Gift for journeycat: Crown on the ground, PG-13
Dec 11, 2010 21:56:22 GMT 10
wordy and Seek like this
Post by max on Dec 11, 2010 21:56:22 GMT 10
To: journeycat
Message: Hope you have a lovely December. Sorry it's taken me a third of it to get this up. Sorry if it's a bit confusing, also.
From: Max
Title: Crown on the ground
Rating: PG-13
Wishlist Item: #2 (Kel/older man) and #3 (Kel/anyone but dom)
Summary: Sometimes, the indelible things hit you where you least expect. Kel/Coram, Kel/Tobe. After Scanra.
_____________
Come you be the pyre;
And I will be the burned one.
Sometimes she remembers the day they met, (at the Armistice ball, when she had approached him, because she'd heard so much about the legendary blacksmith baron, who had accompanied her hero to the roof of the world and back, walked across the tapestry of modern history and retired to love and children in the mountains) ignorant of his high loss, inane questions clamouring through her mead-relaxed mind (about the places he had seen, the deeds which had passed into song he had witnessed, executed, the sweetness of That Northern Air – New Hope then an ache in her guts, and a longing unlike Yaman or Mindelan had ever been when she was a child – in comparison with oppressive-skied, overcast Corus) and he had met her eyes with such force their mountain brown had stolen her voice entirely.
She had seen many things in his gaze that day. The hunger, perennial by now, in the men who understood war – for her conflict-sharpened frame had melted into something leaner and finer than what it had been at eighteen, yet retained its promise of invincibility (after the war, that invulnerability had been intoxicating: incongruous purity of something which would not break); the insurmountable grief of those left in the wilderness by their lost people (and later, in the solitude of her bedroom she had felt his pain as if it were her own, crying for the woman who had died, whom she had never known); the tenderness of the old for the young; and a smoky flicker of familiarity in the blue-grey ring around his irises: not recognition – they'd never met – but words had seemed to blossom in the spaces between the music, and the gaiety, and the grief, saying that although she was a girl, was young, a knight, perfection within reach of her hands all her life, she had something in common with this broken man, who'd battled when there were no wars.
Because speech had escaped her, he had done the talking for the two of them, taking her calloused hand in his own, brushing a kiss across her knuckles with a gentleness belying his build and reputation (contact of mouth and rough stubble sending a surge like magic tingling under her skin), saying, 'Lady Knight. It's an honour,' with the burr like muted thunder at the end of the words. And after a conversation just long enough to be within the realms of propriety, he had deposited her politely back in the company of her friends.
But it hadn't been enough.
'Was that Coram Smythheson?' Merric had asked, intrigued.
'Baron Coram of Trebond?' Neal had countered lazily. 'Yes, it was.'
Me, she'd wanted to respond – illogically – but her Yamani mask had overtaken her (other, more permanent one) by then.
'Gydo knows,' Tobe tells her, words rolling over her back in the late afternoon air from the bed where he lies, chin resting against the diamond of his folded arms, to the desk where she sits, quill scratching parchment like a chorus of grasshoppers in high summer (except it is November, and the light never brightens beyond a blue-grey), and at the breaking of the silence the ink spatters, leaving a trail of freckled black across the page. Drawn up from the words she notices that the light is vanishing and grimaces, crumpling the ruined parchment into a ball and throwing it with practised ease into the wicker basket reserved for such use as she busies herself gathering flint and candle wick, all the while his eyes on her, cold sparkling into her skin from the concentration.
'At that lunch with the General?' he elaborates, as if she's asked for clarification. 'She said she wouldn't tell, “because it's your funeral”.' She can picture the almost-cruel curl of his mouth around the word, as if Gydo's misgivings are unfounded – even a little naïve – although she doesn't turn around. At seventeen he has stretched and lengthened into a creature almost too beautiful to touch, much less look upon for extended periods of time – the delicate angularity of his skeleton and almost fragile hollows of skin and tendons giving way to combat-hardened musculature, blonde hair darkening to gold ochre with adulthood, eyes the same violently diluted blue of the sky at dusk – except, of course, that she has.
The room brightens for a fraction of a second, sheet lightning cleaving evening apart as the weather breaks. Once, this would have worried her – threat of green wood and ramshackle repairs crumpling, livestock dying, wells and stores contaminated, heightened vulnerability to attack – but it has been seven years now, and New Hope has barns, houses with chimneys, a child who can see fronts pushing down from the tundra far to the north, across miles of mountains and plains and the rivers which hurtle down from the roof of the world to shatter on their own borderland hills, weeks in advance, so there is nothing much to be done now but watch the slow dance of bright fires, or complete the correspondence which regularly occupies knights in all the lonely outposts of the world, under the passing ferocity of nameless gods. This is exactly what she is doing, ink and paper before her, and behind, a boy who bleeds from white to a flame when she only lightly brushes his salamander skin. Or will, when the candle finally takes.
'She knows,' he repeats, as if she hadn't heard the first time.
'I trust her.'
From the sigh behind her, she knows it's the wrong thing to have said. Like the weather, his surliness will pass, though – and sooner, every emotion in him flickering through too quickly to ever be properly touched or accounted for. The first time, she had tried to map all the shapes his bones made through his flesh and seen cards of pinned butterflies in her head, given it up for lost.
Fingers ghost over her shoulders, the texture of the air on her exposed neck made wetter by his breathing. 'What were you writing?' voice softer now, man replacing boy and the quill falls just so, vane obscuring the page as his mouth brushes against her temple. 'You'll hurt your eyes if you try it in this light.'
'What light?' she says, nonchalantly as she can, still trying to strike flint with shaky fingers as his hands wander. 'It's not important anyway'.
This isn't entirely a lie.
'Let me,' Tobe says, leaning around her now – and how the barriers have been dissolved by his intimacy, a gradual erosion of space in which she remembers the child who had become the lover, hating hot water, unable to let her out of his sight, and perhaps this has all been inevitable – takes the stones from her hands, and then there is light. This is the first time she's able to appreciate the blanket bunched around his waist as he leans against the desk, hips jutted out, long legs trailing down beneath regulation grey wool to the floor, one hand splayed over the candle, flame growing and swaying up, up, up as it follows his movements, the jut of his jaw, his creased brows...
Belatedly, she realises that he's reading. That, while she's ensured her own correspondence is hidden, the final letter (four words, creamy parchment watermarked) is illuminated in a globe of flickering yellow upon the windowsill.
How strange it feels to hope that he has absorbed the date in the right hand corner, understands how long it's been.
The rain outside crescendoes, raising a few protesting cheeps from the sparrows settling down to sleep. For all the play of amber and shadow the candle's throwing upon him, he is perfectly still.
'Tobe,' she says, lips plucking at the word like a grape to be crushed in a burst of sharp juice between teeth and palate and tongue, and his eyes slide up to meet hers.
Then the shutters burst open.
The light goes out as the storm snatches at the contents of the room and they both jump forward to pull the wooden screens closed again, birds shrieking at the intrusion, cold blasting in – and then they're saved. She reaches for the flint, and his hands close over hers, clumsily in the gloom, moistened by rain. Outside, the wind is blowing to a scream.
'I want you to be happy, lady.' The lady only now when he slips out of being a young warrior on leave, an almost-man. Chilled lips meeting hers with a sting as if she's being kissed by bees (incandescence) and his blanket has fallen in the hustle.
For a while, words becomes unnecessary.
When the desire had come for them, it had crashed into their lives like a tidal wave. The ball, conveniently timed to coincide with congress, ensured that in the following weeks, they crossed and recrossed each other's paths, through the widespread net of mutual friends and interests. And perhaps even if the steps between the General's dinner in recognition of their services to that first glut of skin and heat and spasms of light one fine July night escape her, can only be guessed (an offer of a nightcap, because Trebond House is so much closer to the Minchi's than either Mindelan or the palace; paths opened by boysenberries and oak; ghosts not so easily appeased in the depth of July by saliva on stone flags), it was inevitable. Surrender granted even before she took his hand in hers, led him up through a house she didn't know to a parlour wide open to the summer moonlight, a sloping chair with only one shoulder, the scars on the soft skin of her stomach. The summer night pouring in through the open windows had seemed a balm to that urgent exploration of a mutual self – 'Those older warriors,' Neal had once said, 'Experience flows in their wake like the sea.' But she had never been afraid of drowning.
Sometimes she thinks about what it had meant, not to come back to New Hope of her own volition, but been sent there, and wonders if perhaps she should have been.
Their bodies shudder, and then still. His head pillowed on her breast. A reprieve in the silence of the outside world. The promise, left hanging over the clothes chest for her to pick up at her leisure, and her fingers thread his hair at his particular compact tenderness. For the first time, she sees that she could do this forever.
'I'm going to come back.'
In the morning, Qasim's squad have moved on, and Tobe has departed along with them, leaving behind the dry hay-and-sunshine fragrance which permeates all his things. The letter, casualty of the season, only crosses her mind when she notices that the water on his hands had been ink.
Body dappled by non-bruises.
The sky is the blue which goes on forever.
Message: Hope you have a lovely December. Sorry it's taken me a third of it to get this up. Sorry if it's a bit confusing, also.
From: Max
Title: Crown on the ground
Rating: PG-13
Wishlist Item: #2 (Kel/older man) and #3 (Kel/anyone but dom)
Summary: Sometimes, the indelible things hit you where you least expect. Kel/Coram, Kel/Tobe. After Scanra.
_____________
Come you be the pyre;
And I will be the burned one.
Sometimes she remembers the day they met, (at the Armistice ball, when she had approached him, because she'd heard so much about the legendary blacksmith baron, who had accompanied her hero to the roof of the world and back, walked across the tapestry of modern history and retired to love and children in the mountains) ignorant of his high loss, inane questions clamouring through her mead-relaxed mind (about the places he had seen, the deeds which had passed into song he had witnessed, executed, the sweetness of That Northern Air – New Hope then an ache in her guts, and a longing unlike Yaman or Mindelan had ever been when she was a child – in comparison with oppressive-skied, overcast Corus) and he had met her eyes with such force their mountain brown had stolen her voice entirely.
She had seen many things in his gaze that day. The hunger, perennial by now, in the men who understood war – for her conflict-sharpened frame had melted into something leaner and finer than what it had been at eighteen, yet retained its promise of invincibility (after the war, that invulnerability had been intoxicating: incongruous purity of something which would not break); the insurmountable grief of those left in the wilderness by their lost people (and later, in the solitude of her bedroom she had felt his pain as if it were her own, crying for the woman who had died, whom she had never known); the tenderness of the old for the young; and a smoky flicker of familiarity in the blue-grey ring around his irises: not recognition – they'd never met – but words had seemed to blossom in the spaces between the music, and the gaiety, and the grief, saying that although she was a girl, was young, a knight, perfection within reach of her hands all her life, she had something in common with this broken man, who'd battled when there were no wars.
Because speech had escaped her, he had done the talking for the two of them, taking her calloused hand in his own, brushing a kiss across her knuckles with a gentleness belying his build and reputation (contact of mouth and rough stubble sending a surge like magic tingling under her skin), saying, 'Lady Knight. It's an honour,' with the burr like muted thunder at the end of the words. And after a conversation just long enough to be within the realms of propriety, he had deposited her politely back in the company of her friends.
But it hadn't been enough.
'Was that Coram Smythheson?' Merric had asked, intrigued.
'Baron Coram of Trebond?' Neal had countered lazily. 'Yes, it was.'
Me, she'd wanted to respond – illogically – but her Yamani mask had overtaken her (other, more permanent one) by then.
'Gydo knows,' Tobe tells her, words rolling over her back in the late afternoon air from the bed where he lies, chin resting against the diamond of his folded arms, to the desk where she sits, quill scratching parchment like a chorus of grasshoppers in high summer (except it is November, and the light never brightens beyond a blue-grey), and at the breaking of the silence the ink spatters, leaving a trail of freckled black across the page. Drawn up from the words she notices that the light is vanishing and grimaces, crumpling the ruined parchment into a ball and throwing it with practised ease into the wicker basket reserved for such use as she busies herself gathering flint and candle wick, all the while his eyes on her, cold sparkling into her skin from the concentration.
'At that lunch with the General?' he elaborates, as if she's asked for clarification. 'She said she wouldn't tell, “because it's your funeral”.' She can picture the almost-cruel curl of his mouth around the word, as if Gydo's misgivings are unfounded – even a little naïve – although she doesn't turn around. At seventeen he has stretched and lengthened into a creature almost too beautiful to touch, much less look upon for extended periods of time – the delicate angularity of his skeleton and almost fragile hollows of skin and tendons giving way to combat-hardened musculature, blonde hair darkening to gold ochre with adulthood, eyes the same violently diluted blue of the sky at dusk – except, of course, that she has.
The room brightens for a fraction of a second, sheet lightning cleaving evening apart as the weather breaks. Once, this would have worried her – threat of green wood and ramshackle repairs crumpling, livestock dying, wells and stores contaminated, heightened vulnerability to attack – but it has been seven years now, and New Hope has barns, houses with chimneys, a child who can see fronts pushing down from the tundra far to the north, across miles of mountains and plains and the rivers which hurtle down from the roof of the world to shatter on their own borderland hills, weeks in advance, so there is nothing much to be done now but watch the slow dance of bright fires, or complete the correspondence which regularly occupies knights in all the lonely outposts of the world, under the passing ferocity of nameless gods. This is exactly what she is doing, ink and paper before her, and behind, a boy who bleeds from white to a flame when she only lightly brushes his salamander skin. Or will, when the candle finally takes.
'She knows,' he repeats, as if she hadn't heard the first time.
'I trust her.'
From the sigh behind her, she knows it's the wrong thing to have said. Like the weather, his surliness will pass, though – and sooner, every emotion in him flickering through too quickly to ever be properly touched or accounted for. The first time, she had tried to map all the shapes his bones made through his flesh and seen cards of pinned butterflies in her head, given it up for lost.
Fingers ghost over her shoulders, the texture of the air on her exposed neck made wetter by his breathing. 'What were you writing?' voice softer now, man replacing boy and the quill falls just so, vane obscuring the page as his mouth brushes against her temple. 'You'll hurt your eyes if you try it in this light.'
'What light?' she says, nonchalantly as she can, still trying to strike flint with shaky fingers as his hands wander. 'It's not important anyway'.
This isn't entirely a lie.
'Let me,' Tobe says, leaning around her now – and how the barriers have been dissolved by his intimacy, a gradual erosion of space in which she remembers the child who had become the lover, hating hot water, unable to let her out of his sight, and perhaps this has all been inevitable – takes the stones from her hands, and then there is light. This is the first time she's able to appreciate the blanket bunched around his waist as he leans against the desk, hips jutted out, long legs trailing down beneath regulation grey wool to the floor, one hand splayed over the candle, flame growing and swaying up, up, up as it follows his movements, the jut of his jaw, his creased brows...
Belatedly, she realises that he's reading. That, while she's ensured her own correspondence is hidden, the final letter (four words, creamy parchment watermarked) is illuminated in a globe of flickering yellow upon the windowsill.
How strange it feels to hope that he has absorbed the date in the right hand corner, understands how long it's been.
The rain outside crescendoes, raising a few protesting cheeps from the sparrows settling down to sleep. For all the play of amber and shadow the candle's throwing upon him, he is perfectly still.
'Tobe,' she says, lips plucking at the word like a grape to be crushed in a burst of sharp juice between teeth and palate and tongue, and his eyes slide up to meet hers.
Then the shutters burst open.
The light goes out as the storm snatches at the contents of the room and they both jump forward to pull the wooden screens closed again, birds shrieking at the intrusion, cold blasting in – and then they're saved. She reaches for the flint, and his hands close over hers, clumsily in the gloom, moistened by rain. Outside, the wind is blowing to a scream.
'I want you to be happy, lady.' The lady only now when he slips out of being a young warrior on leave, an almost-man. Chilled lips meeting hers with a sting as if she's being kissed by bees (incandescence) and his blanket has fallen in the hustle.
For a while, words becomes unnecessary.
When the desire had come for them, it had crashed into their lives like a tidal wave. The ball, conveniently timed to coincide with congress, ensured that in the following weeks, they crossed and recrossed each other's paths, through the widespread net of mutual friends and interests. And perhaps even if the steps between the General's dinner in recognition of their services to that first glut of skin and heat and spasms of light one fine July night escape her, can only be guessed (an offer of a nightcap, because Trebond House is so much closer to the Minchi's than either Mindelan or the palace; paths opened by boysenberries and oak; ghosts not so easily appeased in the depth of July by saliva on stone flags), it was inevitable. Surrender granted even before she took his hand in hers, led him up through a house she didn't know to a parlour wide open to the summer moonlight, a sloping chair with only one shoulder, the scars on the soft skin of her stomach. The summer night pouring in through the open windows had seemed a balm to that urgent exploration of a mutual self – 'Those older warriors,' Neal had once said, 'Experience flows in their wake like the sea.' But she had never been afraid of drowning.
Sometimes she thinks about what it had meant, not to come back to New Hope of her own volition, but been sent there, and wonders if perhaps she should have been.
Their bodies shudder, and then still. His head pillowed on her breast. A reprieve in the silence of the outside world. The promise, left hanging over the clothes chest for her to pick up at her leisure, and her fingers thread his hair at his particular compact tenderness. For the first time, she sees that she could do this forever.
'I'm going to come back.'
In the morning, Qasim's squad have moved on, and Tobe has departed along with them, leaving behind the dry hay-and-sunshine fragrance which permeates all his things. The letter, casualty of the season, only crosses her mind when she notices that the water on his hands had been ink.
Body dappled by non-bruises.
The sky is the blue which goes on forever.