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I. John
He stays there, for a little while, after Flint leaves. Amongst Madi’s things. Her books.
He knows that she and Flint share this, wonders if they’d spoken of it. Their conduct towards one another had changed while he was presumed dead, and though they both told him that it was born from a shared understanding during the raid on the Underhill estate, he wonders what else there was. If it can help John at all with the story he tells himself.
Words and stories - the three of them all know their use. John has been made, has made himself, into a new man in the span of a few months largely by the power of tale well-turned. But he does not quite share Madi and Flint’s love for a story on its own merits, outside of its power to sell something. The leather bindings, the hand-tooled titles, the smell of ink, the smoothness of the paper beneath his fingers do not evoke any special sentiment in him. Perhaps it is because he has never owned a book; the few stories that he didn’t steal from the mouths of others were found in stolen pages.
No daylight between us, Flint had said. Some kind of hell, Silver had said. He is so close to Flint now that the two of them might as well be an ouroboros, doomed to eat and repeat one another’s mistakes for the rest of their lives. Hell would be kinder. Hell must be kinder, he prays.
Every time he looks at his captain, he imagines this is what it felt like to be Flint looking at Mrs. Barlow. For how can he ever look at Flint and not see Madi? It can’t be otherwise, not when John sits here with her books in his hands and Flint’s words in his head: I give you my word.
II. Madi
The letter with the terms remains where Rogers left it. There is no temptation there. Madi has seen the world and what it is and what she is now. Her words are never empty. So she has no fear for herself, though plenty is set aside for her people. For Kofi. For her mother.
And her thoughts are always, always, with John.
Unmoored, she fears he will splinter like the hull of the Walrus beneath a barrage of cannon-fire. Billy, the rebellion, the loss of Nassau, the loss of her. Flint.
Their relationship is so volatile, she’d told her father.
Her days of distrusting Flint are over. Now, she knows better: she merely distrusts that Flint will not be able to do what she did (does) for John, what John does (did) for him.
She is somehow in-between them and a bridge between them.
Flint had emerged from that tunnel, into the daylight, his face clean, his red beard well-trimmed. And as soon as he’d stepped forward, she’d felt herself smiling. He looked more well and real than she had ever seen him, and perhaps than he had any right to be, in that moment. The desire to take his face in her hands and proclaim, See, we did make them notice, was strong then and remains strong now. She might have even dropped her thumb down to his chin, stroking the red hairs there, just a feather touch. Maybe she will have another chance.
She would like another chance, too, to kiss John’s face, to feel against her face the scratch of his dark beard. It makes him look by turns ferocious or unkempt and the thought of John and Flint, studies in light and shade, side-by-side now tugs at the corners of her mouth.
Madi tries to hold onto this feeling. Hope is the only way out of this place.
III. Flint
He catches a glimpse of Silver with his red shadow standing beside him on the quarterdeck. Flint turns away quickly, catching his breath before launching himself into some new task that de Groot has recommended.
Later, he returns to the cabin, from which Silver is now absent. The memory of the other man on deck returns. Flint sees two faces of Silver, imposed one over the other: his expression twisted into anger as he’d raged at Flint over Madi and the cache; and his down-turned face, the redness not quite driven out from around his eyes when Flint had found him sitting with Madi’s books.
He regrets that both men were created on account of him.
If Flint reaches back far enough in his memory - in a time measured in months rather than years - he can recall another face, the first face of Silver’s that he saw, which held all the evidence of his youth with none of the recent sadness.
Madi, he suspects, has always acted far older than her years. In his mind, he’d known that she ought to be a young woman - younger than Eleanor, even. Shoulder-to-shoulder on the beach, waiting for the last longboat, he hadn’t seen beyond it, even though her fixed stare made her anxiety plain. It was only when she’d quoted Cervantes to him and smiled that her face made her youth plain to him.
He wants to bottle both their youths up, for safe-keeping, and return them, unscathed, when this is all over; when they can all be safe. It is an impossibility. He knows this. But still, he wants to try.
He will do this. Rescue Madi. Kill anyone who stands in his way. It’s not the first time he’s had this plan, only the first time he’s carried it out. And it will be a form of justice for them all. And if he can have no part of Madi and John and must separate himself from them afterwards, then so be it - though it may kill him.
This is all he has ever wanted: to set things right by the people he loves.