WHO: Max & Various WHAT: A little catch-all post, mmaybe some open starters to come but I'll edit if so. WHEN: Ambiguously Harvestmere WHERE: Places NOTES: Black Sails spoilers and discussion of slavery in the thread with Silver.
She has existed again in public spaces for some weeks now, if only quietly at first, a rustling of skirts and clacking of heels moving through the halls with purpose. She's seen to necessary tasks with the sort of efficient persistence that fills hours, that distracts. Perhaps she has even existed near John, in a brisk, brittle sort of way, as if a kind word might shatter her, so she'd rather he didn't. Time, distance, and a dogged return to normalcy are the paths to recovery she's chosen, and they have almost been effective.
But only almost. Some wounds, when left untended, only fester. (How long has it been, since they last looked at the ones they'd left on each other? That she had left on him?)
So it is she's stolen him away during a quiet moment tonight, a bottle of dry red wine presented as either a peace offering or the necessary social lubricant for the conversation she intends to have. She pours, a glass for him and one for her. Takes the first sip, just to show it isn't poisoned. Takes another just to drown out that thought.
"There is a place just north of the Silent Plains," is where she eventually decides to begin, "That Anne heard spoken of some months ago." Months that feel like years, now. "The estate of a reform-minded man who obtained his laborers from an unusual source."
"This man, we were told, found it profitable to offer his services to wealthy families — some of the most prominent in Tevinter, on occasion — with a need to make troublesome relations disappear. Cared for, tended to, but never to be seen or heard from again."
"It is where I intended to send you, had I captured you." A life of silence and obscurity. Of imprisonment. Of slavery. Her fingertips are pressed very firm to the stem of her glass, but her eyes do not drop from him. "At the time, I think I imagined it a kinder fate."
Max will seek what she needs to heal. John is aware that those she would most like to lean on are not in attendance, just as he is aware of his own shortcomings when it comes to offering comfort. He is talented at spinning lies, and sussing out what people want to hear. But the kind of honest, raw empathy he thinks she deserves is not in him. He dredged it all up for Flint over a campfire, attending to the gnarled wounds of his past. Max is something different. The terrain between them is uneasy, and John doesn't know what is to gain from a clumsy attempt at easing her pain. If it goes wrong, then what? He can't afford Max's ire.
It feels like a risk to accept her parlay this night. But something soft and yielding in John carries him alongside her. It notes the effort she is making. There is nothing between them that is not an exchange. She is eliciting trust from him. John sets aside his sword and crutch, and only lifts his cup when she begins to speak.
"Interesting choice in topic."
How long ago that moment feels: standing upon the beach in the dark, weathering the shock as Max tilts the world beneath his feet. Something twigs in the back of his mind—wealthy families, disappearing troublesome relations. John takes a long sip before he speaks again.
"And what drove you to bestow that kindness on me?"
John's voice dips over kindness. Something ugly and indignant clings to the word. A kindness, to be unmade. A kindness, to be forgotten. He feels anger rise and then fall, looking into her eyes as he tries to understand her motive, to judge whether or not this is a truth she is giving him.
She looks...fragile. He has not seen her laid open like this, even when he'd found her pale with fear standing over two corpses and a pool of blood.
Like all things between them, there is calculation in it. A gift chosen, a meeting place, a gesture of reassurance. A vulnerability, set before him like a bared throat. Of course she wants something from him in return, but for once perhaps all that means is his ear. His consideration of a subject they have both been keen not to address before now. His willingness to entertain whatever change that may bring about between them, at most.
(If that results in securing her footing with him, or clarifying the precariousness thereof, well, all actions have consequences.)
"The alternative was to kill you." No apology, no uncertainty; that was the decision as she saw it then, and sees it now. He'd been an obstacle in her path that she'd seen no other way to surmount; it isn't in her to not surmount it.
"At the time, that was a choice I did not want to live with. But now—" Now he's reached for her when she'd been lost. Strove to see her safe when her safety mattered hardly a whit to anyone else. Asked her freed from not so different a life than the one she'd have condemned him to. Things she doesn't ask of anyone, and would ask of him near least of all.
She doesn't say any of that. Does not, in fact, answer his question in so many words at all. But there is certain pitch to her brow, a softness that isn't calculated beyond the fact that she's decided to show it at all.
"Now I think I would prefer not to live with either."
It is difficult for John to gauge how much weight this moment should carry. As she speaks, he is reminded very much of himself, vomiting out truth to Madi as pain scorched him inside and out. Is that what it takes for the pair of them to make such admissions? Pain scraping them so raw they have nothing else to do but bare themselves in one form or another? He doesn't doubt that Max has carefully crafted this moment to elicit a favorable response from him. But it's the truth behind it that John wishes to assess, and understands he may never be able to.
That's the trouble with the pair of them. They are a matched set. He sees in her all that has made him a formidable force at Flint's right hand. From Max, this is the closest he will ever have to explanation and apology for what has been broken between them.
"If we're being honest," John begins, some dark humor in that turn of phrase. "I would have gone farther to see you safe."
Flint had recognized that in John. There is still something soft in him that recoils from violence. There is still something yielding. It goes away if John allows it, and is all too easily ignored, but it is there. It's what had propelled him to seek a way out for her. It's sentiment. Even after all they have inflicted upon each other, it has remained.
"Is the idea of my friendship still distasteful to you?"
Friendship means something different here than it had on that beach. The rift had changed so many terms. Perhaps if war had never come to their island, they would have never had to reconsider their respective positions. But it did and the reprieve from the business of Nassau has given them both a little breathing room.
And it's perhaps easier for her to speak of the pair of them than it would be for her to speak about what had happened to her when she had been a captive. John has questions, but John is a patient man. He can wait until the time is right to ask after what Anne had heard, what might be hidden from the world in the places Max had intended to imprison him in.
There's a quick flinch at her brow. Would she have done the same for him? No. Maybe. She would like for that to be an option, should he ever be in danger. Softness is something she strives to make room for in her life, in every choice where space can be made for the possibility, but it isn't something she expects to have. But then, perhaps they are not so different in that. There is something to be said for the impulse, separate from the result. He would have tried. She would try to try.
"The concessions required by your friendship were distasteful to me." Were. That isn't an answer. A clarification, more like. She wouldn't go directly against her own interests for him. She might not still, but—
"I would not object," warmer on her lips than the word implies, even hopeful, "were it offered without them."
Here, where that's possible, where their interests are aligned. (For however long their interests are aligned.)
He has so little doubt in Flint. Sat together in a small borrowed boat, winding their way through a plan to bend the Inquisition along with the rest of the world to their purposes, John had felt power crackling between them and understood what it would bring forth. What Max wants to keep Nascere as it had been, hemmed in and tied to Tevinter. Flint wanted to break Tevinter's hold, then break all of Tevinter. John had looked into his face and recognized that between the two of them, they could bring that to pass.
It would be a small thing to lie to Max now about what the future holds. But Max has done one thing right: she came to him in pain and offered him a truth. John falters at the idea of meeting her with anything less.
"Who knows what the future holds?" John says finally. "Perhaps when the Inquisition has finished the points on which we've differed will no longer be an issue."
Simply put: his friendship comes irreversibly with the goal he has tied himself to with flesh, blood and bone. Tevinter's influence will be purged from Nascere. John will speak that ending into reality.
"I'd even say that it's unlikely you have anything left to object to, knowing what Rogers is."
The corners of her mouth pinch, just so. How much she wants to agree, to act as though she could not already see the point at which such a friendship would break. Imagine this optimistic proposal from the John Silver who left for Charles Town beholden to no one, instead of the one who came back, bound hand and foot to something larger than himself. She'd have thought less of it; it might have been more true. Nowadays, she has no trouble seeing the end of things.
"The Venatori have made Flint's war unavoidable, yes. If Tevinter burns itself to the ground, you will not find me wasting my tears over its ashes." Tevinter has never been her goal; only the surest means to an end.
"But there will come a time when it is possible for peace and prosperity and stability to return to Nascere again — when this violence ceases to be a necessity and becomes a choice. How do you imagine Captain Flint will choose then?"
There are things John could say. He knows all the words, has heard Flint unspool them in the quiet space between them as the sea rocks the dingy beneath their feet. John understands what they are trying to do. But he does not find a place for them here in the space between him and Max. Max is not going to be roused to their cause this way. John has tried once before, and he has not yet learned which angle would sway her.
Perhaps she would understand better if she knew what John was. But that is still too great a weapon to ever hand Max. The fragile truce they've brokered between them can't sustain the kind of secret that carries John's life along with it. He is an apostate. He can still suffer greatly for that.
"We are committed to building something better," John tries, and there's some grim humor at the altruism glowing within those words. "Do you think I don't want to come out the other side of this to something stable enough to make a life on?"
After they've thrown it all over. After they've delivered a better system unto this land. That's when they all must begin to rebuild, when the dream Flint has becomes real. John's fingers tap at the table beside his now-empty cup. He does not look down at the stump, what's left of his leg, does not think of what comes next for him.
"He knows when to stop fighting. If you don't believe that of him, you must believe it of me."
Max's chin tilts, just so. It isn't as if she imagined John eager to risk his own skin, of course, but for all that he has become intwined with Flint's crew, she had never quite pictured him putting down roots. (There was a woman, wasn't there? Rumors that had seemed to Max out of character in much the same way. What if neither were?)
"I do." Softer, as if deciding only as the words leave her lips. "I do believe that of you."
Not of Flint. But Flint's friendship isn't what she's after today. Flint's won't be the one tested.
"Perhaps as long as that we have that in common, we need not be at odds."
To think, if things had gone differently in the beginning—
It was always about security in some form or another. He had never quite explained that to Max. There hadn't been time, and afterwards it hadn't seemed to matter. He'd given up his share, so whatever he'd planned for it was severed from him as thoroughly as his leg had been. Freedom, comfort, all of it, he'd have to achieve it by different, more difficult means.
Madi. At the end of all of this, she waits for him.
"I know you have people you wish to provide for," John says, careful of the tone, the expression on his face. He does not mean this as a threat. "I am much the same."
The closest John will come to acknowledging Madi in Max's presence: couched in ambiguous phrasing that could so easily apply to his crew, to the number of pirates fighting back on Nassau. The similarity is pleasing to him, reassuring in a way he does not like to fully consider. That sameness has always been there, which is truly what makes this difficult, makes them both wary of each other. Moreso than ever these days, with Max's priorities having shifted in a way John hadn't anticipated.
"All of which to say, I'd prefer not to be at odds with you."
For many reasons, anywhere between genuine appreciation and dreading the idea of having to constantly account for her as a threat to his machinations. But it all came to the same thing, really: it would be nice to be on more even footing with her.
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for john;
But only almost. Some wounds, when left untended, only fester. (How long has it been, since they last looked at the ones they'd left on each other? That she had left on him?)
So it is she's stolen him away during a quiet moment tonight, a bottle of dry red wine presented as either a peace offering or the necessary social lubricant for the conversation she intends to have. She pours, a glass for him and one for her. Takes the first sip, just to show it isn't poisoned. Takes another just to drown out that thought.
"There is a place just north of the Silent Plains," is where she eventually decides to begin, "That Anne heard spoken of some months ago." Months that feel like years, now. "The estate of a reform-minded man who obtained his laborers from an unusual source."
"This man, we were told, found it profitable to offer his services to wealthy families — some of the most prominent in Tevinter, on occasion — with a need to make troublesome relations disappear. Cared for, tended to, but never to be seen or heard from again."
"It is where I intended to send you, had I captured you." A life of silence and obscurity. Of imprisonment. Of slavery. Her fingertips are pressed very firm to the stem of her glass, but her eyes do not drop from him. "At the time, I think I imagined it a kinder fate."
weeps
It feels like a risk to accept her parlay this night. But something soft and yielding in John carries him alongside her. It notes the effort she is making. There is nothing between them that is not an exchange. She is eliciting trust from him. John sets aside his sword and crutch, and only lifts his cup when she begins to speak.
"Interesting choice in topic."
How long ago that moment feels: standing upon the beach in the dark, weathering the shock as Max tilts the world beneath his feet. Something twigs in the back of his mind—wealthy families, disappearing troublesome relations. John takes a long sip before he speaks again.
"And what drove you to bestow that kindness on me?"
John's voice dips over kindness. Something ugly and indignant clings to the word. A kindness, to be unmade. A kindness, to be forgotten. He feels anger rise and then fall, looking into her eyes as he tries to understand her motive, to judge whether or not this is a truth she is giving him.
She looks...fragile. He has not seen her laid open like this, even when he'd found her pale with fear standing over two corpses and a pool of blood.
no subject
(If that results in securing her footing with him, or clarifying the precariousness thereof, well, all actions have consequences.)
"The alternative was to kill you." No apology, no uncertainty; that was the decision as she saw it then, and sees it now. He'd been an obstacle in her path that she'd seen no other way to surmount; it isn't in her to not surmount it.
"At the time, that was a choice I did not want to live with. But now—" Now he's reached for her when she'd been lost. Strove to see her safe when her safety mattered hardly a whit to anyone else. Asked her freed from not so different a life than the one she'd have condemned him to. Things she doesn't ask of anyone, and would ask of him near least of all.
She doesn't say any of that. Does not, in fact, answer his question in so many words at all. But there is certain pitch to her brow, a softness that isn't calculated beyond the fact that she's decided to show it at all.
"Now I think I would prefer not to live with either."
no subject
That's the trouble with the pair of them. They are a matched set. He sees in her all that has made him a formidable force at Flint's right hand. From Max, this is the closest he will ever have to explanation and apology for what has been broken between them.
"If we're being honest," John begins, some dark humor in that turn of phrase. "I would have gone farther to see you safe."
Flint had recognized that in John. There is still something soft in him that recoils from violence. There is still something yielding. It goes away if John allows it, and is all too easily ignored, but it is there. It's what had propelled him to seek a way out for her. It's sentiment. Even after all they have inflicted upon each other, it has remained.
"Is the idea of my friendship still distasteful to you?"
Friendship means something different here than it had on that beach. The rift had changed so many terms. Perhaps if war had never come to their island, they would have never had to reconsider their respective positions. But it did and the reprieve from the business of Nassau has given them both a little breathing room.
And it's perhaps easier for her to speak of the pair of them than it would be for her to speak about what had happened to her when she had been a captive. John has questions, but John is a patient man. He can wait until the time is right to ask after what Anne had heard, what might be hidden from the world in the places Max had intended to imprison him in.
no subject
"The concessions required by your friendship were distasteful to me." Were. That isn't an answer. A clarification, more like. She wouldn't go directly against her own interests for him. She might not still, but—
"I would not object," warmer on her lips than the word implies, even hopeful, "were it offered without them."
Here, where that's possible, where their interests are aligned. (For however long their interests are aligned.)
no subject
He has so little doubt in Flint. Sat together in a small borrowed boat, winding their way through a plan to bend the Inquisition along with the rest of the world to their purposes, John had felt power crackling between them and understood what it would bring forth. What Max wants to keep Nascere as it had been, hemmed in and tied to Tevinter. Flint wanted to break Tevinter's hold, then break all of Tevinter. John had looked into his face and recognized that between the two of them, they could bring that to pass.
It would be a small thing to lie to Max now about what the future holds. But Max has done one thing right: she came to him in pain and offered him a truth. John falters at the idea of meeting her with anything less.
"Who knows what the future holds?" John says finally. "Perhaps when the Inquisition has finished the points on which we've differed will no longer be an issue."
Simply put: his friendship comes irreversibly with the goal he has tied himself to with flesh, blood and bone. Tevinter's influence will be purged from Nascere. John will speak that ending into reality.
"I'd even say that it's unlikely you have anything left to object to, knowing what Rogers is."
no subject
The corners of her mouth pinch, just so. How much she wants to agree, to act as though she could not already see the point at which such a friendship would break. Imagine this optimistic proposal from the John Silver who left for Charles Town beholden to no one, instead of the one who came back, bound hand and foot to something larger than himself. She'd have thought less of it; it might have been more true. Nowadays, she has no trouble seeing the end of things.
"The Venatori have made Flint's war unavoidable, yes. If Tevinter burns itself to the ground, you will not find me wasting my tears over its ashes." Tevinter has never been her goal; only the surest means to an end.
"But there will come a time when it is possible for peace and prosperity and stability to return to Nascere again — when this violence ceases to be a necessity and becomes a choice. How do you imagine Captain Flint will choose then?"
And how will John?
no subject
Perhaps she would understand better if she knew what John was. But that is still too great a weapon to ever hand Max. The fragile truce they've brokered between them can't sustain the kind of secret that carries John's life along with it. He is an apostate. He can still suffer greatly for that.
"We are committed to building something better," John tries, and there's some grim humor at the altruism glowing within those words. "Do you think I don't want to come out the other side of this to something stable enough to make a life on?"
After they've thrown it all over. After they've delivered a better system unto this land. That's when they all must begin to rebuild, when the dream Flint has becomes real. John's fingers tap at the table beside his now-empty cup. He does not look down at the stump, what's left of his leg, does not think of what comes next for him.
"He knows when to stop fighting. If you don't believe that of him, you must believe it of me."
no subject
"I do." Softer, as if deciding only as the words leave her lips. "I do believe that of you."
Not of Flint. But Flint's friendship isn't what she's after today. Flint's won't be the one tested.
"Perhaps as long as that we have that in common, we need not be at odds."
no subject
It was always about security in some form or another. He had never quite explained that to Max. There hadn't been time, and afterwards it hadn't seemed to matter. He'd given up his share, so whatever he'd planned for it was severed from him as thoroughly as his leg had been. Freedom, comfort, all of it, he'd have to achieve it by different, more difficult means.
Madi. At the end of all of this, she waits for him.
"I know you have people you wish to provide for," John says, careful of the tone, the expression on his face. He does not mean this as a threat. "I am much the same."
The closest John will come to acknowledging Madi in Max's presence: couched in ambiguous phrasing that could so easily apply to his crew, to the number of pirates fighting back on Nassau. The similarity is pleasing to him, reassuring in a way he does not like to fully consider. That sameness has always been there, which is truly what makes this difficult, makes them both wary of each other. Moreso than ever these days, with Max's priorities having shifted in a way John hadn't anticipated.
"All of which to say, I'd prefer not to be at odds with you."
For many reasons, anywhere between genuine appreciation and dreading the idea of having to constantly account for her as a threat to his machinations. But it all came to the same thing, really: it would be nice to be on more even footing with her.