Post by max on Mar 8, 2010 15:46:23 GMT 10
Summary: VerenexPhelan oneshot, because time sinks its teeth in (deepest) when you’re having fun.
Rating: PG-13 (because there's swearing and (obviously) character death. Consider yourself warned.)
Notes: I wrote this yesterday when I was rereading Terrier and I realised how short a time Phelan and Verene were actually together. Then I got that passage from Lolita caught in my brain - We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.
I think I mucked up the expression about odds. If I have let me know and I’ll switch it around. (Thank god I don’t gamble)
Mmm. Enjoy the anticlimax.
...
You are as the tides to me she whispers that first night they hold each other in her narrow bed
...
Of the gixie puppies that show up to practice that first afternoon, there are three who stand out. One with a lot of ash tree-yellow hair, Rebakah Cooper of Lord Provost fame and icy eyes, and a girl wearing her hair in a Yamani top knot, who curses fit to make a stevedore blush when she messes up.
She has the sense to hold her tongue when Sergeant Ahuda shows though, lips pressed tightly together, and her sudden meekness makes him smile.
A pair of hazel eyes flicker his way for all of a wink, but a curl of a grin lingers at the corner of her mouth for the rest of the training session.
‘I’ve lived in Corus all my life and never heard a mot talk like that before,’ he offers when he ambles over to her group of puppies afterwards.
One of the coves snickers. ‘You can take the girl outta Blue Harbour...’
‘Go f*** yerself Hilyard!’ she says fiercely, only for him and several of the others to roar with laughter.
She glowers at them until she sees the funny side of it herself and smiles ruefully.
‘Her people work the seas,’ another of the coves explains. ‘I’m Ersken, the quiet one’s Beka, and I guess you’ve noticed Hilyard and Verene already.’
Verene.
‘You all assigned to evening watch then?’
Four heads nod, but she only looks at him, one eyebrow arched a bit, and he only tears his gaze from her and back to the one who looks like a player – Ersken? – with difficulty.
‘I’m Phelan... this sea business though... i’n’t that just glorified river dodging?’
It’s shaky ground – he doesn’t know her, her people, nor how she’ll react to the tease, but as the others chuckle (even Beka) she glares at him and says,
‘One day I’ll teach you what ignorance it is to lump my lot in with those loobies as wouldn’t know stern from bow, Guardsman Phelan.’
‘I’ll hold you to it.’
And then she smiles, properly.
And a wave crashes down on his insides.
...
Her hair smells of lavender. ‘Wharfies’d not know a bath if it came to life and bit em on the arse,’ she says, tossing her head (hair down today in order to score this particular point) as she walks ahead of him down Stovek Street. And he watches her moving, knowing he’s watching her go.
...
‘Aw heck Verene! We’ll be late!’
‘It won’t take long,’ she calls over her shoulder, walking purposefully towards the large wrought iron gates that guard the docks, and he stands alone with the empty basket she’d placed in his hands where she’d left him for all of a heartbeat before following her, catching up to her chatting with one of the guards.
‘And how’s yer pa?’ the cove (six feet of muscle, his arms and neck all covered in inky blue tattoos) asks her with a grin that reveals the black and gold of a fake tooth and several missing ones.
‘Well wishin’ to be shot of all ducknobs as look to go t’sea,’ she says, and then she shrugs, a fluid sigh of her shoulders sinking. Smiles. ‘Fair weather foul, though.’
The guard nods sagely, and without so much as a flash of gold they’re through and onto the wharf.
The ships seem crowded together as thick as thatch to him, jostling at their moorings, and as they stride past vessels of all shapes and sizes from what seems like all the countries in the world he only has a brief and chaotic impression of their crewmen being just as diverse, Verene ignoring their catcalls or shouting back suggestions just as coarse herself, that curling smile that seems to be perennial to her visible to him alone until she stops to say,
‘We was already so near, and it’s t’one bit as doesn’t set my tripes churnin',’ apologetically before surging on again, ever westward.
She has slipped back into the sailors’ cant she’d grown with for 15 of her 16 years, and so caught up in this sudden realisation of this world of people and water she’s known so intimately so long is he that he doesn’t immediately notice that they’re past the menagerie of people and boats, down by the older jetties where no ships moor now, and he stops at the sight of the rotten looking piles, the ancient mouldering wood, but she continues on.
Walking ahead of him down its length above the grey-green river that matches her hazel eyes, when he calls out her name, she only turns, still walking backwards, raises her arms out, palms up.
You’ve come so far, so why stop there?
And there is something about watching her move that makes him want to follow (forever) sure that some revelation is waiting to greet him out there above the water, and she doesn’t stop walking until they’re side by side at the jetty’s end.
The water is calm, though the current is filled with eddies and whorls, quiet in this morning lull when those that set out at dawn are gone and those coming into port aren’t yet arrived. The masts of the ships behind them are silhouetted against the rising pale yellow sun, and for a moment they look like the tips of pine trees, floating forest above the water, all swaying dreamily with the current. He shakes his head in wonder.
‘Dunno how people can’t see the beauty in the lower city. Not when there are sights like this, there for the taking.’
‘Them cracknobs don’t ever look is why.’
‘To speak of cracknobs...’ and he can tell from the sudden shift of her posture that she has seen where this is going. ‘Are Otelia and Rollo...’ he trails off.
She shrugs, eyes resolutely on the water.
‘It’s only a year. And it’s not as bad... Otelia doesn’t drink every night... it don’t matter much anyhow cos I’m not born to it like Beka. There’s not Dog in my blood so much as salt – ’
She stops when he brushes the tendrils of hair that have escaped her topknot away from her brow, kissing her temple gently as he’d done the other morning.
Except this time there’s no one else there, and they’re standing, and she looks up at him, eyes conveying such turmoil that there is only one thing he can think of to pull her from it (or at least give them an excuse to close their eyes).
His hand moves from brow to jaw, lips from her temple to her mouth, and her own arms twine around his shoulders, her own body, lithe and filled with life, leaning into his as her fingers lace up into his hair, (the sun seems to shine through her, as well as through his closed eyelids. A red heat that defies all the shadow and chill of early spring) his hands pressing her shoulder blades, feeling her heart beating under his fingers.
Verene tastes of spearmint and spring rain.
...
In Blue Harbour we bury our dead in dinghies she tells him one night when they’re breathing, between love. I still call coffins boats.
Well, you’d need a fearsome large pigeon, he says, and he feels her laughter under her skin, his mouth tracing the line of her collarbone (which rolls like seagull wings from her throat to her shoulders, perfectly)
...
The difference between river dodgers and sea people is taught him one fine vernal evening when her blood is spilled as freely and liberally as the ale her dogs had swallowed down by rushers mad with heated blood:
River dodgers might not have known one end of a boat from the other, but they would have known when to disobey orders. When to run. (But soft and soft hearted was the singing puppy)
It is a lesson that has emptied out his insides.
(And in his head the logic goes: I kissed her neck before watch instead of her temple like always so I lived and she died.
The shakes are worse in uniform)
Rosto catches up when he is staring into the grey green water at the jetty’s end, watching it flow away from him and with it his faith.
To his credit the rusher doesn’t offer any cheap two-bit philosophising, just waits until the sun has risen (above the inverted forest, masts and rigging all, light stealers) without alleviating the deep grey colour the world has turned (to ashes – and how else could Beltane ever have ended?) and Phelan finds himself saying,
‘The word for bow used to mean shoulders once. When I look at ships their edges make me think of shoulder blades, with the masts going right through their hearts.’
Saying, ‘Eirlyn – the blonde puppy from Jane Street, if you ever saw her – quit last night. It’s a copper bit to a gold noble more won’t follow.’
‘This mean you want to end your life swingin’ from a barge pole sometime soon?’ the pale man asks.
Three weeks ago she had let him into a world more rich than any he’d ever dared imagine.
He tears his gaze away from the river as hazel as her eyes, turning, instead, to a much darker pair.
‘Not exactly.’
And his body stills, the pain dissolving into his bones (because it’ll never go away)
And he can breathe again.
Rating: PG-13 (because there's swearing and (obviously) character death. Consider yourself warned.)
Notes: I wrote this yesterday when I was rereading Terrier and I realised how short a time Phelan and Verene were actually together. Then I got that passage from Lolita caught in my brain - We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.
I think I mucked up the expression about odds. If I have let me know and I’ll switch it around. (Thank god I don’t gamble)
Mmm. Enjoy the anticlimax.
Twenty One Days
...
You are as the tides to me she whispers that first night they hold each other in her narrow bed
...
Of the gixie puppies that show up to practice that first afternoon, there are three who stand out. One with a lot of ash tree-yellow hair, Rebakah Cooper of Lord Provost fame and icy eyes, and a girl wearing her hair in a Yamani top knot, who curses fit to make a stevedore blush when she messes up.
She has the sense to hold her tongue when Sergeant Ahuda shows though, lips pressed tightly together, and her sudden meekness makes him smile.
A pair of hazel eyes flicker his way for all of a wink, but a curl of a grin lingers at the corner of her mouth for the rest of the training session.
‘I’ve lived in Corus all my life and never heard a mot talk like that before,’ he offers when he ambles over to her group of puppies afterwards.
One of the coves snickers. ‘You can take the girl outta Blue Harbour...’
‘Go f*** yerself Hilyard!’ she says fiercely, only for him and several of the others to roar with laughter.
She glowers at them until she sees the funny side of it herself and smiles ruefully.
‘Her people work the seas,’ another of the coves explains. ‘I’m Ersken, the quiet one’s Beka, and I guess you’ve noticed Hilyard and Verene already.’
Verene.
‘You all assigned to evening watch then?’
Four heads nod, but she only looks at him, one eyebrow arched a bit, and he only tears his gaze from her and back to the one who looks like a player – Ersken? – with difficulty.
‘I’m Phelan... this sea business though... i’n’t that just glorified river dodging?’
It’s shaky ground – he doesn’t know her, her people, nor how she’ll react to the tease, but as the others chuckle (even Beka) she glares at him and says,
‘One day I’ll teach you what ignorance it is to lump my lot in with those loobies as wouldn’t know stern from bow, Guardsman Phelan.’
‘I’ll hold you to it.’
And then she smiles, properly.
And a wave crashes down on his insides.
...
Her hair smells of lavender. ‘Wharfies’d not know a bath if it came to life and bit em on the arse,’ she says, tossing her head (hair down today in order to score this particular point) as she walks ahead of him down Stovek Street. And he watches her moving, knowing he’s watching her go.
...
‘Aw heck Verene! We’ll be late!’
‘It won’t take long,’ she calls over her shoulder, walking purposefully towards the large wrought iron gates that guard the docks, and he stands alone with the empty basket she’d placed in his hands where she’d left him for all of a heartbeat before following her, catching up to her chatting with one of the guards.
‘And how’s yer pa?’ the cove (six feet of muscle, his arms and neck all covered in inky blue tattoos) asks her with a grin that reveals the black and gold of a fake tooth and several missing ones.
‘Well wishin’ to be shot of all ducknobs as look to go t’sea,’ she says, and then she shrugs, a fluid sigh of her shoulders sinking. Smiles. ‘Fair weather foul, though.’
The guard nods sagely, and without so much as a flash of gold they’re through and onto the wharf.
The ships seem crowded together as thick as thatch to him, jostling at their moorings, and as they stride past vessels of all shapes and sizes from what seems like all the countries in the world he only has a brief and chaotic impression of their crewmen being just as diverse, Verene ignoring their catcalls or shouting back suggestions just as coarse herself, that curling smile that seems to be perennial to her visible to him alone until she stops to say,
‘We was already so near, and it’s t’one bit as doesn’t set my tripes churnin',’ apologetically before surging on again, ever westward.
She has slipped back into the sailors’ cant she’d grown with for 15 of her 16 years, and so caught up in this sudden realisation of this world of people and water she’s known so intimately so long is he that he doesn’t immediately notice that they’re past the menagerie of people and boats, down by the older jetties where no ships moor now, and he stops at the sight of the rotten looking piles, the ancient mouldering wood, but she continues on.
Walking ahead of him down its length above the grey-green river that matches her hazel eyes, when he calls out her name, she only turns, still walking backwards, raises her arms out, palms up.
You’ve come so far, so why stop there?
And there is something about watching her move that makes him want to follow (forever) sure that some revelation is waiting to greet him out there above the water, and she doesn’t stop walking until they’re side by side at the jetty’s end.
The water is calm, though the current is filled with eddies and whorls, quiet in this morning lull when those that set out at dawn are gone and those coming into port aren’t yet arrived. The masts of the ships behind them are silhouetted against the rising pale yellow sun, and for a moment they look like the tips of pine trees, floating forest above the water, all swaying dreamily with the current. He shakes his head in wonder.
‘Dunno how people can’t see the beauty in the lower city. Not when there are sights like this, there for the taking.’
‘Them cracknobs don’t ever look is why.’
‘To speak of cracknobs...’ and he can tell from the sudden shift of her posture that she has seen where this is going. ‘Are Otelia and Rollo...’ he trails off.
She shrugs, eyes resolutely on the water.
‘It’s only a year. And it’s not as bad... Otelia doesn’t drink every night... it don’t matter much anyhow cos I’m not born to it like Beka. There’s not Dog in my blood so much as salt – ’
She stops when he brushes the tendrils of hair that have escaped her topknot away from her brow, kissing her temple gently as he’d done the other morning.
Except this time there’s no one else there, and they’re standing, and she looks up at him, eyes conveying such turmoil that there is only one thing he can think of to pull her from it (or at least give them an excuse to close their eyes).
His hand moves from brow to jaw, lips from her temple to her mouth, and her own arms twine around his shoulders, her own body, lithe and filled with life, leaning into his as her fingers lace up into his hair, (the sun seems to shine through her, as well as through his closed eyelids. A red heat that defies all the shadow and chill of early spring) his hands pressing her shoulder blades, feeling her heart beating under his fingers.
Verene tastes of spearmint and spring rain.
...
In Blue Harbour we bury our dead in dinghies she tells him one night when they’re breathing, between love. I still call coffins boats.
Well, you’d need a fearsome large pigeon, he says, and he feels her laughter under her skin, his mouth tracing the line of her collarbone (which rolls like seagull wings from her throat to her shoulders, perfectly)
...
The difference between river dodgers and sea people is taught him one fine vernal evening when her blood is spilled as freely and liberally as the ale her dogs had swallowed down by rushers mad with heated blood:
River dodgers might not have known one end of a boat from the other, but they would have known when to disobey orders. When to run. (But soft and soft hearted was the singing puppy)
It is a lesson that has emptied out his insides.
(And in his head the logic goes: I kissed her neck before watch instead of her temple like always so I lived and she died.
The shakes are worse in uniform)
Rosto catches up when he is staring into the grey green water at the jetty’s end, watching it flow away from him and with it his faith.
To his credit the rusher doesn’t offer any cheap two-bit philosophising, just waits until the sun has risen (above the inverted forest, masts and rigging all, light stealers) without alleviating the deep grey colour the world has turned (to ashes – and how else could Beltane ever have ended?) and Phelan finds himself saying,
‘The word for bow used to mean shoulders once. When I look at ships their edges make me think of shoulder blades, with the masts going right through their hearts.’
Saying, ‘Eirlyn – the blonde puppy from Jane Street, if you ever saw her – quit last night. It’s a copper bit to a gold noble more won’t follow.’
‘This mean you want to end your life swingin’ from a barge pole sometime soon?’ the pale man asks.
Three weeks ago she had let him into a world more rich than any he’d ever dared imagine.
He tears his gaze away from the river as hazel as her eyes, turning, instead, to a much darker pair.
‘Not exactly.’
And his body stills, the pain dissolving into his bones (because it’ll never go away)
And he can breathe again.