Dancing Mad
Written for Waen.
One gets mad in the heat, he thought carelessly. One gets mad and one's head spins and there are hallucinations and mirages and shapes and pictures and pieces of thought put together wrong. Besides that, one gets mad with triumph. Between the fact that it was hot as--hell, he thought, unwilling, really, to stop grinning; and the fact that they were finally, astoundingly, astonishingly debating the question of independence (proposed by a very good man, a man who wasn't John Adams), it might be considered quite natural that he was mad.
'Madness' was his explanation for catching Lee's hands and dancing a dozen steps with him, though in truth it didn't take much madness to make a man do that. Lee went on and danced with half the other men after him. But he laughed and cheered and called out with the rest of them, and ran after Lee, flushed a little with delight. Trying to get another dance (and Lee was happy to oblige) was the mad part; perhaps something of a good kind of mad; but mad nonetheless, he thought, as he was swung around wildly and caught, went on to grab Ben Franklin's arm and shake it in a frenzy of excitement, found himself face to face with John Adams and stopped short before diving to the side and exchanging 'At last!'s and handshakes with Rhode Island.
Then it was all over, all this having taken place in a matter of seconds, just as long a space of time as it might take a man to think of the heat and triumph and madness, and everyone was back at his desk, and Lee a hundred steps away, and he sitting and touching his shirtcuffs curiously as he listened to Pennsylvania speak. But Lee was still smiling, because that was the sort of man he was, getting too excited over a very small thing, and absolutely delirious at anything important; even as Pennsylvania went on talking against John Adams, Lee was smiling, because if Pennsylvania was against them, John Hancock was with them, and the resolution was being debated, anyway, as they'd begun to doubt it ever would be.
So he smiled a little as well, a more private smile, because while it was acceptable for Lee to be grinning at the slightest provocation, it was less so for him; he smiled a little, though, at heat and madness, and glanced back and forth between Pennsylvania and John Adams and Lee, and wondered, briefly, if--when--the resolution when through--he wondered, would Lee dance with him again? and he hoped yes.
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