Would he have been happy alone, tucked away on a plot of land in Antiva? The answer might have been yes, once.
"Maybe. But I've come far past the point where I think I could have been content with such an arrangement."
Unspoken: I think I'd be lonely That had never been a consideration before, but is now. The man he'd been once has been severed from him completely, starved into nothingness and dropped into the sea.
"No," is a gentle thing - not an apology for asking, but an admission of the fruitlessness of the question in the first place. Why ask it at all? He doesn't know the answer to that either. "I don't."
He uncurls his fingers from the bottle's neck. Bracing himself on the chair's arm, Flint carefully lowers himself into it.
John is not a healer, nor has he wished to be. (It's always complicated to yearn for some kind of magic, covetousness giving way inevitably to loathing.) But he feels some twinge of regret now at the limitation, watching Flint's labored movement.
"I can't imagine it compares, giving up the possibility of that life to this loss."
The words come carefully, as cautiously as Howell had once been when peeling bandages back from John's skin to observe the wound there.
"If I can halve the pain of this for you, so we can better see a way forward, I'd do so. Without question."
No less than Flint had promised him. No less than they had been doing for each other all along.
His mouth pulls, briefly crooked. To make up for it, he takes another drink and shifts as if to find some more comfortable way of sitting - not because the ache in his side is so significant, but because he is somehow equal parts fatigued and restless. Finding any arrangement which appeases one upsets the other.
Is it really so far removed from that idea of Antiva? It is, in part the full loss of an imagining already long supplanted - the last lingering shape of a thing first formed in a private study in Tevinter trimmed away.
"I know." But— His thumb at his temple, pushing; forefinger scuffing along his brow line. "I trust some direction will reveal itself by the time we reach Kirkwall. If not before."
There has never been any doubt that they will find a new direction. The burn of conviction in Flint's voice, the promise made in a narrow back room (I'm going to burn down that fucking house.) lives as a lodestone in John's chest. Yes, they will find their way forward. But it doesn't ease the bitterness of the loss.
A few comfortable beats of silence pass. John drains his cup, swallows past the acidic sting of the alcohol. When he sets the cup back on the desk, the action could be mistaken for a silent request for it to be filled again, if John didn't follow the motion by levering himself upward to round the desk.
His attention rises from where its been drawn down into the cup. The habitual arrangement of his features is brittle enough that the more unguarded injury lurking behind it shows briefly through in his momentary bewilderment. His hand falls away from his face as Silver comes around to him.
Hip braced against the desk, John catches hold of Flint's hand to interrupt it's trajectory where it might have returned to the arm of the chair.
"Only what I promised to return," John answers, as he draws the braided loop of grass from his pocket with one hand, Flint's hand still clasped in the other. Drier now than it had been, held lightly between John's fingers, but intact.
In the intervening hours since tying it to his wrist, it's become such a delicate thing. It looks like it might come unwound in the fingers if handled too long. Under close examination, he imagines it would be a simple thing to spot the fractures in the drying shoots and where the weaving - done absently, under hands with a lifetime of practice at tying knots but inattentive regardless - is ready to burst open given enough provocation. Its survival depends on being put in a drawer, or wrapped in a handkerchief and stored at the bottom of a chest. It's a thing that will come to hinge on the security of being treated tenderly enough to be forgotten.
In the circle of Silver's fingers, he turns his hand - touches his wrist, thumb to bone.
"Keep it," he says, looking up from the fragile loop. "I wanted you to have it."
To be given even this humble bracelet is different now, when the place it was harvested is destroyed beyond repair. Yes, it is only a small token of grass, woven from a dead woman's garden. It is not bright with magic. It maybe crumble to dust within the month, if John is not careful with it. But there is a weight to it. John has the sense that if Flint had passed over some vital organ the reception of it would strike John to be the same.
The bracelet is turned once, very carefully, between John's fingers before he pockets it.
"I'd thought it might bring you some comfort," John admits quietly. The echo of gratitude comes forward from the place where they'd stood in the dark on a road in Nascere, trading protections against all expected dangers. It writes itself across John's face as he looks down to the hands, Flint's bare wrist.
"It does." From the rough prickle in his voice, he means it in the way a cut drains pressure from a wound does - unglamorous and painful. "That's why."
What is that loop it if not a piece of a place that had already been hammered into a own kind of totem. Nascere was a home built over the image of some other other life. If that loop goes into a desk drawer or the bottom of his sea chest, then it becomes a grave. A relic whose relevance is only to him and the place in which it's been buried.
How exhausting it is to memorialize things. To put them in dark places on the hope that they won't fall apart rather than to live with them.
They are not so far removed from the past where John walked in to the raw, snapping mess of Captain Flint clutching the lifeless body of his quartermaster. John remembers the remove from which he'd considered the tableau, how his mind had spun first to possibility rather than the pain of the man in front of him. But now—
"I am more than content to hold it on your behalf," John tells him, eyes lifting from their clasped hands. The light pressure of Flint's thumb over his pulse occupies some fraction of John's attention, hyperaware even as he watches Flint's expression. "I can't say I'm entirely unconvinced it didn't save my life."
There is a story John could tell. It would even be a true one. But diversion would muddle what feels like the more pressing point between them.
"But I wouldn't want you to—"
John's voice breaks. It is difficult. It is difficult to find the right words when it matters that they are genuine, instead of smoke and distraction.
"I wouldn't want to rob you of something that could ease this."
The sound he makes on exhale is part laugh, part sigh, and part brittle edge crumbling under force.
"I don't think—" The line of his expression smooths then slides crooked again, untethered as if he's missed the hook he meant to hang it on. Trying again: "I don't know that it's a thing to be eased."
He would have been satisfied, he knows, if what had happened in Tevinter over a decade ago had taken a different shape altogether. If Nascere had been folded back under the wing of authority as it had been meant to according to Thomas' (to their) direction. He might even have been in part satisfied by disappearing back into the obscurity of the Imperium under the veil of Ashe's would-be pardon. He would have been a different person, and he wouldn't have known better.
What difference would the dirt those things had been built on matter then?
But it had— by a method of slashing every other part away, come like a limb to be significant. 'Tell me what it's like, being there,' had been the question, and he'd thought less of the blue harbor and more of Nascere's dark red earth. Digging his fingers into it. Planting things.
His grip on John is quiet, gentle even in the press of the thumb. Steady in the way his face isn't.
"It wasn't made for me." That place or the woven loop. What difference does it make. "Take it."
Edited 2020-10-30 00:55 (UTC)
after an embarrassing amount of time futzing around, at last, a paltry tag
Some urge to contradict the sentiment wrestles it's way through John's mind. But what comes to him is by turns too clumsy and too sleekly-crafted, and both are discarded. Neither are acceptable.
The pain here is familiar to John. He recognizes the way it writes itself across Flint's expression, suffusing each word he speaks. The agony of it is nearly a tangible thing, as present as the fever-warm heat of Flint's skin around the trio of claw marks in his side. John's hand lifts to cup Flint's cheek, palm against the bristle of his beard and fingertips settling along his jawline as John looks into his face.
It startles him. Or wrenches at last against something otherwise torn loose and untethered, the crooked lines or his expression flexing briefly as if for a moment, despite his fingers curved at Silver's wrist and every part of this otherwise, he had forgotten to be prepared for any intimate thing beyond being reliably within arm's length of one another. It carves down through the scattered haze of the preceding hours. Silver's fingertips are rough and warm and demand, for at least a split second, his full attention.
Being fixed to any single spot, he realizes, is exhausting.
With an ragged exhale, Flint gives into the curve of John's palm. Let's himself lean into it, winded.
There is nothing but that, for a moment. Conversation narrows to Flint's breathing, the stroke of John's thumb along his cheek, the warmth of Flint's fingers circling his wrist.
John has no platitudes to offer. He cannot promise that all will be well. He can promise Madi and Flint both that they will put this war back together, but that is a different sort of comfort. It falls short, spoken aloud when they're still trying to take stock of what's been lost to them. Whatever he says to the men is a wholly different matter, separate from what he's willing to offer the pair of them.
At a point, it seems as if John means to say something. (Unspoken: Let me ease this, tell me what to say that would staunch this wound. The instinctive certainty that there is something that can be said doesn't fade, despite knowing otherwise.) But he bends carefully, kisses first Flint's brow, and then his mouth.
Any admission even passing close to I don't know what to do is the relief of being gutted—the give of built pressure spilling out of him, all bitter and dark and helpless—, and there is something near to that divulged in how he leans into the shape of John's hand, in the slow and unmeasured quality of their kiss. It doesn't repair anything. It doesn't undo anything. But what a consolation and it is to bleed all of it out to him rather than alone to the dark - equal parts frustrated and wanting to.
For a moment, he breathes against him—the sharp tang of the cheap spirit loud in both their mouths. Then turns his face deeper into John's palm to press his lips to the lines scored (and healed over) there. Slides his fingers higher up his wrist to hook his thumb just under the battered coat cuff. It was just a place. It was just land. It was people and opportunity and the potential for security, but it isn't starting over even if it seems so.
There are other islands, but none of them would ever be Nascere. None of them would have Miranda (Barlow) Hamilton's little house, nor her garden, nor would they have the brothel he and Max gambled their fortunes in. None of them would have the soaked blood of so many pirates and otherwise to bind the land back to them.
John takes the measure of this loss in again and again, redefining it, circling to map out the jagged edges of a raw wound, note how far the pooling blood has spread. (He thinks of waking up to the aftermath of Howell's surgery, limb gone, pain thundering at the edges of his mind and the detached notion that everything he'd ever hoped for had been taken from me along with it.) Flint's mouth at his palm in tandem with the hitch of his fingers up along John's wrist is like a tug at the end of a line; John feels the pull of it in his chest.
I'm truly sorry, John doesn't say. What does that condolence come to?
"Is this better?" softer, some faint unsteady edge in John's voice. Unspoken also: You don't need to say it.
The line of his mouth and the press of his thumb doesn't gentle, but stills. From the palm of his hand, Flint looks at him - some vicious steel point buried in the offcast shale. The lopsided conflict of it must show in his face. No, and it won't be. Yes, because there is some sense of unburdening in the honesty of the thing.
With some sense of drawing disparate pieces together and holding them briefly in a clenched fist, he says—
"Right now," which is the most honest version of it.
An answer they'd traded before, knowing the the measure of comfort or ease in any given moment isn't lasting. But maybe it will make the next day more bearable. (Had that not been so before?) John's fingers curl lightly against his cheek, marking the conflict in Flint's expression and what it gives way to.
"Alright."
Alright to the tune of So we'll make this last, so we'll stay here. Here with Flint's mouth hot against the fading scars of his palm, his thumb over the beat of blood in John's wrist, the bristle of his bread under John's fingers. Alright in the same breath as Whatever you need.
Wait. Just wait and be here like this. Here is an invitation to pause, to linger, to do nothing but breathe warm into the palm of John's hand and allow himself to be some tangled, difficult thing. It would be fine to be arranged this way for an hour or two. For at least a handful of minutes. He has been doing nothing at all for hours, and this is a better reason to continue in that vein than the numb scattering unfocus that has dragged behind him like an anchor since—
Instead, under the curl and scuff of fingers, he asks, "You're not concerned?"
Yes, John is concerned about what happens when they return to Kirkwall. Everything they'd discussed, all their plans, will need to be realigned. The shape of the future they'd wanted is irreversibly altered. The three of them will need to take stock and reconsider the way forward, without the foundation of Nascere to build upon.
But that is no different than the kind of questions he's held in his mind for years now. The parameters have changed. But as to the rest—
"I have no concerns as to our ability to put this back together," John answers softly. He thinks again of Madi lifting the maps from the floor, her face as she'd studied them. His hand drifts, thumb setting against the cut of Flint's jaw as his hand spans his neck.
From beyond the cabin comes the sound of the ship's bell to mark the hour. In another, says something too practiced to be quieted by anything, the watch will change.
He draws back then. It's a small thing—his thumb retreating from under the jacket cuff and the tilt of his face straightening from where he'd been leaning into the press of fingers. It's not a separation. Rather, he takes stock: of the points of contact between them, of John settled against the desk, of the cabin, and the ship's sounds.
After a beat, from out the shadow cast by John's shoulder— "We've been spread too thin."
In turn John's hand shifts further, falling to the bend of Flint's shoulder, thumb set at the line of his collarbone. The slight straightening doesn't take him far, but realigns some minor pressure in his shoulder.
"I know."
Striking the balance between Riftwatch's goals and their own has demanded more than either of them might have anticipated when they'd first arrived in Kirkwall. Taking higher positions hasn't eased that either.
"But going forward we can narrow our focus. And we won't be making our case alone any longer."
John is still of the opinion that Madi's presence will help them, that she'll be able to sway people neither of them will reach.
And what he'd discussed with Petrana will be of use to them, after they'd unspooled it accordingly. All the conversations where they'd considered how to rally people behind them has come to this point, where they've had a demonstration of how many people would follow them out into the world.
For a moment, it's as if he might lapse back into silence under the flat square of John's hand. His thumb is still there, careful across the bend of his wrist—
"We should tell them," is abrupt. "Julius and Averesch. Nell Voss. Rowntree. Put then in a room and clarify what exactly is at their fingertips."
Because he's right; there are two options available to them. They must either narrow the point of their attention, or make use of the numbers at their disposal.
It is abrupt, but John follows the leap in logic. He had been considering it, so it stands to reason Flint's reasoning would follow. They're all three of them considering assets, how best to use what's close at hand. There is a deep inhale, but there isn't a flinch.
He thinks of Petrana, her ash-soft voice in the garden, discussing those same names. He thinks of Flint's thumbs smoothing across his palm as John said, I can see no other purpose for it at this point than to put it to work.
"Madame de Cedoux offered to make introductions for me with Julius and Rowantree," John says, tone even, as his fingers nudge beneath the collar of Flint's shirt. "There's no reason to delay, but I'd like to pursue it with some delicacy."
Measuring that instinct against Petrana's and finding it to be a match, some shared recognition of the value of having some unseen advantage. At the very least, it would be a silent piece of leverage for Flint to wield going forward.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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"Maybe. But I've come far past the point where I think I could have been content with such an arrangement."
Unspoken: I think I'd be lonely That had never been a consideration before, but is now. The man he'd been once has been severed from him completely, starved into nothingness and dropped into the sea.
"You don't imagine I'm tempted by it now?"
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He uncurls his fingers from the bottle's neck. Bracing himself on the chair's arm, Flint carefully lowers himself into it.
hums indecisively about dialogue
"I can't imagine it compares, giving up the possibility of that life to this loss."
The words come carefully, as cautiously as Howell had once been when peeling bandages back from John's skin to observe the wound there.
"If I can halve the pain of this for you, so we can better see a way forward, I'd do so. Without question."
No less than Flint had promised him. No less than they had been doing for each other all along.
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Is it really so far removed from that idea of Antiva? It is, in part the full loss of an imagining already long supplanted - the last lingering shape of a thing first formed in a private study in Tevinter trimmed away.
"I know." But— His thumb at his temple, pushing; forefinger scuffing along his brow line. "I trust some direction will reveal itself by the time we reach Kirkwall. If not before."
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A few comfortable beats of silence pass. John drains his cup, swallows past the acidic sting of the alcohol. When he sets the cup back on the desk, the action could be mistaken for a silent request for it to be filled again, if John didn't follow the motion by levering himself upward to round the desk.
"I've something for you."
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"What is it?"
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"Only what I promised to return," John answers, as he draws the braided loop of grass from his pocket with one hand, Flint's hand still clasped in the other. Drier now than it had been, held lightly between John's fingers, but intact.
no subject
In the circle of Silver's fingers, he turns his hand - touches his wrist, thumb to bone.
"Keep it," he says, looking up from the fragile loop. "I wanted you to have it."
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The bracelet is turned once, very carefully, between John's fingers before he pockets it.
"I'd thought it might bring you some comfort," John admits quietly. The echo of gratitude comes forward from the place where they'd stood in the dark on a road in Nascere, trading protections against all expected dangers. It writes itself across John's face as he looks down to the hands, Flint's bare wrist.
no subject
What is that loop it if not a piece of a place that had already been hammered into a own kind of totem. Nascere was a home built over the image of some other other life. If that loop goes into a desk drawer or the bottom of his sea chest, then it becomes a grave. A relic whose relevance is only to him and the place in which it's been buried.
How exhausting it is to memorialize things. To put them in dark places on the hope that they won't fall apart rather than to live with them.
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"I am more than content to hold it on your behalf," John tells him, eyes lifting from their clasped hands. The light pressure of Flint's thumb over his pulse occupies some fraction of John's attention, hyperaware even as he watches Flint's expression. "I can't say I'm entirely unconvinced it didn't save my life."
There is a story John could tell. It would even be a true one. But diversion would muddle what feels like the more pressing point between them.
"But I wouldn't want you to—"
John's voice breaks. It is difficult. It is difficult to find the right words when it matters that they are genuine, instead of smoke and distraction.
"I wouldn't want to rob you of something that could ease this."
no subject
"I don't think—" The line of his expression smooths then slides crooked again, untethered as if he's missed the hook he meant to hang it on. Trying again: "I don't know that it's a thing to be eased."
He would have been satisfied, he knows, if what had happened in Tevinter over a decade ago had taken a different shape altogether. If Nascere had been folded back under the wing of authority as it had been meant to according to Thomas' (to their) direction. He might even have been in part satisfied by disappearing back into the obscurity of the Imperium under the veil of Ashe's would-be pardon. He would have been a different person, and he wouldn't have known better.
What difference would the dirt those things had been built on matter then?
But it had— by a method of slashing every other part away, come like a limb to be significant. 'Tell me what it's like, being there,' had been the question, and he'd thought less of the blue harbor and more of Nascere's dark red earth. Digging his fingers into it. Planting things.
His grip on John is quiet, gentle even in the press of the thumb. Steady in the way his face isn't.
"It wasn't made for me." That place or the woven loop. What difference does it make. "Take it."
after an embarrassing amount of time futzing around, at last, a paltry tag
The pain here is familiar to John. He recognizes the way it writes itself across Flint's expression, suffusing each word he speaks. The agony of it is nearly a tangible thing, as present as the fever-warm heat of Flint's skin around the trio of claw marks in his side. John's hand lifts to cup Flint's cheek, palm against the bristle of his beard and fingertips settling along his jawline as John looks into his face.
it's gr8 10/10
Being fixed to any single spot, he realizes, is exhausting.
With an ragged exhale, Flint gives into the curve of John's palm. Let's himself lean into it, winded.
no subject
John has no platitudes to offer. He cannot promise that all will be well. He can promise Madi and Flint both that they will put this war back together, but that is a different sort of comfort. It falls short, spoken aloud when they're still trying to take stock of what's been lost to them. Whatever he says to the men is a wholly different matter, separate from what he's willing to offer the pair of them.
At a point, it seems as if John means to say something. (Unspoken: Let me ease this, tell me what to say that would staunch this wound. The instinctive certainty that there is something that can be said doesn't fade, despite knowing otherwise.) But he bends carefully, kisses first Flint's brow, and then his mouth.
no subject
For a moment, he breathes against him—the sharp tang of the cheap spirit loud in both their mouths. Then turns his face deeper into John's palm to press his lips to the lines scored (and healed over) there. Slides his fingers higher up his wrist to hook his thumb just under the battered coat cuff. It was just a place. It was just land. It was people and opportunity and the potential for security, but it isn't starting over even if it seems so.
(It doesn't undo anything.)
no subject
John takes the measure of this loss in again and again, redefining it, circling to map out the jagged edges of a raw wound, note how far the pooling blood has spread. (He thinks of waking up to the aftermath of Howell's surgery, limb gone, pain thundering at the edges of his mind and the detached notion that everything he'd ever hoped for had been taken from me along with it.) Flint's mouth at his palm in tandem with the hitch of his fingers up along John's wrist is like a tug at the end of a line; John feels the pull of it in his chest.
I'm truly sorry, John doesn't say. What does that condolence come to?
"Is this better?" softer, some faint unsteady edge in John's voice. Unspoken also: You don't need to say it.
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With some sense of drawing disparate pieces together and holding them briefly in a clenched fist, he says—
"Right now," which is the most honest version of it.
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"Alright."
Alright to the tune of So we'll make this last, so we'll stay here. Here with Flint's mouth hot against the fading scars of his palm, his thumb over the beat of blood in John's wrist, the bristle of his bread under John's fingers. Alright in the same breath as Whatever you need.
no subject
Instead, under the curl and scuff of fingers, he asks, "You're not concerned?"
no subject
Yes, John is concerned about what happens when they return to Kirkwall. Everything they'd discussed, all their plans, will need to be realigned. The shape of the future they'd wanted is irreversibly altered. The three of them will need to take stock and reconsider the way forward, without the foundation of Nascere to build upon.
But that is no different than the kind of questions he's held in his mind for years now. The parameters have changed. But as to the rest—
"I have no concerns as to our ability to put this back together," John answers softly. He thinks again of Madi lifting the maps from the floor, her face as she'd studied them. His hand drifts, thumb setting against the cut of Flint's jaw as his hand spans his neck.
no subject
He draws back then. It's a small thing—his thumb retreating from under the jacket cuff and the tilt of his face straightening from where he'd been leaning into the press of fingers. It's not a separation. Rather, he takes stock: of the points of contact between them, of John settled against the desk, of the cabin, and the ship's sounds.
After a beat, from out the shadow cast by John's shoulder— "We've been spread too thin."
no subject
"I know."
Striking the balance between Riftwatch's goals and their own has demanded more than either of them might have anticipated when they'd first arrived in Kirkwall. Taking higher positions hasn't eased that either.
"But going forward we can narrow our focus. And we won't be making our case alone any longer."
John is still of the opinion that Madi's presence will help them, that she'll be able to sway people neither of them will reach.
And what he'd discussed with Petrana will be of use to them, after they'd unspooled it accordingly. All the conversations where they'd considered how to rally people behind them has come to this point, where they've had a demonstration of how many people would follow them out into the world.
no subject
"We should tell them," is abrupt. "Julius and Averesch. Nell Voss. Rowntree. Put then in a room and clarify what exactly is at their fingertips."
Because he's right; there are two options available to them. They must either narrow the point of their attention, or make use of the numbers at their disposal.
no subject
He thinks of Petrana, her ash-soft voice in the garden, discussing those same names. He thinks of Flint's thumbs smoothing across his palm as John said, I can see no other purpose for it at this point than to put it to work.
"Madame de Cedoux offered to make introductions for me with Julius and Rowantree," John says, tone even, as his fingers nudge beneath the collar of Flint's shirt. "There's no reason to delay, but I'd like to pursue it with some delicacy."
Measuring that instinct against Petrana's and finding it to be a match, some shared recognition of the value of having some unseen advantage. At the very least, it would be a silent piece of leverage for Flint to wield going forward.
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