Post by devilinthedetails on Nov 4, 2018 11:11:13 GMT 10
Title: There and Back Again
Rating: PG-13 for references to death
Prompt: There and Back Again
Summary: On the shore of Lake Naxen, Gareth remembers his sister.
There and Back Again
Mists of Time
Gareth knew that Gary and Cythera hated it when he went wandering in the mists around Lake Naxen. They said—Cythera sweetly and Gary sharply—that he could get lost in the fogs that swept about its curving banks. They didn’t realize how right they were, but that didn’t prevent Gareth from roaming around Lake Naxen on days when the mists danced across the water because to him the mists were times and memories of love that he could get lost it. It wasn’t easy to grow old, to see the little sister you had sworn to protect die, and have to wait long decades for the kiss of death, painfully aware that it would come but achingly ignorant of when it would makes its late arrival. The only comfort was to get lost in the mist—to abandon all sense of time in memory…
Leaving Home
“Do you have to go to the Royal Palace to train as a page?” Lianne asked, burrowing her face into Gareth’s shoulder as he said good night to her on the eve of his departure to court to begin training for knighthood.
“It’s my duty.” Gareth patted her back. There was no need, he thought, to distress her by adding that Father would skin him if he tried to plea out of page training to stay by his sister’s side. Father with his boulder features and thundering commands—who treated his two surviving children like soldiers on a battlefield—terrified Lianne. Lianne didn’t need to be frightened when the damp mists shrouding Lake Naxen had crept into her lungs, giving her a hacking cough that had confined her to her bed for days. Lake Naxen might have provided a daunting natural barrier that made siege impossible—that was why Naxen Castle had never fallen, Father had gruffly explained to Gareth once as they stood on the ramparts overlooking the swirling fog—but Gareth also suspected that the damp mists had claimed too many Naxen children to count over the centuries, and he could only pray on every day that delicate, sweet Lianne wouldn’t be one lost to the fog. “A Naxen always does his—or her—duty.”
That along with the damp was in their blood, a grim, joyless inheritance.
Lianne didn’t argue with him. Instead she pressed her lips against his ear, her breath a tickle. “Do you want to hear a secret?”
“Of course.” Gareth hid a grin as he noted inwardly that Lianne’s secrets were always light, floating to him on the butterfly wings of her radiant dreams. “Tell me.”
“I love my brother, and I always will.” There was a sniffle in Lianne’s throat that didn’t come from the cold mist in her lungs, but he could hear that she was trying to be brave for his sake.
“Whisper that every night before bed.” Gareth tucked his words into the shell of her ear. “Even at the palace, I’ll hear it and whisper back that I love you.”
“You can’t hear that far, and neither can I.” Lianne sounded torn between giggles and tears.
“We don’t hear the whispers with our ears.” Gareth yanked lightly on Lianne’s earlobe, tugging her into giggles rather than tears. “We hear the whispers with our hearts.”
Off to War
“I made you handkerchiefs.” Lianne gave a proper curtsy that would have made any priestess proud as she presented him with a box full of handkerchiefs embroidered with birds and flowers in the rich style she was perfecting at the convent. “You’re the king’s squire. You must look impressive when marching off to war.”
He thought the vivid colors were too cherry for the dreary campaign in Tusaine, but it wouldn’t be in the spirit of Midwinter for him to be anything less than appreciative of her gift, which could be the last she ever bestowed on him, though he tried not to contemplate that as he had tried to erase so many troubling notions from his mind to avoid crushing his morale as he readied for war. He was determined to enjoy this Midwinter with Lianne, who was celebrating at the Royal Palace with their parents instead of at the convent. When the holiday was over, he would march off to war in Tusaine with his father and King Jasson. He had to find what peace he could now.
“The handkerchiefs are beautiful.” Gareth leaned toward his sister to kiss her on the cheek that glowed in the firelight. “They’ll remind me of you, giving me strength from the memory of a girl worth fighting for every time I look at them.”
“I’m glad.” Pleased hollies grew in Lianne’s cheeks. Turning her face, she whispered in his ear, “I love my warrior brother, and I’m prouder of him than words can describe.”
“I’m proud of my lady sister,” Gareth whispered back. “Nobody embroiders with greater care and nuance.”
“My brother is as horrible a flatterer as he is shameless.” Lianne laughed and tossed back her shining brown hair. “Even at the convent, there are better embroiderers than me.”
Dance like Nobody is Watching
“Dance like nobody is watching,” Gareth advised his pale sister as he steered her through a minuet at her wedding banquet, her steps slowed by the weight of the hundreds of gazes upon her, waiting to judge her every move.
“They’re watching me all the time.” Lianne’s eyes were wide with the realization that the rest of her life would be on stage for political speculation and criticism. “What if they hate me?”
“Nobody could hate you.” Gareth gave her a thin smile as he spun her beneath the bridge of his arm. “You’ll be a gentle and gracious queen.”
“I hope to be.” Lianne’s smile was slight as his.
“You will be,” insisted Gareth, drawing her close as the music allowed to whisper in her ear. “I love my gentle and gracious queen sister. She’ll make the country proud.”
Lost Child
“I lost another child.” Lianne wept into her fingers. Since her miscarriage, Gareth was the only man beside her husband she had permitted to console her in the sanctuary of her solar, which was warm and muffled as a womb with thick tapestries. “I see them in my sleep, Gareth. They cry for me, but when I stretch my hands toward them, they fly away from me.”
“Perhaps you should ask Duke Baird for potions to drive off these disturbing dreams.” Gareth wrapped an arm around Lianne’s heaving shoulders. She was so haggard and frail that he feared she would fly away from him if she didn’t get more sleep and start eating instead of staring blankly at food as if it were too bland to have any appeal for her.
“Duke Baird couldn’t do anything about these dreams.” Lianne shook her head with a fervor Gareth worried would dizzy her. “Besides these dreams are all I have of my lost children. I don’t want to kill them again in my head and heart.”
“Forgive me for suggesting it.” Gareth coaxed her gingers from her face and kissed them, upset with himself for distressing her in her vulnerable state. “I share your grief over your lost children, Lianne.”
“I know you do. The entire realm does.” Lianne’s fingers trembled between his. “The whole kingdom waits for me to deliver an heir. They cry out for it as if they were my children, and, time after time, I fail them just as I’ve failed as a mother to my lost children.”
“You’re mother of the country.” Gareth squeezed her fingers. It was characteristic of her humility not to notice how when she laughed, her king and court laughed with her, and when she wept, her king and court ached to comfort her. “Everyone loves you.”
“I’ve given birth to nothing but disappointment.” Lianne gazed at him with eyes hollow from mourning. “I’ve failed in my duties to my family and country.”
“You delight your family and country,” Gareth whispered in her ear as if it were a scandalous secret. “Everybody is proud to have such an illustrious queen.”
“You should be ashamed to call me sister.” Lianne’s answering whisper was empty of hope.
“I’m proud of my sister.” Gareth’s whisper was low and fierce. “I always will be because she is my sister and my queen.”
Deathbed Promises
“I worry about Jon and his wildness.” Lianne’s voice was a rasping wisp, but even on her deathbed, her concern was for her family, not herself. “I’d hoped to see him married to a steadying woman before I went to the Peaceful Realms.”
“He’ll steady as he ages,” Gareth reassured her, thinking that there had always been something commanding and charismatic about his nephew’s stubbornness and charm. “He was born to rule.”
“Yes.” Lianne coughed blood into her handkerchief. “He needs guidance to rule well, though.”
“I’ll guide him until the day I die,” Gareth vowed. “Then I’ll find a way to haunt him from the Peaceful Realms. He’ll never be free of my advice.”
“And my husband?” Lianne coughed more blood into her handkerchief. “Will you continue to advise him?”
“I’ll serve and counsel him faithfully forever.” Gareth could hear the frosting of his tone. His sister was on her deathbed due to the dark sorceries of Roger the traitor, and the king refused to give Roger a second, more permanent death as the black-hearted scoundrel deserved. Gareth would never forgive his brother-in-law this weakness, this injustice, that Roald misnamed mercy. “I swore an oath to the Crown when I was knighted and again when I was dubbed King’s Champion.”
“You won’t neglect your own care?” Lianne’s doe eyes reflected how rail-thin and gray Gareth had become since Roger’s resurrection. “I don’t want you working yourself into the grave, dear brother.”
“I’ll forget my health as I attend to my duties.” Gareth wouldn’t lie to his beloved, trusted sister as she lay dying. “Roanna and Gary will be tyrants in their efforts to look after me, however.”
These days indomitable Roanna was more adamant that he eat his vegetables than she had been about Gary doing the same when the lad’s main interest in vegetables was how plates full of them could be smashed. His razor-tongued son had become oddly solicitous about ensuring Gareth ate and slept. The rambunctiousness gone from him, Gary resolved problems of governance from dusk to dawn sequestered in Gareth’s study while his days were spent at meetings where he would outwit any who dared to challenge his inalienable Naxen right to attend. Gareth took a distant pride in his son’s maturity along with grief for his own aging.
“Good.” Lianne’s lips brushed against his ear as she whispered into it, “I love my brother, and I always will.”
“I love my sister,” Gareth whispered back, completing this rendition of their lifelong ritual, “and I always will.”
Across the Lake
Gareth sat on a rock, Lake Naxen rippling at his feet. The mist was almost ethereal about his face, carrying him outside time so he was no longer old but young, watching his sister wade in the shallows while minnows swam silver circles around her ankles. Across the years, he could feel her presence by Lake Naxen more than he ever could in the Conte crypts where she lay in eternal peace beside her loving husband.
He rarely visited her in the crypts because he hated to think of her in the cold she had hated. Instead he visted her at the lake that was his scrying mirror into the serenity of the Peaceful Realms.
When he came, he always whispered, knowing she could hear across the vast lake of life and death that temporarily separated them, “I love my sister, and death can’t keep us apart.”
The wind would howl through his hair, and in it, he would hear her assurance that she loved him and would be reunited soon.
Rating: PG-13 for references to death
Prompt: There and Back Again
Summary: On the shore of Lake Naxen, Gareth remembers his sister.
There and Back Again
Mists of Time
Gareth knew that Gary and Cythera hated it when he went wandering in the mists around Lake Naxen. They said—Cythera sweetly and Gary sharply—that he could get lost in the fogs that swept about its curving banks. They didn’t realize how right they were, but that didn’t prevent Gareth from roaming around Lake Naxen on days when the mists danced across the water because to him the mists were times and memories of love that he could get lost it. It wasn’t easy to grow old, to see the little sister you had sworn to protect die, and have to wait long decades for the kiss of death, painfully aware that it would come but achingly ignorant of when it would makes its late arrival. The only comfort was to get lost in the mist—to abandon all sense of time in memory…
Leaving Home
“Do you have to go to the Royal Palace to train as a page?” Lianne asked, burrowing her face into Gareth’s shoulder as he said good night to her on the eve of his departure to court to begin training for knighthood.
“It’s my duty.” Gareth patted her back. There was no need, he thought, to distress her by adding that Father would skin him if he tried to plea out of page training to stay by his sister’s side. Father with his boulder features and thundering commands—who treated his two surviving children like soldiers on a battlefield—terrified Lianne. Lianne didn’t need to be frightened when the damp mists shrouding Lake Naxen had crept into her lungs, giving her a hacking cough that had confined her to her bed for days. Lake Naxen might have provided a daunting natural barrier that made siege impossible—that was why Naxen Castle had never fallen, Father had gruffly explained to Gareth once as they stood on the ramparts overlooking the swirling fog—but Gareth also suspected that the damp mists had claimed too many Naxen children to count over the centuries, and he could only pray on every day that delicate, sweet Lianne wouldn’t be one lost to the fog. “A Naxen always does his—or her—duty.”
That along with the damp was in their blood, a grim, joyless inheritance.
Lianne didn’t argue with him. Instead she pressed her lips against his ear, her breath a tickle. “Do you want to hear a secret?”
“Of course.” Gareth hid a grin as he noted inwardly that Lianne’s secrets were always light, floating to him on the butterfly wings of her radiant dreams. “Tell me.”
“I love my brother, and I always will.” There was a sniffle in Lianne’s throat that didn’t come from the cold mist in her lungs, but he could hear that she was trying to be brave for his sake.
“Whisper that every night before bed.” Gareth tucked his words into the shell of her ear. “Even at the palace, I’ll hear it and whisper back that I love you.”
“You can’t hear that far, and neither can I.” Lianne sounded torn between giggles and tears.
“We don’t hear the whispers with our ears.” Gareth yanked lightly on Lianne’s earlobe, tugging her into giggles rather than tears. “We hear the whispers with our hearts.”
Off to War
“I made you handkerchiefs.” Lianne gave a proper curtsy that would have made any priestess proud as she presented him with a box full of handkerchiefs embroidered with birds and flowers in the rich style she was perfecting at the convent. “You’re the king’s squire. You must look impressive when marching off to war.”
He thought the vivid colors were too cherry for the dreary campaign in Tusaine, but it wouldn’t be in the spirit of Midwinter for him to be anything less than appreciative of her gift, which could be the last she ever bestowed on him, though he tried not to contemplate that as he had tried to erase so many troubling notions from his mind to avoid crushing his morale as he readied for war. He was determined to enjoy this Midwinter with Lianne, who was celebrating at the Royal Palace with their parents instead of at the convent. When the holiday was over, he would march off to war in Tusaine with his father and King Jasson. He had to find what peace he could now.
“The handkerchiefs are beautiful.” Gareth leaned toward his sister to kiss her on the cheek that glowed in the firelight. “They’ll remind me of you, giving me strength from the memory of a girl worth fighting for every time I look at them.”
“I’m glad.” Pleased hollies grew in Lianne’s cheeks. Turning her face, she whispered in his ear, “I love my warrior brother, and I’m prouder of him than words can describe.”
“I’m proud of my lady sister,” Gareth whispered back. “Nobody embroiders with greater care and nuance.”
“My brother is as horrible a flatterer as he is shameless.” Lianne laughed and tossed back her shining brown hair. “Even at the convent, there are better embroiderers than me.”
Dance like Nobody is Watching
“Dance like nobody is watching,” Gareth advised his pale sister as he steered her through a minuet at her wedding banquet, her steps slowed by the weight of the hundreds of gazes upon her, waiting to judge her every move.
“They’re watching me all the time.” Lianne’s eyes were wide with the realization that the rest of her life would be on stage for political speculation and criticism. “What if they hate me?”
“Nobody could hate you.” Gareth gave her a thin smile as he spun her beneath the bridge of his arm. “You’ll be a gentle and gracious queen.”
“I hope to be.” Lianne’s smile was slight as his.
“You will be,” insisted Gareth, drawing her close as the music allowed to whisper in her ear. “I love my gentle and gracious queen sister. She’ll make the country proud.”
Lost Child
“I lost another child.” Lianne wept into her fingers. Since her miscarriage, Gareth was the only man beside her husband she had permitted to console her in the sanctuary of her solar, which was warm and muffled as a womb with thick tapestries. “I see them in my sleep, Gareth. They cry for me, but when I stretch my hands toward them, they fly away from me.”
“Perhaps you should ask Duke Baird for potions to drive off these disturbing dreams.” Gareth wrapped an arm around Lianne’s heaving shoulders. She was so haggard and frail that he feared she would fly away from him if she didn’t get more sleep and start eating instead of staring blankly at food as if it were too bland to have any appeal for her.
“Duke Baird couldn’t do anything about these dreams.” Lianne shook her head with a fervor Gareth worried would dizzy her. “Besides these dreams are all I have of my lost children. I don’t want to kill them again in my head and heart.”
“Forgive me for suggesting it.” Gareth coaxed her gingers from her face and kissed them, upset with himself for distressing her in her vulnerable state. “I share your grief over your lost children, Lianne.”
“I know you do. The entire realm does.” Lianne’s fingers trembled between his. “The whole kingdom waits for me to deliver an heir. They cry out for it as if they were my children, and, time after time, I fail them just as I’ve failed as a mother to my lost children.”
“You’re mother of the country.” Gareth squeezed her fingers. It was characteristic of her humility not to notice how when she laughed, her king and court laughed with her, and when she wept, her king and court ached to comfort her. “Everyone loves you.”
“I’ve given birth to nothing but disappointment.” Lianne gazed at him with eyes hollow from mourning. “I’ve failed in my duties to my family and country.”
“You delight your family and country,” Gareth whispered in her ear as if it were a scandalous secret. “Everybody is proud to have such an illustrious queen.”
“You should be ashamed to call me sister.” Lianne’s answering whisper was empty of hope.
“I’m proud of my sister.” Gareth’s whisper was low and fierce. “I always will be because she is my sister and my queen.”
Deathbed Promises
“I worry about Jon and his wildness.” Lianne’s voice was a rasping wisp, but even on her deathbed, her concern was for her family, not herself. “I’d hoped to see him married to a steadying woman before I went to the Peaceful Realms.”
“He’ll steady as he ages,” Gareth reassured her, thinking that there had always been something commanding and charismatic about his nephew’s stubbornness and charm. “He was born to rule.”
“Yes.” Lianne coughed blood into her handkerchief. “He needs guidance to rule well, though.”
“I’ll guide him until the day I die,” Gareth vowed. “Then I’ll find a way to haunt him from the Peaceful Realms. He’ll never be free of my advice.”
“And my husband?” Lianne coughed more blood into her handkerchief. “Will you continue to advise him?”
“I’ll serve and counsel him faithfully forever.” Gareth could hear the frosting of his tone. His sister was on her deathbed due to the dark sorceries of Roger the traitor, and the king refused to give Roger a second, more permanent death as the black-hearted scoundrel deserved. Gareth would never forgive his brother-in-law this weakness, this injustice, that Roald misnamed mercy. “I swore an oath to the Crown when I was knighted and again when I was dubbed King’s Champion.”
“You won’t neglect your own care?” Lianne’s doe eyes reflected how rail-thin and gray Gareth had become since Roger’s resurrection. “I don’t want you working yourself into the grave, dear brother.”
“I’ll forget my health as I attend to my duties.” Gareth wouldn’t lie to his beloved, trusted sister as she lay dying. “Roanna and Gary will be tyrants in their efforts to look after me, however.”
These days indomitable Roanna was more adamant that he eat his vegetables than she had been about Gary doing the same when the lad’s main interest in vegetables was how plates full of them could be smashed. His razor-tongued son had become oddly solicitous about ensuring Gareth ate and slept. The rambunctiousness gone from him, Gary resolved problems of governance from dusk to dawn sequestered in Gareth’s study while his days were spent at meetings where he would outwit any who dared to challenge his inalienable Naxen right to attend. Gareth took a distant pride in his son’s maturity along with grief for his own aging.
“Good.” Lianne’s lips brushed against his ear as she whispered into it, “I love my brother, and I always will.”
“I love my sister,” Gareth whispered back, completing this rendition of their lifelong ritual, “and I always will.”
Across the Lake
Gareth sat on a rock, Lake Naxen rippling at his feet. The mist was almost ethereal about his face, carrying him outside time so he was no longer old but young, watching his sister wade in the shallows while minnows swam silver circles around her ankles. Across the years, he could feel her presence by Lake Naxen more than he ever could in the Conte crypts where she lay in eternal peace beside her loving husband.
He rarely visited her in the crypts because he hated to think of her in the cold she had hated. Instead he visted her at the lake that was his scrying mirror into the serenity of the Peaceful Realms.
When he came, he always whispered, knowing she could hear across the vast lake of life and death that temporarily separated them, “I love my sister, and death can’t keep us apart.”
The wind would howl through his hair, and in it, he would hear her assurance that she loved him and would be reunited soon.
Maybe once we'd have seen it during Smackdown!