"Beguile Thy Sorrow" - Titus Andronicus/Greek Mythology fan fiction
Fandom: Titus Andronicus, Greek mythology/Ovid's Metamorphoses
Character/Pairing: Philomela, Lavinia
Summary: AU. Both Philomela and Lavinia find a way out of their stories.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Lots of descriptions of the aftermath of rape and torture, disability resulting from torture.
A/N: I have necessarily blurred the timelines of these two texts, and ignored the paradox inherent in crossing them over, in order to make this work. Because sometimes you just need to give these women a happy ending.
The house was not silent. There was the clacking of the loom, regular, continuing for hours at a time, and the easy clatter of clay and cutlery, the splashing of basins of water. But no speech. No human voices broke the cool tranquility of the forest, startled the singing birds into quiet.
Houses can be prisons, and forests can be torture chambers, but this was neither. Not anymore.
-
Her hands moved quickly, ably, winding thread, drawing the shuttle across. As reassuring as the movements were, as comfortably familiar, she felt conscious of being watched in them, intent eyes on her small fingers. She tried not to turn around or stare back, even as she felt tempted to do so and her throat filled with bitter guilt. It wasn’t fair. Of course it wasn’t fair. But it was not she who had made it so.
If Philomela kept her mouth closed, then it was possible for no one to realize that anything was wrong. And, in theory, it ought to be possible for a noble-born woman to go for long periods without ever needing to open her mouth and speak. It was perhaps for this reason why Procne had thought, at first, that it might be possible for her to still live with her at court. “I want you with me, my dear sister,” she had said, “and nothing he’s done has changed that.”
But it was Philomela who had not been able to bear it. The proximity of so many people all around her; the sickening smells of cooking meat; the way the women would casually and thoughtlessly ask her a question and then look horrified when they remembered that she could not respond. But the idea of going back to her father’s home in Athens was equally unbearable, for she could not stand to imagine how he might look at her, with pity and loss, or how those men who had once vied for her hand, once desired her (and perhaps they still would - were there not advantages to having a silent wife? She shuddered whenever she thought of this) would now deal with her presence. So she told Procne that she wished to live alone and wrote out a list of all the supplies that she would require. Procne had been disappointed, but she had given Philomela what she asked for.
Some might call it bitterly ironic that she had ended up back here again, in the same forest-encircled house in which she had once been kept a prisoner. Philomela did not find it so. In a way, she was glad to be back, now that she could knock the bolts off the door and sleep in certainty that no one would come to wake her. After all, she had spent many hours alone in this house, weaving her tapestry and learning her body anew in the wake of what had been done to it. She felt possessive even of the bloodstains on the floor - mine, she named them in her mind. No one else would be allowed to look at this place, to gape in fascination and imagine. Procne came every week or so to bring her fresh food, wool, other supplies, but that was all of it. Philomela was perfectly capable, in this place, of caring for herself in solitude.
Lavinia had come later.
It was not possible to refuse Lavinia entrance, accompanied as she was by her attentive but nervous uncle, her large dark eyes kept downcast. Philomela had thought that after her own rape some essential part of herself had closed down, gone still and immobile, so that she was no longer capable of feeling anything more than the most perfunctory level of care and interest in those around her. Her focus had, for a long time, been by necessity upon her own body and mind, on the slow planning required to engineer her rescue, and after all that was over she simply could not summon up any care for the concerns of the women in Procne’s court. But, at the sight of Lavinia, compassion rose up in her again, along with an intense desire to have the other woman with her, close to her, at her side. Here was someone who knew, or might know, for whom the content of Philomela’s memories would not be unimaginable. Perhaps it was selfish, then, to take her in, though no one would have guessed this, certainly not the uncle, who thanked her profusely for what he seemed to consider a great charity.
(One of the pleasures of Philomela’s enforced silence was thank she did not need to answer graciously in such interactions, but only nod or shake her head, while thinking whatever she wished inside her own mind.)
Though it was perhaps not entirely the desire for a companion in suffering which motivated her. For she had also found herself staring at Lavinia’s hair, which was long and black and looked as though it had not been brushed for a long time, even though the woman’s garments were richly dyed and finely woven, clean and expensive. She had looked at Lavinia’s hair and been moved almost to tears and thought that she wanted very much to brush it for her, one day.
And now Lavinia was sitting, watching Philomela’s weaving fingers, and Philomela was being driven to distraction by self-consciousness, and by guilt that she still had fingers at all.
(Tereus cutting off her hands was never a fear which Philomela had ever consciously formulated for herself before meeting Lavinia, though she could remember many occasions, as she worked hours upon end at her tapestry, when she had felt incredible gratitude for the fact of her hands, and for her own ability with them. It was simply not an ability she had imagined would be taken away from her. Silent women could still be thought valuable and desired; handless ones might not be. Tereus had very much continued to desire her.)
Eventually, she could not stand being looked at any longer. She stood, and fetched the wax tablet and stylus which she used to communicate, silently thanking Athena that Lavinia at least knew how to read Greek.
We must figure out a way for you to talk to me, Philomela wrote, I cannot go on simply guessing at what you want. She paused, unsure how to delicately phrase what she wanted to ask. It was difficult to get around the grotesque bodily realities of Lavinia’s injuries, but she didn’t like drawing attention to them. Your uncle said something about tracing letters with a stick?
In fact, he had been rather more specific than that, and talked about Lavinia holding the stick in her mouth while she did so. Philomela didn’t want to mention that again.
Lavinia shook her head. Philomela could not tell whether she met to say that no, Philomela had misinterpreted him, or that she simply did not want to use that method of communication again.
Could you try holding this stylus between your wrists? Lavinia seemed wary. Philomela held it out to her.
It turned out to be an awkward, difficult proposition, and Philomela had, in the end, to support one hand of the stylus so that it did not fall to the ground. It took a long time for Lavinia to write out even a single word, and, as she worked at it, strands of her hair fell messily in front of her face.
I can point, she eventually managed to write, to words or letters.
(Philomela did not then know this, but Lavinia had come up with this method herself, had first employed it to tell her family what had happened to her. Not writing, not creating a text, but turning one to her own purposes, manipulating it. This was well-educated Lavinia’s tool to win her own liberation and revenge and recognition.)
The possibilities this held were quickly apparent, though Philomela stared for several long moments at the messy words before she understood them. She had papyrus in the house, though not much of it. Carefully she wrote out each of the letters of the alphabet, as large and clear as she could, making sure to leave space between the letters. When she had finished, she lifted the page and showed it to Lavinia.
For the first time since she had entered the house, Lavinia smiled.
-
When Lavinia met Philomela, she was worn out with anger. She kept thinking, over and over, that the last words she had ever spoken were in the act of begging for mercy, pleading to be spared pain and mutilation. She heard those words play in her ears over and over, and felt sickened and ashamed at the remembered sound of her voice, at the way she had humbled herself before those two men, promising them anything she thought might sway them.
She wished, at least, that had lost her tongue with the taste of curses in her mouth.
(As Philomela had, but Lavinia did not know this for a very long time.)
But there was nothing she could do with the anger, and it was burning through her, maddening her. Even the dripping blood of her two assailants had not quenched it; it was possible that nothing would. She wanted, if not the extinguishing of the anger, then at least to have something in her life apart from it. She could not clearly envision what this might look like.
At first, she thought Philomela might turn out to be only another inducement to anger. This mirror who was not a mirror, this fellow victim whose mutilations did not mar her beauty, did not make people wince upon first looking at her. Philomela was smaller than Lavinia, her body more compact, and Lavinia, who had felt ungainly and awkward in her movements since losing her hands, felt even more so beside her. Philomela looked very calm, sitting at her loom in the swelling afternoon, and Lavinia could not help but worry that she somehow resented her presence and to then, in response, feel a hint of resentment in turn.
So she tried to make herself useful. There were still things that could do, even if there was much of which she was no longer capable. Her body was strong, still - she could carry buckets of water, bundles of grain, as long as they were filled by someone else and placed over her shoulders or on her back. She could sweep the rough flagstones of the house, with the broom held between her elbows. She could steady Philomela’s loom while she worked. And she could do all of this better once she had shrugged off the prosthetic hands her father had outfitted her with, delicate ivory things, which seemed as though they might crack if she hit them too hard and which had always made her feel even more uncomfortable in her body than otherwise. Philomela did stare, for one lingering moment, at her exposed stumps, her still-healing scar tissue, but then, quickly, she shifted her gaze to Lavinia’s eyes.
Their dinner that night was barley and beans, with olive oil but little seasoning. Lavinia realized that Philomela must have as little interest in food now as she herself did - it had no taste now, to either of them, and the process of eating it was uncomfortable. She wondered if Philomela, too, still tasted blood where her tongue had been.
(It tasted just like humiliation and fear.)
The meal was also the first time Philomela would have to touch Lavinia’s body, and it was clear that they both were frightened about that. She would need to much, in the future - accepting Lavinia into her home had also been accepting a role as her caretaker. Lavinia could not now clean or feed or dress herself. In the past, these tasks had been done by servants, but there were none in the Philomela’s little house.
The closest they had come so far to touching was Philomela holding up the stylus as Lavinia wrote with it. Lavinia recalled, with both pleasure and discomfort, the feel of Philomela’s body bent over hers, her bent elbow very near Lavinia’s breasts. And yet that was very different from opening her mouth to let Philomela put food into it.
(“Open your mouth for us, why don’t you,” Demetrius crowed, and his brother sniggered with him. Lavinia saw the knife in his hands and she would not, would not do it.)
It helped, a little, that Philomela did not (could not) say anything, neither command or request, only sit beside her and went for assent. It was awkward. They went slowly, and still Philomela ended up once spilling barley on Lavinia’s robes. She flushed immediately, and opened her mouth, as if she intended an apology before closing it uncertainly.
Somehow, and she did not know how or why, Lavinia found herself laughing then, open-mouthed, low in her throat. Perhaps it was laughter like her father’s - bitter, mocking, turning everything to cruel absurdity, but somehow she did not think so. She didn’t feel bitter. She felt curious, caring. She felt as though she was beginning to see possibilities, futures in which laughter could be a beginning and not an end.
After a moment, Philomela began laughing with her.
-
They learned, after a few weeks, that sharing a bed helped ease the nightmares for both of them. Neither of them had spent the night beside their attackers (Tereus had pulled Philomela out of bed, sometimes, but he had never lain down and gone to sleep). In the darkness, there was only their two bodies, breathing in the erratic, convulsive rhythm of alternations between the remembered and the present. Though Philomela’s wax tablet and Lavinia’s page of letters always lay close beside the bed, they did not attempt at such times, as each of them startled in and out of nightmare, to communicate with words.
Both of them thought, within the privacy of their own skulls, that perhaps, in this dim borderland of remembering, they did not need any longer to be alone, that even as their bodies fought still against long-finished intrusions, they might be able to know, in some part of their minds, that there was another with them, wrist against wrist and shoulder upon shoulder holding steady until they both could make their way home.
Character/Pairing: Philomela, Lavinia
Summary: AU. Both Philomela and Lavinia find a way out of their stories.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Lots of descriptions of the aftermath of rape and torture, disability resulting from torture.
A/N: I have necessarily blurred the timelines of these two texts, and ignored the paradox inherent in crossing them over, in order to make this work. Because sometimes you just need to give these women a happy ending.
The house was not silent. There was the clacking of the loom, regular, continuing for hours at a time, and the easy clatter of clay and cutlery, the splashing of basins of water. But no speech. No human voices broke the cool tranquility of the forest, startled the singing birds into quiet.
Houses can be prisons, and forests can be torture chambers, but this was neither. Not anymore.
-
Her hands moved quickly, ably, winding thread, drawing the shuttle across. As reassuring as the movements were, as comfortably familiar, she felt conscious of being watched in them, intent eyes on her small fingers. She tried not to turn around or stare back, even as she felt tempted to do so and her throat filled with bitter guilt. It wasn’t fair. Of course it wasn’t fair. But it was not she who had made it so.
If Philomela kept her mouth closed, then it was possible for no one to realize that anything was wrong. And, in theory, it ought to be possible for a noble-born woman to go for long periods without ever needing to open her mouth and speak. It was perhaps for this reason why Procne had thought, at first, that it might be possible for her to still live with her at court. “I want you with me, my dear sister,” she had said, “and nothing he’s done has changed that.”
But it was Philomela who had not been able to bear it. The proximity of so many people all around her; the sickening smells of cooking meat; the way the women would casually and thoughtlessly ask her a question and then look horrified when they remembered that she could not respond. But the idea of going back to her father’s home in Athens was equally unbearable, for she could not stand to imagine how he might look at her, with pity and loss, or how those men who had once vied for her hand, once desired her (and perhaps they still would - were there not advantages to having a silent wife? She shuddered whenever she thought of this) would now deal with her presence. So she told Procne that she wished to live alone and wrote out a list of all the supplies that she would require. Procne had been disappointed, but she had given Philomela what she asked for.
Some might call it bitterly ironic that she had ended up back here again, in the same forest-encircled house in which she had once been kept a prisoner. Philomela did not find it so. In a way, she was glad to be back, now that she could knock the bolts off the door and sleep in certainty that no one would come to wake her. After all, she had spent many hours alone in this house, weaving her tapestry and learning her body anew in the wake of what had been done to it. She felt possessive even of the bloodstains on the floor - mine, she named them in her mind. No one else would be allowed to look at this place, to gape in fascination and imagine. Procne came every week or so to bring her fresh food, wool, other supplies, but that was all of it. Philomela was perfectly capable, in this place, of caring for herself in solitude.
Lavinia had come later.
It was not possible to refuse Lavinia entrance, accompanied as she was by her attentive but nervous uncle, her large dark eyes kept downcast. Philomela had thought that after her own rape some essential part of herself had closed down, gone still and immobile, so that she was no longer capable of feeling anything more than the most perfunctory level of care and interest in those around her. Her focus had, for a long time, been by necessity upon her own body and mind, on the slow planning required to engineer her rescue, and after all that was over she simply could not summon up any care for the concerns of the women in Procne’s court. But, at the sight of Lavinia, compassion rose up in her again, along with an intense desire to have the other woman with her, close to her, at her side. Here was someone who knew, or might know, for whom the content of Philomela’s memories would not be unimaginable. Perhaps it was selfish, then, to take her in, though no one would have guessed this, certainly not the uncle, who thanked her profusely for what he seemed to consider a great charity.
(One of the pleasures of Philomela’s enforced silence was thank she did not need to answer graciously in such interactions, but only nod or shake her head, while thinking whatever she wished inside her own mind.)
Though it was perhaps not entirely the desire for a companion in suffering which motivated her. For she had also found herself staring at Lavinia’s hair, which was long and black and looked as though it had not been brushed for a long time, even though the woman’s garments were richly dyed and finely woven, clean and expensive. She had looked at Lavinia’s hair and been moved almost to tears and thought that she wanted very much to brush it for her, one day.
And now Lavinia was sitting, watching Philomela’s weaving fingers, and Philomela was being driven to distraction by self-consciousness, and by guilt that she still had fingers at all.
(Tereus cutting off her hands was never a fear which Philomela had ever consciously formulated for herself before meeting Lavinia, though she could remember many occasions, as she worked hours upon end at her tapestry, when she had felt incredible gratitude for the fact of her hands, and for her own ability with them. It was simply not an ability she had imagined would be taken away from her. Silent women could still be thought valuable and desired; handless ones might not be. Tereus had very much continued to desire her.)
Eventually, she could not stand being looked at any longer. She stood, and fetched the wax tablet and stylus which she used to communicate, silently thanking Athena that Lavinia at least knew how to read Greek.
We must figure out a way for you to talk to me, Philomela wrote, I cannot go on simply guessing at what you want. She paused, unsure how to delicately phrase what she wanted to ask. It was difficult to get around the grotesque bodily realities of Lavinia’s injuries, but she didn’t like drawing attention to them. Your uncle said something about tracing letters with a stick?
In fact, he had been rather more specific than that, and talked about Lavinia holding the stick in her mouth while she did so. Philomela didn’t want to mention that again.
Lavinia shook her head. Philomela could not tell whether she met to say that no, Philomela had misinterpreted him, or that she simply did not want to use that method of communication again.
Could you try holding this stylus between your wrists? Lavinia seemed wary. Philomela held it out to her.
It turned out to be an awkward, difficult proposition, and Philomela had, in the end, to support one hand of the stylus so that it did not fall to the ground. It took a long time for Lavinia to write out even a single word, and, as she worked at it, strands of her hair fell messily in front of her face.
I can point, she eventually managed to write, to words or letters.
(Philomela did not then know this, but Lavinia had come up with this method herself, had first employed it to tell her family what had happened to her. Not writing, not creating a text, but turning one to her own purposes, manipulating it. This was well-educated Lavinia’s tool to win her own liberation and revenge and recognition.)
The possibilities this held were quickly apparent, though Philomela stared for several long moments at the messy words before she understood them. She had papyrus in the house, though not much of it. Carefully she wrote out each of the letters of the alphabet, as large and clear as she could, making sure to leave space between the letters. When she had finished, she lifted the page and showed it to Lavinia.
For the first time since she had entered the house, Lavinia smiled.
-
When Lavinia met Philomela, she was worn out with anger. She kept thinking, over and over, that the last words she had ever spoken were in the act of begging for mercy, pleading to be spared pain and mutilation. She heard those words play in her ears over and over, and felt sickened and ashamed at the remembered sound of her voice, at the way she had humbled herself before those two men, promising them anything she thought might sway them.
She wished, at least, that had lost her tongue with the taste of curses in her mouth.
(As Philomela had, but Lavinia did not know this for a very long time.)
But there was nothing she could do with the anger, and it was burning through her, maddening her. Even the dripping blood of her two assailants had not quenched it; it was possible that nothing would. She wanted, if not the extinguishing of the anger, then at least to have something in her life apart from it. She could not clearly envision what this might look like.
At first, she thought Philomela might turn out to be only another inducement to anger. This mirror who was not a mirror, this fellow victim whose mutilations did not mar her beauty, did not make people wince upon first looking at her. Philomela was smaller than Lavinia, her body more compact, and Lavinia, who had felt ungainly and awkward in her movements since losing her hands, felt even more so beside her. Philomela looked very calm, sitting at her loom in the swelling afternoon, and Lavinia could not help but worry that she somehow resented her presence and to then, in response, feel a hint of resentment in turn.
So she tried to make herself useful. There were still things that could do, even if there was much of which she was no longer capable. Her body was strong, still - she could carry buckets of water, bundles of grain, as long as they were filled by someone else and placed over her shoulders or on her back. She could sweep the rough flagstones of the house, with the broom held between her elbows. She could steady Philomela’s loom while she worked. And she could do all of this better once she had shrugged off the prosthetic hands her father had outfitted her with, delicate ivory things, which seemed as though they might crack if she hit them too hard and which had always made her feel even more uncomfortable in her body than otherwise. Philomela did stare, for one lingering moment, at her exposed stumps, her still-healing scar tissue, but then, quickly, she shifted her gaze to Lavinia’s eyes.
Their dinner that night was barley and beans, with olive oil but little seasoning. Lavinia realized that Philomela must have as little interest in food now as she herself did - it had no taste now, to either of them, and the process of eating it was uncomfortable. She wondered if Philomela, too, still tasted blood where her tongue had been.
(It tasted just like humiliation and fear.)
The meal was also the first time Philomela would have to touch Lavinia’s body, and it was clear that they both were frightened about that. She would need to much, in the future - accepting Lavinia into her home had also been accepting a role as her caretaker. Lavinia could not now clean or feed or dress herself. In the past, these tasks had been done by servants, but there were none in the Philomela’s little house.
The closest they had come so far to touching was Philomela holding up the stylus as Lavinia wrote with it. Lavinia recalled, with both pleasure and discomfort, the feel of Philomela’s body bent over hers, her bent elbow very near Lavinia’s breasts. And yet that was very different from opening her mouth to let Philomela put food into it.
(“Open your mouth for us, why don’t you,” Demetrius crowed, and his brother sniggered with him. Lavinia saw the knife in his hands and she would not, would not do it.)
It helped, a little, that Philomela did not (could not) say anything, neither command or request, only sit beside her and went for assent. It was awkward. They went slowly, and still Philomela ended up once spilling barley on Lavinia’s robes. She flushed immediately, and opened her mouth, as if she intended an apology before closing it uncertainly.
Somehow, and she did not know how or why, Lavinia found herself laughing then, open-mouthed, low in her throat. Perhaps it was laughter like her father’s - bitter, mocking, turning everything to cruel absurdity, but somehow she did not think so. She didn’t feel bitter. She felt curious, caring. She felt as though she was beginning to see possibilities, futures in which laughter could be a beginning and not an end.
After a moment, Philomela began laughing with her.
-
They learned, after a few weeks, that sharing a bed helped ease the nightmares for both of them. Neither of them had spent the night beside their attackers (Tereus had pulled Philomela out of bed, sometimes, but he had never lain down and gone to sleep). In the darkness, there was only their two bodies, breathing in the erratic, convulsive rhythm of alternations between the remembered and the present. Though Philomela’s wax tablet and Lavinia’s page of letters always lay close beside the bed, they did not attempt at such times, as each of them startled in and out of nightmare, to communicate with words.
Both of them thought, within the privacy of their own skulls, that perhaps, in this dim borderland of remembering, they did not need any longer to be alone, that even as their bodies fought still against long-finished intrusions, they might be able to know, in some part of their minds, that there was another with them, wrist against wrist and shoulder upon shoulder holding steady until they both could make their way home.