Post by max on Feb 5, 2012 14:03:37 GMT 10
Title: Hippolytus Arisen
Rating: PG
Prompt: #60 - An equal and opposite reaction
Summary: Keladry comes to a realisation on the Northern Front. Post LK.
A/N: I'm tired of editing this. No wonder I haven't bothered writing any fanfiction in months - oh wait, that's right. I HAVE EXAMS AGAIN.
_____________________
You do not feel it when he dies, and so it takes until the first time for you to have any idea of what has occurred.
This doesn’t happen until the fourth year, when you are in the village you have raised from the blood-churned ashes of your dead, when with sudden terrible violence the spectre of a boy so beautiful as to make your lungs ache reconciles himself from the air outside your unshuttered window, eternally eighteen, with the light shining through him, a pitiless smirk playing about sensuously full lips as your tea drops from your shaking hands and shatters to the ground while he fades out of corporeality and back into the white northern sky.
Tobe rushes in at the sound of the porcelain breaking (as you stoop to pick up the pieces, wondering what southern bureaucrat ever thought fine china sent to commanding officers had any hope of surviving a warzone intact; the absurdity of this life being so mythical that this was considered feasible by administration, the obscenity that they will expend money on this before they will send more grain), because Tobe has always lived in one kind of war or other, still won’t allow himself to decode any noise as anything so commonplace as a slip of the hand when for all his life before he has been able to equate the sound of a cup smashing with the sound of his bones snapping like so many green twigs. You understand how this child needs you to hold him up and afloat upon the great tides of history through which you move, so you tell a lie about forgetting the dimensions of your desk, take his husky scolding (all fortified by the relief threading through it) like an antidote to the hysteria you can feel rising in you like the sea, throw yourself into the martial arts rhythms which throw off any thinking beyond the blur of dark wood and blue blade and your beating heart, reminding yourself you are alive and in control until you are calm again and can breathe.
That night, though, he flashes across your mind’s inner landscape with the force of a typhoon, violating as the chamber which had sent you nightmares and a thousand times more terrible in his absolute beauty, eyes the same searing blue as the sun. You cannot meet them, wake up with tears sparking in one eye but not the other and fissures running down to your core with the immensity of what it means.
Until this day you have missed him only in the curious way in which you have wondered what he might have been, if he had been raised in a world like your own. Only thought of him in terms of the looks of this or that man you have passed in comparison to his own impossible rose and ivory architecture, too busy fighting and surviving and carrying worlds on your nineteen year old’s shoulders to give more thought than this to a boy four years dead and nearly a decade lost to anyone who could have saved him. You had known every way he moved in combat, the quicksilver spark in his eye which heralded a transgression, how he tied his hair back when something required his full concentration, but although this knowledge has remained in your mind as all knowledge does, you had thought nothing of it. It was in your commander’s eyes to absorb everything the better to do what you were needed to. That was that.
But now the winds which roll down the Vassa from the north-eastern mountains slip into the cracks inside you, and you know why you have never felt his loss. Across all the quiet moments of your life as long as you now live, know you will find him rising up out of the past, the eternal challenger with the eternity held like a weapon between the kisses brimming on his too-full, too-red mouth; know you did not feel it when he died, because he has been alive inside of you. Ever since his own life ended (years before the Chamber took him for its own) has been filling all the hollows of your insides and you have had no more awareness of this than the pressure of the air the mages say is equal in every direction, filling every silence and absence and emptiness. You had always thought love might feel this way – not the piecemeal affection you doled out to Cleon nor the dazzled attraction you have harboured for the handsome and jewel-eyed – but it is the force of his rage that neither of you will ever be free of.
People will say you throw off light because of your greatness, because you are god-touched, because of the goodness in you, and the lie of it will hold terrible weight in you as the truth does not; wherever you go, carrying him inside you with all the dreadful wonderment of having eaten a star.
Four years on, the true sun pours down on your skin from your unshuttered window with the same inhuman radiance as the molten whisper of him in your blood,
And if you have taken this from him, the Black God alone knows what has been taken from you.
Rating: PG
Prompt: #60 - An equal and opposite reaction
Summary: Keladry comes to a realisation on the Northern Front. Post LK.
A/N: I'm tired of editing this. No wonder I haven't bothered writing any fanfiction in months - oh wait, that's right. I HAVE EXAMS AGAIN.
_____________________
You do not feel it when he dies, and so it takes until the first time for you to have any idea of what has occurred.
This doesn’t happen until the fourth year, when you are in the village you have raised from the blood-churned ashes of your dead, when with sudden terrible violence the spectre of a boy so beautiful as to make your lungs ache reconciles himself from the air outside your unshuttered window, eternally eighteen, with the light shining through him, a pitiless smirk playing about sensuously full lips as your tea drops from your shaking hands and shatters to the ground while he fades out of corporeality and back into the white northern sky.
Tobe rushes in at the sound of the porcelain breaking (as you stoop to pick up the pieces, wondering what southern bureaucrat ever thought fine china sent to commanding officers had any hope of surviving a warzone intact; the absurdity of this life being so mythical that this was considered feasible by administration, the obscenity that they will expend money on this before they will send more grain), because Tobe has always lived in one kind of war or other, still won’t allow himself to decode any noise as anything so commonplace as a slip of the hand when for all his life before he has been able to equate the sound of a cup smashing with the sound of his bones snapping like so many green twigs. You understand how this child needs you to hold him up and afloat upon the great tides of history through which you move, so you tell a lie about forgetting the dimensions of your desk, take his husky scolding (all fortified by the relief threading through it) like an antidote to the hysteria you can feel rising in you like the sea, throw yourself into the martial arts rhythms which throw off any thinking beyond the blur of dark wood and blue blade and your beating heart, reminding yourself you are alive and in control until you are calm again and can breathe.
That night, though, he flashes across your mind’s inner landscape with the force of a typhoon, violating as the chamber which had sent you nightmares and a thousand times more terrible in his absolute beauty, eyes the same searing blue as the sun. You cannot meet them, wake up with tears sparking in one eye but not the other and fissures running down to your core with the immensity of what it means.
Until this day you have missed him only in the curious way in which you have wondered what he might have been, if he had been raised in a world like your own. Only thought of him in terms of the looks of this or that man you have passed in comparison to his own impossible rose and ivory architecture, too busy fighting and surviving and carrying worlds on your nineteen year old’s shoulders to give more thought than this to a boy four years dead and nearly a decade lost to anyone who could have saved him. You had known every way he moved in combat, the quicksilver spark in his eye which heralded a transgression, how he tied his hair back when something required his full concentration, but although this knowledge has remained in your mind as all knowledge does, you had thought nothing of it. It was in your commander’s eyes to absorb everything the better to do what you were needed to. That was that.
But now the winds which roll down the Vassa from the north-eastern mountains slip into the cracks inside you, and you know why you have never felt his loss. Across all the quiet moments of your life as long as you now live, know you will find him rising up out of the past, the eternal challenger with the eternity held like a weapon between the kisses brimming on his too-full, too-red mouth; know you did not feel it when he died, because he has been alive inside of you. Ever since his own life ended (years before the Chamber took him for its own) has been filling all the hollows of your insides and you have had no more awareness of this than the pressure of the air the mages say is equal in every direction, filling every silence and absence and emptiness. You had always thought love might feel this way – not the piecemeal affection you doled out to Cleon nor the dazzled attraction you have harboured for the handsome and jewel-eyed – but it is the force of his rage that neither of you will ever be free of.
People will say you throw off light because of your greatness, because you are god-touched, because of the goodness in you, and the lie of it will hold terrible weight in you as the truth does not; wherever you go, carrying him inside you with all the dreadful wonderment of having eaten a star.
Four years on, the true sun pours down on your skin from your unshuttered window with the same inhuman radiance as the molten whisper of him in your blood,
And if you have taken this from him, the Black God alone knows what has been taken from you.
Maybe once we'd have seen it during Smackdown!