They reach Kirkwall at midday as it surges with foot traffic and shouting and cut purses and merchant sailors and titled women in ribbons and silk accompanied by steel prickling shadows. A herd of blatting goats driven down from to foothills to the Lowtown by girl of fourteen, her little brother, and a rangy speckled dog lead their company, and they part ways only in the last twisting cut of the avenue - goats driven into the dirt packed side yards of the tanneries and butchers stinking of melting fat and singed hair, and the five of them following the final bend to the harborfront with its own distinctive brine and rot reek.
The Gallows sits just there in the distance against the flat matte grey of late Kingsway. By some fortuitous coincidence, the ferry from it is just over halfway across the water. They could easily make their way to meet it there at the slip slip and walk straight on, so passing in one uninterrupted line from Nevarra to the Gallows. It will be as if they were never gone at all.
Is that acceptable?
"You and I should see to the ship. De Groot will have something to say about the progress of the refit," Flint says to Silver. Anyway, it does them no good to return all at once.
Which is how the two of them finally find themselves finally diverging in a hired boat hacking speedily toward the Walrus under the power two paid oarmen. Flint sits quietly in the bow. There is something pale and drawn in him as he studies the shape of the Gallows between the crowded lines of merchant and fishing vessels at anchor, but otherwise there are no signs of trip's ill effects. All scratches and the magnificent array of bruising lay under a shirt and cinched belt and the fall of a dark coat, busted knuckles minimized by the heavy rings on his fingers so that there is no break at all in the illusion.
This is the second time in so many months that John has walked his way back to Kirkwall under unauspicious circumstances.
He is aware of a particular weight hanging over their journey home. John is many things, but he isn't a fool. He can guess at the source of it, even if he isn't willing to do anything but hope Flint's suspicions pass. It doesn't seem unreasonable, considering the chaos they had come out of.
But sitting in that small boat, taking stock of Flint as they are delivered back to the ship, John considers that whatever tension has drawn taut between them will not be released simply by returning to what is familiar to them. The impulse to speak comes to him several times, but they are not alone. So he watches Flint's torn knuckles and holds his tongue, suppresses the urge to spin out conversation away in any other direction.
Of course, once Flint's cabin door closes John finds himself with very little idea of what to say.
"You should sit," is what he decides upon. Certain impulses weigh out over all others. "I can see to what's needed here."
They both know they've come aboard for more reasons than just to hear De Groot's report. There are very few places in the Gallows where they can speak freely, and Flint is in no condition to rig a sloop to take them out onto the water this time.
"I don't doubt it," he says, careful about finding the edge of the slung bed and easing down onto it. The climb up the side of the ship from the rise and fall of the jolly-boat had been unpleasant enough that here, in the privacy of the Walrus' cabin, he is short of breath and sweating.
"Anyway, you'll have to. I can't stay long. Madame Baudin will say something to her husband if I fail to make our standing appointment." They were meant to be back yesterday and to fit easily back into the places they've arranged for themselves here. He looks to Silver. "But before that, you and I should reach an agreement here. About what occurred on the road."
There is a singular problem with using magic so freely, John has found. Once drawn open, the Veil does not simply fall back and recede quietly. He is aware of the ebb and pulse of power. It lives at the edge of his awareness. He feels it every time he draws breath. He is painfully aware of it now as Flint's gaze lifts and he broaches the topic of the road.
"Alright," John answer, tone steady in spite of the thunder of his heartbeat. He leans against the table at Flint's bedside, does not think of the early days of their partnership when they'd spoken in this same position. Much has changed.
But John finds himself floundering, unsure of exactly which approach serves him best. (Which lie is less damaging, which lie insults the bond between them least.)
"It was an ambush," John says carefully. "I don't think anyone is going to be objecting over much to the fate of those men."
"Those men aren't my concern. If things go to plan - and there is no reason to assume that they won't -, then there will be no cause for anyone to even know they played in part in this."
Then what is?
He has turned the shape of that question over in his mind in the intervening hours since to no end. The road from Nevarra was long and the old fixtures of the ruined Imperial Highway unfamiliar enough that they failed to act as any meaningful guidepost to his eye. But standing in the churn of the Kirkwall's docks, he thought he might have at last determined some direction.
"If any part of our work in Nevarra was successful, the situation there will begin to change quite quickly. Speaker Orlok may act as an appropriate shield between Riftwatch and the world, but there is a very real possibility that I might soon find myself playing a similar role here between certain perspectives and what we might accomplish here. My concern is there," he says, nodding toward the door. "In that fort at the mouth of the harbor. What worries me is that it may require the truth, and that right now I'm not certain I know every part of it."
There is something willing like an invitation in his face: "Am I wrong?"
There is a palpable weight to this moment. John feels some yet unformed consequence of his decision here bearing down upon him. For a long moment there is silence as John watches Flint's face, lets the entreaty he finds there sink like a hook into his chest.
There is always a cost. He'd been foolish to think it would begin and end with the blood spilled on that roadway.
"You asked me once who I was," John begins, and then stops. Instinct reminds him there is danger here, that he teeters upon a precipice that he has invested a great deal of energy in try to avoid. "Is the answer I gave then, and all that has passed between us since, is that no longer enough?"
The question is unfair. John knows as he speaks it. What Flint invokes are forces bigger than either of them. Had John stayed his hand on that road, perhaps this would not have ever been an issue. But now, as their handiwork takes root in Nevarra, what John has done, and the secret he's kept for so long, need to be accounted for. The question becomes whether or not John is capable of stalling long enough to find a way that they need not be.
Does that play into the story he's told himself these last few days as they'd made their painfully slow trek back to Kirkwall, or run counter to it? I haven't yet said what it is I suspect, he might say. Yet here you are insisting it doesn't matter. But hasn't he? Said it in the quiet stretches of road and the uneasy company taken about a fire at night. And has John Silver really denied anything new that he hasn't in some earlier hour?
If it's an unfair question, then maybe it is one in a series.
"Would this be easier if I first told you what I think I know?"
But there is nothing that makes this conversation easy. There is no way to skirt the edges of this secret without some quiet agony, without fear knifing through him.
"It's as fair a place to start as any."
And a kindness, whether or not Flint intends it to be.
Just like when he had spoken with Isaac, John feels some panicked sense of desperation. It had served him before, but he can't make use of it now without damaging something important. He's bound himself with blood and bone to this ship, this crew, this man before him. It's too late to extricate himself the way he might once have.
"Then I will tell you the story I have been telling myself, and between us we can make sense of the parts which contradict one another."
This is not a kindness. It is vulnerability. It is a gap between two pieces of plate, it is tender flesh exposed, it is a small island in the middle of a sea trapped between two forces that would see every feature of it washed away. I will tell you what I need to say, and you will tell me what you want to. I know this.
"You know what occurred when the ambush first was sprung, just as I'm certain you saw me turn and charge the riders. In that moment, I had considered the possibility that we all might be slaughtered there in the road and that our only alternative was to buy the time for the mages in our company to act. I assume the first archer was killed then. I assume there was another. I assume someone ruined the one horse, and that this is when Speaker Fabria raised another to clear the road.
"What followed, I can't say clearly. But there is some... indescribable certainty," he decides, "In being dragged down into a place that wants to kill you by hands that a moment ago meant to do it themselves. It is cold and it is distant and dark, and is it any wonder that when next some other person came on that place that they might be mistaken for something they could not possibly be. It should be easy to forgive. But try as I might, I can't shake the question from my mind. If Ilias and Leander were otherwise occupied, and Isaac still had the capacity to mend me after all was said and done, then who was it that killed that woman who had meant to ride away?"
The recitation builds a snare, one piece after another. John feels it cinch tight as Flint finishes, knows himself to be trapped.
The silence stretches. In spite of himself, John tries to think of a lie. He looks into Flint's face until he can't anymore, eyes dropping to his hands, to the cracked window open behind Flint's long-neglected desk.
Yes, John could lie. He could plead ignorance and Flint would accept it. But he sees the cost. He sees what that lie would fracture and knows it to be too great to repair.
"I couldn't let her go," John admits. The confession is drawn from him almost unwillingly, quiet agony belying the steadiness of his voice. "I couldn't risk it."
It's a small admission, but speaking it aloud seems to draw the air from the room.
He recalls some late autumn as a boy being forced to turn fetid straw blanketing the mushroom bed in the sunless garden plot of his grandfather's house, and how strange the heat of rotting things had been trapped between the pitch of mud and the cold snap of the air. He remembers the bitter stench of it, and the act of finding and being encouraged to turn a stone in the earth. What squirming living things had been exposed by it? He can't picture them. But he can see a woman saying to a boy, They would have eaten what belongs to you if you'd left them there.
Distantly, Flint is aware that he is studying the lines of Silver's hands. There is dirt under his fingernails and in the creases of his travel weary clothes. There is dried mud ground into the stitching of his boots. He hears himself ask, "When else?"
What other opportunities had been too precious to waste doing nothing?
John's hands spread helplessly. Honesty doesn't come easily to him, and it is made worse now as John dredges out the only secret whose keeping has ever mattered. Flint may as well have asked John wrench out his organs for inspection, to bare his skin to count scars, note broken fingers and toes and consider what charms John had bought with each small, private spark of pain.
But then, maybe that is the point: to make John transparent, as he'd once asked.
Some sharpening thing in the dark that has suffered pain says it does.
But he closes his hands around the writhing impulse of that and instead asks, "What real danger could a lone rider in the dark possibly have represented to any of us?" It is not a metaphorical question. Tell him why it mattered this time.
His hands close in on each other. He cups the right, thumb in the center of his palm.
"She saw us."
But even in speaking that, it is as if a cloak is pulled away. Something deeper, a more base fear: She saw me.
He almost laughs. Had he not been warned? That's what it does. Cloaks itself in whatever it must to move you to action, Flint had told him. All that John has made of himself, all that need to control a situation rapidly devolving into chaos, it pushed him one step too far. That rider. That woman. He could have stopped at the first and perhaps escaped notice. Perhaps by the time he had put his bloody hands to Flint's body in the road the pain would have been distraction enough.
There is a silence then that John does not know how to fill. Even what little he has offered feels too much. It is more than he has ever spoken aloud.
In that quiet, the outline of this resolves itself. Part of it resembles something intolerable - a place that doesn't exist anymore, because it was razed to cinders at the behest of a dead woman with the help of a man who had recognized the vanity in this one. It gives him pause, ragged breathing sawing alongside the natural murmur of the ship about them. What is he asking for? And when placed in the same position--
(In another room, Rutyer says I want only what I said from the very start. Friendship between us. Shall I define friendship for you?)
--what part of himself would he be willing to expose?
"She won't be the last one. That is what this is." He raises his focus from the clench of John's hands to his face. "That is the reality of where we are."
This changes nothing John wants to say, but of course, it has changed everything. That is the price. John has seen others like him pay it, over and over and over again. He sees between them cracks, spidering out beyond John's ability to repair.
"What does that mean?"
Between them, the shared concept of reality is bending beneath the weight of this truth. The shorthand between them is blurred, and John doesn't know how long it will take to restore it, to discern the true extent of the damage that has been done here.
"It means that if we're to do what we came here to, that we must be prepared--" he is making some careful motion with his hands, swollen knuckles and the minor catch of light on bits of metal as he turns then over. Easy, it says. This is precisely why they are having this discussion here, now. This is damage that can be moderated. They simply have to understand it.
"To withstand this place and what it will ask of us. That until now, we have been acting with an eye turned toward the preservation of our the roles Riftwatch has defined for us, but that I see a future where we will either be forced to expose ourselves or admit that our efforts here don't actually service this war."
Will he live the rest of his days here in Kirkwall feeling the cinch of a snare? He feels it as Flint speaks. Sweat breaks across his skin as he draws a deep, careful breath. He thinks of Isaac, the invitation that was not an invitation at all.
John straightens, crutch taking his weight.
"Please understand, I do not want this to be known."
It has been said before. I do not want this, before Howell's saw had bit into his flesh. I do not want this life, before being drawn inescapably into the affairs of pirates.
"If I could have ripped these abilities from my blood I would have done so a long time ago. I have no wish to embrace—"
His voice breaks. In that break, the beat of silence, there lives a terrible, unnamed thing. The fear of it drives John's mind in one direction. It takes effort to consider the two options Flint invoked rather than scuttling blindly from one of them.
"I will manage the consequences of this. It won't touch our business here. I wouldn't allow that."
His hand twitches out, but the line of his arm doesn't actually extend from where it lays across his thigh. Just that small motion forward draws a stitch of pain through his side.
The intent registers, even if the action does not. John inhales, grip flexing on the crutch. Attempts at persuasion spin desperately through his mind but for the moment, they settle. He meets Flint's gaze, expectation and apprehension obvious on his face.
There is an urge in what somehow feels somehow both like a surge of relief and a moment he won't easily capture again to say, Let us pretend that nothing happened. He could be blind to what had happened in the road; he could will himself to say I will forget this and we can go on just the same. There are men who would do it, who can be told to swallow pieces of themselves and do it, and they belong in places like this one.
So: "We have come all this way together. You must know that I wouldn't lie to you now. So when I say that I will protect this, know that I will go forward and do so to whatever extent I am able."
What shape will his actions be forced to take in order account for it? What effect will that have on their positions here and the people cinched tight about them by necessity? That he doesn't yet know.
The white-knuckled grip on his crutch loosens. John doesn't lean back against the table, but the tension passes from his body. He doesn't say anything for a long moment, holding Flint's gaze before he inclines his head.
"It won't interfere with our business," John repeats. Every other response is inadequate in the face of what Flint has offered to him. (I believe you. Thank you.)
There is some instant, involuntary flexion in the lines of his face - the flash of something brittle - and a hesitation he can't mitigate before it happens which says, It already has.
There is truth in that reaction. It's nothing John knows. He has become a certain kind of liability. He is quiet for a long moment, feeling the weight of that settle onto his shoulders.
John will manage it. He has been managing this secret for most of his life, and all that's different now is the stakes associated with failure.
"If what we've done pays off in Nevarra, you're right. This place will ask more of us."
If.
"I would not see us give up our investment here."
Now more than ever, the time spent here has to bear some reward. John has given this place a year and some odd months, and now his dearest secret. It cannot all come to nothing in the end.
"Then we're in agreement." He sounds very certain even as his thumb has set at the edge of one of his rings, unconsciously contemplating turning it around and around on its finger. "That's all I needed to know - to verify that we continue to drive this thing rather than be driven."
Decisions can be made as they create the circumstances which require them.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
how come you nevarra go there
The Gallows sits just there in the distance against the flat matte grey of late Kingsway. By some fortuitous coincidence, the ferry from it is just over halfway across the water. They could easily make their way to meet it there at the slip slip and walk straight on, so passing in one uninterrupted line from Nevarra to the Gallows. It will be as if they were never gone at all.
Is that acceptable?
"You and I should see to the ship. De Groot will have something to say about the progress of the refit," Flint says to Silver. Anyway, it does them no good to return all at once.
Which is how the two of them finally find themselves finally diverging in a hired boat hacking speedily toward the Walrus under the power two paid oarmen. Flint sits quietly in the bow. There is something pale and drawn in him as he studies the shape of the Gallows between the crowded lines of merchant and fishing vessels at anchor, but otherwise there are no signs of trip's ill effects. All scratches and the magnificent array of bruising lay under a shirt and cinched belt and the fall of a dark coat, busted knuckles minimized by the heavy rings on his fingers so that there is no break at all in the illusion.
no subject
He is aware of a particular weight hanging over their journey home. John is many things, but he isn't a fool. He can guess at the source of it, even if he isn't willing to do anything but hope Flint's suspicions pass. It doesn't seem unreasonable, considering the chaos they had come out of.
But sitting in that small boat, taking stock of Flint as they are delivered back to the ship, John considers that whatever tension has drawn taut between them will not be released simply by returning to what is familiar to them. The impulse to speak comes to him several times, but they are not alone. So he watches Flint's torn knuckles and holds his tongue, suppresses the urge to spin out conversation away in any other direction.
Of course, once Flint's cabin door closes John finds himself with very little idea of what to say.
"You should sit," is what he decides upon. Certain impulses weigh out over all others. "I can see to what's needed here."
They both know they've come aboard for more reasons than just to hear De Groot's report. There are very few places in the Gallows where they can speak freely, and Flint is in no condition to rig a sloop to take them out onto the water this time.
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"Anyway, you'll have to. I can't stay long. Madame Baudin will say something to her husband if I fail to make our standing appointment." They were meant to be back yesterday and to fit easily back into the places they've arranged for themselves here. He looks to Silver. "But before that, you and I should reach an agreement here. About what occurred on the road."
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"Alright," John answer, tone steady in spite of the thunder of his heartbeat. He leans against the table at Flint's bedside, does not think of the early days of their partnership when they'd spoken in this same position. Much has changed.
But John finds himself floundering, unsure of exactly which approach serves him best. (Which lie is less damaging, which lie insults the bond between them least.)
"It was an ambush," John says carefully. "I don't think anyone is going to be objecting over much to the fate of those men."
This is not about blame. They both know that.
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Then what is?
He has turned the shape of that question over in his mind in the intervening hours since to no end. The road from Nevarra was long and the old fixtures of the ruined Imperial Highway unfamiliar enough that they failed to act as any meaningful guidepost to his eye. But standing in the churn of the Kirkwall's docks, he thought he might have at last determined some direction.
"If any part of our work in Nevarra was successful, the situation there will begin to change quite quickly. Speaker Orlok may act as an appropriate shield between Riftwatch and the world, but there is a very real possibility that I might soon find myself playing a similar role here between certain perspectives and what we might accomplish here. My concern is there," he says, nodding toward the door. "In that fort at the mouth of the harbor. What worries me is that it may require the truth, and that right now I'm not certain I know every part of it."
There is something willing like an invitation in his face: "Am I wrong?"
no subject
There is always a cost. He'd been foolish to think it would begin and end with the blood spilled on that roadway.
"You asked me once who I was," John begins, and then stops. Instinct reminds him there is danger here, that he teeters upon a precipice that he has invested a great deal of energy in try to avoid. "Is the answer I gave then, and all that has passed between us since, is that no longer enough?"
The question is unfair. John knows as he speaks it. What Flint invokes are forces bigger than either of them. Had John stayed his hand on that road, perhaps this would not have ever been an issue. But now, as their handiwork takes root in Nevarra, what John has done, and the secret he's kept for so long, need to be accounted for. The question becomes whether or not John is capable of stalling long enough to find a way that they need not be.
no subject
If it's an unfair question, then maybe it is one in a series.
"Would this be easier if I first told you what I think I know?"
no subject
But there is nothing that makes this conversation easy. There is no way to skirt the edges of this secret without some quiet agony, without fear knifing through him.
"It's as fair a place to start as any."
And a kindness, whether or not Flint intends it to be.
Just like when he had spoken with Isaac, John feels some panicked sense of desperation. It had served him before, but he can't make use of it now without damaging something important. He's bound himself with blood and bone to this ship, this crew, this man before him. It's too late to extricate himself the way he might once have.
no subject
This is not a kindness. It is vulnerability. It is a gap between two pieces of plate, it is tender flesh exposed, it is a small island in the middle of a sea trapped between two forces that would see every feature of it washed away. I will tell you what I need to say, and you will tell me what you want to. I know this.
"You know what occurred when the ambush first was sprung, just as I'm certain you saw me turn and charge the riders. In that moment, I had considered the possibility that we all might be slaughtered there in the road and that our only alternative was to buy the time for the mages in our company to act. I assume the first archer was killed then. I assume there was another. I assume someone ruined the one horse, and that this is when Speaker Fabria raised another to clear the road.
"What followed, I can't say clearly. But there is some... indescribable certainty," he decides, "In being dragged down into a place that wants to kill you by hands that a moment ago meant to do it themselves. It is cold and it is distant and dark, and is it any wonder that when next some other person came on that place that they might be mistaken for something they could not possibly be. It should be easy to forgive. But try as I might, I can't shake the question from my mind. If Ilias and Leander were otherwise occupied, and Isaac still had the capacity to mend me after all was said and done, then who was it that killed that woman who had meant to ride away?"
no subject
The silence stretches. In spite of himself, John tries to think of a lie. He looks into Flint's face until he can't anymore, eyes dropping to his hands, to the cracked window open behind Flint's long-neglected desk.
Yes, John could lie. He could plead ignorance and Flint would accept it. But he sees the cost. He sees what that lie would fracture and knows it to be too great to repair.
"I couldn't let her go," John admits. The confession is drawn from him almost unwillingly, quiet agony belying the steadiness of his voice. "I couldn't risk it."
It's a small admission, but speaking it aloud seems to draw the air from the room.
no subject
Distantly, Flint is aware that he is studying the lines of Silver's hands. There is dirt under his fingernails and in the creases of his travel weary clothes. There is dried mud ground into the stitching of his boots. He hears himself ask, "When else?"
What other opportunities had been too precious to waste doing nothing?
no subject
But then, maybe that is the point: to make John transparent, as he'd once asked.
"Does it matter?"
no subject
But he closes his hands around the writhing impulse of that and instead asks, "What real danger could a lone rider in the dark possibly have represented to any of us?" It is not a metaphorical question. Tell him why it mattered this time.
no subject
"She saw us."
But even in speaking that, it is as if a cloak is pulled away. Something deeper, a more base fear: She saw me.
He almost laughs. Had he not been warned? That's what it does. Cloaks itself in whatever it must to move you to action, Flint had told him. All that John has made of himself, all that need to control a situation rapidly devolving into chaos, it pushed him one step too far. That rider. That woman. He could have stopped at the first and perhaps escaped notice. Perhaps by the time he had put his bloody hands to Flint's body in the road the pain would have been distraction enough.
There is a silence then that John does not know how to fill. Even what little he has offered feels too much. It is more than he has ever spoken aloud.
no subject
(In another room, Rutyer says I want only what I said from the very start. Friendship between us. Shall I define friendship for you?)
--what part of himself would he be willing to expose?
"She won't be the last one. That is what this is." He raises his focus from the clench of John's hands to his face. "That is the reality of where we are."
no subject
"What does that mean?"
Between them, the shared concept of reality is bending beneath the weight of this truth. The shorthand between them is blurred, and John doesn't know how long it will take to restore it, to discern the true extent of the damage that has been done here.
no subject
"To withstand this place and what it will ask of us. That until now, we have been acting with an eye turned toward the preservation of our the roles Riftwatch has defined for us, but that I see a future where we will either be forced to expose ourselves or admit that our efforts here don't actually service this war."
no subject
John straightens, crutch taking his weight.
"Please understand, I do not want this to be known."
It has been said before. I do not want this, before Howell's saw had bit into his flesh. I do not want this life, before being drawn inescapably into the affairs of pirates.
"If I could have ripped these abilities from my blood I would have done so a long time ago. I have no wish to embrace—"
His voice breaks. In that break, the beat of silence, there lives a terrible, unnamed thing. The fear of it drives John's mind in one direction. It takes effort to consider the two options Flint invoked rather than scuttling blindly from one of them.
"I will manage the consequences of this. It won't touch our business here. I wouldn't allow that."
no subject
"Stop. Just stop and listen to me."
no subject
no subject
So: "We have come all this way together. You must know that I wouldn't lie to you now. So when I say that I will protect this, know that I will go forward and do so to whatever extent I am able."
What shape will his actions be forced to take in order account for it? What effect will that have on their positions here and the people cinched tight about them by necessity? That he doesn't yet know.
no subject
"It won't interfere with our business," John repeats. Every other response is inadequate in the face of what Flint has offered to him. (I believe you. Thank you.)
no subject
"Of course."
no subject
John will manage it. He has been managing this secret for most of his life, and all that's different now is the stakes associated with failure.
"If what we've done pays off in Nevarra, you're right. This place will ask more of us."
If.
"I would not see us give up our investment here."
Now more than ever, the time spent here has to bear some reward. John has given this place a year and some odd months, and now his dearest secret. It cannot all come to nothing in the end.
no subject
Decisions can be made as they create the circumstances which require them.
(no subject)
(no subject)