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[ Characters ] Mireille Duroc/unreadability and Silver/annealoncemore
[ Location ] A clearing in Schwartzwald, somewhere between Jamarrow and Childreams.
[ Date/Time ] 19th of April, early afternoon.
[ Warning ] Awkward honesty?
[ Content ] Mireille gets rid of The Mouse and Silver... hasn't learnt not to run around with knives.
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( The mouse is the least of her problems... )
He has struggled enough already. Is struggling enough, judging by the knives in his hands, the blades catching the sunlight and reflecting it onto the trunks in glimpses of gold.
Turning her attention back to him and meeting his gaze, she shrugs lightly. Perhaps it is because he is a man and she is a woman; a shred of maternal warmth making her more likely to care for such details. Yet, she finds it an illogical conclusion - between the two of them, he is the one who has been a parent and she has never seen herself naturally fitting the role of a mother.
“It cannot help its ways,” she tells him, evenly. It must seem an easy answer, but to Mireille it isn’t. Not with every of its implications.
People have reasons and agendas; plans they will lie, cheat and murder to see into existence. Flowers and mice only have the characteristics of their kind; like children. Innocence isn’t forever, she knows. Better than most. Just because she has had to give up on hers…
The line of her mouth tightens. Even if she dirties it with her own half-truths, why then not value innocence when it is presented to her? In the same way she leaves her mark on it, it might leave its mark on her.
Or so she hopes. At least.
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In this moment, she reminds him of Ray. It's not that Ray would go out his way to save a talking mouse, or even be able to express a sentiment like the one she just had without laughing. No - it's that, like Ray, she has seen the world for what it is at the core (he can see it in her eyes, in the way she forms her words, even when he isn't trying to see it - oh, even when he's trying not to see it). It's that she has seen the blackness that bubbles and rots beneath this calm veneer, but has chosen to continue holding her beliefs. It's not even that her beliefs are anything like Ray's, and it's not like her beliefs are logical, anyway, and yet... each time they speak, she becomes more and more difficult to ignore.
Silver cannot envy the mouse its innocence when he cannot imagine seeing the world through any set of eyes but his own, grey-lensed glasses though he may permanently wear. He cannot even praise it for being true to itself - that is something reserved for those who have been forced to face the true depth and darkness of which they're capable. If there's to be any principle behind this creature - as Mireille seems so intent on finding - perhaps, Silver concludes, it's that some people can find something worth protecting in almost anything.
Honestly, Silver doesn't get it at all.
"Anyone can say that for themselves. It's no excuse."
A sentence like that has nothing to do with the mouse, when you get to the bottom of it. Silver, of all people, has the most cause to say something so flatly realistic. After all, perhaps those who murdered his family and wounded him could not have helped their ways; however, he certainly hopes he is not expected to forfeit his vengeance on them on those grounds alone, or in fact at all. If all creatures are products of their natures, then the only grounds on which to judge are the consequences of what they do.
And let's face it, it was a pretty annoying mouse.
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As he speaks, she heads for a smaller boulder next to the one he has chosen for table, leaning against it gingerly - as not to get her dress dirty. As long as she doesn’t have much else to wear, it won’t do, washing it time and again. His words sting, flatly, because in another world, at another time, she would have been very likely to agree with him.
Everybody carries the full weight of their own choices. Free will is a privilege that comes with its own obligations; consequences one must stand by. Mireille has chosen the very position in which she has stranded. Even through the thick veil of pretence she so likes to wrap around herself, this is an undeniable truth. Spoken in Father’s voice.
Her lips tremble.
Not looking at Silver directly, she instead focuses on the way his hair reflects the light… strangely. Almost lifelessly. “You are right. It’s not an excuse.” Sometimes there simply is no excuse or if there is, it holds no purpose, but even in those situations… surely… “I suppose I was simply trying to explain.”
By now, she has come to understand that the two are not synonymous.
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He finds a tree with a sturdy trunk and leans back against it, one leg propped up a little, looking at his ease but as always alert, maybe even tense. They're about two metres apart, a distance of closeness Silver is used to, in conversations - judged never by what is proper, but by what distance words should cross to ring most true.
Making excuses for a mouse like this, exerting herself to care for something so useless... the sheer illogicality of it is overwhelming. How can she gain any value from it, this... this unyielding need to care? Silver cannot fathom thinking with his heart even this much - after all, hadn't he said once he would never let the light of sadness touch him again? Didn't that extend, more than anything, to the light of all these unnecessary feelings?
And yet. Having anything, even this... unlike Mireille, Silver does not avert his gaze, focusing directly on her features as he contemplates her words. Even in doing something so frivolous as caring for a talking mouse, she seems to have some sense of purpose.
After all, she doesn't need to make her explanations to him. They owe each other nothing.
"More things like this will happen in the future. You should decide now how you feel about it."
His tones is casually flat, his words direct as always, spoken as if it is the only truth he can accept. If she is going to make a habit of something like this, she should at least know her own reasons.
As Silver will tell you (often and loudly), having a reason for something is a very good start.
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Mireille is no naïve schoolgirl. She knows the workings of politics well; knows the shadows of its backside. Even so, she wants to focus on… on… Jean Louis taking her hands in his, telling her they will surely win. Michel Lavreau reaching out for a scalpel, his fingers brushing those of his wife as she hands it to him. Her younger self holding on to her father’s pale, lifeless hand for dear life.
Her hands have been quite powerless since that moment, haven’t they? Mireille raises one hand slowly to look at it; her soft, pale skin slowly hardening from the manual labour she has to do here. Her wedding ring glints in the light. Through the bars of her wide-spread fingers, Silver looks very free.
“I do feel helpless sometimes,” she admits, though none of the actual feeling is evident in her voice. It’s only halfway a conclusion and she doesn’t know why she would ask this person something like this, because she doesn’t know him. They are not close, and is this not something to tell the people dearest to your heart? However, she thinks he will accept it for what it is and it makes the words flow more easily. “I have learned to care, but…” Her hand drops to her side once more. “It isn’t always enough.”
So many times, she has let Jean Louis know her views and opnions and seen it have no real impact. He leaves it be and she stumbles along. Without explanation. Even without any excuses. Yet, for all it's worth, however little, it’s all she has and thus it matters.
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Silver knows better than anyone: caring will only disappoint you, if you are foolish enough to even attempt it in the first place. The only thing anyone can do is kill before they're killed, and keep living - and even then, he can't be sure why.
And yet. As long as she is able to latch on to something - as long as she can pick one path out of the din - then there is sure to be people who feel the same way. Even if he can't understand it. Should he envy her the resolution to choose this path, or just be confused that she can muster up the strength and will to see so much good in a world like this?
"Calling yourself helpless is an easy excuse," he replies instead - not going near that "caring" comment, knowing by now that he's just doomed to have these irresolvable differences with everyone he meets. His tone is direct but very casual, not so much an accusation as the statement of a fact. His gaze does not leave her features.
"You have more power than the people you're deceiving with your charade, anyway."
Given the harsh nature of the words, he actually doesn't sound angry or forceful at all - after all, it doesn't really have much to do with him, it's just... true. And Silver is always happy to state the truth, no matter how awkward a truth it may be.
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If that is not being helpless, she doesn’t know what is. Of course, it is not a state of mind she has willingly chosen, but she sees no way out of it… Mireille can’t expect Silver to understand, though. If she were to draw the parallel to how he could do nothing when his family died but look on from a safe distance, she would remind herself too much of Jean Louis, and that, that, she couldn’t bear.
Besides, he lost his memory. All she has lost… No, she has no excuses anymore. Not even her dreams.
Instead she stares off into space. All she sees is memories that have little effect. “Knowledge is only power when it is common,” she tells him, her voice strained, “Jean Louis may think he is in control like this, but -” There is a moment of silence when she realises she is about to speak very poorly of her husband to a man who could be a compromise to his, their, plan. She presses her lips together, eyes narrowing. It holds no importance here and once they return to Luxembourg… Perhaps he will see reason now, so far away from his strings and puppets. “- in the end the power resides with the people. When their approval wears thin, no impostor will ensure Jean Louis his position.”
Mireille contemplates her own words for a moment. In this, if nothing else, Father’s will is carried out, at least. When they have something to say, the people will speak. Surely. Because they must. It is all she has to rely on.
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For Silver, what she's talking about isn't the real world at all - it's politics. Perhaps the power rests with the people, but as far as Silver is concerned the power rests with those who have something to do and the means to do it. As for politics, as for the coming-together of thousands of events, the reputations and situations that take years to build... it is a field of consideration well beyond Silver.
After all, Silver is not a patient man.
"Will you wait for times like those instead of making something happen for yourself?"
That's Silver for you - always focusing on actions, determined that once a person knows their reason for doing something, there is no excuse not to do it. You talk the talk, Mireille - all this about caring, about not wanting to be helpless - but when it comes to the things you can do with your own two hands...
Can you walk the walk?
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Even so, her motions are angry when she straightens up and steps away from the boulder. One step closer to him, the knives laid carefully out on the rock next to her shining silvery. First Jean Louis, now Silver… always asking her to do. Of course, because both of them are male - Mireille is no feminist but to believe a woman has the same range of options of action as the man next to her is unrealistic. Not to mention how, most obviously, she and Silver are not from the same circles of society. Every restriction that weighs double on her, he doesn’t get to carry on his shoulders at all.
Tone insistent, she raises her chin. “I do what I can.” And it’s the truth. Unfortunately that truth also entails that what she can isn’t as much as she would want it to be. A long moment passes when she simply focuses her gaze on him, his alert stance, the way his body looks toned - not a man who spends most of his time at dinner parties eating himself fat over diplomatic particularities. What do they have in common, besides the shared moment of losing everything? She, because he couldn’t wake her father from the dead. He, because she had asked him to anyway. Mireille looks away, attention caught by the shining blades on her left.
“Not everybody can be carrying knives with them to cut through the obstacles they face,” she continues. Gently.
She admires him for his resolve, but she possesses neither his skill nor his objective. Not that she perceives herself weak or aimless; Mireille does what she can with what she has.
If she didn’t, she wouldn’t be able to live with herself.
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So it's good he has Mireille around to voice these confusing truths, right?
Silver watches Mireille move, noting her agitation without comment or apparent reaction. She's a woman, yes, but she's also the state minister's wife and the "president"'s daughter; surely she has a great deal more power than most. Because Jean Louis definitely listens to her opinion all the time, right? At least, she should - as anyone does, really - have the initiative to try for change, if she has anything resembling a reason to do it.
Following the direction of her attention, Silver also wanders over to the rock on which his knives are lying - bringing them closer together, her expression clear and firm under the sunlight that seeps through the canopy of leaves, his own features as intense yet unreadable as ever.
Was it easier for him, to move through the world without the constraints placed upon others, to live and die by his own two hands? He picks up a knife, thoughtfully, searching for his own reflection in the silver-grey length of the blade, momentarily blinded by the sunlight that catches and reflects off the shining surface. Certainly, he has his own freedoms - something he hardly likes to think about, coming so close as it does to finding a silver lining to the giant grey cloud that is his life. And certainly, he's capable of cutting through obstacles when they arise.
Even so, it's not as simple as that. "That doesn't help when I don't know who my enemies are."
There's irritation in his voice, the kind that's bubbled and brewd for a while. It's not exactly aimed at her - it's just that the problem with only caring for so few things as Silver does is that, when you come to a dead end, it's hard to find anything else to do. And being here - no corrupt politicians to kill, no family's death to avenge - oh yes, he's very much having trouble finding something to be his purpose.
Not that that isn't, you know, the story of his life anyway.
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Are they friends? Are they enemies? Acquaintances? Are they at all familiar? She has grown up in a world where relations of any kind are of the utmost importance and having them labelled correctly even more so. One has to strike the best match, be it in friendship or marriage, to climb the social ladder, to conquer more ground. Names. Faces. To remember them and remember them well is the only life preserver available.
Silver isn’t Michel Lavreau. It might be Lavreau’s eyes and Lavreau’s face, but it isn’t Lavreau’s name or his life. Mireille has nothing to draw upon.
"Is it really that important?" she asks, walking up next to him - not shoulder by shoulder, it wouldn’t be proper, but a few feet apart, both of them looking down at the knives. Judging by the experienced grip he has on the knife in his hand, his enemies are of his own making, implying, of course, that so are your friends. Reaching up her hand to the pendant of her necklace, she hesitates. All she has to go with is that she, for some unexplainable reason, wants to be familiar to him. That is what she wants him to make of her. What she has already made of him.
Out of nostalgia, perhaps, if she is cynical. Guilt, if she were still raw and bleeding.
If she is truthful, though, Mireille knows it’s neither of those. She doesn’t know what draws her to him. She observes, he asks for her reasons; but she has no reasons beyond what she sees.
In the blade of the knife he is holding, she sees his reflection.
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And as for the fact that she breaks through his silver-grey fog, in a way even Ray never did, that when she speaks he is forced to listen no matter how irrational or ridiculous her words logically are... well, let's just not think about that. We don't want to break Silver's brain yet.
For a moment their eyes meet in the reflective surface of the blade - an odd way to look each other in the eyes, he thinks. As always she is almost impossible to read, but perhaps that in and of itself is a tell-tale sign of some sort of feeling. His own expressions are certainly no less impassive than hers.
He is the first to tear his gaze away, turning the knife in the same movement so that it is merely a glint of steel under sunlight, nothing that can reflect anything about him. Oh, yes, he will use those knives when he needs to. He will use everything at his disposal.
"It's all I have!" His words are ambiguous and he doesn't clarify his meaning; for a moment even he wonders what he means. Surely a more ideal person (a him from the past, even) would tell him he is so much more than his revenge, but he is in no state to believe something that comes down to a blank and useless reassurance. How can he be complete in any sense, how can he achieve closure and attempt to move on, when he has not had his revenge? Now that he knows who he is, is it not doing himself a disservice to simply abandon the path he has almost found?
The truth is that he has no answer to these questions - just more questions. It's how he has learned to live.
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He may not be aware of it; surely he isn’t, if he were, he would not argue with her over her choice of words - but what he is saying is similar to what she is feeling. Even if no one else asks her why she stays, with Jean Louis, with his all too ambitious plan and all the lies it entails, Mireille does question herself. In the dark of night. And the answer she finds is this: It’s all she has. It’s not much. It’s not in any sense or definition good, but she has no choice but to make of it what she can. She has nothing else.
Once it was enough. A long time ago. When Jean Louis was still the man Father had trusted, and she was still her father’s daughter, ideals and beliefs intact. All that is gone now. Long gone. Silver fights his way back, or his way onwards, with his knives and his choice of revenge. She fights, too - but her battle doesn’t require any physical weapons, only words. Too many words.
“It's like that sometimes,” she says. Simply. "I know." It leaves her previous question redundant, but that’s the difference between them, isn’t it? Blood spilled always matters. Words…
Mireille has been married to a talented politician for too long not to know how feeble an existence words live.
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But... a treacherous part of him knows that's not true. There's nothing flowery about the way she speaks, nothing that even suggests she sees the world through the pink-tainted lenses that seem to be the natural curse of so many women. If anything she is like him (like Ray, too - it's just that Ray is loathe to talk about it like this) - someone who has seen much more of the world's truths than is entirely healthy for them. Someone who could have happily lived had they not known, but who, now that they do, cannot imagine living any other way.
(A small part of him wishes she were more flippant, more full of empty ideals; it would make her words easier to dismiss.)
"Don't pity me."
It comes out with such preemptive force that even he's a bit taken aback by his rudeness. Ah well. It's not so much that he suspects she was going to - if anything, he knows neither of them lend themselves to being pitied or to pitying.
It's just... an assertion. The only way he knows, to say that this is what he has chosen to be (as far as one can choose, given the givens).
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Doesn’t she have regrets? Wouldn’t she sometimes wish…?
Watching Silver’s face for a moment, she tightens her grip on her pendant. It would be a lie to insist she doesn’t feel guilty for what her own situation has made of his; the losses he has suffered, the times he has had to forget to live on. However, as she stands like this, next to him, she could never pity him. He moves forward, gets rid of the obstacles lying before him in the only way he knows.
No moral speculations, no social limitations like a straitjacket.
His might not be a way she can understand or fully endorse, but it’s better than the aimlessness she often feels existing within her own reach. “I can’t pity you,” she says, “even if I wanted to, I can’t.” Hesitantly she leans forward and takes hold of one of the knives. The handle feels foreign against her palm; she shifts it to her other hand awkwardly. It’s a weapon. Not only something with which to slice carrots and bread. Quickly, as if burned, Mireille puts it back down, turning on her heel so that he won’t see the twist of her mouth.
Blood. So much blood.
“Pitying someone like you would only be debasing myself to an even lower position, wouldn't it?”
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It takes a moment for the rest of her words to sink in; when they do, he turns to her rather abruptly, her eyes intent as he questions. "You think your position is low now?" A hint of something in his voice - it may come across a little bitter at first, because surely she NOBODY can suffer like he does, etc., but if you listen closely there's a hint of... well, we loathe to think Silver might be so far as curious, but certainly he's more intrigued to hear her answer than usual. It's not a worldview he's ever come across before, and that if nothing else is worthy of his attention.
Without waiting for an answer, Silver walks over to where the knives now lay, glinting with innocuous shine in the morning light. Having watched calmly as Mireille had reached for the knife, Silver now reclaims it, picking it up with practiced ease and offering it back to her, hilt-first. His eyes are on hers, as serious as ever, and his grip is firm.
"Being scared of this is no way to survive."
Politics and easy words can only go so far. When it comes to action, to defending all those things she claims to care so deeply for... there is no sense in having pride in one's own abilities, but nor is there any reason to be horrified of what one's capable of.
The only thing anyone can do is know themselves and know their enemies.
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