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Rediscovering – relearning – each other was what came next.
James couldn’t believe how much he had forgotten about Thomas. Time and war had robbed him of so many of the little details he had remembered so clearly in the beginning, and what had remained had felt more like a dream than a memory.
They had both changed.
The first night back together, James couldn’t take his eyes off Thomas, lying opposite him in a too-small bed. He was determined to commit the new lines on his face to memory, by looking at them and by touching them…
Thomas smiled and ran a hand over James’ scalp.
“It’s so short,” he mumbled.
A pang of pain – of guilt – went through James. He hadn’t told Thomas everything yet, but that had been the first thing he had told him about – Miranda. It felt like it had been for nothing now, even though he knew it both had always been and would never be. Death was almost always pointless.
“It was easier like this,” James said and resisted the urge to touch his own hair. “I needed it gone after...” He couldn’t finish the sentence, even now. Thomas nodded. “It felt like casting off the remnants of who I had been.” Maybe now he would be able to grow it again. Maybe now he would be able to see himself in the mirror again without flinching, without the deep, icy black descending on him and trying to drown him.
“You can be yourself again now,” Thomas said. For some reason that statement felt like a slap in the face for James. Like a stone wall had suddenly been erected in front of him without any warning.
He reached inside himself and found only emptiness, a void where his identity had been. Silver had truly unmade him – had robbed him of his identity along with his motivation. “I’m not sure if I still know who I am,” he admitted after a moment. “I left Captain Flint behind… but I’m not James McGraw anymore, either.”
“You can be just James, then,” Thomas said. “I’m just Thomas, now, too...”
James realized that Thomas had been forced to cast off his identity, too, and it made it easier. He thought about it for a moment, looking at Thomas as if he would find himself again in his eyes. “Yeah,” he mumbled after a while. He would just be for a while, without being someone. He would search, and find himself again, with Thomas.
Rediscovering Thomas was what James found comfort in. The way their bodies wrapped around each other now, after years of being apart. The way they still fit together. The way Thomas’ hands ghosted over his skin, as if he was scared to break him – as if it wasn’t the other way around, as if what James had done wasn’t going to threaten to break them both. But it was easy to ignore those thoughts, when he was still trying to wrap his head around the fact that Thomas was alive. A living, breathing human under his hands.
The first night back together, sleep only found James slowly – and then he woke in the middle of the night, in a panic, unaware of his whereabouts and confused, until Thomas’ hand found his.
“I’m here. You’re not dreaming. This is real.”
Even though his words were calm and soothing, they only made James’ heart beat faster, but finally, eventually, his eyes focused on Thomas’ worried face.
“How did you know I wasn’t having a nightmare?” he asked. His own voice sounded foreign to his ears, too quiet and too loud at the same time in the small room.
“Because this is not the night for them,” Thomas replied.
James settled back down. He squeezed Thomas’ Hand and searched his face – he didn’t know what for. A memory? A lie? An absolution?
Thomas seemed to sense what he was thinking. “I had nightmares for a long time, too. And I assume some of them even came true, even though I didn’t see it. I saw you and Miranda dead so often that eventually, part of me accepted it as truth.” James inhaled sharply but Thomas shook his head and shushed him before he could say anything. “I never stopped hoping. And I do not blame you for anything.”
“I’m sorry,” James said, almost compulsively, and Thomas smiled sadly.
“Did I not just say that I don’t blame you? We can start again. We don’t have to go back. We don’t have to do anything.” He looked at their hands in the half-dark – the moonlight filtering through the windows was illuminating the small room only a little – and intertwined their fingers. “Stay with me.”
James hadn’t heard words as calm and sweet in a while, and he hadn’t had the urge to actually listen in even longer. He smiled.
It was dawn when James fell asleep again.
Maybe tomorrow he would be able to see the sun again and actually feel its warmth on his skin.
Rediscovering their differences: necessary and welcome and hard all at once.
It was good to know that there were things that had not changed, that they would always argue over certain foods, that not everything was going to perfect all the time.
They had gained new things to disagree about over the years, too.
James wanted to be as far away from the sea as he could for a while, and being with Thomas, being on land, was all he needed – and wanted – to forget. But Thomas... The second thing Thomas wanted to do after getting off the plantation, was to see the sea.
He said he wanted to see it stretch on for miles and miles, the emptiness, the horizon in the distance, and taste the freedom that came with the smell of saltwater.
James couldn’t bear it. For him the sea was coloured red, an ocean of blood. He feared that if he ever stepped near it again, it would swallow him whole and spit him out in the pieces he was already teetering on the brink of breaking into.
Thomas agreed to travel inland with James, content with the rolling green of the land as new-found freedom, and James had never loved him more. It still pained him to know that Thomas was holding back for his sake, especially since he could still smell the tang of the sea wherever they went, even if he couldn’t see it.
So he let Thomas go to the beach alone and waited.
When Thomas returned – windswept and happy – he embraced James tightly. “It was everything I remembered it to be. But it was missing you. I was missing you.”
James held Thomas’ hands in his, feeling his pulse in his wrists, a steadily beating reminder of his survival, and he believed him. He almost apologized again, but held back. They were their own people, and it was better that way. No one was keeping Thomas from the sea anymore and no one was making James return to it.
The sea didn’t hold their future – there was nowhere for them to go out there, no home to go back to – so they turned inwards on the continent. Maybe they would find a new life there.
James was sure that he would eventually want to see the ocean again, even miss it, but for now he wanted to be with Thomas and have solid ground under his feet, far far away from everything that reminded him of his failings.
For now, he would just be.