated with his new-bound thick-covered book that looked so incongruous. thomas’s hand at his elbow, james buttoning thomas’s frock coat, kissing his knee as he pulled up his stocking. thomas with miranda laughing in his lap, the two of them fiercer friends than james had ever seen anyone before, thomas had loved miranda, he’d known that as much as anyone had ever known anything, and as she tires against his chest, trying to breathe deeply against painful sobs, sobs that drag out of her like the hull of a boat in water too shallow for it, he remembers thomas, and it’s in his stead he presses a shaky kiss to her cheek (he’d always favored the firehead, but thomas had gone to school in france for a time, according to miranda, and had come back with cheek kisses. she’d said it teasingly, like it was a disease. thomas had snickered, thumped his head against the back of his chair as he laughed, and james’s faint unease had been with them then but now he just wanted to reach through the portrait of his memory and smooth the lines from their faces, hold their hands. how am i to face this, with no hope to a return to this? his hands tightened in their place at the back of miranda’s head as she folded into him, a new wave of sobs wracking her. more shards of glass, two, three. all of a sudden it was too much. he pulled back, hand on her shoulder. her face was red, rubbed raw like it was sandpaper, eyes flushed.

“i’m sorry,” he says, as he untangles himself, and the visible pang of loss is almost more than he can bear as he throws himself out of the front door to cling to one of the struts of the front porch as the first of his sobs wheeze out of him, summoned from the depths of him by what kind of magic he can’t understand but it’s all he can think of, just thomas’s face, and thomas’s fingertips against the side of his face, and the warmth of him, gone, g o n e. thomas, dead in bedlam, dead in bedlam and james is here, free, he pushes the thought of it should have been me as far from him as he is able, but not before he glimpses its ugly face. he’s on his knees now, on the porch, his wheezing, wretched sobs tumbling out of him like gunpowder from a dropped pouch, and every inhale feels like tinder, feels like flint. he shakes his head in refutation of the name, but that just pulls something in his chest as he sobs harder, thinks of thomas and the softness of his shirts and the softness of his hair and his skin under james’s hands, his living heartbeat, cold, cold. he can’t stand to think what miranda’s neighbors will think of him, captain flint, weeping on the widow barlowe’s porch. the widow barlowe, now widowed in truth, thomas, thomas. he can’t breathe, but he forces himself to stand. goes back into the house to see miranda, stiff-backed and trembling as she makes herself with slow hands a cup of tea, eyes red and filled with so much anger, i am e n r a g e d, he remembers, and feels a shame at the depth of feeling he isn’t feeling because what he’s filled with is grief and sorrow and tired. and he stands against the doorway and miranda meets his eyes, and he cannot feel what she is feeling, and then she says,

“alfred hamilton is travelling by sea six months from now” and a shutter drops because he can. and there must be a truly terrifying smile on his face because miranda takes half a step back before meeting his eyes again, meeting fire with fire, and taking a full step forwards.

“good,” he says, and miranda, discomfort with this sort of bloodlust in her shoulders if not her face, hesitates before, tipping her head back and forth, as if to circumvent a sob. “yes,” she says, voice harsh with tears, but she meets his eyes again, and there is no discord in her. “yes. yes it is.”

they sketch out a loose plan on a piece of parchment, what details miranda has and what connections she and james, and gates if he can find a way to get him to cooperate, which he will, can scrape together so that, whatever ship Alfred Hamilton ends up on, it will be accosted and the Earl will pay the damages he has laid against james and miranda, and now most finally, thomas. he will die, and only then will the two of them have to think about what they’ll do next. on nassau, which was always thomas’s dream, nassau, where it seems like no one is incorruptible.

but when he dreams that night, it’s the shaking cursing sorrow that follows him into his dreams. the walls of the hamilton house ache with it, in the gold of the curtains james knows were dark red, in the gold cast of the fire that doesn’t touch thomas, who isn’t gold but is whole, dressed in soft greens and yellows, gold-trimmed brocade that is wiry under james’s fingertips. he stands there across from james by his favorite chair, and james can’t cross to reach him.

“what would i do if i had not met you? who would i blame my life on? i once was told that all men get what they deserve... who the hell then threw this curve? there are no answers, but what would i do, if you had not been my,” his throat dies on the word. must this door on his life close too? must he leave behind this warmth of the hamilton household, must he leave this ease, these words they gave him? “my friend.”

thomas is half a memory, half a memory, speaking to him, animated, and he knows these memories though he can’t see the words, thomas at his desk, thomas over a translation, thomas, thomas thomas, thomas, he crosses to him but thomas is mist, a mirage and he finds himself looking at him gesturing over the dining room table, deep in conversation with miranda, and he feels both so young and so excruciatingly old he could scream. “where had you been,” and sobs breaking through to him even now, “where are you now?”

“who would i be, if i had not loved you? how would i know what love is?”

the memory changes, and it’s them seated, thomas sprawled and yet tucked up in his chair like only his long limbs and absurd posture would allow, the room a velvet blackness of dark walls and nighttime around them, thomas’s mouth moving, james remembering the words, “do you regret--” in that memory he’d cut thomas off, reassurances and brashness and bluster and gentle soothing fingertips and sincerity, but as thomas fades again, he shouts against the walls of the dream, “i’d do it again, i’d like to believe that i’d do it again and again and again,”

then thomas, as he’d last seen him, eyes shining with the promise that the sea lords would back them, backing james up against an end table to kiss him breathless and, with absolute conviction, say to him, “of course they’ll listen to you, you’re brilliant,” and james had held the lapels of his coat but hadn’t kissed him again, and james feels the loss, the regret hot on his tongue, against his mouth.

and then again all of a sudden the scene is different and it’s that bright early-spring day when he’d first seen thomas, but he’s standing apart, watching it happen, watching the long grey wig swing lightly as thomas turned, “what would i see, if i had not seen you, who would i feast my eyes on? there are no answers but would would i do, if you had not been my,” the word is settling like the closing of a door against his tongue, and he resolves never to speak it, never to speak the lie of omission that the door closing on his life with thomas was mandating, even as the dream wrenched him free of it, into sweating, shaking, feverish embodied misery with the word “friend” still ringing in his mind.

miranda was watching him from the other side of the bed, awake with luminous eyes catching the light from the moon. he knew, abruptly, that she hadn’t slept, but that his shaking, tossing and turning hadn’t helped. she looked as young as he felt, then, and when she said softly, miserably, “i miss him,” he was still rattled, shaken, adrenaline-freed enough to say “i miss him too.” she tucked herself under his chin then, wrapped her arms around him as he did the same around her, and laying back against the pillows he held her, and she held him, as the two of them drifted off fretfully into a restless, unhealing sleep.

#james #ask to tag #drabble #almost the entire dialogue here is from a song and i REFUSE to feel embarrassed about it #shit i left out the worst one but im not going to go back and edit it #the worst line for the song is 'i always heard good men get better with age.... we're just gonna skip that stage.... there are no answers'#L I K E #and another line is in the title

0 notes