[i’m juggling about four different flashback-era fics right now and this snippet fits into none of them, but i’m fond of it and so i thought i’d post it here for the last day of james/miranda/thomas appreciation week. happens at some nebulous point between the 2.01 and 2.03 flashbacks.]
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"Tell me about yourself, Lieutenant," Miranda says, smiling at him over a spoonful of soup. "Thomas says your father was a carpenter. Are you from London?"
Thomas half expects James's shoulders to stiffen, his chin to jut out; he has a sneaking suspicion that if he had asked the same question, that's exactly how James would've reacted. Instead, though he still holds himself so warily, he answers, easily enough, "A carpenter's mate, ma'am."
"Is there a difference?" Miranda asks, genuine, truly wanting to know.
"A carpenter's mate is the aide to a ship's carpenter, ma'am."
Thomas will admit he hadn't know that, but he stays judiciously silent. "I see," Miranda says. "Is he the reason you joined the Navy, then?"
"My whole family's been at sea, for as long as we can remember," James says simply. A hedge, Thomas notices, neither answering the question nor not answering it, but nonetheless a strangely poetic thing for him to say. Miranda's learned more about him in two minutes than Thomas had in weeks now, and wonders again, always, at her.
"That sounds rather romantic," Miranda says. "Is it?"
"Not particularly, ma'am, no," James says, dry, and Miranda laughs brilliantly. Thomas watches James watch her, the way he looks at her like she has some kind of light shining from her, and he feels a strange ache in his stomach.
"So you decided to join the Navy," Miranda prompts.
She takes a spoonful of soup, waiting, but all he says is, "Yes, ma'am."
"Not as a carpenter's mate?"
"I wasn't very good at carpentry."
Miranda laughs again, and Thomas smiles. "You've quite a talent for that, Lieutenant," he says.
James turns to look at him. "I'm sorry, my lord?"
"Answering questions," Thomas says, "without really answering them at all."
James blinks, caught off guard. Instead of protesting, though, he clenches his jaw. "I'm sorry, my lord," he says stiffly. "What question would you have me answer?"
Thomas notes the glance Miranda sends his way--careful--before he looks back to James. "What if," he says, "you answer one of our questions, and we'll answer one of yours."
"I see very little use in that, my lord," James says, eyebrows raised.
"Don't you?" Thomas asks. "If we're to be working together, I feel we should know something about one another. I don't know anything at all about you."
"Besides what you learned from your old schoolmates, you mean," James says dryly.
Across the table, Miranda raises her eyebrows, looking down at her plate to hide a smile. "Yes," Thomas says, smiling as placidly as he can. "Besides that."
James gives him--not quite a smile, but his expression has some humor in it, however much at Thomas's own expense. "I see."
Thomas regards him for a moment. "Where did you grow up?" he lands on, finally. Something easy, something that won't scare him away.
"Padstow," James answers neatly, then in the same breath asks: "Why are you so interested in reforming the Bahama Islands?"
Thomas sits back in his chair. "That's not fair at all," he protests. "You cannot give a one-word answer and then ask a questions that requires paragraphs to answer."
"I don't believe there were any rules to that effect, my lord," James says, and he's definitely trying to hide a smile now.
"I believe the lieutenant's right, dear," Miranda says, hiding her own smile behind the rim of her wineglass.
"My own wife, against me," Thomas says, in mock outrage. "All right," he says, turning back to James. "I am interested in the Bahamas because I feel there is good to be done there."
"That's nothing you haven't said before," James points out.
"I was trying to keep it short."
"I could've come up with that answer myself."
"And I could've told you were from Cornwall by the way you say your Hs," Thomas returns.
"There's nothing wrong with the way I say my Hs," James replies, "and you're cheating at your own game."
"You've only just figured that out?" Miranda asks, and arches her eyebrows when James looks over at her. "He's never been particularly good at playing by the rules."
"I would argue that's a virtue," Thomas says, arching his eyebrows right back at her.
"Would you?" James asks.
Thomas looks at him steadily. "You wouldn't?"
James clears his throat, but doesn't reply.
"I believe that means he wouldn't," Miranda tells Thomas, sounding amused.
"But wouldn't you agree, Lieutenant," Thomas says, still looking at Miranda, who's giving him a somewhat impenetrable, if still largely amused, look, "that there are rules of our society that are inhumane, even amoral? What are we to do then?"
"I take it we are talking about more than a parlor game," James says dryly.
Thomas looks over at him, eyebrows raised, waiting. James sighs.
"Those rules are in place for a reason," he says evenly. "They create our world. We cannot simply dispose of them on a whim."
"I'm not speaking of disposing of them altogether," Thomas argues, leaning his forearms on the table, "and certainly not on a whim. But is it not our duty the think on the world around us, not simply to walk through it blind and obedient? And if we find our world wanting, isn't it our duty to act to rectify that want?"
James, far from his confidence of a moment before, is looking at him apprehensively. "If every man walked through the world, questioning everything he saw, we would not have a civilization, we would have anarchy," he says. "Each man judging day to day, need to need, emotion to emotion, what is good and right to do?" He smiles slightly. "It's a nice theory, my lord, but that's not the way the world works."
Thomas glances at Miranda then, sees her gazing warmly at the lieutenant. She looks over at him, always able to tell when his eyes are on her. She cocks one eyebrow. He does the same. "Well," Thomas says, "it seems I'm outnumbered."
"It rarely seems to stop you," Miranda points out sweetly.
Thomas looks back to James. "It seems you share your views with my dear wife." He sighs, more dramatically than strictly necessary. "And I was so hoping to gain someone else to my side."
"Perhaps you should've looked elsewhere than the Navy," Miranda says.
"I was told they were sensible."
"That is, perhaps, the problem."
James, who was looking between them as if watching a particularly engaging fencing match, ducks his head, hiding a smile. Thomas is distracted a moment, watching him: the small, unexpected expression hits him strangely in his chest, something more than it should. It is, he thinks, the first time he'd seen the lieutenant really smile; not the wry thing he uses when he finds Thomas particularly ludicrous, but a small soft expression that Thomas thinks, immediately and unreasonably, he'd do very much to get back again.
"Why did you join the Navy, Lieutenant?" Thomas asks, then. James hesitates: he adds, "Come now, I'll owe you an answer. And I promise not to cheat."
James still doesn't answer right away, but he looks as if he's deliberating on some point, rather than whether to answer at all. "Admiral Hennessey," he says finally, almost warily, as if he suddenly expected them to laugh at him or banish him from their table, "convinced me to join, as a boy. He said there was a future in it." He looks down again at his plate.
"It seems he was right," Thomas says, once it's clear that's all James is going to say. Then he catches another part of that reply: "A boy? How old?"
"I believe you already asked your question, my lord."
"Thomas," Thomas corrects him, and James looks up to give him one of his exquisitely skeptical looks, "and I'll owe you two answers."
"It seems you are getting yourself dangerously in debt," James says.
"Are you adverse to a little risk, Lieutenant?"
James opens his mouth, as if he knows his answer, and then pauses, regarding Thomas with a long look. "Perhaps you are too little averse to it yourself, my lord."
Thomas sits back in his chair, smiling at him a little. "That's nothing I haven't heard before."
"Clearly it had little effect."
“Now it seems you are speaking of more than a parlor game,” Thomas says, and James concedes it with a slight nod of his head, the raise of his eyebrow. "Are you so against the idea that the Bahama Islands--indeed, the whole of our holdings in the West Indies--can be reformed?" Thomas asks him. "What could make a simple string of islands so irredeemable in your eyes?"
"I don't think they're irredeemable, my lord," James says. "They are not themselves moral, they cannot think or act. It is as I said earlier--as civilization needs its monsters, England needs her dark shadow."
"I don't believe that's true," Thomas says seriously.
"Don't you?" James asks. "Civilization can only succeed if it has something to point to, to say, that is uncivilized. If you take that away there is no civilization."
"Perhaps that is a good thing," Thomas says. "If as you say the Bahamas are England's dark shadow, then perhaps they can learn from her wrongs, the wrongs of the civilization that has cast them out. They could build something to fix the worst parts of the old world, while keeping its best.”
James looks at him, incredulous. "You don't really believe that."
"Of course I do."
James makes a little scoff of a noise. "We do not learn from our mistakes," he says firmly. "There will always be crime, and greed, and mayhem, and simply sailing across a sea, to a new land, will not make men forget what they are."
"Why not?" Thomas asks simply.
James looks at him as if he's grown another head. "Because it's not the way the world works," he says rather sharply. "The way it has always worked, and frankly, my lord, the way it always will."
"And this new world--a new world, without the blights and prejudices of the old--how do we know that is not the solution, the essential ingredient in beginning anew?"
"Because it simply isn't," James says, words still coming out sharp. "Holding up a place as the deliverance of mankind is a children's tale, or worse, the fantasy of men too consumed by their own ideals to see beyond their own noses; but while you are building your Bensalem, my lord, the rest of us are living in the real world," he snaps.
There is a long pause. Thomas pointedly doesn't look over at Miranda, already knowing the exact expression on her face, the exact look she'll be giving him.
"I've upset you," Thomas says finally.
"Not at all," James says stiffly.
Thomas regards him closely. "Why?" he asks simply, finally. "What gives you this unshakably negative view of human nature, of the world at large? How must a people so capable of good, kind, and beautiful things always succumb, in your view, to their most base of instincts?"
James's fingers curls around the handle of his spoon, his eyes looking down at his plate. After a long moment, he says, "Eleven."
Thomas frowns, utterly perplexed. "Beg pardon?"
"I was eleven when I joined the Navy," James says. He looks up at Thomas, and he has the slightest, unexpected smile around the corners of his mouth. "Now you owe me two answers."
