Post by max on Aug 11, 2014 18:40:06 GMT 10
To: mistrali
Message: Happy Ficmas! I'm so, so sorry this took so long! I ended up working on three prompts all up, but one got awkward and the other very complex
I hope this is to your liking
Sorry for the wait and the sad faces
From: Max
Title: Tonight at Noon
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1578
Wishlist Item: #5 – Zahir/Vania
Summary (and any warnings): Zahir/Vania. On fate and reflection.
Notes: Title is from the children's poem by Adrian Henri. End thing is adapted from one of Andrea Gibson's spoken word numbers. I got my Vania stuff from q-canon rather than fanon so sorry if that isn't your ish. A lot was artistic license, also.
Of all the Conté children, Vania is the one who most resembles her grandmother.
The grandmother she never knew; the one they had called the most beautiful woman in the world. The one who had died during the civil war which had forced her mother to relinquish all her ties to her kingdom, travel halfway across the world, never to return.
Really, she has never known either of her grandmothers, but at least there are portraits of Lianne, and her great-uncle the Duke of Naxen who will quietly recount stories of a past that seems like a back-to-front fairy tale if she asks; stories of the time before immortals, before lady knights, when the greatest conflict ever fought on Tortallan soil was the Battle of Joyous Forest, in which her uncle (not her real uncle) Coram had saved uncle Gareth's life, and chivalry was purer for never being challenged.
Kalasin, though, is another matter. A name drenched not in black magic but blood; a flash of misgiving in her aunt Buri's eyes in the moments when Vania says or does something more suited to a K'miri princess than a Tortallan one, and the ghost of another woman overlays her like another skin. It's in her physiology anyway: the curve of her cheekbones, the length of her legs. The slanting almond shape of her eyes – though they, at least, are the same obscuring blue as the rest of her family's, her skin as imperviously pale.
No one talks about Kalasin, though.
Well, just this once, when an arrow grazes her temple and her mother is in the north, she wakes to her aunt gingerly smoothing her hair back from her brow, her dark eyes over-bright with tears. In the K'miri no one has ever needed to teach her, aunt Buri says 'You remind me so much of her sometimes.'
And although Vania never mentions it again, she resolves not to be so reckless after that.
'Did you know the mages say the stars of the heavens outnumber all the grains of sand in all the deserts of the earth?'
'Now I do,' she replies, without turning. She can well imagine what Zahir looks like in the archway behind her, leant elegantly against one stone wall, hands fisted in his pockets – because, he says, the air is wetter here, and uncomfortable in the cold – and she had come out to watch the night falling.
Besides, this is the way they have greeted each other since childhood – her childhood at least, when the things she had not known had seemed endless, and Zahir had been the one to teach them to her. How to pluck the thorns from roses and stick them to your fingers without pricking yourself. How the blue pigment used in all the frescoes in all Mithros' temples from Corus to Cría was sourced from one particular lapis mine in the foothills of the Roof of the World. How true Sirajit ballads are meant to be sung in six-two timing, but are usually adapted to something more reasonable. Sometimes there were practicals – gifts held in the palm of his hand; things no one else would offer a princess. The dessicated shell of a cicada. A stormwing feather, cleaned and dangerous and shining (hold it at the tip – never the sides) – but mostly the knowledge was words, because words were so much easier to hide.
Zahir has always been careful in that way. She had been eight years old when he was squired to her father and hadn't realised it at first. Then she'd been twelve, and hadn't understood it, even though by then Kalasin – her sister Kalasin – had gone. Now Vania is sixteen and the Scanran war is over, and she doesn't try to reconcile the inexorable, tidal pull they hold for each other, because it is something neither of them are permitted.
'They do.' He reaffirms, pushing himself up off the wall and coming over to her. 'Though there are some constellations which have been known to vanish they are yet unable to account for.'
She likes the way they are in a garrison in the middle of nowhere – the one where her rider group has stopped for the night, the one he commands – and he still smells of rosemary. She considers complimenting him on this when he reaches down to brush an errant wisp of hair back from her face and says, 'You look well, Princess.'
'As do you, Sir Commander,' she replies, and grins so the familiarity of the gesture doesn't get to be too much. They are far from the Royal Wing now – she is just another rider in Group Askew; he just another knight – but the beating of her heart – palpable in her ears as in her chest – is all the reminder she needs of her double-layered blood. By extension, his double-layered loyalties.
They are both of them products of the old King's wars – different sides of the same coin. Where she had been born into royalty, Zahir had been brought to Corus at the point of a sword.
She hadn't known it, though. Not until one of the bitter scenes which is the only way she remembers Liam's adolescence, when he had accused their father of “kidnapping the Bazhir boys” and then she'd learnt more than she had ever wished to know. How his father was headman of a tribe which, historically, had never really ceded to the Crown. How First Company of the Own had travelled from Tasride south, bound between the desert on one side and the Emerald Ocean on the other, to return to the palace with Zahir, nine years old and all but a prisoner. How he had not been the only child subjected to it.
He had been seventeen when he relayed all this to her, when she – appalled – had gone to seek the truth from him directly. Now when her heart hammers it is the first thing that comes to her mind.
Her K'miri heart; the part of her that reflects Kalasin in the ways which most worry her mothers. In her blood runs the legacy of conqueror and conquered alike, untenable, rising like water to the moon to leave her all filled by a fiery, shapeless aching she becomes unable to control. The day she was nearly killed by an arrow to the brow was the day aunt Buri received notice of a rebellion efficiently put down in the hill country to the cost of ninety-three Hurdik lives.
She had been fourteen.
'Vania –' Just her name, not an indiscretion outside of her father's gaze and she blinks up into Zahir's eyes (amber in the light of the sun – the mages say, the greatest of all the stars), his hand cupping her face like a scene from a midsummer pageant, except his fingers, crept to the hinge of her jaw, are checking her pulse.
He has been one of the dearest people to her since childhood (her childhood – his having been taken from him) and it's the first time they've been this close in two years.
She is Kalasin's granddaughter (her pale afterimage, a trick of the low light), so she turns her face into his touch and kisses his palm.
*
His fingers twitch against her skin but his eyes remain soft and level. Nothing new to either of them – that had been the day he had comforted her when she had wept for what her father had done (wiping away her tears with his thumbs and telling her 'But if I hadn't gone with them, we never would have been friends.' Realising only after the fact that this was his daughter, somehow slipped into his heart like a bone lodged in his throat.
Untenable, except that she had been all K'miri anguish – mollifying – Conté eyes luminous in tears.
A trick of the gods. A girl he never should have loved.)
For a long moment the silence between them is its own communication. Then Vania sighs, her breath warm against his skin.
'Tell me more about the stars.'
The things they want from each other are the things they cannot have so he says, 'Did you know that even if we were able to view the night sky entire, we would only see the equivalent number of stars as would comprise a handful of sand?'
And Vania settles against him, and closes her eyes.
*
Her father became Bazhir in order to become Voice. Her great-grandfather destroyed worlds. But Jessamine is in her blood too, the House of Conté now the last of the Barzun throne (yet another of the things they do not know how to touch).
It was a long time ago.
In the borderlands Zahir gives her words in place of gifts she cannot take and she imagines vast deserts of stars, black-glittering, dunes resonant with celestial music too holy for the living to hear. His cupped palms full of radiant sand only they are able to see.
She holds out her own hands to receive her tithe of the heavens glimmering. Sleepily asks, 'Did you know Vania is the K'miri name for the evening star?'
When he breathes out the air seems to billow inside her own chest; fire restored from heat to quiet light, the only way she has ever known how to live.
'It's to be expected.'
*
I said to the sun, “Tell me about the big bang.”
The sun said, “It hurts to become.”
Message: Happy Ficmas! I'm so, so sorry this took so long! I ended up working on three prompts all up, but one got awkward and the other very complex
I hope this is to your liking
Sorry for the wait and the sad faces
From: Max
Title: Tonight at Noon
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1578
Wishlist Item: #5 – Zahir/Vania
Summary (and any warnings): Zahir/Vania. On fate and reflection.
Notes: Title is from the children's poem by Adrian Henri. End thing is adapted from one of Andrea Gibson's spoken word numbers. I got my Vania stuff from q-canon rather than fanon so sorry if that isn't your ish. A lot was artistic license, also.
Of all the Conté children, Vania is the one who most resembles her grandmother.
The grandmother she never knew; the one they had called the most beautiful woman in the world. The one who had died during the civil war which had forced her mother to relinquish all her ties to her kingdom, travel halfway across the world, never to return.
Really, she has never known either of her grandmothers, but at least there are portraits of Lianne, and her great-uncle the Duke of Naxen who will quietly recount stories of a past that seems like a back-to-front fairy tale if she asks; stories of the time before immortals, before lady knights, when the greatest conflict ever fought on Tortallan soil was the Battle of Joyous Forest, in which her uncle (not her real uncle) Coram had saved uncle Gareth's life, and chivalry was purer for never being challenged.
Kalasin, though, is another matter. A name drenched not in black magic but blood; a flash of misgiving in her aunt Buri's eyes in the moments when Vania says or does something more suited to a K'miri princess than a Tortallan one, and the ghost of another woman overlays her like another skin. It's in her physiology anyway: the curve of her cheekbones, the length of her legs. The slanting almond shape of her eyes – though they, at least, are the same obscuring blue as the rest of her family's, her skin as imperviously pale.
No one talks about Kalasin, though.
Well, just this once, when an arrow grazes her temple and her mother is in the north, she wakes to her aunt gingerly smoothing her hair back from her brow, her dark eyes over-bright with tears. In the K'miri no one has ever needed to teach her, aunt Buri says 'You remind me so much of her sometimes.'
And although Vania never mentions it again, she resolves not to be so reckless after that.
'Did you know the mages say the stars of the heavens outnumber all the grains of sand in all the deserts of the earth?'
'Now I do,' she replies, without turning. She can well imagine what Zahir looks like in the archway behind her, leant elegantly against one stone wall, hands fisted in his pockets – because, he says, the air is wetter here, and uncomfortable in the cold – and she had come out to watch the night falling.
Besides, this is the way they have greeted each other since childhood – her childhood at least, when the things she had not known had seemed endless, and Zahir had been the one to teach them to her. How to pluck the thorns from roses and stick them to your fingers without pricking yourself. How the blue pigment used in all the frescoes in all Mithros' temples from Corus to Cría was sourced from one particular lapis mine in the foothills of the Roof of the World. How true Sirajit ballads are meant to be sung in six-two timing, but are usually adapted to something more reasonable. Sometimes there were practicals – gifts held in the palm of his hand; things no one else would offer a princess. The dessicated shell of a cicada. A stormwing feather, cleaned and dangerous and shining (hold it at the tip – never the sides) – but mostly the knowledge was words, because words were so much easier to hide.
Zahir has always been careful in that way. She had been eight years old when he was squired to her father and hadn't realised it at first. Then she'd been twelve, and hadn't understood it, even though by then Kalasin – her sister Kalasin – had gone. Now Vania is sixteen and the Scanran war is over, and she doesn't try to reconcile the inexorable, tidal pull they hold for each other, because it is something neither of them are permitted.
'They do.' He reaffirms, pushing himself up off the wall and coming over to her. 'Though there are some constellations which have been known to vanish they are yet unable to account for.'
She likes the way they are in a garrison in the middle of nowhere – the one where her rider group has stopped for the night, the one he commands – and he still smells of rosemary. She considers complimenting him on this when he reaches down to brush an errant wisp of hair back from her face and says, 'You look well, Princess.'
'As do you, Sir Commander,' she replies, and grins so the familiarity of the gesture doesn't get to be too much. They are far from the Royal Wing now – she is just another rider in Group Askew; he just another knight – but the beating of her heart – palpable in her ears as in her chest – is all the reminder she needs of her double-layered blood. By extension, his double-layered loyalties.
They are both of them products of the old King's wars – different sides of the same coin. Where she had been born into royalty, Zahir had been brought to Corus at the point of a sword.
She hadn't known it, though. Not until one of the bitter scenes which is the only way she remembers Liam's adolescence, when he had accused their father of “kidnapping the Bazhir boys” and then she'd learnt more than she had ever wished to know. How his father was headman of a tribe which, historically, had never really ceded to the Crown. How First Company of the Own had travelled from Tasride south, bound between the desert on one side and the Emerald Ocean on the other, to return to the palace with Zahir, nine years old and all but a prisoner. How he had not been the only child subjected to it.
He had been seventeen when he relayed all this to her, when she – appalled – had gone to seek the truth from him directly. Now when her heart hammers it is the first thing that comes to her mind.
Her K'miri heart; the part of her that reflects Kalasin in the ways which most worry her mothers. In her blood runs the legacy of conqueror and conquered alike, untenable, rising like water to the moon to leave her all filled by a fiery, shapeless aching she becomes unable to control. The day she was nearly killed by an arrow to the brow was the day aunt Buri received notice of a rebellion efficiently put down in the hill country to the cost of ninety-three Hurdik lives.
She had been fourteen.
'Vania –' Just her name, not an indiscretion outside of her father's gaze and she blinks up into Zahir's eyes (amber in the light of the sun – the mages say, the greatest of all the stars), his hand cupping her face like a scene from a midsummer pageant, except his fingers, crept to the hinge of her jaw, are checking her pulse.
He has been one of the dearest people to her since childhood (her childhood – his having been taken from him) and it's the first time they've been this close in two years.
She is Kalasin's granddaughter (her pale afterimage, a trick of the low light), so she turns her face into his touch and kisses his palm.
*
His fingers twitch against her skin but his eyes remain soft and level. Nothing new to either of them – that had been the day he had comforted her when she had wept for what her father had done (wiping away her tears with his thumbs and telling her 'But if I hadn't gone with them, we never would have been friends.' Realising only after the fact that this was his daughter, somehow slipped into his heart like a bone lodged in his throat.
Untenable, except that she had been all K'miri anguish – mollifying – Conté eyes luminous in tears.
A trick of the gods. A girl he never should have loved.)
For a long moment the silence between them is its own communication. Then Vania sighs, her breath warm against his skin.
'Tell me more about the stars.'
The things they want from each other are the things they cannot have so he says, 'Did you know that even if we were able to view the night sky entire, we would only see the equivalent number of stars as would comprise a handful of sand?'
And Vania settles against him, and closes her eyes.
*
Her father became Bazhir in order to become Voice. Her great-grandfather destroyed worlds. But Jessamine is in her blood too, the House of Conté now the last of the Barzun throne (yet another of the things they do not know how to touch).
It was a long time ago.
In the borderlands Zahir gives her words in place of gifts she cannot take and she imagines vast deserts of stars, black-glittering, dunes resonant with celestial music too holy for the living to hear. His cupped palms full of radiant sand only they are able to see.
She holds out her own hands to receive her tithe of the heavens glimmering. Sleepily asks, 'Did you know Vania is the K'miri name for the evening star?'
When he breathes out the air seems to billow inside her own chest; fire restored from heat to quiet light, the only way she has ever known how to live.
'It's to be expected.'
*
I said to the sun, “Tell me about the big bang.”
The sun said, “It hurts to become.”
Maybe once we'd have seen it during Smackdown!