Post by devilinthedetails on Jul 27, 2018 9:23:29 GMT 10
Title: An Excess of Perfection
Rating: PG
Prompt: Excess
Summary: Three generations of Contes and their struggles with perfection.
An Excess of Perfection
I Perfect Son
The day before he began page training, Jon was jittery, so Roald took him on a ride through the Royal Forest. As they steered their mounts—Roald’s a fine stallion from the Cavall stables and Jon’s a well-bred pony from Galla—along a sun-dappled dirt path with the fallen leaves crackling beneath the hooves of Roald’s horse and Jon’s pony, Roald asked as mildly as he might to a startled steed, “Are you nervous about page training, son?”
“No, it’s not page training I’m nervous about, Father.” Jon fidgeted with his reigns, causing his pony to whinny with unease.
“What are you nervous about then?” Roald prompted when an unusually reticent Jon failed to elaborate on what was stirring his anxiety.
“I’m worried that I’ll disappoint you and Mother.” Jon gazed at Roald with such fear on his face that Roald was overcome by the urge to reassure his son that he had never been and never would be a disappointment.
Before Roald could find the words to express this powerful pride he always felt when he laid eyes on his child, Jon went on with morose earnestness, “I have to be a perfect son for you and Mother because you can’t have another, don’t I?”
Remembering how his own father had always tied love to unattainably high standards he had eventually decided not to break his heart and nature trying futilely to meet, Roald reached out a leather-gloved palm to pat his son’s knee. “You were the perfect son for your mother and me from the moment you were born. That’s why the gods have granted us only one child.”
Jon’s forehead knotted as he considered this. Then, cocking his head in confusion, he wanted to know, “Why does Mother cry sometimes because I’m her only child if I’m a perfect son?”
“Sometimes things are so perfect that we can’t help but weep over them, Jon.” Roald tugged on his beard as he struggled to answer this difficult question that cut to the deepest sorrow of his wife and his marriage. Seeing that Jon still appeared as baffled as if Roald had offered this explanation in Scanran, Roald attempted a clarification. “Have you ever laughed so hard at a joke that you found yourself crying?”
“Of course, Father.” Jon seemed surprised at the question. “Our jesters and jugglers wouldn’t be very good if I hadn’t.”
“Indeed.” Roald felt a small smile forming beneath his beard and mentally blessed his son for being a perfect innocent who brought so much sunlight to his life. “A perfect joke is one that makes us laugh until we cry. A perfect person is similar, bringing us so much happiness that we’re moved to tears sometimes.”
“I don’t enjoy making you or Mother cry”—Jon’s seriousness ebbed into a faintly mischievous grin—“but if that’s what it takes to be perfect, I’ll do it more often.”
“Be careful.” Roald lifted a finger in warning. “If you make us cry too much, I’ll punish you.”
“Punished for being perfect, Father?” Jon emitted an exaggerated sigh, and Roald was unable to bite back a chuckle. “I can’t win.”
II Midwinter Mayhem
“Roald.” Jon stepped out of the parlor in the royal quarters onto a balcony bedecked in festive fir garlands and icicles that shone silvery in the Midwinter moonlight where his oldest son had banished himself form the circle of family sipping cider around the blazing fireplace. “I thought I might find you out here.”
As Roald turned from the railing to bow silently, a chiding comment about Midwinter being a holiday meant for celebration with family died on Jon’s tongue as he remembered being Roald’s age. At Roald’s age, he had felt a deeper bond with his friends than his family, preferring their company to that of his parents. “If you would rather spend the rest of your evening with your friends, you have my leave to do so.”
“I don’t want to see my friends, but thank you, Papa.” Roald sounded as if he were brooding, and Jon frowned, wondering what was bothering his solemn son now.
“Do you want to be alone?” Jon pressed, gently prompting Roald to express himself as he had done ever since Roald learned to talk. “If so, you need only say so, and I’ll honor your wish for solitude.”
“Thank you, Papa.” Roald inclined his head. “I don’t wish to be alone, though.”
“No?” Jon arched an eyebrow when Roald neglected to expand upon this notion. “What do you want then?”
“I want to talk yet I don’t want to talk. I want to be alone yet I don’t want to be alone.” Roald bit his lip in a nervous gesture that had plagued him since childhood, and Jon recalled with surge of sympathy how his own teenage years had torn and troubled him. “I don’t know what I want because it’s all contradictory, and that probably makes me sound like a brat.”
“You don’t sound like a brat. You just sound confused.” Jon squeezed his son’s shoulder in reassurance.
“Papa.” Roald raised wide eyes—blue as Jon’s but shaped like Thayet’s—to Jon’s. “Are you disappointed in me?”
The question slammed into him with the force of a punch to the chest because he had never claimed Roald was a disappointment to him and yet the fear that he was a disappointment to Jon hounded Roald’s heels. When he could speak, he replied, continuing to knead the muscles in Roald’s shoulder which had broadened courtesy of the weights Lord Wyldon made the pages don in their daily training, “You’ve never been and never will be a disappointment to your mother or me, son. If you misbehave, we might be disappointed in your actions but never in you.”
“I acted badly tonight, didn’t I, Papa?” Roald’s gaze dropped from Jon to the balustrade as if he were ashamed to meet his father’s eyes over some mystery offense Jon couldn’t name. “I got spots on my hose at the banquet.”
“That was an accident, Roald.” Jon had noticed the evidence of mishaps on multiple pages including his heir but dismissed them as testimonies to the awkwardness of youth. Only someone as determined to be perfect as Roald would worry about such a trivial matter rendering him a disgrace to his parents. “Your mother and I will never be disappointed in you for something you didn’t do intentionally or anything you did without knowing it was wrong. We didn’t think you’d grow up without accidents and mistakes. Those don’t disappoint us.”
“It doesn’t matter that it was an accident.” Roald gripped the railing with white knuckles as if he craved something solid to cling to in the midst of the turmoil he was creating in his own mind. “I still disgrace the kingdom, you, Mama, and myself, of course, though that matters least.”
“If the worse disgrace a man’s son is guilty of is spots on his hose, that man should count himself blessed by Mithros and all the gods.” Jon spoke dryly when he wanted to give voice to the idea that any father would be proud of a son as respectful and dutiful as Roald but choked over the praising words. “Those spots were barely noticeable, by the way. Anyone who judges you for them is a fool.”
“Yes, Papa.” Roald hesitated and then hedged, “I couldn’t share with you what goes on in the pages’ wing…”
“Of course you couldn’t.” Jon’s tone was wry but he hoped that it still invited his son to confide in him through hypotheticals. “If you did, I would provide what guidance I could.”
“Thank you.” Roald paused again before relating in his slow, soft way, “If there were pages who were spilling on other pages and tripping them up, I couldn’t fight the pages responsible for such nasty pranks because it would violate my royal dignity and compromise my diplomatic relationships with them in the future, wouldn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so,” Jon agreed, patting his son’s shoulder as he thought for the thousandth time that his heir was a far more natural diplomat than him. Roald understood nuance, tact, and subtlety far better than Jon had as a page. “A brawl would be tempting and temporarily satisfying to your baser instincts but probably not the best long-term solution to the problem.”
“That’s what I thought.” Roald’s shoulders remained tense despite Jon’s patting. “In such a situation, I also couldn’t use a royal command to order them to stop with the stupid stunts because they would only resent me for taking advantage of my royal privilege—lording over them as they would see it—and plot a more devious revenge in the future, Papa.”
“A wise observation.” Jon wished he had been as quick to recognize that before he had created an enemy—Ralon of Malven—in the pages’ wing who would come back to haunt him as he was becoming king. “Royal commands are powerful but dangerous because they can provoke the bitterness you mentioned, son.”
“Yet, with the pages running ram-shod over everyone, it would be a failure of my obligations to do nothing.” Roald pinched the bridge of his nose in a mannerism Jon recognized as his own when the stress of ruling threatened to crush him body and soul. “I would have to say something, wouldn’t I, Papa?”
Although he heard the desperate note to his son’s tone that suggested his boy didn’t know what to say, Jon tilted his head a few inches to murmur in Roald’s ear, “In such a situation, I couldn’t tell you what to say, but I could promise you that when the right moment to speak arrived, you’d find the perfect words to say.”
“Thank you for your advice and faith in me.” Roald bowed. “They mean everything to me, Papa.”
“You’re a good boy, Roald.” Jon pulled Roald into a hug and was relieved to feel his son relax into the embrace. “Everyday you make your mother and me proud.”
III Losing Face
“You don’t have to say anything.” Lianokami peered at Roald from behind her fingers, hiding behind her hands the way she had fled to her bedchamber after snapping at Lady Haname and ripping her parchment to shreds when the sharp-eyed Lady Haname had dared to correct one of the recurring flaws in Lianokami’s calligraphy, which the Yamani insisted be perfect, precise, and graceful with no sloppiness or idiosyncrasies to mar what was as much an art form as writing. “I know I lost face, Da.”
“Yes, you did.” Roald was quiet but firm as he lowered Lianokami’s palms until nothing could conceal her eyes dark as Shinko’s but shaped like Roald’s. “You didn’t lose face when you made a mistake in your calligraphy but you did when you lost your temper. You must apologize to Lady Haname and clean up the parchment that you tore.”
“I’ll apologize most humbly to Lady Haname and tidy the mess I made.” Lianokami’s gaze fell to the floor. “I’m embarrassed by my behavior, Da. I just get so frustrated and humiliated when I can’t make the calligraphy perfect no matter how hard I try.”
“Your mother and I don’t expect you or your calligraphy—or anything else you do—to be perfect.” Roald kissed his daughter’s crinkled forehead and smiled slightly when he felt it ease under his affection. “We just expect you to try to be perfect at calligraphy and all else because what matters isn’t that we be perfect, which is impossible, but that we always strive for perfection, which is our duty to ourselves, our families, and our realm.”
“What do we do when we try to be perfect and can’t be, Da?” Lianokami seemed to be blinking back tears.
“We don’t lose our tempers, we remain courteous of others, and we stay dignified.” Roald combed his fingers through her long, ink-black hair. “Those things mean more than our being perfect, Lian. We mustn’t lose sight of that in our pursuit of perfection.”
Rating: PG
Prompt: Excess
Summary: Three generations of Contes and their struggles with perfection.
An Excess of Perfection
I Perfect Son
The day before he began page training, Jon was jittery, so Roald took him on a ride through the Royal Forest. As they steered their mounts—Roald’s a fine stallion from the Cavall stables and Jon’s a well-bred pony from Galla—along a sun-dappled dirt path with the fallen leaves crackling beneath the hooves of Roald’s horse and Jon’s pony, Roald asked as mildly as he might to a startled steed, “Are you nervous about page training, son?”
“No, it’s not page training I’m nervous about, Father.” Jon fidgeted with his reigns, causing his pony to whinny with unease.
“What are you nervous about then?” Roald prompted when an unusually reticent Jon failed to elaborate on what was stirring his anxiety.
“I’m worried that I’ll disappoint you and Mother.” Jon gazed at Roald with such fear on his face that Roald was overcome by the urge to reassure his son that he had never been and never would be a disappointment.
Before Roald could find the words to express this powerful pride he always felt when he laid eyes on his child, Jon went on with morose earnestness, “I have to be a perfect son for you and Mother because you can’t have another, don’t I?”
Remembering how his own father had always tied love to unattainably high standards he had eventually decided not to break his heart and nature trying futilely to meet, Roald reached out a leather-gloved palm to pat his son’s knee. “You were the perfect son for your mother and me from the moment you were born. That’s why the gods have granted us only one child.”
Jon’s forehead knotted as he considered this. Then, cocking his head in confusion, he wanted to know, “Why does Mother cry sometimes because I’m her only child if I’m a perfect son?”
“Sometimes things are so perfect that we can’t help but weep over them, Jon.” Roald tugged on his beard as he struggled to answer this difficult question that cut to the deepest sorrow of his wife and his marriage. Seeing that Jon still appeared as baffled as if Roald had offered this explanation in Scanran, Roald attempted a clarification. “Have you ever laughed so hard at a joke that you found yourself crying?”
“Of course, Father.” Jon seemed surprised at the question. “Our jesters and jugglers wouldn’t be very good if I hadn’t.”
“Indeed.” Roald felt a small smile forming beneath his beard and mentally blessed his son for being a perfect innocent who brought so much sunlight to his life. “A perfect joke is one that makes us laugh until we cry. A perfect person is similar, bringing us so much happiness that we’re moved to tears sometimes.”
“I don’t enjoy making you or Mother cry”—Jon’s seriousness ebbed into a faintly mischievous grin—“but if that’s what it takes to be perfect, I’ll do it more often.”
“Be careful.” Roald lifted a finger in warning. “If you make us cry too much, I’ll punish you.”
“Punished for being perfect, Father?” Jon emitted an exaggerated sigh, and Roald was unable to bite back a chuckle. “I can’t win.”
II Midwinter Mayhem
“Roald.” Jon stepped out of the parlor in the royal quarters onto a balcony bedecked in festive fir garlands and icicles that shone silvery in the Midwinter moonlight where his oldest son had banished himself form the circle of family sipping cider around the blazing fireplace. “I thought I might find you out here.”
As Roald turned from the railing to bow silently, a chiding comment about Midwinter being a holiday meant for celebration with family died on Jon’s tongue as he remembered being Roald’s age. At Roald’s age, he had felt a deeper bond with his friends than his family, preferring their company to that of his parents. “If you would rather spend the rest of your evening with your friends, you have my leave to do so.”
“I don’t want to see my friends, but thank you, Papa.” Roald sounded as if he were brooding, and Jon frowned, wondering what was bothering his solemn son now.
“Do you want to be alone?” Jon pressed, gently prompting Roald to express himself as he had done ever since Roald learned to talk. “If so, you need only say so, and I’ll honor your wish for solitude.”
“Thank you, Papa.” Roald inclined his head. “I don’t wish to be alone, though.”
“No?” Jon arched an eyebrow when Roald neglected to expand upon this notion. “What do you want then?”
“I want to talk yet I don’t want to talk. I want to be alone yet I don’t want to be alone.” Roald bit his lip in a nervous gesture that had plagued him since childhood, and Jon recalled with surge of sympathy how his own teenage years had torn and troubled him. “I don’t know what I want because it’s all contradictory, and that probably makes me sound like a brat.”
“You don’t sound like a brat. You just sound confused.” Jon squeezed his son’s shoulder in reassurance.
“Papa.” Roald raised wide eyes—blue as Jon’s but shaped like Thayet’s—to Jon’s. “Are you disappointed in me?”
The question slammed into him with the force of a punch to the chest because he had never claimed Roald was a disappointment to him and yet the fear that he was a disappointment to Jon hounded Roald’s heels. When he could speak, he replied, continuing to knead the muscles in Roald’s shoulder which had broadened courtesy of the weights Lord Wyldon made the pages don in their daily training, “You’ve never been and never will be a disappointment to your mother or me, son. If you misbehave, we might be disappointed in your actions but never in you.”
“I acted badly tonight, didn’t I, Papa?” Roald’s gaze dropped from Jon to the balustrade as if he were ashamed to meet his father’s eyes over some mystery offense Jon couldn’t name. “I got spots on my hose at the banquet.”
“That was an accident, Roald.” Jon had noticed the evidence of mishaps on multiple pages including his heir but dismissed them as testimonies to the awkwardness of youth. Only someone as determined to be perfect as Roald would worry about such a trivial matter rendering him a disgrace to his parents. “Your mother and I will never be disappointed in you for something you didn’t do intentionally or anything you did without knowing it was wrong. We didn’t think you’d grow up without accidents and mistakes. Those don’t disappoint us.”
“It doesn’t matter that it was an accident.” Roald gripped the railing with white knuckles as if he craved something solid to cling to in the midst of the turmoil he was creating in his own mind. “I still disgrace the kingdom, you, Mama, and myself, of course, though that matters least.”
“If the worse disgrace a man’s son is guilty of is spots on his hose, that man should count himself blessed by Mithros and all the gods.” Jon spoke dryly when he wanted to give voice to the idea that any father would be proud of a son as respectful and dutiful as Roald but choked over the praising words. “Those spots were barely noticeable, by the way. Anyone who judges you for them is a fool.”
“Yes, Papa.” Roald hesitated and then hedged, “I couldn’t share with you what goes on in the pages’ wing…”
“Of course you couldn’t.” Jon’s tone was wry but he hoped that it still invited his son to confide in him through hypotheticals. “If you did, I would provide what guidance I could.”
“Thank you.” Roald paused again before relating in his slow, soft way, “If there were pages who were spilling on other pages and tripping them up, I couldn’t fight the pages responsible for such nasty pranks because it would violate my royal dignity and compromise my diplomatic relationships with them in the future, wouldn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so,” Jon agreed, patting his son’s shoulder as he thought for the thousandth time that his heir was a far more natural diplomat than him. Roald understood nuance, tact, and subtlety far better than Jon had as a page. “A brawl would be tempting and temporarily satisfying to your baser instincts but probably not the best long-term solution to the problem.”
“That’s what I thought.” Roald’s shoulders remained tense despite Jon’s patting. “In such a situation, I also couldn’t use a royal command to order them to stop with the stupid stunts because they would only resent me for taking advantage of my royal privilege—lording over them as they would see it—and plot a more devious revenge in the future, Papa.”
“A wise observation.” Jon wished he had been as quick to recognize that before he had created an enemy—Ralon of Malven—in the pages’ wing who would come back to haunt him as he was becoming king. “Royal commands are powerful but dangerous because they can provoke the bitterness you mentioned, son.”
“Yet, with the pages running ram-shod over everyone, it would be a failure of my obligations to do nothing.” Roald pinched the bridge of his nose in a mannerism Jon recognized as his own when the stress of ruling threatened to crush him body and soul. “I would have to say something, wouldn’t I, Papa?”
Although he heard the desperate note to his son’s tone that suggested his boy didn’t know what to say, Jon tilted his head a few inches to murmur in Roald’s ear, “In such a situation, I couldn’t tell you what to say, but I could promise you that when the right moment to speak arrived, you’d find the perfect words to say.”
“Thank you for your advice and faith in me.” Roald bowed. “They mean everything to me, Papa.”
“You’re a good boy, Roald.” Jon pulled Roald into a hug and was relieved to feel his son relax into the embrace. “Everyday you make your mother and me proud.”
III Losing Face
“You don’t have to say anything.” Lianokami peered at Roald from behind her fingers, hiding behind her hands the way she had fled to her bedchamber after snapping at Lady Haname and ripping her parchment to shreds when the sharp-eyed Lady Haname had dared to correct one of the recurring flaws in Lianokami’s calligraphy, which the Yamani insisted be perfect, precise, and graceful with no sloppiness or idiosyncrasies to mar what was as much an art form as writing. “I know I lost face, Da.”
“Yes, you did.” Roald was quiet but firm as he lowered Lianokami’s palms until nothing could conceal her eyes dark as Shinko’s but shaped like Roald’s. “You didn’t lose face when you made a mistake in your calligraphy but you did when you lost your temper. You must apologize to Lady Haname and clean up the parchment that you tore.”
“I’ll apologize most humbly to Lady Haname and tidy the mess I made.” Lianokami’s gaze fell to the floor. “I’m embarrassed by my behavior, Da. I just get so frustrated and humiliated when I can’t make the calligraphy perfect no matter how hard I try.”
“Your mother and I don’t expect you or your calligraphy—or anything else you do—to be perfect.” Roald kissed his daughter’s crinkled forehead and smiled slightly when he felt it ease under his affection. “We just expect you to try to be perfect at calligraphy and all else because what matters isn’t that we be perfect, which is impossible, but that we always strive for perfection, which is our duty to ourselves, our families, and our realm.”
“What do we do when we try to be perfect and can’t be, Da?” Lianokami seemed to be blinking back tears.
“We don’t lose our tempers, we remain courteous of others, and we stay dignified.” Roald combed his fingers through her long, ink-black hair. “Those things mean more than our being perfect, Lian. We mustn’t lose sight of that in our pursuit of perfection.”
Maybe once we'd have seen it during Smackdown!