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“Again,” Flint says, and watches Silver’s face fall, but he can’t think of that now, not yet, not until this new information has had time to settle into his understanding of this man in a way he can get his mind around. “And faster, this time,” he adds after their first three touches, hoping to push them both past the moment.
The world is a place of unending horrors.
Silver sets his shoulders and his jaw and raises his cutlass into basic guard instinctively, which gives Flint his smile back.
“Better,” he praises, and then steps forward into his advance.
*
In training, the teacher must watch the student closely. For injury or fatigue, for positioning errors that may compound into form problems, for weaknesses that may be exploited by an enemy. Decades of drillmasters and swordmasters in his ears, hours spent sweating in ranks on Navy ships as they all swung through the guard, parry, advance, block, parry, riposte, guard, reset motions of the daily drills, have engraved this into his very bones.
With Silver, close observation has never been a chore.
War and illness and privation have whittled him down to muscle and bone and sinew, all tied together with a grace that is startling in a man who must fight on only one leg. Silver picks up the parry positions quickly, guarding low right and low left, twisting easily at the waist to guard his weak side with the crutch. He’s fluid even in his mistakes and his balance is shockingly good, considering.
Flint surges forward into a beat parry, knocking Silver’s blade back towards his face out of its swing, and Silver staggers back, losing his balance.
“Don’t let me trick you into overextending,” he warns, waiting just long enough for Silver to get his balance back before advancing again, his sword an extension of his arm and his mind, touching here and there with the point, walking Silver through the forms of defense. “If you’re pulled off balance by your own attack, it is then so much easier for me to take advantage.”
“Easy for you to say,” Silver gasps, barely getting his blade around to block a cut, then up to parry an overhand swing, then down again to parry the riposte. He’s all defensive now, but that’s just how Flint wants it. The point here, after all, is to not die.
“Concentrate on your strengths. Use them,” Flint insists, in both his words and his attack, pressing it forward again and giving Silver no time to re-set. “Your speed, your intelligence. You are both faster and stronger than anyone will expect you to be, but your balance will never be good, and if it comes to a shoving match, you won’t win. Move. Pivot. Spin--yes!”
Silver twists away, ducks a shoulder in a liquidly instinctive move that Flint could never teach him and comes around in a perfect counter-attack, sliding inside Flint’s guard long enough that he has to break the pattern to parry. They stand there, locked and grinning, for a long moment before stepping apart.
“That was well done,” Flint nods, wiping at his face with his sleeve.
Silver huffs a little, though he’s obviously pleased, smiling and flushed. “You could have killed me twenty times.”
“More like fifty,” Flint corrects, both dry and accurate. “But you’re unlikely to be facing too many trained swordsmen next week. And if you do find yourself meeting someone with officer’s bars on the battlefield, please, for the love of god, disengage.”
“I suppose that’s comforting. Sort of,” Silver rolls his eyes at him. “Really, though. It’s been a week, and I can tell we’re still practicing basic steps. They have about as much relation to the kind of fighting we do as the Marquess of Queensbury rules do to a back-alley brawl. How is this going to help me at all?”
Flint cocks his head, considering Silver. This cipher of a man, who is perhaps revealing more about his past, without saying a word, than he could ever know. Who understands Flint’s loftier academic explanations of swordplay, who lets Flint indulge himself in them and even encourages them, perhaps seeing how much pleasure it gives him. But does not have any concept of training and its practical effects.
“I am going to pretend to be...oh, I don’t know. Billy. A good fighter, as they go. Big and strong, fearless. Completely uneducated. You are going to fight the way we have been for a week. And perhaps you’ll see. Agreed?”
Silver’s eyes light with curiosity, just as he’d hoped, and he shakes his hair back behind his shoulders, settles his crutch more firmly under his arm.
“Are you sure you want to be Billy?” That grin is pure wickedness. “I mean. Considering.”
“Concentrate, Silver,” Flint warns, but that particular grin has a terrible effect on him, and he can’t help returning it.
“If you turn that sword on yourself, I’ll be forced to intervene,” Silver laughs at him, and he rolls his eyes and shakes his shoulders out and drops into a loose, sloppy fighting stance.
“Jesus!” Silver darts back as Flint arcs a wild, high swing over his head as he charges forward, and with a clang, he meets the strike in the high parry position that Flint had drilled him in over and over. As Flint wrenches the blade around to go for a hard slicing cut at his side, Silver parries again, runs his blade up Flint’s in a perfect glissade and advances inside his guard, ending with the blade at Flint’s throat.
It had all taken less than four seconds, from Flint’s first attack. And now they are still, and Silver’s eyes are huge and startled, and Flint can feel the smile spreading across his face, wide and real.
“You’re not unkillable,” Silver wonders out loud. “You’re just that much better than everyone else?”
“I’ve been doing this for a very long time,” Flint, who has never understood the point of false modesty, points out as he disengages. “Give it ten or fifteen more years. You’ll get there.”
“Unbelievable,” Silver mutters, but does not argue when Flint calls it a day.
*
“You must NOT overextend,” he says again, for the hundredth time, and spitefully knocks Silver back onto his arse with one sweep of his saber. Silver glares up at him from his elbows in the sand. “Your energy is an advantage but you cannot be tempted into action you’re not prepared for. Know your enemy’s strengths and your own weaknesses, for he will surely know them, and plan accordingly.”
“It’s hard to fucking hide mine, isn’t it,” Silver spits, and rolls to his knees before levering himself back to his feet with the crutch. Flint is pleased to see that he never dropped his blade, at least.
“That is just the surface. Optics. It is to your advantage to be underestimated. Use it. Bring them to you, make them play your game, and do not rush to them to demonstrate your lack of experience in the areas where you have none.”
Flint storms a few steps off, frustrated. Silver is only just now starting to know enough to know how little he knows, and Flint has no time. Not enough to shove decades of experience and agonizingly-won knowledge into his curly little head, not enough to find the words to make him understand.
He turns to look, and Silver is back up, glaring at him.
“You have power,” he tries again. “Strength that even I cannot match and skills that serve you well. But you must know their boundaries, their limitations, or you will be lost. Force the game onto your terms, or do not play at all. Draw your opponent in and make him think he has won, and then strike. Do not go head to head with someone who has spent decades waging blunt war when you can only stand on uncertain ground. That is madness.”
Silver’s glare has cleared into something more thoughtful.
“Are we still talking about swordsmanship?” The question is almost gentle, and Flint stares at him, then stomps back into guard position.
“Again,” he grates out, and lunges into his attack.
*
Time is telescoping on him, hours spent in camp managing logistics and battle plans stretching long, training with Silver seeming to fly by in mere moments. He’s started arriving at the bluffs hours before their scheduled practice time to move through his practice forms and drills alone, letting the silence and the sea soothe the rough, raw places in his thoughts. Late in the week, clouds roll in, and he finds himself marking his footwork in dim, indirect light, only halfway paying attention as his body follows all the long-familiar patterns.
The world is a place of unending horrors.
He knows it well. He’s been an agent of those horrors himself. Is it any wonder that John Silver would be wary of revealing the details of his own demons to one who was so often named demon himself? Or perhaps that’s not quite right, he thinks, shedding his coat, then moving again.
Perhaps it is not so much a matter of trust as of pain, and of new beginnings, and he has a rough outline of Silver now, the whole man. He is lettered, and well-spoken, broadly literate, but without the accent, affectations, or skills of a formal high education.. Brilliant, but untrained. Perhaps the son of a minor landowner. Perhaps a parson’s son, given his distaste for things religious. Cruel things had happened to him, the world had not been kind, he had fled that unkindness, and then he had drifted onto the Walrus, and his new story had begun. The terrible details of those cruelties may not be Flint’s to know. It may be enough to know they existed at all.
Silver, when they had first met, had charmed and flirted and beguiled as a reflex, with anyone who so much as looked his way. As slick and insincere as a whore’s promise of love, his wide smile and easy words and pretty face were as effective as any of Flint’s growls and glares and silences when it came to creating safe distance. He lied as easily as breathing, his stated priority was always and only himself, and loyalty as foreign a concept as courage. But he has not been that way with Flint for a long time, now. Flint has had his honesty, he knows it, in every area but one. And his loyalty and courage, Flint cannot question.
And maybe that is enough.
It is not as though, he thinks wryly, he ever had cause to hope for anything more. And just to punish himself for that thought, he moves into an intricate attack pattern, blade spinning and whirling, attacking on high line and then low, a great leap of balestra into a lunge, riposte and counter-riposte, drop to the ground for passata-soto, four imaginary enemies now dead, and up again into coupé, coupé, and finally, rest.
He pants for a long moment, mind clear and quiet for once, and relaxes.
“It’s really not fucking fair that you’re putting in extra practice,” Silver’s voice says mildly, and he’s so startled he trips a little as he spins and has to flail his arms to keep his feet. He’s glad for the distraction once he sees him, though.
They’ve been shedding layers of clothes and armor for nearly two weeks, now, coats and belts and lies, and today Silver is in simple black, his hair loose down his back, slim and sharp as a blade himself as he watches Flint with a little quirked smile. Flint swallows past a suddenly dry mouth, and shakes his sword at Silver warningly.
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to sneak up on a man with a blade?”
“Someone may have, but I certainly wasn’t listening. And after that display, I was fairly sure you’d need to at least catch your breath before slaughtering me by accident.” Silver hops closer, already moving more easily and surely on his crutch than he ever had on the leg, the hours of training informing his muscles and balance and keeping him moving smoothly.
“You’re early,” Flint says, for want of any answer to that.
“Not as early as you.”
Flint tips a shoulder, bothered by any intimation that he might be neglecting the invasion. “Things are well in hand. Assignments are known, supplies are being stocked, crews readied. I’m sure I wasn’t missed.”
“I missed you.” And that’s the kind of honesty he’d been thinking of before, and it has him tongue-tied and confused, searching about for the second sword, as unsure of his footing here as if he were standing in quicksand.
“Right, well. We should get to it. Only two days, now.”
“We who are about to die salute you,” Silver says mockingly, raising his sword in salute. He is kind enough not to comment on the flinch Flint cannot suppress, but his face is drawn into more serious lines as he begins his first advance.
The first few passes of their spar are made in silence, and Flint can feel a difference now, in how Silver is fighting. His face is hard, his eyes intent, and he seems to be throwing himself into the movements with real commitment. Flint speeds up his own attack accordingly, pressing his advantage, forward and forward until he cuts past a late parry and his blade rests against that mane of hair, fractions of an inch from the skin beneath. Silver glares at him, shoves his blade away.
“Again,” he mutters, and Flint obliges him. And again, and again, until finally Silver finds the rhythm perfectly, parry and riposte and he moves backwards, drawing Flint forward and forward and yes, there it is, and Flint blocks his perfect strike neatly and they are staring at each other, solemn.
Sudden fear, from nowhere, arches through Flint and his stomach clenches and his heart pounds hard against his ribs. In two days, they go to war. He could lose...everything. Again.
“The world is a place of unending horrors,” he says, without thinking or meaning to, and makes a quick, jerky step backwards in shock as John Silver’s face just...collapses before him. Rage, shame, agony, all suddenly twist his features from calm to livid in an instant.
“I will not be pitied by you,” he howls, and leaps at Flint, all training forgotten, a wild swing coming in so wide that Flint merely steps out of its path, stunned speechless. He gets his blade up to block the next stab, just as sloppy and unrefined, and then his own instincts take over and he darts in and seizes Silver’s sword wrist in an iron grip, pulling it away from them, seizing his shoulders with his other arm, his own blade dropped and forgotten in the grass. They are chest to chest and he can feel the heaving of Silver’s breaths against him and for a wild moment worries that Silver is going to bite him, the way his teeth are bared and he’s twisting against Flint’s hold.
“Stop, STOP!” He is pleading, he knows, and then his own anger flares, because what the FUCK is going on, here. “Fucking stop NOW. I hold no pity for you, you idiot. Would I drill some pitiable creature in warfare and swordplay? Trust him at my left hand, guarding my weak side? Respect his words and ideas in the most important war of my life?” Silver has gone still, might even be listening. “I have spent two weeks trying to impart all I can to you so that you will live, no matter what befalls us in this campaign. Because no matter what your past might declare to me were I to know it, the John Silver I know today is worthy of a crown.”
Silver’s absolute motionlessness brings their position into strong relief, suddenly. Pressed together from chest to knees, his arm around Silver’s shoulder and their arms extended in a parody of a walz. Silver’s forehead against his shoulder. He can’t see his face, but his breathing is starting to calm.
“I’m sorry,” Silver says suddenly, his voice tight and thin. “That was...uncalled for. I have been waiting for you to press me on this, and it...I cannot. But I thank you. For stopping me, before I could do any harm.”
"I think we both know that that is quite unlikely anyway," Flint points out, and Silver's shoulders rise and fall, maybe a shrug, definitely an acknowledgement.
Flint does not let him go. He’s burning warm where they are touching and it’s so stupid, but for just a moment more he wants to savor it. This idiot in his arms, and how Thomas and Miranda must somewhere be laughing at him now, he thinks wryly, now that he is finally dealing with an inconvenient, if beloved, temper.
Perhaps it is this that keeps him from moving when Silver lifts his face and kisses him.
It’s unschooled and sloppy, desperate, but absolutely sincere for all that, and Flint’s shock lets Silver press his advantage, freeing his hand and getting it up around Flint’s neck, pulling him closer to deepen the kiss. Silver’s face is a blur of black and white and blue before his startled eyes, and he’s tense and quivering-taut against Flint’s body, his mouth hot and open and urgent, biting sweetly at his own, and oh, goddammit.
With a growl, Flint hooks a leg behind his knee and takes him down to the ground, following him down and making sure he does not land too hard, looming over him braced on his own hands once he’s prone in the grass. He can’t quite bring himself to scowl, but he lifts his head away when Silver reaches for him, and tangles a hand in his hair to hold his head still. His heart is pounding so hard he can feel his pulse in his wrists and throat, and Silver is wild-eyed and flushed and staring up at him.
“In another time, in another place, I would fight for you,” he says, his own voice raw and strange in his ears. His hand moves in that hair, stroking; an indulgence. Silver turns into it, catlike, and his breath catches. “I would mount a campaign that would be the envy of Hannibal, the dearest desire of Alexander, and you would be mine. But here, now. This is not for us.” He has known it since Silver and Madi’s eyes had met and lingered, since well before their touches had become more than fond.
“And if I should decide to wage my own campaign?” Silver asks defiantly, eyes narrowed up at him, mouth still red from that kiss, and Flint smiles at him honestly, and actually chuckles when Silver bites vindictively at the thumb he tries to rub across his lower lip.
“I believe we have spoken at length on the subject of overextending yourself.” He rolls off of Silver, sits up, gives himself only the tiniest fraction of a second to bend around the aching pain of loss hollowing out his middle before standing again.
“Did you mean it,” Silver asks suddenly, and Flint doesn’t turn, doesn’t look. Just tiredly reaches for his sword, to clean it and put it away.
“Mean what?”
“About the respect. And trust between us. Though I have not told you what you asked, all those details I left behind me long ago?”
“I did,” he confirms. “Every word.”
“Then I do not believe we can possibly lose,” Silver says, and Flint has rarely heard him so sure, and when he turns, he is sitting in the grass, covered in sand, holding out a hand. Waiting for Flint to take it, and help him up, and walk at his side as they go to start a war for freedom.
and then Silver goes and has dinner with Madi and has that whole conversation with her with that WILDLY DREAMY LOOK ON HIS FACE the end.