he'll say, are you married? we'll say, no, man
Winter Holiday Commentfic
The Masterpost Edition
In November, in lieu of sending Christmas cards, I asked you lot for fic prompts. And prompt you did, all kinds of weird and wonderful things... These are the results! I thought I'd post the ficlets here in case they might be of interest to anyone who hadn't seen them. I'll leave this post public, too.
Thank you so much if you prompted -- I had a great time writing them all. Here they are (in order of prompting, not writing!):
beedekka requested Diomedes and Ajax with as many plausible Christmas references as possible snuck in:
Later On, We'll Conspire
Athene comes to him in the midst of battle.
He's fighting and shouting, arms swinging, whole body buzzing, and then everything hushes, lengthens. He knows a god is there before he turns and sees her, great and imposing in the armour that shines across her body like glimmering snow on a mountain. He is the only one who can see her; she is the only thing he can see. Under her helmet her hair is black as a silent night.
Her skin seems to burn, like an open fire, and looking upon her makes him burn too. Not Aphrodite's burning, this, but a biting heat like a wound, and Diomedes thinks of all the kings of the Greeks who have travelled so far with so many men, thinking so highly of themselves; they seem to him now as small and insignificant as a handful of chestnuts, as Athene shines over him like some great magnificent star.
He will fight alongside Aias, she tells him; he sees her pride swell at the mention of his name. He feels it too, the mention of that great lord of the Greeks striking his heart like the sounding of a bell. His great fellow-warrior. So many years, so much flowing blood, black-red and steaming like hot spiced wine, and Aias is still strong and constant as those trees that never lose their leaves. They stay verdant green even through the hardest of frosts, and they cheer men to look upon in the bleakness of midwinter. Aias' presence erases bleakness. He is a fire, too; the thought of him burns in Diomedes' head as though even the memory of him has all the ferocity of the sun that bakes the plains.
You will fight alongside Aias, she says; and then is gone, whirling around as she vanishes so the sunlight catches her breastplate like the guttering of a candle-flame. Diomedes' eyes ache as the fighting seems to recommence around him and he grips his spear tighter in his sweat-damp fist, thinks he sees just a flash of Aias's great shield in the distance before he throws up his own arm to deflect a blow from a nearby Trojan warrior. He fights on.
broadlicnic requested Romeo/Mercutio or Hamlet/Horatio:
he sings a love song
This is a ghost story.
He nearly killed himself and the thought still scares him, like the sound of a lone bell tolling, like looking over cliffs and feeling the pull of the long way down in his stomach. Sometimes he wonders if he's wandering the world like a shade; he walks and the ground barely gives way beneath his feet. As if he were floating down a river with flowers in his hair; but, no, that was not his destiny. Wrong lover of the prince. Try again.
The memory of Hamlet pursues him like a vengeful spirit, telling and retelling its own story, desperate to be heard again, known again. When the snow falls he remembers winters in Wittenberg and knows he can never go back, pinches out his candles and lies in dark lodging-houses trying vainly to sleep. Sometimes in the dead of night, his hands feel heavy, as if from cradling the weight of a dying friend's head. He remembers the feel of the hair between his fingers and thinks of Hamlet pressing his weight down over him like a triumph, Hamlet in bed, cursing like a pirate, Hamlet's pale thin body covering his own. Himself, below, trembling and gasping like a dying man.
The pair of them used to talk for hours and now Horatio finds his voice is dying within him, drying up in his mouth, a tool rusting from lack of use. It hurts to breathe the frozen air too deeply; it cuts into the chest like a sword-wound. He had spent months in Elsinore with only his own breath for comfort; you live to tell the tale, he told himself, sighing the words out when he was alone. The good friend, the dutiful man. He left the palace as autumn lengthened to winter and his voice hardened in his throat like a dried apple-core, lodged there.
One day it will be different. Years from now, one distant day, there will be a room that is a home rather than a lodging-place, and the journey will end at a doorway where the candlelight streams out honey-coloured and warm. His voice will return to him and he will laugh like a lover laughs, swear and sigh and sing and perhaps he will not be alone, for there must be someone else, to talk to. The ghosts will rise from the dark earth unquiet as ever and chatter with each other over wine and baked meats, but Horatio's mouth will be as full of words as a garden that blooms with spring flowers, and he will not hear them.
motetus requested Cicero or Arthur/Eames or Ian Hislop/Paul Merton:
May Your Days Be Merry and Bright
Ian doesn't Tweet, but he does text, sometimes. Paul gets one, to his surprise, on Christmas Day.
He's at his brother's this year, spent most of yesterday holding his niece and nephew upside down by their ankles and trying not to say anything wrong to his sister-in-law. The text comes after the present-opening and the abundant turkey lunch -- Merry Christmas, it says, and Have some sherry for me. Ian's been on antibiotics, couldn't shake the chest infection that had meant they'd had to replace him with John Sergeant on the last episode of Have I Got News.
Paul thinks of how odd it felt not to have the familiar bald head and sarky comments across the studio from him, and then pictures Ian horribly, regrettably sober at Christmas dinner. Poor bloke. Late last night, dutiful, Paul downed the sherry that Amy and Oliver left out for Father Christmas; now he dedicates that retroactively to Ian, smiling a bit to himself, but it doesn't feel quite good enough. After a minute of thought he sends back, I'll buy you one instead. Sometime in the New Year?
Why not? It's been a while since he and Ian talked, really talked.
sistermine requested Esca, Marcus and a pomegranate:
(NB this is a zombie AU story, so a warning for, um, zombies? and another for animal harm.)
to face unafraid
It starts with pomegranates. Persephone's fruit -- appropriate enough, for the dying-sickness.
The farm-workers tell each other tales in hushed tones, the stories of their lands, or ones they've heard along their travels: how a man could die and not die, how he would thirst for the flesh of his fellow-man. The news of a plague comes in with every ship that docks nearby. It taints crops and infects men, say the traders at the horse-markets. It spreads from the south. And then the three labourers who ate the first of this year's pomegranate harvest are all struck down with the same illness.
It makes them mad, it removes the people Esca and Marcus knew from their bodies and leaves a spirit behind that is hungry for blood and savagery. It isn't long before Kurios bites Ulla as she is trying to nurse the three of them, and when her crescent-shaped wound begins to swell and suppurate she comes to Marcus with old, sad eyes in her young mother's face and tells him to quarantine her with them.
Marcus tries to argue at first, but Esca agrees with her, holding her shaking hand as she says, I can feel the sickness rising already. You smell different, all of you, you smell wonderful --
*
In the end, they lose everyone, and all the crops. Burn body after wasted body, burying the ashes in a copse of trees far from the farm buildings. The horses don't seem to be susceptible to the sickness, nor their cat, but everything that still lives is wasting away for want of food. Marcus holds Esca tightly at night around his thin, thin middle and lets the cat share their bed. Even she -- a terrific scavenger, whom Esca found hiding in a barn-corner when she was a plump little kitten -- is finding less and less food now, losing energy.
When they finally have to kill one of the horses for food, she whinnies almost gratefully as life leaves her, and Esca is glad that Marcus pretends not to notice him crying. They begin to stay together all the time, they're at each other's backs always and it's almost like their journey beyond the wall again, only they are so much older now.
Neither wants to leave the farm, but they have to in the end. They arm themselves with the sharpest tools they can find, argue endlessly about where they ought to go, think but don't talk about the danger of being ambushed by the living-dead creatures. Marcus loads their two strongest horses with packs and then they turn the rest loose on the estate.
Esca holds the cat in his arms for a long time before he finally decides not to try and bring her with them. "Let her follow if she chooses," he says firmly, half to the creature herself, as he lets her go. Marcus puts down what's in his hands and goes to Esca, gathers him in, skin and bone and all the freckled angles of him. Let him be all right, Marcus thinks like a silent prayer as he presses their thin bodies together bruisingly hard. Gods, let us be all right.
*
In the deserted farmhouse to the East of their lands where they first set up camp, there are three well-sealed jars of a sludgy red-brown preserve, which Marcus discovers, upon opening one, to be a tangy chutney flavoured with oranges and pomegranate. He mixes a small portion with water and sets it over their fire to warm like soup. Three of the death-creatures killed on the journey from their farmhouse to here -- Marcus's sword, Esca's dagger, Marcus's makeshift hoe-turned-spear -- and while they prepare to bed down, they discuss pomegranate chutney in calm voices and don't discuss the pomegranate harvest that set their labourers mad with something like death but, impossibly, worse.
The chutney is beginning to bubble and give off a sweet smell when Marcus hears Esca gasp from behind him and whips around lightning-fast, hand gripping his dagger; but it's the cat. Of course it is. She's followed them; she belongs to them.
Marcus remembers lying half-drowned in a British river, how he was at once almost certain that he was going to die, and entirely certain that Esca would come back for him. Vindication, relief and love are mingled in Esca's expression as he cradles the cat reverently in his lean hands. Esca. Marcus breathes in the smell of the death-fruit and looks at the man he has spent his life with, lets the strength flow through him with its changing currents.
coeurdesoleil requested Iphigenia or Electra or both:
i've got a feeling this year's for me and you
their father's a dangerous man, their mother even more so. maybe he has his cronies and his guns but he's mostly intimidation -- knocks people around a little sometimes, they've both seen enough to know that -- but mother inspires fear by her very presence, could make the hardest ganglands thug wish he'd never been born. persuasive, too. could talk her way out of a prison cell -- hell, she really did, once, if the stories are true.
but this is beside the point. when you've just broken with everything you ever knew, lost all the protection you never even realised you had (made a run for it with nothing but a backpack full of laundered 20-euro notes and your sister's hand in yours) -- your mind does tend to race and race. going over and over things once and again like odysseus pretending to be away with the fairies, ploughing the sand on the beach, trying to look mad so that they wouldn't hold him to his promises. (see, little elly knows her stuff, she's a clever girl, she reads her books and thinks too much about them and not enough about what's going on around her. she surely wouldn't tell anybody what she heard, she probably doesn't even realise what it means --)
so their father is dangerous and their mother is dangerous and their brother is. well. neither a help nor a hindrance. neither up nor down. neither genie's boy nor elly's, more father's than mother's but you wouldn't bet on him either way. i told him what i knew and that was stupid. that was my mistake. i asked if i should tell our sister and he said i shouldn't, so of course i did.
it took a while to track her down, but eventually i got a message: take some money and nothing else. get on this train. say nothing to anyone. ever since our father's business nearly killed her and she left us i had known that one day i'd have to choose between my sister and my family. in the end it was as easy as breathing and as hard as slipping past my brother's bedroom door without waking him to say goodbye.
if things had been different, maybe i would've had to slip past my sister's door to meet up with my brother, instead. vice versa.
if things had been different, she might have been dead.
genie takes her purse out of her pocket and fills it with a few of the notes from my backpack. a photograph falls out of one of the slots where her credit-cards would be, if she had any: it's the whole family together, halloween, maybe five years ago. i'm done up in grey zombie facepaint and fake blood but i mostly look cute, chubby-cheeked, still young. genie's beside me in a little black dress and even at seventeen she looks every inch the bond girl, plastic gun tucked into a lacy garter, eyes that could draw you close enough for her to stab you inconspicuously in the stomach.
when i go to hand the picture back to her, she just makes a face, so i tear us out of it, two little girls playing at secrets and death, and throw the rest out of the window as the train streaks onwards through the night.
icicleair requested an As You Like It and Twelfth Night winterland crossdressing crossover:
Wonderland
Sometimes she imagines that Cesario is still out there, somewhere, yomping around in his trousers making men and women swoon alike. Despite the likeness, the confusion, she knows that he was nothing like Sebastian, for Sebastian's manliness is more a matter of anatomy than bearing; it always was. Cesario was more male than most men -- so much so that she remembers more than once being surprised while changing clothes, the stark femininity of the body under his clothes making her start.
It surprises her one winter morning, two years a married woman, when she wakes from a dream in which Cesario -- what? He walked through the town, that was it -- he was done up in new breeches, strutting around needlessly to show them off, bowing to gentlemen, chatting with traders. Orsino is away, due back tomorrow, and she's alone amid chilly white bedsheets that seem to be impersonating the snowdrifts outside; she feels her long hair on her shoulders and remembers.
Sometimes she looks into his closet when he's away, for comfort, just a quick glimpse to remind her that she isn't without her man for long; but this is different. She lingers over the clothes, smelling the leather and touching the silk and velvet, for so long that she begins to feel at home in there. She barely realises that she's holding a pair of trousers, long and thick and slim-legged for riding, until they're halfway up her legs.
Oh. Well. Harmless to pull them on and fasten them snugly, she supposes, and then, daring, drags a jerkin down from where it hangs and tugs it over her shoulders. Something will have to be done about her breasts, but that feels like a familiar problem, hardly an obstacle at all.
She doesn't think of herself as Cesario as she sneaks out to the forest behind their estate. His boots crunch into the snow, leaving their indelicate impressions, and she marvels at the comfort of them, the ease with which they can be worn. She'd forgotten.
No, she isn't really Cesario, though that's the name she gives when she meets another boy in the forest. Ganymede, he says, and tips his head politely. Cesario sees through him -- her -- with little effort, but decides to keep quiet about it. (Two boy-girls in the forest! How fantastical, she thinks wryly, how improbable. What an interesting picture they must make together amid the frost-marked trees.)
She -- he -- Ganymede -- is looking for a Jove to complete the mythological scene. "My lord," Ganymede calls the absent man, and tells Cesario to direct any lords he might find in the direction of this particular page. Cesario swears on his good name that he will.
As they shake hands in farewell (Ganymede's fingers as soft pale cold slender as Cesario's) another fragment of last night's dream comes back -- in it, Cesario was being fitted for his new breeches, laying out his body proudly for the measuring-tapes -- whose? She flashes on an image of Orsino kneeling before her; yes, Orsino was the tailor, fitting her with the instruments of her masculinity --
Her feet traipse on through the snow. It's easier by the minute, being this person, wearing these clothes; it feels more appropriate and right than she has for a long while, as though the forest were the site of reality, today, and her cold bedroom merely the place where she woke up wrong. A place for shamming femininity and longing to get out into the wildness, in spite of the biting cold that creeps into the bones.
It isn't long before she finds Ganymede's man. A black-cloaked figure wandering aimlessly through the valley below her; he's looking about him, it's clear he is waiting for somebody. His page-boy, no doubt. And who else but lovers and madmen would be out in the wintry forest on such a day? Surely it is Jove, and now Cesario must play Aphrodite, matchmaking this lord to his wandering Ganymede.
"Sir!" Cesario calls out, her boy's voice carrying as she strides down towards him, and the figure turns --
It's Orsino. She flinches but makes herself keep the same pace, stomping downhill; his face goes through a number of expressions too quickly for her to parse them and then he makes for her, too.
"Sebastian?" he says as she approaches, his voice all pleasant surprise and formality, and oh. That hurts terribly, tears coming hot into her eyes.
How she wishes he had recognised her; or if not her, at least Cesario! She wishes he had fallen to his knees with joy to see her like this, his boy again. Most desperately of all she wishes that she had not found him here, playing Jove to someone else's Ganymede. Why doesn't he want to chase her through the forest? Why did he never ask this of her?
As they draw level with one another something changes: No, she thinks. No. Wishes and why-nots be damned. Cesario's resolve breaks its feminine restraints like a dam, and the girl-in-boys'-clothes feels her limbs burn the winter cold away with anger and something else. Desire. This is my husband, she thinks. I want him to know me.
"It's I," she says in her true voice, and tumbles her hair out from her cap the way she did on that day years ago, hoping he will understand that it means something different this time. No -- farewell that. She will make him understand.
honeyed_oak requested my favourite Romans at Saturnalia or the ending of the Aeneid changed:
If You Want It
It all happens in a rush -- everyone is dying, Nisus and Euryalus and Camilla and Pallas, the truce seems broken before it is even secured, his arrow wound burning with pain and seeping dark blood, the battle raging on and on. Time seems to blur, fold into itself, and focus sharply on this moment he's imagined, this moment, when he raises his sword over Turnus, heart thundering, blood ringing in his ears --
"Stop!"
The word hits like a blow and he realises he wasn't breathing, gulps down some air. All around them the fighting has ceased, and now that the spell of the death-moment is broken Turnus scrambles for safety across the dirt of the plain, makes for the speaker. It's Lavinia, her skirts gathered up, her head high.
"My love," Turnus says, sounding at once grateful and bewildered. Lavinia smiles slightly.
"No need for fighting any longer," says a second voice, and the speaker is another woman walking among the men, a woman whose skin seems to glitter like the surface of a stream, whose hair waves over her shoulders like a mountain spring's outpour. Everyone is sheathing their swords as she passes, and Aeneas dazedly puts his up, too. He's still buzzing all over his body, fizzing down all his limbs. Juturna says, "We women have settled this. There will be no more deaths to settle this dispute -- and no marriages to settle it, either."
Aeneas thinks of the fatal marriage with Dido, of Troy and Creusa; he thinks suddenly of Andromache, wonders if she lives, if Asytanax does. No more marriages. He weighs the thought as if testing the heft of a sword.
"Lavinia shall marry neither of you," Juturna continues, looking hard at Aeneas with her river-blue eyes, then turning to her brother. "She is not some token of good faith, the spit that seals a merchant's pledge-handshake. And she is not the spoils of war. I, for one, value her at more than the price of a gilded tripod or jewelled drinking-cup."
If Lavinia feels the weight of two armies' eyes on her, considering her value anew, she does not show it. "Better still to say that I have no price, for I cannot be bought or bartered. And I have never wished to marry. My father knew this, but he only now acknowledges my will."
Her tone and bearing invite no argument, but Turnus approaches her, touches her arm with his grimy, bloody hand. "But my darling --"
"Your darling no longer, Turnus," she says, detaching herself easily, and Aeneas is still catching his breath, is (he thinks) coming back to himself after what feels a long time, but even he can decode the smile she exchanges with Juturna. The gratitude and pride there are tangible, the resolve admirable.
"But we are no fools, we women," Juturna proclaims now, looking at Aeneas again. "We know that something more is needed to assuage the anger, to make right the wrongs, to restore the peace." And as she steps aside she seems to produce something from the drapes of her clothing, as though she pulls it through a waterfall.
No, not something -- somebody.
Pallas.
"Persephone owed me a debt," she says to the men's cries of amazement when Pallas stands before them again, tall and strong as ever. She's smiling secretively, Aeneas vaguely registers, but that doesn't matter -- he cannot care any longer, honestly, nothing matters as much as getting hold of Pallas and making sure he is real, really alive, safe and healthy and whole. Aeneas's helmet hits the dirt. Shocked tears spring into his eyes as he buries his face in Pallas's shoulder, breathes against the boy's warm skin, holding on tightly.
"Will this do?" Lavinia says after some minutes, when Aeneas has looked and touched his fill for the moment. "Is this sufficient to end the war? The return of a loved one thought lost forever?"
And it cannot be insufficient. It must satisfy him, satisfy them all. If it comes as a shock, if the men grumble and, later, get into the odd drunken fight with the Latins, if it takes all Juturna's skill and power to pacify Turnus, then those are the consequences of trying to pass a woman from man to man like a wine-cup.
Aeneas closes the gates of war alongside his new adoptive father, Latinus; he builds a great, many-roomed house, fit for the royal lines of Troy and Latium; he takes counsel daily from Lavinia on how to create a harmonious kingdom. Iulus grows and grows, and Aeneas heals his weary heart, and throughout it all Pallas smiles at his side like a second chance.
Why yes, all the titles are from the lyrics of Christmas songs, because I am exactly that kind of dork, and of writer. No regrets!
The Masterpost Edition
In November, in lieu of sending Christmas cards, I asked you lot for fic prompts. And prompt you did, all kinds of weird and wonderful things... These are the results! I thought I'd post the ficlets here in case they might be of interest to anyone who hadn't seen them. I'll leave this post public, too.
Thank you so much if you prompted -- I had a great time writing them all. Here they are (in order of prompting, not writing!):
beedekka requested Diomedes and Ajax with as many plausible Christmas references as possible snuck in:
Later On, We'll Conspire
Athene comes to him in the midst of battle.
He's fighting and shouting, arms swinging, whole body buzzing, and then everything hushes, lengthens. He knows a god is there before he turns and sees her, great and imposing in the armour that shines across her body like glimmering snow on a mountain. He is the only one who can see her; she is the only thing he can see. Under her helmet her hair is black as a silent night.
Her skin seems to burn, like an open fire, and looking upon her makes him burn too. Not Aphrodite's burning, this, but a biting heat like a wound, and Diomedes thinks of all the kings of the Greeks who have travelled so far with so many men, thinking so highly of themselves; they seem to him now as small and insignificant as a handful of chestnuts, as Athene shines over him like some great magnificent star.
He will fight alongside Aias, she tells him; he sees her pride swell at the mention of his name. He feels it too, the mention of that great lord of the Greeks striking his heart like the sounding of a bell. His great fellow-warrior. So many years, so much flowing blood, black-red and steaming like hot spiced wine, and Aias is still strong and constant as those trees that never lose their leaves. They stay verdant green even through the hardest of frosts, and they cheer men to look upon in the bleakness of midwinter. Aias' presence erases bleakness. He is a fire, too; the thought of him burns in Diomedes' head as though even the memory of him has all the ferocity of the sun that bakes the plains.
You will fight alongside Aias, she says; and then is gone, whirling around as she vanishes so the sunlight catches her breastplate like the guttering of a candle-flame. Diomedes' eyes ache as the fighting seems to recommence around him and he grips his spear tighter in his sweat-damp fist, thinks he sees just a flash of Aias's great shield in the distance before he throws up his own arm to deflect a blow from a nearby Trojan warrior. He fights on.
broadlicnic requested Romeo/Mercutio or Hamlet/Horatio:
he sings a love song
This is a ghost story.
He nearly killed himself and the thought still scares him, like the sound of a lone bell tolling, like looking over cliffs and feeling the pull of the long way down in his stomach. Sometimes he wonders if he's wandering the world like a shade; he walks and the ground barely gives way beneath his feet. As if he were floating down a river with flowers in his hair; but, no, that was not his destiny. Wrong lover of the prince. Try again.
The memory of Hamlet pursues him like a vengeful spirit, telling and retelling its own story, desperate to be heard again, known again. When the snow falls he remembers winters in Wittenberg and knows he can never go back, pinches out his candles and lies in dark lodging-houses trying vainly to sleep. Sometimes in the dead of night, his hands feel heavy, as if from cradling the weight of a dying friend's head. He remembers the feel of the hair between his fingers and thinks of Hamlet pressing his weight down over him like a triumph, Hamlet in bed, cursing like a pirate, Hamlet's pale thin body covering his own. Himself, below, trembling and gasping like a dying man.
The pair of them used to talk for hours and now Horatio finds his voice is dying within him, drying up in his mouth, a tool rusting from lack of use. It hurts to breathe the frozen air too deeply; it cuts into the chest like a sword-wound. He had spent months in Elsinore with only his own breath for comfort; you live to tell the tale, he told himself, sighing the words out when he was alone. The good friend, the dutiful man. He left the palace as autumn lengthened to winter and his voice hardened in his throat like a dried apple-core, lodged there.
One day it will be different. Years from now, one distant day, there will be a room that is a home rather than a lodging-place, and the journey will end at a doorway where the candlelight streams out honey-coloured and warm. His voice will return to him and he will laugh like a lover laughs, swear and sigh and sing and perhaps he will not be alone, for there must be someone else, to talk to. The ghosts will rise from the dark earth unquiet as ever and chatter with each other over wine and baked meats, but Horatio's mouth will be as full of words as a garden that blooms with spring flowers, and he will not hear them.
motetus requested Cicero or Arthur/Eames or Ian Hislop/Paul Merton:
May Your Days Be Merry and Bright
Ian doesn't Tweet, but he does text, sometimes. Paul gets one, to his surprise, on Christmas Day.
He's at his brother's this year, spent most of yesterday holding his niece and nephew upside down by their ankles and trying not to say anything wrong to his sister-in-law. The text comes after the present-opening and the abundant turkey lunch -- Merry Christmas, it says, and Have some sherry for me. Ian's been on antibiotics, couldn't shake the chest infection that had meant they'd had to replace him with John Sergeant on the last episode of Have I Got News.
Paul thinks of how odd it felt not to have the familiar bald head and sarky comments across the studio from him, and then pictures Ian horribly, regrettably sober at Christmas dinner. Poor bloke. Late last night, dutiful, Paul downed the sherry that Amy and Oliver left out for Father Christmas; now he dedicates that retroactively to Ian, smiling a bit to himself, but it doesn't feel quite good enough. After a minute of thought he sends back, I'll buy you one instead. Sometime in the New Year?
Why not? It's been a while since he and Ian talked, really talked.
sistermine requested Esca, Marcus and a pomegranate:
(NB this is a zombie AU story, so a warning for, um, zombies? and another for animal harm.)
to face unafraid
It starts with pomegranates. Persephone's fruit -- appropriate enough, for the dying-sickness.
The farm-workers tell each other tales in hushed tones, the stories of their lands, or ones they've heard along their travels: how a man could die and not die, how he would thirst for the flesh of his fellow-man. The news of a plague comes in with every ship that docks nearby. It taints crops and infects men, say the traders at the horse-markets. It spreads from the south. And then the three labourers who ate the first of this year's pomegranate harvest are all struck down with the same illness.
It makes them mad, it removes the people Esca and Marcus knew from their bodies and leaves a spirit behind that is hungry for blood and savagery. It isn't long before Kurios bites Ulla as she is trying to nurse the three of them, and when her crescent-shaped wound begins to swell and suppurate she comes to Marcus with old, sad eyes in her young mother's face and tells him to quarantine her with them.
Marcus tries to argue at first, but Esca agrees with her, holding her shaking hand as she says, I can feel the sickness rising already. You smell different, all of you, you smell wonderful --
*
In the end, they lose everyone, and all the crops. Burn body after wasted body, burying the ashes in a copse of trees far from the farm buildings. The horses don't seem to be susceptible to the sickness, nor their cat, but everything that still lives is wasting away for want of food. Marcus holds Esca tightly at night around his thin, thin middle and lets the cat share their bed. Even she -- a terrific scavenger, whom Esca found hiding in a barn-corner when she was a plump little kitten -- is finding less and less food now, losing energy.
When they finally have to kill one of the horses for food, she whinnies almost gratefully as life leaves her, and Esca is glad that Marcus pretends not to notice him crying. They begin to stay together all the time, they're at each other's backs always and it's almost like their journey beyond the wall again, only they are so much older now.
Neither wants to leave the farm, but they have to in the end. They arm themselves with the sharpest tools they can find, argue endlessly about where they ought to go, think but don't talk about the danger of being ambushed by the living-dead creatures. Marcus loads their two strongest horses with packs and then they turn the rest loose on the estate.
Esca holds the cat in his arms for a long time before he finally decides not to try and bring her with them. "Let her follow if she chooses," he says firmly, half to the creature herself, as he lets her go. Marcus puts down what's in his hands and goes to Esca, gathers him in, skin and bone and all the freckled angles of him. Let him be all right, Marcus thinks like a silent prayer as he presses their thin bodies together bruisingly hard. Gods, let us be all right.
*
In the deserted farmhouse to the East of their lands where they first set up camp, there are three well-sealed jars of a sludgy red-brown preserve, which Marcus discovers, upon opening one, to be a tangy chutney flavoured with oranges and pomegranate. He mixes a small portion with water and sets it over their fire to warm like soup. Three of the death-creatures killed on the journey from their farmhouse to here -- Marcus's sword, Esca's dagger, Marcus's makeshift hoe-turned-spear -- and while they prepare to bed down, they discuss pomegranate chutney in calm voices and don't discuss the pomegranate harvest that set their labourers mad with something like death but, impossibly, worse.
The chutney is beginning to bubble and give off a sweet smell when Marcus hears Esca gasp from behind him and whips around lightning-fast, hand gripping his dagger; but it's the cat. Of course it is. She's followed them; she belongs to them.
Marcus remembers lying half-drowned in a British river, how he was at once almost certain that he was going to die, and entirely certain that Esca would come back for him. Vindication, relief and love are mingled in Esca's expression as he cradles the cat reverently in his lean hands. Esca. Marcus breathes in the smell of the death-fruit and looks at the man he has spent his life with, lets the strength flow through him with its changing currents.
coeurdesoleil requested Iphigenia or Electra or both:
i've got a feeling this year's for me and you
their father's a dangerous man, their mother even more so. maybe he has his cronies and his guns but he's mostly intimidation -- knocks people around a little sometimes, they've both seen enough to know that -- but mother inspires fear by her very presence, could make the hardest ganglands thug wish he'd never been born. persuasive, too. could talk her way out of a prison cell -- hell, she really did, once, if the stories are true.
but this is beside the point. when you've just broken with everything you ever knew, lost all the protection you never even realised you had (made a run for it with nothing but a backpack full of laundered 20-euro notes and your sister's hand in yours) -- your mind does tend to race and race. going over and over things once and again like odysseus pretending to be away with the fairies, ploughing the sand on the beach, trying to look mad so that they wouldn't hold him to his promises. (see, little elly knows her stuff, she's a clever girl, she reads her books and thinks too much about them and not enough about what's going on around her. she surely wouldn't tell anybody what she heard, she probably doesn't even realise what it means --)
so their father is dangerous and their mother is dangerous and their brother is. well. neither a help nor a hindrance. neither up nor down. neither genie's boy nor elly's, more father's than mother's but you wouldn't bet on him either way. i told him what i knew and that was stupid. that was my mistake. i asked if i should tell our sister and he said i shouldn't, so of course i did.
it took a while to track her down, but eventually i got a message: take some money and nothing else. get on this train. say nothing to anyone. ever since our father's business nearly killed her and she left us i had known that one day i'd have to choose between my sister and my family. in the end it was as easy as breathing and as hard as slipping past my brother's bedroom door without waking him to say goodbye.
if things had been different, maybe i would've had to slip past my sister's door to meet up with my brother, instead. vice versa.
if things had been different, she might have been dead.
genie takes her purse out of her pocket and fills it with a few of the notes from my backpack. a photograph falls out of one of the slots where her credit-cards would be, if she had any: it's the whole family together, halloween, maybe five years ago. i'm done up in grey zombie facepaint and fake blood but i mostly look cute, chubby-cheeked, still young. genie's beside me in a little black dress and even at seventeen she looks every inch the bond girl, plastic gun tucked into a lacy garter, eyes that could draw you close enough for her to stab you inconspicuously in the stomach.
when i go to hand the picture back to her, she just makes a face, so i tear us out of it, two little girls playing at secrets and death, and throw the rest out of the window as the train streaks onwards through the night.
icicleair requested an As You Like It and Twelfth Night winterland crossdressing crossover:
Wonderland
Sometimes she imagines that Cesario is still out there, somewhere, yomping around in his trousers making men and women swoon alike. Despite the likeness, the confusion, she knows that he was nothing like Sebastian, for Sebastian's manliness is more a matter of anatomy than bearing; it always was. Cesario was more male than most men -- so much so that she remembers more than once being surprised while changing clothes, the stark femininity of the body under his clothes making her start.
It surprises her one winter morning, two years a married woman, when she wakes from a dream in which Cesario -- what? He walked through the town, that was it -- he was done up in new breeches, strutting around needlessly to show them off, bowing to gentlemen, chatting with traders. Orsino is away, due back tomorrow, and she's alone amid chilly white bedsheets that seem to be impersonating the snowdrifts outside; she feels her long hair on her shoulders and remembers.
Sometimes she looks into his closet when he's away, for comfort, just a quick glimpse to remind her that she isn't without her man for long; but this is different. She lingers over the clothes, smelling the leather and touching the silk and velvet, for so long that she begins to feel at home in there. She barely realises that she's holding a pair of trousers, long and thick and slim-legged for riding, until they're halfway up her legs.
Oh. Well. Harmless to pull them on and fasten them snugly, she supposes, and then, daring, drags a jerkin down from where it hangs and tugs it over her shoulders. Something will have to be done about her breasts, but that feels like a familiar problem, hardly an obstacle at all.
She doesn't think of herself as Cesario as she sneaks out to the forest behind their estate. His boots crunch into the snow, leaving their indelicate impressions, and she marvels at the comfort of them, the ease with which they can be worn. She'd forgotten.
No, she isn't really Cesario, though that's the name she gives when she meets another boy in the forest. Ganymede, he says, and tips his head politely. Cesario sees through him -- her -- with little effort, but decides to keep quiet about it. (Two boy-girls in the forest! How fantastical, she thinks wryly, how improbable. What an interesting picture they must make together amid the frost-marked trees.)
She -- he -- Ganymede -- is looking for a Jove to complete the mythological scene. "My lord," Ganymede calls the absent man, and tells Cesario to direct any lords he might find in the direction of this particular page. Cesario swears on his good name that he will.
As they shake hands in farewell (Ganymede's fingers as soft pale cold slender as Cesario's) another fragment of last night's dream comes back -- in it, Cesario was being fitted for his new breeches, laying out his body proudly for the measuring-tapes -- whose? She flashes on an image of Orsino kneeling before her; yes, Orsino was the tailor, fitting her with the instruments of her masculinity --
Her feet traipse on through the snow. It's easier by the minute, being this person, wearing these clothes; it feels more appropriate and right than she has for a long while, as though the forest were the site of reality, today, and her cold bedroom merely the place where she woke up wrong. A place for shamming femininity and longing to get out into the wildness, in spite of the biting cold that creeps into the bones.
It isn't long before she finds Ganymede's man. A black-cloaked figure wandering aimlessly through the valley below her; he's looking about him, it's clear he is waiting for somebody. His page-boy, no doubt. And who else but lovers and madmen would be out in the wintry forest on such a day? Surely it is Jove, and now Cesario must play Aphrodite, matchmaking this lord to his wandering Ganymede.
"Sir!" Cesario calls out, her boy's voice carrying as she strides down towards him, and the figure turns --
It's Orsino. She flinches but makes herself keep the same pace, stomping downhill; his face goes through a number of expressions too quickly for her to parse them and then he makes for her, too.
"Sebastian?" he says as she approaches, his voice all pleasant surprise and formality, and oh. That hurts terribly, tears coming hot into her eyes.
How she wishes he had recognised her; or if not her, at least Cesario! She wishes he had fallen to his knees with joy to see her like this, his boy again. Most desperately of all she wishes that she had not found him here, playing Jove to someone else's Ganymede. Why doesn't he want to chase her through the forest? Why did he never ask this of her?
As they draw level with one another something changes: No, she thinks. No. Wishes and why-nots be damned. Cesario's resolve breaks its feminine restraints like a dam, and the girl-in-boys'-clothes feels her limbs burn the winter cold away with anger and something else. Desire. This is my husband, she thinks. I want him to know me.
"It's I," she says in her true voice, and tumbles her hair out from her cap the way she did on that day years ago, hoping he will understand that it means something different this time. No -- farewell that. She will make him understand.
honeyed_oak requested my favourite Romans at Saturnalia or the ending of the Aeneid changed:
If You Want It
It all happens in a rush -- everyone is dying, Nisus and Euryalus and Camilla and Pallas, the truce seems broken before it is even secured, his arrow wound burning with pain and seeping dark blood, the battle raging on and on. Time seems to blur, fold into itself, and focus sharply on this moment he's imagined, this moment, when he raises his sword over Turnus, heart thundering, blood ringing in his ears --
"Stop!"
The word hits like a blow and he realises he wasn't breathing, gulps down some air. All around them the fighting has ceased, and now that the spell of the death-moment is broken Turnus scrambles for safety across the dirt of the plain, makes for the speaker. It's Lavinia, her skirts gathered up, her head high.
"My love," Turnus says, sounding at once grateful and bewildered. Lavinia smiles slightly.
"No need for fighting any longer," says a second voice, and the speaker is another woman walking among the men, a woman whose skin seems to glitter like the surface of a stream, whose hair waves over her shoulders like a mountain spring's outpour. Everyone is sheathing their swords as she passes, and Aeneas dazedly puts his up, too. He's still buzzing all over his body, fizzing down all his limbs. Juturna says, "We women have settled this. There will be no more deaths to settle this dispute -- and no marriages to settle it, either."
Aeneas thinks of the fatal marriage with Dido, of Troy and Creusa; he thinks suddenly of Andromache, wonders if she lives, if Asytanax does. No more marriages. He weighs the thought as if testing the heft of a sword.
"Lavinia shall marry neither of you," Juturna continues, looking hard at Aeneas with her river-blue eyes, then turning to her brother. "She is not some token of good faith, the spit that seals a merchant's pledge-handshake. And she is not the spoils of war. I, for one, value her at more than the price of a gilded tripod or jewelled drinking-cup."
If Lavinia feels the weight of two armies' eyes on her, considering her value anew, she does not show it. "Better still to say that I have no price, for I cannot be bought or bartered. And I have never wished to marry. My father knew this, but he only now acknowledges my will."
Her tone and bearing invite no argument, but Turnus approaches her, touches her arm with his grimy, bloody hand. "But my darling --"
"Your darling no longer, Turnus," she says, detaching herself easily, and Aeneas is still catching his breath, is (he thinks) coming back to himself after what feels a long time, but even he can decode the smile she exchanges with Juturna. The gratitude and pride there are tangible, the resolve admirable.
"But we are no fools, we women," Juturna proclaims now, looking at Aeneas again. "We know that something more is needed to assuage the anger, to make right the wrongs, to restore the peace." And as she steps aside she seems to produce something from the drapes of her clothing, as though she pulls it through a waterfall.
No, not something -- somebody.
Pallas.
"Persephone owed me a debt," she says to the men's cries of amazement when Pallas stands before them again, tall and strong as ever. She's smiling secretively, Aeneas vaguely registers, but that doesn't matter -- he cannot care any longer, honestly, nothing matters as much as getting hold of Pallas and making sure he is real, really alive, safe and healthy and whole. Aeneas's helmet hits the dirt. Shocked tears spring into his eyes as he buries his face in Pallas's shoulder, breathes against the boy's warm skin, holding on tightly.
"Will this do?" Lavinia says after some minutes, when Aeneas has looked and touched his fill for the moment. "Is this sufficient to end the war? The return of a loved one thought lost forever?"
And it cannot be insufficient. It must satisfy him, satisfy them all. If it comes as a shock, if the men grumble and, later, get into the odd drunken fight with the Latins, if it takes all Juturna's skill and power to pacify Turnus, then those are the consequences of trying to pass a woman from man to man like a wine-cup.
Aeneas closes the gates of war alongside his new adoptive father, Latinus; he builds a great, many-roomed house, fit for the royal lines of Troy and Latium; he takes counsel daily from Lavinia on how to create a harmonious kingdom. Iulus grows and grows, and Aeneas heals his weary heart, and throughout it all Pallas smiles at his side like a second chance.
Why yes, all the titles are from the lyrics of Christmas songs, because I am exactly that kind of dork, and of writer. No regrets!