Post by jazzyjess on Dec 14, 2010 5:48:22 GMT 10
To: Pandesme
Message: I had a thousand different plans for this fic, and it turned out to be none of them! I’m sorry it’s a day late – I blame my finals for costing you a timely ficmas gift. I tried to incorporate all aspects of your request but didn’t really do some of them too much justice. Either way, I really hope you enjoy!!
From: Jess
Title: In media res
Rating: PG13
Wishlist Item: #1 (Kel/Neal friendship fic), #2 (Neal/Dom cousin/friendship fluff), #3 (Kel/Raoul father/daughter-ness), #4 (Kel surprises/shocks her friends), #5 (Kel/Dom as a pairing)
Summary: Sometimes, there is a reason.
--
i.
Once every year, Dom returns to New Hope.
He goes to shake someone’s hand, admire someone’s baby, help lift the walls of someone’s new house. There is something special about the people of this town, the refugees who are no longer seeking refuge, the convicts whose crimes have been pardoned – it was maybe the rescue, back in Scanra, that connected him to these people, but above all he figures it was the way they were after. Seeing such scattered people pull themselves together inspires him, and Dom can’t help but step right into the muddle with them, to need and be needed.
It is, after all, the reason he joined the King’s Own. At home, he is uncomfortable – he has never liked being alone, and the tomblike silence of Fief Masbolle is more than he can bear. He should have been the youngest son of a youngest son, destined to be last for inheritance and last for opportunities. He had a brother, once – a brother to whom the responsibility of Masbolle would fall after the death of their father – but that brother is long since gone, nothing left but a shallow grave and a memory. Dom knows that Neal, the brother of his heart, has long since believed that their family is cursed. They were only children, Neal barely old enough to remember, when Dom lost his brother, and then Neal’s fell one by one to the hungry jaws of the Immortals War. Curse, he admits, is the best way to describe the tragedy destined to follow them through time. If he isn’t motherless, he’s the next best thing, because all she has been these long years is a shell of the woman she once was. There’s nothing in left in her but despair and madness, and Dom knows that even when she looks at her remaining son, she doesn’t really see him.
So he doesn’t return home but for the occasional, brief, obligatory check-in. He writes letters to his mother but he knows she doesn’t read them. While on the road with the Own he tumbles – and sometimes courts – the prettiest girls, but deep in his heart he longs for a life he never had. He longs for a wife and a child, for laughter and happiness, but he knows how his home can leech the colour from the sun, and he doesn’t think he could ever subject a young family to such hopelessness.
ii.
She is running, shouting orders to the men around her – “Leave the tents! Let them burn! Somebody loose those bloody horses from the picket or they’re dead!” Everywhere she turns, through the thick, choking smoke, she sees the dark side of war. There is panic and terror, and no matter what she does, she can’t make it stop. Her face is grimy from soot and sweat, but she counts herself lucky because men who weren’t quick enough to escape their tents in the wake of the Magefire are missing chunks of hair and their bright pink flesh and tissue stand out against the dark of their arms. She doesn’t stop running, circling the camp as it burns, tents and trees alight with flames as dark as blood, but all the while she is searching – searching –
On the second rotation, she spots him. Merric’s hair is dark and matted to his head with sweat; there is blood running down the side of his face from a cut somewhere above his ear. The sword in his hand is smeared with what she knows to be the blood of the enemy. He sees her too, changes his path and veers toward her. “Kel!” he bellows, and she is reaching out for him –
With a start, she wakes up, unable to control the violent tremors wracking her body. Her stomach is roiling violently, and she barely makes it to the latrine before she is vomiting everything out of her system. The night visions keep her awake in the dark, fear of nightmares preventing her sleep. She never dreams the rest but even this much is enough for her memory of the night to remain fresh. Over and over in her mind’s eye, she watches her friend, her captain, her one-time lover, as he is gutted from behind. She watches as if from above as she coldly picks up his sword from his still-clenched hand and turns shock and rage onto the big blond man before her.
Kel barely remembers the squads from the Own arriving, driving out the Scanrans, putting out what fires they could, Raoul swinging her up on his horse. She doesn’t really remember the ride to Fort Mastiff, or what happened to the twenty-eight men in her party of forty who never returned to their station. What she remembers is Merric’s face, twisting in agony as he tried to hold his insides together. What she wouldn’t give to forget that too.
iii.
Neal hates them for months.
It isn’t as though he doesn’t understand. They’ve explained it to him – everyone has, Dom and his father and Alanna – but understanding doesn’t always mean accepting.
He’s known since October, when he sees Kel sliding limply from her old knightmaster’s horse, using his Gift to scan her body even as he uses his hands to keep her from collapsing – what he finds is grief, and there, inside, a flicker of life that he’s never seen before. What he hates most of all his that Merric’s legacy will never be told. No one must ever know. Neal can keep a secret, but his mother raised him to know what kinds of secrets are right, and watching the old baron of Hollyrose weep for the lost heirs is one of the hardest things he’s ever done.
iv.
It is pitch black when Dom leaves his tent, early for his shift on the watch but restless and unable to sleep. Third Company, three days south of Mastiff, is silent with nearly three hours until dawn, and there is something about silence and stillness together that makes him itch. From the crack at the bottom of the Knight Commander’s tent there is a sliver of light – a reading lamp, Dom supposes, not enough to permeate the thick canvas walls but more than sufficient for late-night reports. Still, it’s a long night, and Dom wonders if this is a sign of like calling like.
Cautiously, he rounds the front of the tent, pulls back the flap and meets Raoul’s eyes. “Come in,” the bigger man gestures, and as Dom steps in, he notices the grey at Raoul’s temples, the lines on his face, the circles under his eyes. A quick glance around shows no reports, no books, no maps open from their canisters against the wall. “I’ve just been thinking,” says Raoul quietly, catching Dom’s look.
“Shall I leave you to it?”
“No.” He sighs, rubs a hand over his eyes. “I could use an ear to talk things out.”
As Raoul tells him about the attack on Kel’s encampment, tells him of the spectacular death toll, Dom studies his Commander. He has respected this man for years. He would ride for this man at a drop of a hat. He even supposes that he’d take an arrow for Raoul, should things come to that. He’s no Lerant, following at Raoul’s heels like a well-trained dog, but he knows that he’d offer support when it matters most. This is why, when Raoul meets his eyes once more and says, “There is no father,” Dom knows what must be done in the line of duty. He respects his Knight Commander. But somewhere inside, Dom loves him too, and his heart aches for the pain on Raoul’s broad face. They both know what befalls a woman pregnant out of wedlock, and Dom can`t bear to consider what would be said of a Lady Knight.
“Rider women,” Raoul tells him gravely, “are sent to the convent until the child is born. The mother is faced with a decision. Should the mother choose to find a suitable husband and leave the Riders, she may keep the protection of convent until such a spouse is chosen. Should she wish to rejoin the Riders, she may leave the child to be raised under the Goddess.”
Dom knows this. He has heard it from other men, has seen his Rider friends disappear from the ranks for eight months at a time. But just as he knows that Kel could never give up her child, he knows that Tortall cannot afford to lose another knight so soon.
“What I need is protection,” Raoul continues. “If I could find some way to keep her sheltered – she could return to Mindelan, I suppose, but the gossip that follows an unmarried mother could cause irreversible damage.”
They sit in a silence that is so tense it’s almost tangible.
After a moment, Dom says quietly, “I will afford her that protection.”
He grasps the hand that Raoul extends to him – a handshake is standard, even expected – but being pulled into a hug catches him totally off guard. When Dom leaves for his patrol, he thinks there are tears on the Knight Commander’s cheeks.
v.
The first snow doesn’t fall in Fief Masbolle until mid December.
From a window in the library, Dom watches his young wife, bundled from head to toe, as she gathers snowballs and throws them for the dogs. With all the layers, the bump of her stomach is disguised, and for a while he imagines that she is just a carefree woman, enjoying the snow and the solitude of winter. A sound behind him causes Dom to turn around, and he stares at his mother who watches in the next window.
“I like this girl,” she tells him. “She grounds you.”
He is considering this when she adds, “Love suits you.”
vi.
She catches ill late in March, and Dom panics. Already it has been seven months – she is due in May, and he has heard enough from his mother to know that such sickness so late in the term can have terrible results. There is a hedgewitch who lives in the village below the fief, but when she examines Kel, she shakes her head and advises him to call a real Healer, and with haste. There is only one Healer that Dom knows well and trusts. He writes a letter to Baird and dispatches a messenger to Corus, post haste, praying to any god listening that he get there without trouble.
Nearly a week passes before the fief gates open to admit a cloaked rider – in this time, Kel has worsened, her fever spiking dangerously and her fever dreams more panicked. Dom has hardly left her side, but he rises to greet the newcomer himself, hoping beyond all hope that his uncle be able to keep her alive.
When he arrives in the foyer, it isn’t his uncle passing his muddy cloak to the maid, but a young man whom he hasn’t heard from in months. “Nealan,” he croaks, and meets his cousin in a hug. For a moment, it’s as though their friendship had never rifted. But he remembers Kel, sweating upstairs in a semi-conscious haze. “Please,” he whispers, and Neal backs off, all business now.
“Take me up,” he orders, striding past Dom and mounting the stairs two at a time.
Neal’s green Gift is already pulsing around Kel’s body by the time Dom joins him, and he sits in a chair across the room to keep from hearing Neal’s murmurs. Once or twice, Kel appears to respond to whatever her friend was whispering, pain and terror on her face being replaced with a happiness that Dom has so missed seeing. They stay like this for hours, until sleep claims him, and when Dom wakes up, his wife is sleeping peacefully and his cousin is saying sternly to her prone body, “And don’t you ever scare me like that again!”
vii.
When the child is born, his hair is a dark, muddy red. His eyes are blue – the colour of Dom’s eyes. He wonders if it’s a trick of fate, or if it’s the hand of the Goddess blessing them for their struggles. Eventually he decides that it makes no difference.
Message: I had a thousand different plans for this fic, and it turned out to be none of them! I’m sorry it’s a day late – I blame my finals for costing you a timely ficmas gift. I tried to incorporate all aspects of your request but didn’t really do some of them too much justice. Either way, I really hope you enjoy!!
From: Jess
Title: In media res
Rating: PG13
Wishlist Item: #1 (Kel/Neal friendship fic), #2 (Neal/Dom cousin/friendship fluff), #3 (Kel/Raoul father/daughter-ness), #4 (Kel surprises/shocks her friends), #5 (Kel/Dom as a pairing)
Summary: Sometimes, there is a reason.
--
i.
Once every year, Dom returns to New Hope.
He goes to shake someone’s hand, admire someone’s baby, help lift the walls of someone’s new house. There is something special about the people of this town, the refugees who are no longer seeking refuge, the convicts whose crimes have been pardoned – it was maybe the rescue, back in Scanra, that connected him to these people, but above all he figures it was the way they were after. Seeing such scattered people pull themselves together inspires him, and Dom can’t help but step right into the muddle with them, to need and be needed.
It is, after all, the reason he joined the King’s Own. At home, he is uncomfortable – he has never liked being alone, and the tomblike silence of Fief Masbolle is more than he can bear. He should have been the youngest son of a youngest son, destined to be last for inheritance and last for opportunities. He had a brother, once – a brother to whom the responsibility of Masbolle would fall after the death of their father – but that brother is long since gone, nothing left but a shallow grave and a memory. Dom knows that Neal, the brother of his heart, has long since believed that their family is cursed. They were only children, Neal barely old enough to remember, when Dom lost his brother, and then Neal’s fell one by one to the hungry jaws of the Immortals War. Curse, he admits, is the best way to describe the tragedy destined to follow them through time. If he isn’t motherless, he’s the next best thing, because all she has been these long years is a shell of the woman she once was. There’s nothing in left in her but despair and madness, and Dom knows that even when she looks at her remaining son, she doesn’t really see him.
So he doesn’t return home but for the occasional, brief, obligatory check-in. He writes letters to his mother but he knows she doesn’t read them. While on the road with the Own he tumbles – and sometimes courts – the prettiest girls, but deep in his heart he longs for a life he never had. He longs for a wife and a child, for laughter and happiness, but he knows how his home can leech the colour from the sun, and he doesn’t think he could ever subject a young family to such hopelessness.
ii.
She is running, shouting orders to the men around her – “Leave the tents! Let them burn! Somebody loose those bloody horses from the picket or they’re dead!” Everywhere she turns, through the thick, choking smoke, she sees the dark side of war. There is panic and terror, and no matter what she does, she can’t make it stop. Her face is grimy from soot and sweat, but she counts herself lucky because men who weren’t quick enough to escape their tents in the wake of the Magefire are missing chunks of hair and their bright pink flesh and tissue stand out against the dark of their arms. She doesn’t stop running, circling the camp as it burns, tents and trees alight with flames as dark as blood, but all the while she is searching – searching –
On the second rotation, she spots him. Merric’s hair is dark and matted to his head with sweat; there is blood running down the side of his face from a cut somewhere above his ear. The sword in his hand is smeared with what she knows to be the blood of the enemy. He sees her too, changes his path and veers toward her. “Kel!” he bellows, and she is reaching out for him –
With a start, she wakes up, unable to control the violent tremors wracking her body. Her stomach is roiling violently, and she barely makes it to the latrine before she is vomiting everything out of her system. The night visions keep her awake in the dark, fear of nightmares preventing her sleep. She never dreams the rest but even this much is enough for her memory of the night to remain fresh. Over and over in her mind’s eye, she watches her friend, her captain, her one-time lover, as he is gutted from behind. She watches as if from above as she coldly picks up his sword from his still-clenched hand and turns shock and rage onto the big blond man before her.
Kel barely remembers the squads from the Own arriving, driving out the Scanrans, putting out what fires they could, Raoul swinging her up on his horse. She doesn’t really remember the ride to Fort Mastiff, or what happened to the twenty-eight men in her party of forty who never returned to their station. What she remembers is Merric’s face, twisting in agony as he tried to hold his insides together. What she wouldn’t give to forget that too.
iii.
Neal hates them for months.
It isn’t as though he doesn’t understand. They’ve explained it to him – everyone has, Dom and his father and Alanna – but understanding doesn’t always mean accepting.
He’s known since October, when he sees Kel sliding limply from her old knightmaster’s horse, using his Gift to scan her body even as he uses his hands to keep her from collapsing – what he finds is grief, and there, inside, a flicker of life that he’s never seen before. What he hates most of all his that Merric’s legacy will never be told. No one must ever know. Neal can keep a secret, but his mother raised him to know what kinds of secrets are right, and watching the old baron of Hollyrose weep for the lost heirs is one of the hardest things he’s ever done.
iv.
It is pitch black when Dom leaves his tent, early for his shift on the watch but restless and unable to sleep. Third Company, three days south of Mastiff, is silent with nearly three hours until dawn, and there is something about silence and stillness together that makes him itch. From the crack at the bottom of the Knight Commander’s tent there is a sliver of light – a reading lamp, Dom supposes, not enough to permeate the thick canvas walls but more than sufficient for late-night reports. Still, it’s a long night, and Dom wonders if this is a sign of like calling like.
Cautiously, he rounds the front of the tent, pulls back the flap and meets Raoul’s eyes. “Come in,” the bigger man gestures, and as Dom steps in, he notices the grey at Raoul’s temples, the lines on his face, the circles under his eyes. A quick glance around shows no reports, no books, no maps open from their canisters against the wall. “I’ve just been thinking,” says Raoul quietly, catching Dom’s look.
“Shall I leave you to it?”
“No.” He sighs, rubs a hand over his eyes. “I could use an ear to talk things out.”
As Raoul tells him about the attack on Kel’s encampment, tells him of the spectacular death toll, Dom studies his Commander. He has respected this man for years. He would ride for this man at a drop of a hat. He even supposes that he’d take an arrow for Raoul, should things come to that. He’s no Lerant, following at Raoul’s heels like a well-trained dog, but he knows that he’d offer support when it matters most. This is why, when Raoul meets his eyes once more and says, “There is no father,” Dom knows what must be done in the line of duty. He respects his Knight Commander. But somewhere inside, Dom loves him too, and his heart aches for the pain on Raoul’s broad face. They both know what befalls a woman pregnant out of wedlock, and Dom can`t bear to consider what would be said of a Lady Knight.
“Rider women,” Raoul tells him gravely, “are sent to the convent until the child is born. The mother is faced with a decision. Should the mother choose to find a suitable husband and leave the Riders, she may keep the protection of convent until such a spouse is chosen. Should she wish to rejoin the Riders, she may leave the child to be raised under the Goddess.”
Dom knows this. He has heard it from other men, has seen his Rider friends disappear from the ranks for eight months at a time. But just as he knows that Kel could never give up her child, he knows that Tortall cannot afford to lose another knight so soon.
“What I need is protection,” Raoul continues. “If I could find some way to keep her sheltered – she could return to Mindelan, I suppose, but the gossip that follows an unmarried mother could cause irreversible damage.”
They sit in a silence that is so tense it’s almost tangible.
After a moment, Dom says quietly, “I will afford her that protection.”
He grasps the hand that Raoul extends to him – a handshake is standard, even expected – but being pulled into a hug catches him totally off guard. When Dom leaves for his patrol, he thinks there are tears on the Knight Commander’s cheeks.
v.
The first snow doesn’t fall in Fief Masbolle until mid December.
From a window in the library, Dom watches his young wife, bundled from head to toe, as she gathers snowballs and throws them for the dogs. With all the layers, the bump of her stomach is disguised, and for a while he imagines that she is just a carefree woman, enjoying the snow and the solitude of winter. A sound behind him causes Dom to turn around, and he stares at his mother who watches in the next window.
“I like this girl,” she tells him. “She grounds you.”
He is considering this when she adds, “Love suits you.”
vi.
She catches ill late in March, and Dom panics. Already it has been seven months – she is due in May, and he has heard enough from his mother to know that such sickness so late in the term can have terrible results. There is a hedgewitch who lives in the village below the fief, but when she examines Kel, she shakes her head and advises him to call a real Healer, and with haste. There is only one Healer that Dom knows well and trusts. He writes a letter to Baird and dispatches a messenger to Corus, post haste, praying to any god listening that he get there without trouble.
Nearly a week passes before the fief gates open to admit a cloaked rider – in this time, Kel has worsened, her fever spiking dangerously and her fever dreams more panicked. Dom has hardly left her side, but he rises to greet the newcomer himself, hoping beyond all hope that his uncle be able to keep her alive.
When he arrives in the foyer, it isn’t his uncle passing his muddy cloak to the maid, but a young man whom he hasn’t heard from in months. “Nealan,” he croaks, and meets his cousin in a hug. For a moment, it’s as though their friendship had never rifted. But he remembers Kel, sweating upstairs in a semi-conscious haze. “Please,” he whispers, and Neal backs off, all business now.
“Take me up,” he orders, striding past Dom and mounting the stairs two at a time.
Neal’s green Gift is already pulsing around Kel’s body by the time Dom joins him, and he sits in a chair across the room to keep from hearing Neal’s murmurs. Once or twice, Kel appears to respond to whatever her friend was whispering, pain and terror on her face being replaced with a happiness that Dom has so missed seeing. They stay like this for hours, until sleep claims him, and when Dom wakes up, his wife is sleeping peacefully and his cousin is saying sternly to her prone body, “And don’t you ever scare me like that again!”
vii.
When the child is born, his hair is a dark, muddy red. His eyes are blue – the colour of Dom’s eyes. He wonders if it’s a trick of fate, or if it’s the hand of the Goddess blessing them for their struggles. Eventually he decides that it makes no difference.
Maybe once we'd have seen it during Smackdown!