Work Text:
“Solomon–where is he?” Thomas looks behind him, brow furrowed, squinting through the Savannah sunlight at the small group that escorted him there.
James looks back as well, hand still on Thomas’s neck, thumb working back and forth along his jaw. “Who?”
“Solomon, he... he said he’d come with you,” Thomas says, eyes finding James’s again as his grip tightens on his hips. “He said he’d bring you here.”
“The foreman?”
Thomas frowns, reaching a hand up to cup his face. “One of your men,” he clarifies. “Your quartermaster, he said.”
James freezes, searching Thomas’s eyes for any hint he may be mistaken, for any hint of a lie he’s grown too accustomed to searching for. “John,” he chokes out, scratching his dirty nails on the back of Thomas’s neck. “His name was John.”
Thomas looks at him with despair, eyes wide and face slack. “He’s dead?” There’s a fear there James has never seen before and never wants to see again.
He shakes his head before tucking himself under Thomas’s chin. “He’s well. Or will be, eventually. He always manages.”
Thomas cradles the back of James’s head. He kisses his temple and James lets out a sigh he’s been holding for the past eleven years. “Perhaps you don’t know him as well as you think, then,” Thomas says, and James feels the words rumble in his bones.
“I don’t want to talk about this right now, can we just–” he breaks off, turning his head into his lost lover’s neck. He draws his arms tight around Thomas’s too-thin middle, pressing a kiss to the muscle of his shoulder. “Fuck, I can’t believe you’re really here.”
“It feels like a dream,” Thomas agrees. They spend ages like that, holding each other in the field, until it’s time for them to return to one of the large houses for the workers as the sun dips below the horizon. The lodgings are nicer than James would have ever expected, a parlor, a kitchen, and two men to a room. Thomas’s roommate is a kind man, younger than both of them, and he vacates the room when he learns who James is.
James breathes out an oath against Thomas’s lips as he’s pushed against the door and thanks god for small kindnesses.
James rouses to Thomas trailing his fingers down his chest well before dawn, cheek pressed against his shoulder. Every time he wakes he has to remind himself that this isn’t some cruel dream, that he actually gets to have this. Thomas presses a kiss to the side of his neck and hums, eyes still closed.
“I miss him,” he says with a sigh, and the sorrow in his voice wakes James up immediately.
“Your father?” he asks, having told him of what happened on the Maria Aleyne just the day before. Thomas slides his hand to fit perfectly against his ribs and scoffs, butting his forehead against James’s cheek.
“Never. He can rot in hell.” James smiles at that, feeling much the same. What follows prompts a much different reaction. “John, I mean. Or Solomon, as I knew him.”
The silence stretches between them for a minute, James struggling to control his breathing under Thomas’s arm. “How did you come to know him?” he asks, feeling rage and sorrow and heartbreak. His voice trembles, and he can’t look at Thomas because he knows the pity he’ll find there.
“He wrote me.” Thomas yawns, rubs his eyes. “Told me you were still alive, told me everything that was happening in your world. That man has a way with words that matches you or I.” Thomas moves down and kisses the top of James’s chest, lips gentler than he feels he deserves. “I miss trading stories with him. I can see why you love him.”
They hadn’t exchanged many words about his quartermaster and perhaps his silence was the most telling. He’s spent weeks dwelling on their last few days together, and he still hasn’t quite reconciled everything within himself. “Thomas,” he starts, voice wary.
“Don’t,” he chides, moving to blanket James’s entire body with his own. “You know I’m not the jealous type. Denying him is hurting you, I can see that much. And judging by the words he and I have shared I’d love to meet him, if nothing else.” He reaches to stroke the frown from James’s face, a sad smile coming to his own. “When we leave this place, I want to find him.”
“Thomas .”
“James ,” he counters, pinching his cheek. “You need this.”
James closes his eyes and tilts his head back, linking his hands on the small of his lover’s back. There’s a lump in his throat he tries to swallow past, and his voice is thick when he responds. “He lied to me. He lied to you. I don’t know if I could ever trust him after what he’s done.”
“You did before.”
James opens his eyes to frown at Thomas, who sports a confident smile. “You may not have told me about him, but he certainly told me about you, unless all of that was a lie as well. Though it seems to me he couldn’t have fabricated the story between you two. The evidence of its effects is laying right here in front of me,” he says, poking James over his heart. “You learned to trust him once. You can do it again.”
Their escape doesn’t require as much planning as other endeavors James had undertaken in his life, and they were soon on a ship to their long-abandoned home. There was some comfort returning to the town he was born in, where no one knew of Lord Thomas Hamilton’s quiet retirement from politics or his own expulsion from service. The small blessings of Alfred Hamilton’s desire not to cause waves.
Thomas comes home on a blessedly warm mid-summer day to James holding a letter addressed to him, glaring at it like he could no longer read. “This is Silver’s handwriting.”
“I’m aware,” Thomas responds, leaning in for a kiss as he takes the letter from his lover’s hand. “I wrote him first.” He trails his hand along James’s waist as he retreats to his small study. James follows, radiating anxious energy.
“Why?” he asks, as Thomas hangs his light coat on a hook beside the door. Their home is spare, with both of them getting re-accustomed to the concept of owning and keeping things, but it suits their needs. There’s a crease between James’s brows that Thomas leans in to kiss away before he moves to his desk.
He settles into his chair, back facing the window. He folds his hands over his stomach as he leans back. “I told you some months ago, did I not? I missed him. And he did too, if the words in his letters are to be believed. I hardly see the problem here.”
James’s mouth twitches as he stares down at the floor. A million questions race through his mind, so he settles for the easiest. “How did you even find him?”
Thomas fiddles with the corner of the envelope, sliding his nail under the flap, watching James’s face twitch as his fingers threaten to open it. “I started in Nassau. I figured there must be someone there who might help. Max seemed like the logical place to start despite the animosity between them, since she was the one who told John about the plantation in the first place. Once she made sure my own letter made it to him, when the door to continue our communication was opened to him… Well we both know our John’s never been a man of few words.”
“He isn’t–” James stops himself, nostrils flaring. He isn’t ours, he wants to say, but he can’t make the words leave his mouth. “I can’t believe you would tell him where we live. How can you be so sure he doesn’t still want me dead?”
Thomas looks at him with pity he’s managed to avoid all this time and sighs. “James, dear... He never wanted you dead in the first place.”
Summer gives way to a harsh winter and winter gives way to a gentle spring. James should have seen this coming, knowing both of them, but he’s still blindsided by it. Thomas seems more active than usual, cleaning up the sitting room and the kitchen with the excuse that it was a little bit of spring cleaning. The air coming off of the ocean is warmer than usual this time of year, so James believes it, though he’d later call himself a fool.
He looks up with minor curiosity at a knock on the door later that night, winter’s last touch manifesting in a slight fog on their windows. Thomas is launched from his seat before James can even ponder aloud who it might be.
The door opens with a creak. “Better late than never, yes?” says the voice from the other side of the door, and James thinks he heard wrong. And then Thomas beckons the man in with words he doesn’t hear, and then John Silver is standing in their small parlor.
Thomas reaches out to shake John’s hand. He looks good, James thinks, and he can feel that familiar lump in his throat again. Better than he had when they were together to be sure, and James mulls over what comforts he might have had in the time in between. He doesn’t notice John had been staring right back at him until his attention is called away.
“A pleasure to officially meet you,” Thomas begins, and then shakes his head with a laugh. “What in the world am I doing? Come here,” he says, pulling John into an embrace he sinks into willingly. They clutch at each other and James is at a loss for words, heart twisting at the way John buries his face in Thomas’s shoulder. It’s like they’ve been waiting to know the other was real for their whole lives.
Thomas pulls back just enough to get his hands on either side of John’s face, just long enough to sigh out, “God, look at you,” before John is surging forward to kiss him.
James shifts awkwardly in his seat, completely forgotten for the moment. They share each other’s breath and he’s unable to look away no matter how hard he tries. He knows how Thomas feels better than anyone, and he's struck by the thought of what John may feel like.
John rests his forehead on Thomas’s chest when they break their kiss. He looks up at Thomas with a dazed fondness before he comes back to himself, casting a frantic look at James, stammering out, “I’m sorry, I didn’t think, I just–”
Thomas strokes John’s shoulder slowly, smiling down at him. “Trust me, James is well aware of how irresistable I am. Let me show you to your room so you can get settled and I’ll call you down when dinner is ready. I’m sure we have much to discuss.”
John nods, reaching down to grab his dropped bag a moment too late, scowling when Thomas snatches it from under him. “I carried it here, I can carry it up a flight of stairs.”
“John, I’m well aware you’re not an invalid, but you are a guest, so I’ll treat you as such. Come along!” Thomas pats James on the shoulder as he leads John upstairs and John’s own unforgettable gait stops next to James’s chair. He’s staring into the fire now, refusing to look at a ghost he’d tried to leave far behind him.
The broad hand placed on his shoulder does little to soothe his nerves. “I missed you,” John says, voice as unsteady as his steps when he follows Thomas a beat later.
Thomas returns a couple minutes later after a hushed conversation with John and a concerning bout of silence. James is up to meet him in the kitchen, already started on fixing dinner just to have something to do with his hands. He hasn’t felt the urge to break something so strongly in at least a year. He isn’t going to break his streak now.
“Why the fuck is he here,” James hisses as Thomas closes the door behind him. His lover gives him a withering look before turning to take down an apron from a hook on the door.
“You know perfectly well why he’s here.”
“What, his letters were so seductive you called him here to deliver?”
“That’s not– Well. Perhaps part of it, but no.” Thomas finishes tying the apron around his waist and comes to rest his hip on the counter near where James is cutting vegetables. “He’s here because I know you’ll never come to terms with what lies between you if he isn’t right in front of you.” Reaching forward to push a lock of hair behind James’s ear, he continues, “I know you’re never the one to take the first step. I figured I’d give you a push. Or at least, bring in the man who will take that first step for you.”
James leans his head into the hand still resting on his cheek with a sigh. “I don’t know if I can let him,” he admits, voice rough.
Thomas pinches his cheek gently and presses a kiss to his forehead. “Try, though. If not for yourself, for me.”
James nods after a moment, drawing slightly away to continue his dinner preparations. He sniffs the stock he’d been preparing, trying to work through an overwhelmed haze. He remembers the first letters they’d shared over a year ago and wonders how much John has changed in the two years it’s been since he last saw him. “How long has this been going on between you? How was I completely unaware of how you felt for him?”
“You never wanted me to talk about my letters with him. Anyway, I wasn’t fully aware how I felt until he was standing in front of me.” Thomas bumps James away from the vegetables with his hip, leaving him to deal with the potatoes. “This isn’t going to be an issue, is it? I told you all those months ago I wasn’t jealous, but I never considered how you might feel. Whether you’d be jealous of him. Or of me.”
James tilts his head back and prays to a God he doesn’t believe in for strength he doubts he ever had. Damn him, he’s jealous of Thomas, but he won’t give him the satisfaction of being right. “Have these new feelings changed the ones between us?” James asks, flicking a peel onto his growing pile on the counter.
“No, and I sincerely doubt they ever will.”
“Then there’s no issue,” James responds, and he means it. “I’ll stay as long as you have me. John Silver killed James Flint, but there’s nothing in the world that could take James McGraw from you.”
Thomas takes his face in his hands then and kisses him firmly, pulling back with an exaggerated smack. “And Thomas Hamilton loves you very, very much.”
“I’m aware,” James says with a laugh, getting back to his chopping. They settle into an easy rhythm, dropping things into the stock and stirring periodically, holding the spoon up to one another to test the flavor. The time passes quickly, and before James knows it Thomas is leaning in for a kiss and telling him he’s going to notify their guest dinner is ready.
James busies himself with preparing the dishes, pulls out a bottle of wine from their well-loved cabinet, sets the table. Standing back to assess the setting, it’s a far cry from meals he and John have shared before. He thinks perhaps that difference will be good.
He tracks the distinct two-step as it paces overhead and down the stairs. John enters the room and stops short. He’s lost his jacket, and though the roughness to him has lessened somewhat over the past years, he retains a wildness James thinks he’ll likely never shake. He only breaks eye contact and begins moving again when Thomas pokes him squarely in the back.
James pulls out a chair for him, and he can see the struggle within John to tell him to go fuck himself before he sighs out, “Thank you.”
They settle, and with John’s first bite he closes his eyes and groans. After a few more ravenous bites, he says, “I’m still impressed by your cooking. I never would have guessed it, when we first met.”
“Well, you’ve met the man responsible for making my cooking palatable. Does it make sense now?” James questions, gesturing to Thomas who is seated across from him.
“I suppose it does,” John replies, looking at him with a sheepish smile.
James just stares back, stubborn as ever. He watches with some sick satisfaction as John’s adam’s apple bobs and he shifts in his seat. Thomas clears his throat, spoon clinking against the side of one of their old bowls. “Why don’t you share with us what you’ve been doing since James saw you last? It’s been a couple of years, there’s quite a bit to catch up on.”
John stalls with his spoon halfway to his mouth, lowering it as he looks between the two of them, eyebrows raised. “You didn’t tell him?” he asks Thomas, who shrugs.
“He never wanted to listen. Trust me, I tried.”
There had been several attempts on Thomas’s end, of course, but James never felt quite ready to consider where his feelings fell on the matter of one John Silver. He holds a hand out to Thomas, cheek twitching. “Now hold on, you know it was far more complicated than that.”
“Was it? I don’t recall.” He squints at James, challenging him to deny him again, before turning back to John. John looks at James with hurt resting on every plane of his face, and James has to look down at his soup in shame. “Now John, how is Madi? As regal and incredible as ever, I assume.”
John hesitates a moment, tapping his spoon against the side of his dish before answering. “Yes, she’s doing well. She still hasn’t forgiven me either,” he says with a pointed look toward James, “But we own a tavern in Bristol now. Perhaps that’s some kind of forgiveness.”
“Then why are you here,” James grits out, dropping his spoon into the bowl.
“James–” Thomas cautions, but John replies too quickly.
“I missed an old friend,” is his simple response.
“Bullshit,” James spits, hand clenching around the arm of his chair. “You have what you wanted, what could you possibly want from me now?”
John looks between Thomas and James again, a sad sort of fear there. “I don’t want anything, I swear. Nothing but reconciliation.”
“What makes you so sure you’ll find it here?”
John raises an eyebrow at Thomas, who lets out a long sigh. “Because I told him he would,” Thomas says, and James feels his heart break all over again. To have his trust betrayed like this, to have someone know him so completely he doesn’t even have to voice his deepest secrets for them to be known. “Don’t look at me like that,” Thomas chastises, reaching to lay a hand over James’s white-knuckled fist. “I know you.”
And with that, Thomas stands from his chair and presses a lingering kiss on James’s forehead, gentle like he’s trying to soothe a wild animal. It works, and James curses him as the tension drains from his body. Thomas takes his bowl in one hand and lays the other on John’s shoulder as he goes to leave the room. “I’ll be upstairs, because I don’t think this is a conversation either of you want witnesses for. Just try not to kill each other in my absence.” John snags his wrist before he can move away completely, pressing a kiss to the back of his hand. They share a look, and then Thomas is gone.
James waits until he hears the door to their bedroom close before he rises, abandoning his meal but taking the wine with him, draining half of it on the way to their parlor. He settles himself and waits in tense silence for John to follow, his gut twisting over the minutes it takes for John to finally stand and follow him.
“I’m here because I fear I left too many things unsaid,” John says as he hobbles across the carpet, letting out a sigh as he settles into the small sofa next to the hearth. James doesn’t turn, but watches John’s reflection in the glass of the window he stands near. He knows he left too many things unsaid between them, and he almost dreads what John will say. He looks beautiful in the warm light of the fire, and James wants to throttle him for existing. But there’s a bit of hope there, too.
“Over these past years…” John pauses, spinning a ring on his finger, one James recognizes as one of the first he’d acquired during their partnership. “I tried to forget about you, truly. I tried to put your memory in the ground like I told everyone I’d put your body. But damn it, you–” he shakes his head, wringing his palms together. “You’re fucking unkillable. You just wouldn’t stay down.” John lets out a sad laugh and runs a hand through his hair, free of tangles like it never was before. “It was hard, too, with Thomas sending me news of how you were both faring. It was enough to know you were alive, and happy.”
“And then you go and fall for my husband,” James says, turning to meet John’s now confrontational glare.
“I suppose I did. However, knowing your history, and as he assured me earlier this evening, that shouldn’t necessarily cause any problems, yes?” John responds with an assured cockiness that’d been missing since he’d first arrived, and James feels something in his stomach unclench. There you are, he thinks.
“Thomas is his own man,” James says, coming around to sit on the settee across from him. Something in the way John talks about him reminds him of how he himself thinks of Thomas, and he wants to hear more. “I can’t keep him from doing what he wants, nor would I want to try to.”
“He is something special,” John agrees, a wistful look on his face James is absolutely sure he isn’t aware of. “Exchanging letters with him… It was like talking with myself, at times. He can go on and on about the smallest things, but he always seems to have a point. And his morals, good Lord,” John says with a huff, shooting James a smile. “God himself has nothing on the goodwill and intelligence of Thomas Hamilton.”
James huffs out a laugh at that, intimately aware of what it’s like to engage in conversation with Thomas. “I need you to know,” John continues, back to wringing his hands, “What I feel for Thomas isn’t some fleeting thing. He’s one of the most incredible people I’ve ever met, and I want to be near him, at least. If he’ll have me.”
“I know the feeling,” James replies. Miranda had once talked about how being near Thomas was to know the presence of a truly great man, and none of that presence changed in their decade apart. Dampened somewhat, at times, but never lost.
A silence stretches between them, John fidgeting in his seat as James looks into the fire, lost in his thoughts. Eventually, John speaks again, so quiet James barely hears him over the crackle of the fire. “I’d like to be near you, too.” There’s something broken in his voice.
James looks up at him sharply, brow furrowed. “Why?” he asks, and John gives him an incredulous look.
“Do you not remember that year we spent together? Do you not remember the things we could accomplish when we were of the same mind? Do you not remember how invincible it made you feel?”
James scoffs, leaning back in his seat. Of course he remembers. “You ask as though an experience like that is possible to forget.”
John smiles at him, a pain still visible there. “And would you believe me if I told you that the whole time–once we became close; the whole time, I was wishing we could find someplace to rest? Somewhere I could admire your mind and your body in peace.”
James searches his face and finds no lies there, only the relief of finally saying things he had held on to for years, and the fear his truths would be unwelcome. Something breaks in him, too.
“In the end,” James starts, leaning forward onto his knees, “I felt your betrayal like a knife in my heart. After all we’d been through, after the… feelings that had grown in me over the last months,” he faintly registers John straightening up at that, “I was heartbroken. I was enraged that you would use the lie of Thomas being alive to try to control me. The way I treated you, once you convinced me to relent–” he cuts himself off, scratching the stubble growing along his jaw. “When I finally saw Thomas standing in that field, I regretted all of it. But by then you were long gone, and I couldn’t bear to speak of you for months–years, really–due to the guilt of where things were left between us.”
John rises, foregoing his crutch and using James’s shoulder as a support to lower himself onto the settee next to him. The warmth of his palm unsticks something in James, and he almost feels sick remembering the words he threw at John in their final days.
“I never held that against you,” John assures, hand on James’s knee. “How could I, knowing you so well? I never gave you good reason to take me at my word. I could never hold that against you, especially with how I felt after leaving you there.”
“And how was that,” James asks, looking down at John’s hand, the new rings mixed with the old.
“Like the most powerful tide I’ve ever known was trying to pull me back to you. Walking away from those gates was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” He gives James’s leg a squeeze and James brings his hand to cover John’s. He closes his eyes, releasing a shuddering sigh.
“We spent one short year together, while you and Thomas have spent the last two talking near constantly. I fear I know nothing of you now, I know nothing of the man you’ve become–” John stops him by turning his hand in James’s grasp, lacing their fingers together.
He leans in close, forehead resting on James’s shoulder. “I’m the same man I was before. I swear to you, you know of me all I can bear to be known. Thomas may know my thoughts, but no better than you do. And you have the added advantage of knowing how they form. We had the same mind. I don’t think that’s changed much.” James turns his head to rest a cheek on John’s curly hair, clean and miles away from how it was before. There are no braids, no adornments, just a simple tie pulling it back from his temples. James rubs his thumb back and forth along John’s hand.
“God, I’ve missed you,” James sighs, feeling his throat close as he closes the distance even more between them, pressing a kiss to the crown of John’s head.
John shifts beneath him, pulling back enough to see James’s face. His eyes shine with the threat of tears and he looks even younger than he had when they first parted, somehow. He looks like it was the first time he’s been able to breathe easy in a long while. James brings his hand to John’s face to wipe away a tear as it finally falls, and John can’t stop the small wet laugh that follows. “The feeling’s mutual,” John quips, and James brings their lips together.
He never let himself imagine it, but if he had it would have been exactly this. A tentative brush of lips gives way to a kiss filled with relief, grief, hope, and James can’t stop the few tears that fall from his eyes as well. John’s mustache drags across his upper lip and their fingers tangle in each other’s hair and he clutches John like he never wants to let go.
“Well, now that that’s settled.” They break apart with a jolt, looking up to Thomas standing in the hallway with a candle. “Come to bed, you two. I’m afraid the night chill is getting to me and I could use some company.”
John looks between them, eyes wide, and James cradles his face to draw him into another kiss. He pours reassurance into it, urging John to trust him again, especially in this. James rises and hands John his crutch before joining Thomas and giving him a kiss as well. They don’t try to assist John up the stairs, but James waits for him at the top, where John draws him in to press a kiss to his cheek with a whispered promise that he’ll be right with them. He retreats to the guest room and James only has to bear a moment of worry that he won’t join them before John emerges in just his underclothes.
He looks nervous, James thinks as he takes John’s hands in his own to lead him backwards to their bed. Thomas seems to notice too, because he states: “James and I are hardly strangers to sharing a partner. You have nothing to fear here.”
James can see that the words only heighten John’s worry. He looks to Thomas who looks slightly abashed, having realized his mistake immediately. They can see John doesn’t want anything more than the comfort of a warm bed right now. Anything else can wait until what lies between them is no longer so new.
James draws John into a hug, wrapping his arms around his middle. He allows himself to breathe John in for a moment while his hands come to rest on the back of his head. The knowledge that he can have this without fear is a revelation, and he lets out a breath as John's finger's thread through his hair. He listens as Thomas slips into bed behind them, letting himself feel John breathe for a long moment.
In a flash James throws John up onto the bed and situates him in between the two of them. John lets out a surprised laugh and some of the tension falls from his shoulders. James thinks that he could listen to that noise for an eternity and never tire of it. Looking over at Thomas, he seems to feel the same way. John turns over in James’s arms as Thomas slides closer, reaching out to pull him into a tender kiss before John fully relaxes. James tightens his arms around John’s middle as he watches, pressing a kiss to the back of his neck. It's a small taste of what's to come, and James can't wait for more.
James presses a kiss to John’s collarbone before he allows himself to close his eyes, and he lets their gentle breathing lull him to sleep.