Post by max on Jul 4, 2012 22:02:59 GMT 10
Title: The Sum of Living
Rating: PG
Prompt: #71 - Broken Dreams
Summary: It isn’t for the faint of heart. Briar, Evvy, negligence and deal-breakers.
Notes: I’m probably the only one who likes this pairing. Aaand I covered my favourite broken dream for the Dream prompt so let's go with thistotally total AU of a totally and absolutely canonical ship (well in saying this, this kind of an instant and such does take place in my extended Briar/Evvy timeline, but as a oneshot by itself it looks a little different).
.
.
You see a lot, being mage-born. Being a street rat. Surviving a war. At night the dreams come, horrors both sublime and terrible weaving together in a many-layered tapestry whose threads snarl and trap him until he can’t even scream, can’t do anything but look.
But there is Gorse’s baklava. The silent choir of the green world. The incomparable colours of the sky, above storms.
His mothers. His sisters.
You learn.
The tree of life is a gnarled and tangled thing. As a green mage he has become accustomed to being able to read the filigree patterns of leaves and bark and branches, to being able to touch the highest, newest bud and trace its veins right down to their subterranean roots. But there is none of this in living. Only the haphazard recognition of the same limbs, when they curve back into sight from beneath their brethren. A clumsy matching-up of branches by sight, and forever uncertainly.
The first time he sees her in the marketplace of Summersea the echoes of the scene stop him dead.
The same girl who had been dressed in rags. The same girl who would always be tiny due to the malnutrition of her childhood and in spite of her inordinate strength. The same mountain carried as tenderly upon her back as other women carried children. The knotted lace architecture of time thickening the air around her into light, dancing on the porcelain-delicate angles of her face. The sudden spine-liquefying realisation that he has gone for half a summer and in that time she has become a beautiful thing.
She stands there, selling the most fragrant peaches of the Earth Temple orchards and it has been less than a half-year since he had carried her because her feet were flayed apart.
(It had been the one time anyone had ever held onto him as if he were the only thing in the world.)
He starts forward, her name brimming up on his lips like dew, but she moves and the air leaves his body altogether.
The robes whiter than magnolia flowers.
In that instant, he understands three irrefutable things.
The first, that he will never see anything so lovely as she is, gilded by that late summer light. The second, that up until this moment, he had thought he understood loss quite well.
The third is that he is about to and will learn for the rest of his life how mistaken he was upon that second point.
What’s wrong? Sandry asks, and from the part of him which is theirs he can feel Tris and Daja mirroring her concern.
He forces boneless feet back the way he had come, and tells them I didn't tend my irises.
And it isn't a lie at all.
Rating: PG
Prompt: #71 - Broken Dreams
Summary: It isn’t for the faint of heart. Briar, Evvy, negligence and deal-breakers.
Notes: I’m probably the only one who likes this pairing. Aaand I covered my favourite broken dream for the Dream prompt so let's go with this
.
.
You see a lot, being mage-born. Being a street rat. Surviving a war. At night the dreams come, horrors both sublime and terrible weaving together in a many-layered tapestry whose threads snarl and trap him until he can’t even scream, can’t do anything but look.
But there is Gorse’s baklava. The silent choir of the green world. The incomparable colours of the sky, above storms.
His mothers. His sisters.
You learn.
The tree of life is a gnarled and tangled thing. As a green mage he has become accustomed to being able to read the filigree patterns of leaves and bark and branches, to being able to touch the highest, newest bud and trace its veins right down to their subterranean roots. But there is none of this in living. Only the haphazard recognition of the same limbs, when they curve back into sight from beneath their brethren. A clumsy matching-up of branches by sight, and forever uncertainly.
The first time he sees her in the marketplace of Summersea the echoes of the scene stop him dead.
The same girl who had been dressed in rags. The same girl who would always be tiny due to the malnutrition of her childhood and in spite of her inordinate strength. The same mountain carried as tenderly upon her back as other women carried children. The knotted lace architecture of time thickening the air around her into light, dancing on the porcelain-delicate angles of her face. The sudden spine-liquefying realisation that he has gone for half a summer and in that time she has become a beautiful thing.
She stands there, selling the most fragrant peaches of the Earth Temple orchards and it has been less than a half-year since he had carried her because her feet were flayed apart.
(It had been the one time anyone had ever held onto him as if he were the only thing in the world.)
He starts forward, her name brimming up on his lips like dew, but she moves and the air leaves his body altogether.
The robes whiter than magnolia flowers.
In that instant, he understands three irrefutable things.
The first, that he will never see anything so lovely as she is, gilded by that late summer light. The second, that up until this moment, he had thought he understood loss quite well.
The third is that he is about to and will learn for the rest of his life how mistaken he was upon that second point.
What’s wrong? Sandry asks, and from the part of him which is theirs he can feel Tris and Daja mirroring her concern.
He forces boneless feet back the way he had come, and tells them I didn't tend my irises.
And it isn't a lie at all.
Maybe once we'd have seen it during Smackdown!