head in my fucking hands because flint unlocks real care for silver after the damn shark date (when he has no one else to possibly attach to) (when silver has made himself vulnerable out of sheer necessity) and silver asks pre-battle about flint's past but he doesn't even think to return the favor until the cliff scene weeks (months?) later. and silver's Thing of course requires that this frightens him. he can't be known but he wants and needs love anyway. and flint gives as much as he can but because of who they are it is incomplete on both sides. like we knew this. we've known this.
but i think about vane and how his trauma mirrors silver in some ways, and how he isn't afraid for his past to be known. he WANTS to be understood. his problem, as a foil for silver, is that while others want to know silver, others do NOT want to know vane. anne knows where he goes when he leaves nassau to confront albinus, but she either doesn't care or has so staunchly squashed her emotions that it's functionally the same. eleanor refuses to know vane because it suits her vanity for him to be an emotionless animal straining at the leash. teach knows vane, but he uses that knowledge to also put him on a leash. and rackham uses the fact that he knows vane so well to excuse what he does with that knowledge. in a lot of ways, vane is just as friendless as silver and flint.
i think silverflint is real in that the connection and the love is there. but the monstrousness of silver's past warps that love so badly that silver can never acknowledge it, and flint can never properly address it. so it can never be consummated in any sense of the word.
but vane and flint see each other. flint doesn't share his story with vane on purpose, but i think he definitely overheard at least part of the conversation with miranda in the tavern — and vane doesn't use that information against him. then given the nature of vane's letter to eleanor, flint definitely knows at least part of vane's story — and it's that knowledge which allows flint to tell him to forget about debts and oaths and decide for himself who he is. maybe the first time in vane's life he has ever been given that option.
all of this is cemented in charlestown: when vane realizes their common purpose and articulates it in the bluntest possible manner, and when flint repays that trust by protecting the remainder of vane's crew afterward.
to be seen is to be loved.
