bakerstreet | Shipping Picture ♡ ｐｒｏｍｐｔｓ

How John can feel so simultaneously lost and found, so seen in such a short space of time is temporarily out of reach. He doesn't put it out of mind, but it's difficult to work his way to a conclusion with James' lips consistently demanding attention. Attention that he finds himself more than happy to supply.

When the other man's words finally line up into a full, comprehensible sentence, it takes him a moment, and then another, to understand them for what they are. And god they're so fucking gentle there's another moment's pause as he swallows down an unbidden lump in his throat.

"I would be lying to you - and myself - had I said I hadn't imagined... something like this. But intended it? No." He's glad for the fact that he doesn't have to explain that, that James already understands well enough. With some effort, he pulls his head back so he can look the man in the eye, cheeks flushed and gaze momentarily indiscernible.

"Yes, it has. And... sparked more."

James will have to ask about what he imagined. His mouth hooks up at the side, his eyes casting down to study Silver's face. He stores the question for later. He has other things to ask now.

"Have you been with other men before?" he asks, calm and searching — a touch warning, maybe. He doesn't want Silver to rush. A genuine curiosity motivates him too. Silver always seemed more interested in schemes than in sex.

The answer to the question is simple, but the explanation is far from it. John's eyes snag on the half-smile and for a moment, he's back to feeling like time is starting to lose all meaning. Had he not walked through the door less than an hour ago uncertain as to whether he would be walking back out alive?

"No," he answers, finally, glancing back up at James' eyes in an attempt to marry up tone with whatever shade he finds there. Curiosity, it seems, and the kind of look he finds almost difficult to comprehend is being given to him.

"No, I haven't. But..." Silently he asks himself why - how - there seems to be more buts this side of developing a fucking conscience. Perhaps he'd be more appalled by its appearance had he not had a hand in putting back together what concerns him now. Whatever Flint had expected, and whatever James is expecting now, he hadn't really returned to the man to shatter that peace he'd been warily describing earlier.

"Thomas?"

James shakes his head, and snorts. "You don't know Thomas." Then it's his turn to regret his automatic turn of phrase. He pinches his lips together, irritated at himself for his own bluntness. This needs a more careful explanation.

Gently, he eases back just enough to put some space and cool air between them. Just enough to ensure they can both think straight. "He has no capacity or need for jealousy. He has my total fidelity, and I his. This...can exist alongside that. I don't propose to deceive him." One eyebrow twitches upwards. He can't stop himself from adding, "Had I sent you away without acting, against my own wishes, he would have been the first to call me a coward."

Despite his wishes otherwise, the cool air the space allows verges on pleasant. Given his thoughts when he arrived, keeping his jacket on had seemed like a good choice at the time. Now, having been both bathed in the heat from the open fire and having existed very firmly in James' personal space, he's half glad for the opportunity to cool down.

"I see," he finally says, slowly, eyebrows raised at the explanation and considers his own interest in meeting Thomas increased twofold. His understanding of relationships as anything other than opportunities to further his own agenda are, he'd admit if asked, based on very few of them. In fact, before Flint, and then Madi, he'd not spent much time considering their merits at all beyond that. To see the possibility of something like this, something offered to him, in its living, breathing form is... astonishing.

"I'm not certain I know what this is but if you - and Thomas - are of a mind that it could exist..." he trails off, unable to put his finger on exactly when James had managed, once again, to smother diversion and misinformation in favour of the truth.

James can see the wheels moving behind Silver's eyes. And he can see him flounder without anything to machinate towards or away from. He recognises the uncertainty: it existed in him when he first met Thomas, it reared up again when he found him again. How to put off the usual logic of win or lose and step into a new way of being?

With a slight wry smile, James notes, "You sound like you do when you're negotiating." It's not bad. Silver's voice has always had a near-magical quality: what he describes settles and shapes reality. It's a pleasure to hear him begin to explore the new possibilities between them. But James doesn't want either of them to occupy the guarded, strategising space of negotiations — not now. His hands come to the lapels of Silver's jacket.

"Stay," he says. "Meet Thomas in a few days. Between then and now — it's up to you. But tonight, stay here." His fingers curl in his jacket lapels and then release. "Take this off."

It's slow, John's reemergence from inwardly trying to understand this new, precious thing that James is sharing with him, the care with which he does noted. He had asked, not too long ago, for James to show him who he is now. The only thing he finds himself lacking a single shred of surprise at is how completely, how thoroughly, the man has taken to doing that. The thought makes him smile openly.

"In my experience," he starts to say as he takes the suggestion on board and shrugs his jacket off, holding it briefly between his hands as he continues, "most things are a negotiation."

The jacket is dropped on to James' chair, the closest available surface, before his gaze returns to the man in question. That wide-eyed, slightly out of his depth expression ghosts across his features again before it's chased off by something else. Something far more heated, more urgent.

Reaching into the cool space between them, he hooks a finger into the neckline of James' shirt to ease him closer, his other hand framing a cheek as he leans in to instigate another kiss. If James would like him to sound less like he's negotiating, perhaps he ought to occupy his mouth with something else. That thought makes him smile, too.

"That's not — mm." Wisely, John interrupts the argument before it can properly take off. James' hands come back to his torso, winding in the looser cotton of his shirt to hold him close as he kisses him back.

The heat and the lack of air and the press of John's body muddy his thoughts. He turns his mouth away from John's lips, into his palm, to nuzzle hot breath and stiff red beard against the web between his thumb and forefinger.

"I wondered if you were dead," he's dizzy enough to say, though he knows he shouldn't. "I wondered if it were possible you could die and I not know."

With his mouth achingly free, John pauses to enjoy the feel of bristles against his palm, forehead resting for a moment at James' temple. He listens and absorbs the words, frowns slightly as he contemplates them from a far more open, far more exposed position than he'd maybe once have liked to. Retreating back to metaphor doesn't seem to be an option, not now he's already started on his perhaps perilous journey into open ground.

"Had I..." he starts to say, pulls his head back enough to drop his mouth into the exposed, weather-worn skin at the side of James' neck. He doesn't leave a kiss there, simply rests his lips against the warm skin as he imagines how that scenario might play out.

"...Madi would have sent word," he continues, pulling his mouth away from skin that still, somehow, tastes like salty sea air and glances up at James, trying to catch his eye. He can imagine it now, her searching her own heart to understand whether James wouldn't want to know and deciding that she hadn't the right to assume it so.

James nods, the movement pressing his mouth closer into John's palm. He knows his gaze is being sought, and for a moment he closes his eyes against it, unwilling to be caught so vulnerable.

He regrets mentioning it. Once it feels like most of the danger has passed he opens his eyes and sighs in a hot rush, turning away from John's hand, his fingers creeping up to his collar. "Yes. I wondered whether she would find me." It would be so easy for a letter to lose its way, to fall from a bag and be trampled underhoof, to be directed to the plantation in Savannah long after they absconded. He lay awake often enough cursing his own lack of omniscience, tortured by not knowing. "It's...not relevant now." He scolds himself for letting the thought stumble out of his mouth.

He ducks his head down and catches John's mouth: brief, gentle. Neither of them need to think about empty torturous nights just now. "Will you come to bed?"

It's not that empathy had been something strictly belonging to theory rather than practice, but John has spent a lifetime not testing his capacity for it. Empathy had required the kind of involvement that had remained undesirable for so many years. But he feels something like it now, solid and very much in practice as he watches with a swell of intimacy James wrestle with his own thoughts. He could point out that he's very much rooted in this reality, still not dead against all odds. But those words don't feel right, don't do justice how suddenly and deeply he'd like to relieve the man of those thoughts.

Perhaps, sooner rather than later, he'll fully remember how much of it he'd developed in such a short space of time. The kiss, as brief as it is, provides an opportunity to square away his own questions for a time he's not so firmly enveloped in this shared space.

"Yes, if that's where you want me to be." And it really is a case of what James wants, what exactly it is that he needs in this moment.

The way John puts it causes a wrinkle of surprise to fold between James' eyebrows. As if James' interest were in question. Of course that's where he wants him.

He'll explore that later, he decides. Along with whatever Silver has been imagining. For now, he just nods. Without releasing his grip on his shirt, he murmurs, "Give me a moment — just to extinguish the fire." He glances up, nods in the direction of a door in the far corner. "Study's through there."

Study, not bedroom. It doesn't occur to him that this sounds strange until he's unwound his fingers from Silver's shirt and stepped back, at which point he adds, "Ah, it's — well, you'll see."

The study is what they call it, but it's a second bedroom: unused, but kept necessarily ready, in case someone should stumble into the house and have the thought, but where does James sleep, if the master bedroom belongs to Thomas? It hasn't happened. It will never happen. Over-cautious from terrible experience, they keep the bed there made up with the second-best linens anyway. The rest of the room is books and a wide, notched table with a collection of cat scratches all along its legs. It's cluttered with papers, cups, a chess board abandoned halfway through a game. Pinned unframed to the wall is a small charcoal sketch of Miranda as she was once, almost unrecognisable in her finery, mouth open in a laugh: there is a small TH signature in the corner.

Edited 2020-04-20 11:48 (UTC)

Adjusting his stance to balance as James pulls away - because, to someone like John, it matters - his attention drifts to the door nestled in the far corner. The fleeting thought that he should retrieve his cane is precisely that - brief. He reasons that he's really not going to need it, the short journey to the door and beyond one that he's certain he can master.

As tempting as it is to keep his eyes on the other man, to keep watching as though he'd like to avoid missing out on anything, avoid breaking this new reality, he carefully limps his way to the door. Stepping into the study and realising imminently what it is that he's supposed to be taking note of, his eyes run a circuit of the room. The bed first, the chess set, the cat scratched table and finally the portrait, complete with initials he can link to their owner.

Eventually, when James joins him, he'll be studying the spines of books, committing to a still sharp memory what they all are.

He's grateful John doesn't ask why the study, why not the main bedroom. James knows Thomas will approve, but still can't bring himself to bring Silver literally into their bedroom without his express permission. It's illogical and he expects Thomas will laugh at him for it, which is how he knows that the gesture is not really aimed at protecting Thomas, and more about protecting himself. Keeping some part of himself private, while he gets used to this new reality.

He's quick to douse the fire and the lamps. The cat winds between his ankles and then slinks off to her own nocturnal business — terrorising mice and moths alike. In the cool, dark quiet, he takes a few moments to settle himself, and to breathe, and then he finds John in the study.

He lingers in the doorway, and takes a selfish second to watch. His mouth curls up to see him so absorbed: of course he would immediately try to memorise the room and find the details. James comes up behind him, spreads a hand at the small of his back. "Not bored, are you?" Most other people would struggle to identify the dry humour buried deep in his voice. Not Silver.

Raising his eyebrows, John glances up to look at James - really? - before finding himself unable to keep up the charade and exhaling his amusement through his nose. He's far from it and is more than certain it doesn't need an explanation, not with the humour he reads in the other man's words.

With a hand anchoring James' by the wrist, he turns until it's pressed flat against his stomach. Yes, the other man's interest in books - in stories - has been as interesting as the stories themselves, but it's not what they've retired to the 'Study' for. It isn't pages that John would like to busy his hands with.

"I have... so many questions. ...for later." As if he has to explain that, for once, he's going to put the quest for those answers aside because there is something else he'd like instead. Something that, perhaps, doesn't require a definitive answer just yet.

"Hm." James nods, thoughtful and serious, even as he inches forwards to back John gently up against the books, their spines nudging into his. "Good." He doesn't kiss him yet, just nudges their temples together, their chests, their hips.

"I have questions for now." His hand slides down to John's waistband, then under the hem of his shirt to brush his knuckles along the hot fuzzy skin of his stomach. "You said you imagined something like this. Tell me what that something was."

"Really?" This time the question does spill from his lips, backed up as he is against a bookcase he'd only seconds ago been studying. It's less that he feels crowded against it and more that he feels framed by James. He briefly considers it's not the worst position to find himself in.

The knuckles at his stomach have been there before, but never in this context. Out of sight, his fingers tug the shirt free of the back of James' trousers, hand slipping to the small of his back. Breath hitching in his throat, he twists his face until his lips are close enough to brush against the curve of James' ear when he next speaks.

"How about I let you know when we're close to what exactly it is I imagined?" It's less negotiation and more foreplay, a reminder that he is stepping into this as an equal, someone who can and will challenge. The very same person who answers questions with another question, though this time the purpose couldn't be further from deflection.

James laughs sharp and quiet, pleased to be thwarted. Pleased, too, to have John's breath tickle his ear. A little shiver runs down between his shoulders. "Very well."

He kisses him soundly, crowding him in tighter and sliding his hands further up his torso beneath his shirt, fingertips pressing in to the solid old shiphand muscle built packed tight about John's ribs. His mouth on his is heavy, pushy, proving something — he's not sure what. His thigh pushes between John's legs, tongue between his lips.

The more James pushes him, the more contradictions bubble up to the surface. John submits and shifts his legs wider but rocks his hips forward against the thigh there. His jaw slackens, lips parting to accept the tongue pressing for access, but both hands eventually tighten at James' waist, strong but pliant, to pull him closer. He accepts and rails against James in equal measure.

Overwhelmed, comforted, aroused... John's mind is struggling to stop bouncing between the three, never sure which exactly is shouting the loudest. Though perhaps what eclipses it all is James' solid presence: unapologetic, confident, unyielding.

Chest tensing in response to the hand roaming beneath his shirt, John groans into the kiss. Silence between them has spanned years, something which he's intent on righting now, however those sounds come.

James enjoys the contradictions. They jar and thrill him. He likes not being quite sure what John will do: where he can push him, where he will give, where he'll push back.

John's noises make him feel animal. He has the urge to lick them from between his teeth. He's breathless when he surfaces for air, trailing kisses down to the spot just below his ear and letting his teeth scrape the skin there — chasing a reaction, another noise.

Eyes falling shut and jaw tilting up, for a moment John can only try his best to suck a deep breath into his burning lungs. His sharp intake of air punches into the spaces between the rustle of fabric separating them, more a gasp than anything. Maybe it's the teeth at his neck, maybe something else, but his shaky, holding on by his fingernails grip of any semblance of self-control is finally wrenched free.

Both hands move in unison, drawn out of the loose confines of James' shirt and bunching at the hem, tugging upwards. Too many clothes is everything he can't wrangle into words above struggling to catch his breath again.

James gets the picture. His hands come up to help: he grabs the hem of his own shirt and yanks it off over his head. He's softer at the middle than he was when he was younger, but he's still stocky and strong, a thick crop of rusty hair spread across his chest and spreading from his navel to the button of his trousers.

He brings John's hands to his torso: here, touch. His own palms frame John's face. And then he remembers that there are scars on his back that John hasn't seen on him before. All across his shoulders and his spine are the thick ridged welts of a cat o'nine tails beating he took some years ago when he and Thomas made their first, ill-fated escape attempt. The experience had only made him more determined not to fail a second time.

He teeters, hands on the very man who put him there, wanting him and seeing, too, the ease with which he could kick Silver's legs out from under him and then bludgeon him to death with any one of the heavy leather-bound tomes within reach.

He steps back quickly, and with a sharp inhale — "I — excuse me. A moment." Quick and blunt, scraping his nails along his scalp to ground himself, his bare chest rising and falling too quick before he can catch his breath.

One moment, everything seems to be sliding into a similar kind of fluid direction that their friendship of old had been. Understanding how to move together without really having to speak about it. John can feel his heart skip a beat as he splays his hand out across James' chest, warm and solid.

The next, he can feel himself slip as that solid warmth retreats. All he can do in that one moment is grab clumsily at the bookcase behind him, scrabbling for some kind of purchase that will save him from the floor. It's a closely fought battle, a book tumbling from where he's knocked it off the shelf he's gripping at so hard his knuckles are white. The resulting thunk is secondary to how incredibly pervasive James' too quick breathing is.

He opens his mouth to ask what the fuck? but it snaps shut again before he can get anything out. A cold trickle of some old, half-forgotten feeling, runs down his back and he realises, frozen in place where he is despite his own heaving chest, that he isn't to follow. Resting his head back against the bookcase he's only just now understanding to be uncomfortable - he hadn't been paying attention before - he frowns, concerned, confused and like he's had a rug pulled out from under him.

"What's wrong?" he finally asks once he's got his breathing back under control, the alternative question of 'are you alright?' never making it close to spoken words. He's got that answer already. Clearly the answer is no.

Damn it. James hadn't meant to knock Silver off balance — he huffs and some small movement in him gives away an instinct to step in and help steady him which he wisely quashes. He stays apart, breathing hard.

"...Just a..." A what? How to phrase it? He sighs, shakes his head. "Someone else's memory." He breathes in deep again, knuckles across his mouth, and turns away, to the bed. As he does, the new scarring is visible for a moment: then he turns again to sit at the edge of the mattress and push his fingers through his hair.

"It's alright," he says, softer, calmer, then beckons with a tilt of his chin for John to join him at the edge of the bed.

John doesn't need to ask whose memory it was - it's a redundant question because he already knows. What he doesn't know is why now it's a dark enough memory to physically rip them apart. That second question becomes just as redundant after he catches sight of the stripes decorating the man's back. The scars shine in the candlelight, illuminated as though specifically for his benefit.

He has never had a problem connecting dots. Once he has the first, he can chart his own path to what tends to be a reasonably accurate conclusion. A selfish, ugly part of him hates that particular skill for a brief moment, his mind rushing through a story that he can't claim wasn't written by him. He can't lump it into the reputation of a man he says he's killed. He had told James that he'd killed Long John Silver, hadn't he? If only it was so simple to step away from that dead king's darkest deeds too. James had spoken of absolution earlier. John knows it isn't possible.

Rather than do as he's been silently asked, he straightens up against the bookcase but doesn't stop leaning against it. His nostrils flare with unspent emotion, jaw tightens as if he doesn't trust himself to speak, and his breath is shaky for entirely different reasons now. But his eyes don't leave James' face.

"I did that to you, didn't I?"

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