bakerstreet | Shipping Picture ♡ ｐｒｏｍｐｔｓ

[for your perusal: one two three four - I was vaguely picking them with post-canon in mind, but if they spark something else then go for it!]

( these are all perfect! I’m just headed to bed but I’ll write up a starter tomorrow ^.^ )

( ooc: hope this is ok! I left the location pretty vague in terms of where exactly Flint is but please do let me know if you'd like me to change anything! also wrote it up in prose but if you prefer action tags I can match that :) )

The door John stands at can't just be a door. No, this door has to be the door, the journey to it both long and arduous. In some ways, perhaps he's distantly aware that his route to this particular door has been far longer than the physical journey itself. Years long, each passing week stretching away from Skeleton Island, from Savannah, and yet it's never far enough.

He isn't free. At least, not in a way that allows him to truly live. He'd unmade Flint and left what he'd hoped to be a different man, a man at peace, in Savannah. He'd killed Long John Silver in the hopes that the part of him that had become so soundly intertwined with Flint could be laid to rest alongside him. But that hadn't been enough.

Betrayal, he knows intimately, has never left such a gaping wound, has never affected his own sense of identity down to his very core. He used to know who he was, didn't he? His best kept secret, the kind of secret that had been the shield he'd crafted to protect himself from a world full of terror. Scant few had come close to seeing past it, had come close to truly knowing him.

He knows just as well that nothing will fill this empty void he's been carrying around with him, heavy in ways that are unbearable on his worst days. Death had suggested itself as a conclusion on more than one of those occasions. But, even then, he could feel that death wouldn't be enough, wouldn't be enough for him.

So, he had started in Savannah, asking the right questions, carefully collecting answers that had taken him on what still feels like the hunt for a ghost. Terrifying, and bordering all-consuming. Obsessive, much like the ghost he's searching for. All roads had led to here and so he stands, eyes affixed almost unseeingly to this door.

He doesn't know how long he stands there, mind drifting back at an alarming speed, replaying the last time he'd seen the man he's here for. In all likelihood, he has come here to die, to provide an opportunity for retribution, an opportunity for closure. To be put out of this unending misery. It's selfish, of course it is. But he stands here all the same, a hand slowly, shakily, reaching up to rap knuckles against the wooden grain of this door.

[delightful! I prefer prose, it's cool. question: how present would you like Thomas to be? he could be alive and present, alive and temporarily absent, or dead. if alive and present, I'm happy to write for him in addition to Flint.]

James thinks often of Miranda. He sometimes feels he's living her life. When she lived in that cottage inland on Nassau, she complained to him that her voice hurt from not speaking. Now that same scratchiness lives in his throat more often than not.

But he's not a total recluse. Not enough that a knock on the door is a shock. Probably one of the merchant captains from St Augustine come with questions — all this time and he's never gotten away from sailors. Never quite got inland far enough. A couple of the captains rely on him for advice on courses and new perspective on their business decisions. It's a living.

It's not a living he feels particularly enthusiastic about, though. Particularly not when it interrupts him while reading. He snaps his book shut, brows twitching down in annoyance. "¿Qué quiere?" he demands, hoarse and irritable, out of his mouth before he comes to the door. What do you want? The deadbolt in the door clangs as he unlocks it.

He's set to continue a tirade of quick, irritable Spanish warning his visitor against calling at this hour. It dies in his mouth when he sees John there. Something shifts in his face like a change in light. He stands silent and open-mouthed in the doorway.

There are bits of Captain Flint that will never go away. A hardness in the face and hands, wind-chapped and weathered. A vicious cleverness in the eyes. But other parts of James are changed. His hair is more grey than red at the temples. He doesn't wear any earrings or decoration any more. And for once, there's not even the slightest bruise or cut visible on him, and his clothes are clean and simple: no salt-stiff captain's finery here. There is one new scar visible, though: long and deep and old, bisecting his left eyebrow.

The look on his face, though, is pure Flint. A blank mask behind which he is furiously calculating. Flicking through which question needs to be asked first while his fingers twitch at his hip (no weapon) and his eyes scan John (is he armed? new scars? is he still on the account?). A quick look behind him. This cottage is far enough from the main road but carts still occasionally trundle past within viewing distance, even at this time. And John must have asked questions in town to arrive here.

James exhales hard through his nose and steps back, his decision made. "Whatever you're here to do, do it inside." A rusty but still quick part of his brain is thinking: just two steps backwards and he can grab the poker from beside the fire.

( hmm, completely up to you! would dead be too bleak?! really depends on how you'd like to play flint! this is my first silver/flint rodeo :3 )

John doesn't flinch, but perhaps he should. Visibly trying to hold himself together on the doorstep, he struggles silently against the unforgiving tide of memories, of years old accusations and the complicated twist of something in his gut. Every waking hour - and there had been a lot of them - had been turned towards this moment and, now that it's here, he can feel himself passively accepting whatever it is that Flint wants to level him with.

Expression open, raw again, as honest as he thinks he's ever had the capacity to be, his eyes search the once familiar face in front of him. There's little calculation behind it, a distinct lack of a plan or direction in the face of that blank mask. Once upon a time he knew a man who wore that expression. Reading Flint had become like second nature, grew more effortless the longer they had walked the same path, together. And now? Now he isn't certain. Now he's lost.

But then Flint breaks into that heavy, tense silence and John, for all his messy thoughts, steps unevenly into the space the other man affords him temporarily as asked. The cane he has come to use to aid him reverberates dully against the floor as he passes, attention drawn shamelessly to the interior of the cottage. The prosthetic leg, hidden beneath his plain clothes, seems to ache just as deeply against memories from a lifetime ago as the rest of him does.

He almost asks what Flint thinks it is he's here to do, what fresh hell he estimates he's brought to his door, but he cuts himself off at the very last moment. Questions, he's sure, he hasn't the right to ask, and answers he's certain he doesn't deserve.

"I killed him," he finally speaks up as he stares blindly at an open book, his own voice raspy at best and his back still turned on Flint.

"Long John Silver is dead."

[haha I was trying to work out how dead would impact on flint! also: my first rodeo too, nice. I'm gonna go for a sort of happy medium with thomas being still alive, still around, but currently away, to keep the focus on these two a little more without turning flint into too much of a grieving rage machine.]

For a moment Flint thinks Silver means someone in town. For a moment, he thinks of Thomas — away for the month on one of his pilgrimages to the Jesuit community two day's ride away. He's unsteady with horror for a second, readying his hand for the poker...and then Silver finishes the thought, and he's being fucking metaphorical.

He feels relief. The world start to make a little bit more sense, though he's still struggling to grasp what John is here for. He watches him intently. Imposed upon this cottage Silver looks like a hallucination, but James knows that when he dreams of him he always gets some detail wrong. He couldn't dream this.

Flint's eyes follow the same path as Silver's, around the interior of the cottage, wondering what it must look like to new eyes. Books, maps, the unwashed dishes from two solitary meals. A half-written letter that James started to Thomas yesterday and now feels the urgent need to rip from the desk before John can draw close enough to read — he resists the instinct. A one-eyed black cat easily mistaken for a shadow on the windowsill until she rolls her head up to fix Silver with a hostile stare.

"Is the world better for it, do you think?"

( oh man, well, I'm enjoying the hell out of this so far! sounds perfect to me! ♥ )

Movement out of the corner of his eye snags his attention and John, otherwise adrift, meets the cat's unfriendly gaze. Yes, he's sure he's thoroughly deserving of that disdain, that judgement. Averting his eyes, they find Flint instead as he turns to face him, back now to the rest of the cottage and its interesting details. Perhaps he should have given the other man more of an opportunity to decide for himself whether this meeting ought to take place, but John already knows that the uncertainty of Flint not showing had driven him here instead.

Eyebrows draw together at the question, thoughtful. It feels familiar, a not-forgotten thing, Flint asking questions that force him to inspect what exactly it is that he thinks so that he can heap misdirection and subterfuge on top to protect himself. At least, that's how it started, and perhaps how it had ended despite his best efforts. He hasn't come here to lie.

"I don't know. I don't recognise the world. ...I don't recognise myself."

It's the truth, the only truth that he knows and can share with one of the two people who had managed to pierce the veil enough to reach beyond all he offers on the surface. He's not sure what that is, anymore.

"I thought I'd stopped trying to understand it..." but I haven't. I can't doesn't leave his lips. Eyes dropping away from Flint - the only way he knows how to refer to the man in front of him, despite trying to free him from that name, that man - he fixes his gaze upon a painting hung on the wall.

"...you can't. Instead, you came here," Flint finishes for him, voice cool and accusatory. "Did you think I could help you recognise yourself again? Make sense of the world again?"

He could do that once. His greatest talent was reshaping the world around him through force of will. Not anymore. "The man who could do that doesn't exist any more. You made it so he couldn't exist anymore. So what the hell are you doing here?"

"No," John returns quicker than he'd meant to, shaking his head and holding up a solitary, bared palm - the one not holding steadfast to his cane. Exhaling heavily and trying his utmost to re-order his thoughts, he takes a moment before he tries again.

"No, that's... not entirely true."

Perhaps part of it is exactly as Flint suspects, but there's something else that John had wanted, still wants. Something he needs to see for himself. He can't and won't apologise for what he'd done to Flint, to Madi. How he'd cut their war off at the knees. Both of them still live and that... it's something he'd choose again, were time returned to that point and he had that very same opportunity laid out before him.

"I came to see you. I came to see for myself-- to ask you if you're happy. I think about it a lot."

The question is so outside the realm of what James could have ever expected that he takes a few moments to actually parse it. It leaves him off-balance, staring at Silver in astonishment.

He could answer straightforwardly enough: that there are infinite different shades of happiness, and he has experienced some of its rarest forms. That Thomas is as constant and frustrating and fierce as ever, but that he's also irreversibly changed from his time under the Savannah sun. That James is equal parts alarmed and delighted by every sign of age he counts on both his and Thomas' faces — every line, every silver hair a sight he never expected to see. That the world is turning like a ship's wheel spinning out of control as the ship itself lists. That James has failed at his life's work, but life won't let him go, and that paradox is more than enough excitement these days.

All that quivers just beyond saying. Wanting to be said. But he can't find a way to get it out of his mouth, when the sight of Silver has shocked him into old angry habits. Doubtless Thomas would be pacing behind him right about now, waiting for the moment to step in with a hand at his shoulder, to interrupt the rising crimson fury — well, damn Thomas, he's off arguing with his beloved priests. If anything, the knowledge that he should slow down and listen just provokes Flint further and puts more venom in his voice when he snarls, "It didn't cross your mind, while you were thinking about it, that you might jeopardise my peace by coming to check on it?

"My happiness is only relevant to you as a means by which you might be absolved. You came here to have your conscience stroked back to sleep."

"I did. I thought about whether it was the right thing to do. It's been... years. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that stories... told secondhand, third-hand... it wasn't enough."

Guilt is something he rarely had time for, before. The world was harsh enough to survive without having to carry around extra baggage. An extra weight to hold on to while fighting to cling to life. But everything had changed, everything turned on its head. He found a crew, a purpose. A captain. A friend. The guilt is his own to shoulder and asking Flint to lighten the load is an ugly thought.

Shifting where he stands, the movement borne more of the nervous energy that's building again rather than physical discomfort, his eyes haven't left Flint's face since he started speaking. He'll face into that fury, weather it for as long as he's given it.

"I haven't come looking for absolution. Believe it or not... I'm genuinely interested in the answer."

It's not really what Silver says that gives Flint pause, but the way he holds his gaze. Not many people can stare back when Flint directs his anger their way. He'd forgotten how well Silver meets him.

"...There isn't one," he retorts. Still angry, but softer, simmering. "The question's too broad."

His eyes trip up and down Silver's frame once more, and then he moves past him towards a tall cabinet of plates and tankards, and an array of bottles racked next to it. He plucks one of the bottles from where it sits and pours out two measures of dark, fragrant wine, his back to Silver the whole time. Anyone not schooled in Flint's manner would read it as rude: Silver should know enough to recognise that presenting his back is a surprising offer of vulnerability.

"Sit," he barks. "And ask something more specific."

Flint asks for something more specific but John, for the moment, is full of silent gratitude that his visit hasn't been cut short. Whatever the reception he had anticipated, be it anger, violence or point blank refusal to even open the door to him, he had hoped for time to talk. Had hoped for it before he'd realised he was letting himself run away with the idea. A dangerous place to go.

As the other man seems temporarily willing to suffer his company he does as he's been ordered. Careful as he limps his way to a chair, he props his cane up against the arm and finally sits. He doesn't remove his jacket, doesn't care to presume he knows when he will be outstaying his welcome. But this is... certainly something.

The chair is surprisingly comfortable and gives a good vantage point to watch how Flint moves. John makes the most of the opportunity to observe freely. His gaze sweeps across broad shoulders and down the other man's back in an unhindered path led by curiosity. How does Flint hold himself? Is it the same as before? Does he look unburdened - or at the very least less burdened - of his rage at losing Thomas now that he has the man back? And... where is Thomas?

"What are you reading?" he finally asks, eyes still trained firmly on Flint's back and not shifting away even as he's making a move to turn around. He'd spotted the book as he'd been invited in and, though it's not a specific question about the man's happiness, it is still related. It would have been impossible to work so closely with Flint and not understand how much pleasure books brought him and, apparently, still do.

Flint shoots him a look over his shoulder, evidently judging the choice of question.

"Ovid's Metamorphoses." He's comes by and sets down the two cups of wine on the low table by the fire. He's poured out pirate measures: the drink threatens to overflow both cups. He takes a seat opposite Silver, and pushes the book along the table to allow Silver to see. The book is not a translation, but printed in the original Latin. "You likely know some of the stories — Narcissus and Echo, the Minotaur, Ganymede, Pygmalion, Orpheus and Eurydice..."

He was never taught Latin. He's read the Metamorphoses before, in English and Spanish translation. The Latin is new. Thomas is teaching him, as he taught him Spanish. It's far slower: perhaps it's harder, or perhaps Flint is just older. "You didn't come here to ask about my books."

"I know you enjoy books," returns John, and it would be matter of fact if not for the warmth in his tone. As if it's a perfectly reasonable answer to Flint's statement of why he's not here. His curiosity sticks, eyes running over the the unfamiliar shapes structured into passages of writing. John has never been the educated kind of intelligent, but he can at least acknowledge what education provides. For a start, being able to comprehend anything written on either of the two pages currently on show.

Nodding his thanks for the wine, he wraps his fingers around the cup and brings it to his lips, recognises with a smile the measure for what it is. The wine itself is heady, thick against his tongue and clings to his tastebuds long after he's swallowed. Eventually, he nods his agreement that perhaps it hadn't been the question that he'd really wanted to ask.

"You have Thomas back."

It's still not an entirely complete question, more an invitation to elaborate as much as Flint would like to. Once upon a time they had been close enough that John would have simply asked. Much has happened since then. They had talked about Thomas such a long time ago, before Long John Silver had seen it fit to prise open that particular avenue to explore. Even now, John isn't certain which motivation had come first - his genuine care for Flint, for his survival, or an opportunity to open up more choices, should he need them. In the end, they seemed to equate to the same thing.

James' fingers twitch on the rim of the cup. After a moment, he nods. But rather than a yes or a no, he says, "You've never met him."

He offers it thoughtfully, mulling it over as he takes a sip of wine, mulls that over too. It seems strange to him that two of the most influential people in his life have never exchanged a word. Perhaps it's for the best. They might not get on.

"He's away. There's a monastery not far from here." He doesn't give too much away on his face, but a little quirk in his brow gives away a faint, tender exasperation. "He makes a habit of visiting. For spiritual conversation — to have arguments I will no longer have with him, in other words." Beloved, infuriating Thomas. An idiot free-thinking egalitarian Protestant who gets sullen about having to fit in with the prevailing Catholic theology of Spanish Florida. James has begged him to be more subtle, but even after Savannah Thomas doesn't have it in him. And yet he's adored at that damn monastery. Something about Thomas just has that effect on people, however illogical.

Again, James wonders what he and Silver would make of each other. This time, a new and more alarming prospect emerges: they might like each other.

"Is it coincidence that you're here in his absence? Or did you time...whatever this is...to avoid him?"

Listening in rapt silence, John has taken to quietly watching Flint again. Towards the end, they'd had more conversations like this. In fact, he remembers those conversations far more keenly than he remembers others. The contrast yawned so wide that it had been the difference between night and day. The difference, he had assumed, between Flint and James.

"I'd like to meet him," is all he says at first by way of answer, his timing purely the coincidence that Flint had first suggested. Though perhaps there is some good fortune in Flint being alone. John can't be certain how honest he could have been in front of anyone else. He takes a restorative sip of his wine at the thought before pushing himself onward.

"Whenever you used to talk about him..." he says, shaking his head slightly in something verging on disbelief, "it was like talking to a different man. And I..."

He trails off, brows tightening into a frown and eyes drawn to the tabletop as he loses his way in those memories. Darkness, he remembers that. But he remembers with perfect clarity the days he saw Flint smile. The days where he stopped looking haunted, if only for a moment. At the time, John had been convinced that those particular days had lifted his own spirits simply for the proof that whatever path their union was taking them down together, there was a way back out to the light on the other side. He had to believe in that. But now... now he can call it exactly what it is.

And how could he not want to meet Thomas?

"To this day, I've never met anyone like you. How could I not want to meet the man you fell in love with? Who you were burning the world down for?"

"Perhaps because I was burning down the world for him," Flint clips back, neat and dry. "You're the most intimate surviving witness to what I was. It wouldn't surprise me if you'd dread meeting his eye, knowing what I did in his name."

That's more than he planned on saying. He's slightly shaken to hear Silver talk about love. They approached the subject frankly when they were close, towards the end, but there's a gap between then and now. That word in this place cuts close to the bone and makes him feel skinned of his usual protections.

Partly because he wants to know, and partly to ensure he's not the only one who looks vulnerable, he asks, "...and Madi?"

The idea that he might dread meeting Thomas doesn't cross his mind until the moment it falls from Flint's lips. Feeling out the jagged edges of the concept, he finds himself disagreeing. No, his curiosity now outweighs the deeds of their shared past. In fact, the only barrier he sees is Flint himself, and his wishes. Those he will respect, even if his track record suggests otherwise. At least, until he can talk him around into seeing his point of view.

But it's the mention of Madi that draws his gaze up from where it's been fixed on his cup of wine in contemplation. Catching Flint's eye, he takes a moment to delve into why the man is asking. He arrives at the conclusion that it's a fair question, given his own. Perhaps his explanation will shed some rough light on his own existence these past few years. Dragging a hand through his beard, he casts around for words to share with this man who had come to know Madi, even like her, John thinks.

"Do you remember what I said to you... that day?" The day he had unleashed his own plan upon Flint's war - on Madi's war, too.

"That I would wait?" He'd shared the same words with the only two people in the entire, dangerously teetering world, that he'd ever promised to wait for in the entirety of his life to that point. He's still waiting, still not forgiven for what he wrought upon the life of that war and, in turn, upon their relationship.

Of course Flint remembers. It's perfect and vivid in his mind. His lashes flicker in the firelight as his eyes dip down. The social instinct is to say I'm sorry, as on hearing of the death of a loved one, but he interrogates the urge: is he sorry? Only partly. Is he surprised? Not at all.

To some extent, it's what John deserves. Madi wasn't made to forgive such violations "I see," he says, and takes a drink to give him more time to put the words together.

When he knows what he wants to say, he laughs: very quiet, surprised, just a breath. "I feel some pride in her. I'm glad that of the three of us, one of us...is as constant in that war as ever. It would be her, of course. Her commitment was always the purest." He doesn't say it, but it plays out in his voice: he misses her. For all that life without a cause is safer and more peaceful, he misses the company of crusaders.

Stopping short of instinct forging a response for him, John bites his bottom lip in an effort to stem the sudden onslaught of emotions at Flint's response. It's a complicated mess of sensations that leaves him feeling much like he's been struck at point blank range with cannon fire.

He isn't certain what to focus on first, Flint's pride or the undercurrent of missing Madi. It would be an understatement to simply agree that he misses her too. She had come to find him, after he'd explained what exactly had happened to Flint. When he'd tried to explain why he'd done what he had. But he's still waiting for a seemingly insurmountable chasm between them to be bridged. He'd said forever and he'd meant it.

"We do still talk." But his betrayal is suffering a long, protracted, drawn-out death.

"And I find myself living in hope," the only brightness against a life with long shadows from the past cast across it. Perhaps it's foolish, to cling to it, but the alternative is what he's been fighting tooth and nail to keep himself away from. Despite it all, he smiles.

"Otherwise I don't suppose I would be here either."

At that, James has to smile. It's tiny, easily missed, and quickly hidden behind his cup. When he lowers the wine back down to the table his mouth is as stoic as ever, but some glimmer of amusement remains in the depths of his eyes.

"Hope," he says. "That's one way of putting it. Balls like lead shot, there's another."

Exhaling his amusement, John's fingers rest lightly at his cup of wine should he need it. He'd learned early in life that placing expectations on anyone other than himself was a mistake. Yet here he is having expectations exceeded all the same. Another time perhaps he'd inspect the phenomenon more closely, but he allows himself the space to enjoy the moment instead.

"Thank you," he eventually says, drawing that cup of wine closer to himself again, punctuating his sentence with a sip. His amusement has evaporated but his expression remains soft and uncharacteristically open. He truly hadn't tracked Flint down to be disingenuous with him but he's certainly not thanking the man for likening his balls to lead shot.

Flint shakes his head. He doesn't want to be thanked for allowing Silver to be here, or to listening to him. It's not any kindness or softness in him that accommodates him, but weakness.

Were Thomas here, of course, it would be easier to remember that softness and weakness are easily confused, that James has a terrible track record at differentiating the two, that he always assumes the worst of himself. But Thomas isn't here. Old habits are easy to fall into.

"I won't say you're welcome." He grimaces, glances out of the window. It's dark out. "...You walked here from St Augustine?" he asks, a note of unsurprised exasperation in his tone. It's a long journey on foot, even with two of them.

long john silver | black sails

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