Experience Tumblr Like Never Before
So beautiful and hearwarming! It would be amazing if Madi went freeing them, I think the three of them would make a great squad.
They deserve that freedom and the happiness which comes with it. Sometimes is useful to read things like this. It makes one feel better, even if I can hardly imagine it coming true.
I wrote a little short thing in celebration. All prompts to be handled shortly - I’m in a writing mood!
It has been a long time since Thomas Hamilton had the luxury of caring about smells. He recalls his first night in Bethlem Royal Hospital all too well for so many reasons, but high on the list is the appalling stench of the place. He recalls retching over and over again that first night - soiling the rough uniform they had forced him into and earning himself a qualification as a messy patient, something which he had come to regret in later months as he sat in his cell, dressed in little more than rags, huddling in the straw. He has long since learnt to disregard any and all smells that might have disturbed him in his former life - and so it takes him quite by surprise when the scent of the sea, complete with its faint edge of the dead things that have washed up overnight but without the heavy reek of the Thames, strikes him all at once. He breathes it in, and feels something in him ease- as if it had taken this to assure him at last that he is still breathing, still here -
Still tangible and alive.
“Thomas?” James asks, and Thomas shakes his head, struck speechless as he stands on the shore for the first time in years, staring at the ship that is going to take them away from this shore - away from all that they have both suffered and into a new life.
“Forgive me,” he croaks, and swallows hard. “Forgive me,” he repeats. “I - had no idea not smelling tilled earth any longer would affect me this way.”
James blinks.
“There’s - a strange sort of symbolism in that, I suppose,” he acknowledges, and Thomas stands, dumbstruck for a moment at the eloquence of his husband’s statement.
He has been dead to the world for ten years. He has smelled earth - worked it, been covered in it for so long. His fingernails have been crusted with it, his hands turned black and brown as it’s been ground into his skin. He’s been buried - buried before his time, before the breath has left him, with no coffin, even, to shield him, and he suddenly feels as if he has just, finally, burst free of his premature grave only to find himself not thirty feet from freedom such as he has only dreamt of in his fitful, disturbed coma. He turns, and kneels, allowing the sea water to run over his fingertips, then raises them to his nose. He is alive, and he suddenly wants to splash out into the swell, bathe himself in the ocean, allow it to wash the past ten years off his beleaguered, dirt-encrusted skin and his battered psyche.
“Do you think,” he asks, taking a deep breath, “that there’s time for a bath, before we leave?”
James looks at him, and then at the water.
“That’s going to be colder than you think it is,” he warns, but doesn’t sound like he has any real expectation of dissuading Thomas from his goal. In fact, he’s looking at the water speculatively himself, and then at Thomas, who grins at him.
“I might need supervision,” he says. “I think you should come and make certain I don’t drown.”
“We have a few hours before nightfall,” James agrees, and Thomas feels a thrill of possibility run through him - even as he recalls that they are not entirely alone.
The ship in the bay, after all, will not surrender itself to two men. Thomas turns toward their ragged crew of escaped convicts, and the stronger men that Madi has brought with her to their rescue. He looks to Madi herself, who stands, one eyebrow raised in amusement.
“I will take the men further up the inlet,” she says to both of them. “Do not make me come looking for you in the dark.”
James blushes - actually blushes, and then the princess turns, and walks away, and Thomas’ grin widens.
“Shall we?” he asks, and James gives a huff of helpless laughter, and then they are both laughing, stripping their shirts off and going splashing into the water. There will be grime in their hair tomorrow and they will both need a new set of breeches, but for now, they are joyful, cleansed with the salt, renewed, refreshed -
Resurrected.