James Monroe’s first inauguration March 4, 1817: James Monroe personally asked childhood and lifelong friend Chief Justice John Marshall to administer his Oath of Office.
John Marshall discovers the scar on James Monroe's shoulder and everything seems to collide.
American Revolution RPF, American History RPF, 18th Century CE RPF
Relationship: John Marshall/James Monroe
Part 2 of the Early American History | Stories They Won't Tell series
Words: 3,297
Chapters: 1/1
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December 23rd, 1777
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“We don’t have much time.”
There were hands everywhere; running across his chest and nails gliding through his hair, movements on his hips that seemed nearly to burn his exterior with their imprint. Those words whispered so seductively in his ear after the amount of times their knees had knocked together and their sides impressed into each other's shape intentionally by the smoldering fire had become unbearable. It wasn’t unusual, James Monroe and John Marshall shared a tent; there shouldn’t be any concerned glances and how closely connected their shoulders were as they stumbled somewhat with a little liquor bathing on their tongues to their place.
It was silent, no crickets and just the sound of their boots brushing against the tall, dead, frozen grass and the crunch of their soles on the crackling white snow. James kept casting a hesitant glance over his shoulder and felt a rose flare creep across his cheekbones, lighting up his face--the only time he wasn’t reckless was with John. He swallowed hard and the older boy strided ever so calmly beyond the embers and the roaring laughter that echoed, bouncing off the trees landing in their hearing. They followed the same trail along the rows and columns of tents leading from the heat and the cold licked his neck rather unforgivably and he burrowed further down into the collar of his uniform.
James tore his gaze off the bloody footprints in the snow and flickered his sea-glass eyes up to wander across the back of John’s posterior and the short hair that accompanied it, those dark muddy strands raining neatly against the base of his skull in an array that met the contrast of his crisp soldier’s uniform. He devoured enduring, quickening his long legs, breath billowing out in clouds against the air as he wrapped his willing fingers around John’s forearm, lugging himself closer as they walked in unison. John only managed a smirk out of the corner of his iris, the unbearable tension slipping across his cheeks, blaring garnet tenaciously.
There were no sounds and the only tents this far were dim now, the flaps shut to the frigid weather with a tie. Sauntering over the winter bitten fields with an enamored sense of the atmosphere that hummed around, electric between them, moments before their mouths collided; it was worth everything to get lost in him. His lips moved like a tidal wave to discover words that did not lay on his tongue and were not found to his language. Recognizing the lead, cloudy sky and the different shades of dusk shrouding the firmament with a rare breeze that rustled through the branches of the ghostly trees surrounding the area. They seemed to trap him in their embracing, scratching arms.
John stopped still in his tracks, footprints, turning over in the still twilight to wrap his grip around the younger man’s wrist twisting the bewilderment from his facial features around his shoulders like a shawl and he tugged him towards the back side of their tent. There was a momentary lapse, between a glance and a kiss where their eyes met and a pooling abyss swallowed rolling waves into their breaking; this was where the world paused for the briefest of times, the only thing keeping them was the anticipation nipping at their sheath. Of lips on his own, for the solitude, so intense it clung to the air, staining them close, an era so splendid they knew when it would end--it was only the beginning.
The waiting instant where their flares both parted and they sunk into each other’s features like soft clay. The sweet simmering ensued and it became clear they had waited too long before they splintered. In the midnight heavens, James leaped, immersing his arms around John’s neck like tying vines of delicate strangulation that brushed their frozen fingers at the top of his back. Their mouths did not seem displaced and a stage before the passion took place, James hooked a leg around John’s ankle, their bodies wedding as he shut his eyes, digging and burrowing his face into their neck, soaking in the warmth of his collar and the scent of his being.
There were hands on the small of his back, holding him in place as that blade moved and he parted his perception, starving now for a second of confusion as John’s thin pressures landed underneath his jaw and began to stream quick beats against the skirt of his jugular. Panic, accompanied with a familiar hammering of his chest against his cracking ribs as if his heart was in a cage attempting to be set free. There was heavy breathing, in the silence both speaking to one another still with the most true and pure passions that they both could hear. The wind ceased to whip against their frozen ears and those kisses lining his neck written like a poem, a whisper in the dark that seemed to glow. Arousal inflaming every warm gasp and the grasp flew again.
James raced his vehement tips like an itch to loop around John’s waistcoat collar, ripping at the layers fervently--finding trouble in this because his head was twitched to the side with compressions gliding up and down as the boy’s nifty digits found their way to his buttons and was beginning to unhook the shirt down to the waist.
James pulled off, wiping his mouth, “Wait--”
John let go, inclined and switching his palm from where they lay on his lower back to guide to his hips as he licked the corner of his mouth as if savoring the taste. “We don’t have much time”, a thumb swiped the undercut of his chin and respired with anxiety. The silent one left his aperture patent a juncture before agreeing--they had already lost so much time.
Shutting his mouth and with frozen January wind striking against his partially revealed chest, allowed to be led into their tent with his pulse frantically struggling in his throat, stretching his veins around dismal flowers across internal land. John led the way through the tents opening, knowing plenty well that the two Portersfields and Johnson were going to busy for the next half hour by the coals. The older one went in first impatiently and Monroe passed a singular glance back with his gaze to the misty clearing in the trees; chewing at his inner cheek with his chattering gums before that recognizable large handed grip ripped him into the inside of the tent, letting out a slight yelp as he fell into another’s arms.
There was one blanket they both shared from the consequence of short rations, and Marshall didn’t know the younger Southerner knew of all the times he woke up at dawn to fix the covers until they rested solely on Monroe’s gullet; guarding him from the elements. Now they were getting to exposed and didn’t complain of the cold as he shot to the soil and the blanket on the ground. Monroe looked down, being yanked down by the man below him on the floor looking so impassioned and inflamed in yearning as he stared up at his universe, reaching out for him. That night they both willed for it so earnestly they made it clearly known.
As James fell on his knees on the frozen earth and lay across the chest of John’s entity, there was lips again pressed into the hollow of his neck, a thigh pushed between his legs, burning hot inside his, as his palms open and wide lured him closer and tighter; their bodies folding together, folds that held and shapes that don’t let go. They moved into each other, silhouette catching in the shaded moonlight. Not waiting a moment of hesitation, John laying on his back, saving him as a spark as the man he loved began again and ensnaring the buttons lining his waistcoat and down to the abdomen. Blindly through rushed sight and their cavities loosely connected together, their bite on the surface of each other’s teeth and not an ounce of regret lacing their bones or thickening their blood.
Fingers made their way to tug his pasty shirt from his tight hips air flowing through the cracks causing them both to shiver. If only their bodies would marry the beauty growing inside them; it would be less exhausting. They carried pieces of each other and fragments that were left unchanged by the years as bright as before across their dress. John arched his back off the ground and pushing his grip, lacing them together as he tugged James’s shirt off of his shoulders, tossing it to the side and running his embrace across his bicep; perceiving every inch of expression as he always had when they were boys, or at William & Mary or at any entrance were their waves were still just as powerful as they rolled across their bodies in a heavy entwine and infatuation with the turmoil they lived around and had etched into their skin.
The younger Virginian led his lips his lover’s nape and felt the chills wavering down their spine; so consolidated they were that James swore those were also his. James was still on his knees, one arm holding himself up as another slid up to cup John’s jaw in the shaky, rocky surroundings, wringing out his wavy hickory short hair and John let a finger brush those curls out of his eyes, looping them behind the shell of his ear and finding the familiar places were his hands used to search around the coves of his body, building little invisible imprints to remind the next person who holds his soul that he was once there; alive, there and very real.
John hesitated, somewhat startled, leaping back slightly, blinking rapidly as the pads of his fingers found a stranger on James’s skin, an anonymity that was once was not there. There was a hurt expression of confusion that flared across James’s facial features and his naturally serious face softened around the brows, melting like scolding candle wax that contaminated the corners of his teal eyes as they wrinkled like his large, chapped lips. Where his meandering appendages went to discover the familiar dimple that impregnated the center of his chin, they instead met a large area of raised skin, currant core with coral ringing it like a large coin; it was contrasting to his fitting pale tone with the season.
His lips drew apart and their gaze met forlornly with a sign of brokenness flaring across his pupils and reaching to the little scar on his left shoulder where it pulsated rather frantically as if it was attempting to formulate words. John swallowed a knot of tension gathering in the back of his throat and flowed to his stomach as his optics locked on that large scar that rooted into his veins. It was both a blessing and curse to feel everything so very deeply. That tiny scar could of been the reason they wouldn’t have their books at night or be warm in bed together once again with the winds open to summer air and the moon bright. He raised his contact again where it had faltered from before as James in a set of confusion following John’s nervous Adams apple bob in his throat tearfully.
Monroe’s eyebrows ceased disclosure and demolish from their arched height and he remembered the lilac that at stole at his complexion and blood that drank into the dirt and the roots of nearby trees only a year ago. As he had lay with crimson pooling from his wound, his flickering eyelids found their way to the sky in hope of finding a moon that was not there by fate of the fog on that night--there was hope of seeing it just one last time before his eyelids had shut in the unwavering circumstance, miles from home. John seemed to gather this story at his fingertips, uncertain for landing again on the bullet wound and the lead cylinder that still lay in his shoulder around a mountain of muscle and flesh, building into his person.
They both fastened to the truth--the present and that they were able to catch each other’s glance and collect one another’s love in their glare. They clung to the music and Marshall traced the outline of the cutting, one inch scar that was the same distance away from his heart... His jaw set--he couldn’t think of it.
“John…”, James’s soft voice extracted into the air and he reached for their other hand and ran a thumb reassuringly over the bruises on his hands, stif there to remain until spring burnt the frost that kept them there.
They were both subtly growing dismantled in the things that would take them away and vowed to never return to the subject; but this was different--this John Marshall would carry the stain on his fingers tips of forever. It was each other. That reassuring extension raised the other’s fingers to his lips where his gingerly kissed his knuckles, blinking so slowly his eyelashes beat against his cheek bones as he bore the weight of words they both wished to say in their skulls. John begged for the music to feel it with his heart so that he could relish in the reality of that scar.
James could feel the onset of this interaction had taken its toll and in his bareness and revealing as he lay shirtless with his entire torso revealed to the cold, goosebumps rose across his skin. John’s eyes remained permanent on that bullet hole and the guilt burned, burrowing beneath the surface. Feeling the scar pulsate in his shoulder, his cheeks began to pink, catching the trembling of that man’s fixation that moments earlier bore his name and fingers that now were lying tentatively on his breast, once were ringeleting through his hair.
“John… please, it’s nothing--"
“--I almost lost you,” John’s glimmer faltered to the ground, inclining his forehead, bowing his chin, strands hovering in front of his vision and he swallowed slowly, teeth scraping together, “Almost losing you isn’t just nothing to me, James.” Lyrics sang so brutally like a vicious hiss as his glimpse raised once again, a certain liquid turning over as tears brimmed the edges of his vision that reflected like a piercing lake, “It’s everything.”
The silence stemmed through and the crackle of firewood in the distance accompanied it. James latched his front teeth to his flesh and tossed his cranium to the side in a sense of embarrassment settling on him. “I-I’m sorry.”
It wasn’t was John was expecting, taking back and flickering several times the water from his eyes studying the person in front of him. There he was, James Monroe, no longer a soldier, in his 6’0, tall, broad and bulky stature: how he was so small right now as a child circulated through his brain in flashes of momentary pangs like a river as they surrounded him. There in front of him was not James Monroe the soldier and war hero: it was the shy boy, a poor Virginian of humble backgrounds and an unwilling perseverance for the good he seeked. Short, vulnerable, wrapped around his little finger. There was strength in this form of vulnerability as if he was facing his demons and knowing that kindness is more important in spite of them. To be laid out so vulnerable on the soil was to be brave.
Plunging into sorrow head first he leaned forward, tracing his palm along his jaw once more and felt that tension knotting the edges of his visage and across his chin. His orbs seemed to open to galaxies as his face relaxed, falling into the touch, growing towards the comfort. His shoulder grew to a dull throb until it faded into thin air, dropping as John came to lead own his lips towards that little scar on his shoulder, pressing his brushing graze higher across his collarbone and higher still till they came to base of his neck and the cold sweat that gathered on his chin, flinching as those lips went across his jowl and landed at the corner of his mouth so seductively coy that his spine shivered.
Muffled, “That sweetness is still there, I can see.”
“It never left.”
Their lips released one another's again and Marshall’s watch came too at the scar. “It is a beautiful reminder, isn’t it?”
Quizzically cocking his head to the lateral and sparkling like a child as he raised his own fingers to scrap the raised skin, jumping at his own touch as he could almost feel the bullet twitching around behind the layers of human. “John…”
Their eyes met, “Jas, the war hasn’t changed you one bit. Don’t keep lying to yourself.”
A melt in James's chest, shoulder decreasing, sipping back.
“You’re soft for the sake of every hard heart; show them with every movement, just I can see that gentle does not mean weak.”
A smile painting the corners of his mouth, wrapping his wrists around the back of John’s neck, tugging his head into his lap where he brushed back the hair on his forehead and seemed to quiet all of his fears. “I feel so cheated in the moments I don’t get with you; but it allows me to love the do’es even more, my dear.”
This made John simper and his eyes shut, molding together as his features muted, moving with the calm sway of every breath in his lungs and desire. No longer vulnerable and falling under the insensible shift of enrichment. The scar began to pulsate with every breath that faltered in his stretching veins. It was surprising to him how someone who was able to bring out everything of his grew to be himself. As if they had switched roles for one night, resulting in anxiety. He wanted to shed every layer down to the bone beneath become hauntingly beautiful as he searched for his soul. He hadn’t intended such a serious tone tonight, missing the form of each other’s bodies for so many months of longing and perhaps he expected to bite on his own fist to quiet himself as John landed between his thighs, moving in the sway of his hips with his mouth.
He won’t wake up with blood cloaking his lungs or search for life one last time in the moon and nor would he feel light shift in his brain as the edges of his vision turned a startling and more dazzling scarlet that consumed him and the tips of his fingers with a denim coating as his life dripped out of him and the sound of musket shots muted as his eyes rolled back with many names on his tongue and the snow beneath his palms feeling as smooth as their crescendo. That was thing, lying under the cloudy sky he became just the same scared boy from Virginia with a whole life ahead of him. It was the first time he had recognized this when the darkness consumed him and he passed.
James shifted John’s body off of him and onto the blanket, sitting up and pulling his shirt back over his shoulders, hesitating where he knew the indent was, staring ardently at his lover, slept soundlessly in the shameless warmth. He skirting himself closer, his stomach against the curve of John's back on a false bed of flaws, shutting his eyes with heavy lids soft as his character and fell deeper as he remembered him; body, soul, all and quite possibly if he willed it--the tiny scar that breathed life into his heart. Curling up with him, spending eternity becoming one like woven stars.
