Post by max on Sept 4, 2013 14:43:45 GMT 10
Title: Bread and Oranges
Rating: PG
MPP: #86 (All I Want)
Summary: A Pasco-centric (which is to say, one-sided) love story.
Notes: Part two of In a Temperate Climate. Which should probably be read sequentially. The bit at the end is Eliot. The title is from Pawn Shop Blues.
He falls in love with her the way he had fallen into his magic. As if it, too, has always been some latent part of him. The answer to a question he had never thought to ask.
He thinks, perhaps, this isn’t far from the truth – but when she comes back to Emelan before the leaves have fallen from the trees he knows that while love-of-Sandry may have always been a part of him, Sandry herself is not.
Not in the way he needs her to be.
He has had dinners at the citadel many times since first she pulled him from the dark and into the blue light. Had heard her speak with such affection in her voice for her faraway siblings (not understanding why this had bothered him until he was 16, a night in Carp Moon he barely remembers outside of his memory of her) and been secretly relieved and sickened with distress all at once at how they had gone about hurting her upon their return – but at the welcoming dinner the Duke puts up they serve all her favourite dishes and she looks more radiantly beautiful than he has ever seen her – it is almost more than he can stand, knowing she looks like this because in almost five years he has never before seen her genuinely happy.
He doesn’t understand how he could have failed to see something so fundamental. Eats mechanically and watches the way Briar squeezes Evvy’s shoulder softly through her novice habit and how she doesn’t so much as flinch when he does so. While Tris and the little girl negotiate pudding and tabbouleh. While, at the other end of the table, Daja speaks softly with Lark, one beautiful dark forearm supporting her head gleaming with candlelight, braids falling down over her face. While from the way they glance at each other now and again, he can tell they speak to one another without words, and Sandry glitters and shines in this world, held temporarily at bay, to which she had belonged before ever he knew her.
She catches him staring and smiles.
‘Student of mine,’ this said as she throws herself into the chair next to his – he stores the mine even as he observes that they have changed even the way she moves, some kind of vibrancy in her gestures that hadn’t been there before – ‘I expected to see you happier to see me.’
‘I am,’ he responds, understanding that the blush on her cheeks is equal parts excitement, fatigue and the crisp white wine her uncle stores in the cold cellars several storeys below their feet. Nothing to do with him. ‘I missed you. A lot.’
His conversation all clipped and not his own because what he wants is to say what he has no right to. All he can give her the barest sliver of the truth – but she has known him since he was a child (as he has known her in turn; maybe someone less attuned would not have noticed it but he does, he does), in a flicker of her eyes draws back into herself.
It takes only a moment but his magic is in movement.
A beat too late, she smiles a bittersweet crescent of pain.
‘What’s this, Pasco Acalon?’ her voice softer, lighter, than it had been only a moment earlier. ‘I didn’t think you’d have grown out of me over half a summer...’ and he knows she has only said the last part to alleviate the ghastly tension that has caught them in its net but her lips tremble over the unsustainable smile – the kind you make instead of crying – and it sounds hollow – sounds true – because she believes it to be so.
One fear overrides another: the risk of hurting her greater now than the risk of touching her – and in so doing, hurting himself. He chokes ‘I never’ – and without hesitating at all, takes her hand.
He had done this the first day he met her, too, but it is the first time he has touched her since equinox. Skin rough in ways noble maidens’ are not meant to be; the coarseness of raw flax worked into the pads of her fingers through a lifetime of weaving, the scar in her palm that tingles with power against his skin. Like velvet brushed the wrong way. Like Yazmin’s voice. He runs his thumb over her knuckles, then meets her cornflower eyes.
‘Never ever.’
Everything feels far away, except for her eyelashes. The swell of her mouth. Her irises, like a window into the high chambers of the evening sky.
He feels her intake of breath before she says his name.
‘Pasco –’
Then her concentration snaps away from him to someone beyond his shoulder; in the same motion her hand slides from his grip.
Mastering the urge to take hold of it again, he follows her gaze and finds her sisters watching them. Her brother, most determinedly not looking at them.
‘It looks like we’ve been interrupted.’ She glances back at him surprised – having forgotten, presumably, that he was next to her at all.
He thinks of the scar in her palm, and then the one across his chest. It is only to be expected. ‘Don’t keep them waiting on my account.’
‘I’m sorry.’
He waves off the imploring look she directs at him and motions for her to go back to her family. ‘I’m happy to see you so happy.’
It’s true – she looks like a flower budding, for all that the nights are turning towards the cold again – because he is.
And it isn’t enough, not by any means – but she smiles again: a smile of the same clear splendour as the sun in triumph, broken through cloud. Wholly for him.
And – just for a moment – it is everything.
*
She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
Rating: PG
MPP: #86 (All I Want)
Summary: A Pasco-centric (which is to say, one-sided) love story.
Notes: Part two of In a Temperate Climate. Which should probably be read sequentially. The bit at the end is Eliot. The title is from Pawn Shop Blues.
He falls in love with her the way he had fallen into his magic. As if it, too, has always been some latent part of him. The answer to a question he had never thought to ask.
He thinks, perhaps, this isn’t far from the truth – but when she comes back to Emelan before the leaves have fallen from the trees he knows that while love-of-Sandry may have always been a part of him, Sandry herself is not.
Not in the way he needs her to be.
He has had dinners at the citadel many times since first she pulled him from the dark and into the blue light. Had heard her speak with such affection in her voice for her faraway siblings (not understanding why this had bothered him until he was 16, a night in Carp Moon he barely remembers outside of his memory of her) and been secretly relieved and sickened with distress all at once at how they had gone about hurting her upon their return – but at the welcoming dinner the Duke puts up they serve all her favourite dishes and she looks more radiantly beautiful than he has ever seen her – it is almost more than he can stand, knowing she looks like this because in almost five years he has never before seen her genuinely happy.
He doesn’t understand how he could have failed to see something so fundamental. Eats mechanically and watches the way Briar squeezes Evvy’s shoulder softly through her novice habit and how she doesn’t so much as flinch when he does so. While Tris and the little girl negotiate pudding and tabbouleh. While, at the other end of the table, Daja speaks softly with Lark, one beautiful dark forearm supporting her head gleaming with candlelight, braids falling down over her face. While from the way they glance at each other now and again, he can tell they speak to one another without words, and Sandry glitters and shines in this world, held temporarily at bay, to which she had belonged before ever he knew her.
She catches him staring and smiles.
‘Student of mine,’ this said as she throws herself into the chair next to his – he stores the mine even as he observes that they have changed even the way she moves, some kind of vibrancy in her gestures that hadn’t been there before – ‘I expected to see you happier to see me.’
‘I am,’ he responds, understanding that the blush on her cheeks is equal parts excitement, fatigue and the crisp white wine her uncle stores in the cold cellars several storeys below their feet. Nothing to do with him. ‘I missed you. A lot.’
His conversation all clipped and not his own because what he wants is to say what he has no right to. All he can give her the barest sliver of the truth – but she has known him since he was a child (as he has known her in turn; maybe someone less attuned would not have noticed it but he does, he does), in a flicker of her eyes draws back into herself.
It takes only a moment but his magic is in movement.
A beat too late, she smiles a bittersweet crescent of pain.
‘What’s this, Pasco Acalon?’ her voice softer, lighter, than it had been only a moment earlier. ‘I didn’t think you’d have grown out of me over half a summer...’ and he knows she has only said the last part to alleviate the ghastly tension that has caught them in its net but her lips tremble over the unsustainable smile – the kind you make instead of crying – and it sounds hollow – sounds true – because she believes it to be so.
One fear overrides another: the risk of hurting her greater now than the risk of touching her – and in so doing, hurting himself. He chokes ‘I never’ – and without hesitating at all, takes her hand.
He had done this the first day he met her, too, but it is the first time he has touched her since equinox. Skin rough in ways noble maidens’ are not meant to be; the coarseness of raw flax worked into the pads of her fingers through a lifetime of weaving, the scar in her palm that tingles with power against his skin. Like velvet brushed the wrong way. Like Yazmin’s voice. He runs his thumb over her knuckles, then meets her cornflower eyes.
‘Never ever.’
Everything feels far away, except for her eyelashes. The swell of her mouth. Her irises, like a window into the high chambers of the evening sky.
He feels her intake of breath before she says his name.
‘Pasco –’
Then her concentration snaps away from him to someone beyond his shoulder; in the same motion her hand slides from his grip.
Mastering the urge to take hold of it again, he follows her gaze and finds her sisters watching them. Her brother, most determinedly not looking at them.
‘It looks like we’ve been interrupted.’ She glances back at him surprised – having forgotten, presumably, that he was next to her at all.
He thinks of the scar in her palm, and then the one across his chest. It is only to be expected. ‘Don’t keep them waiting on my account.’
‘I’m sorry.’
He waves off the imploring look she directs at him and motions for her to go back to her family. ‘I’m happy to see you so happy.’
It’s true – she looks like a flower budding, for all that the nights are turning towards the cold again – because he is.
And it isn’t enough, not by any means – but she smiles again: a smile of the same clear splendour as the sun in triumph, broken through cloud. Wholly for him.
And – just for a moment – it is everything.
*
She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
Maybe once we'd have seen it during Smackdown!