Fic: After her, the flood
Title: After her, the flood
Author: emei
Fandom: Merlin
Rating: PG13
Lenght: 3050 words
Warnings: Warning for character deaths.
Prompt: 105) I have noticed that as soon as you have soldiers the story is called history. Before their arrival it is called myth, folktale, legend, fairy tale, oral poetry, ethnography. After the soldiers arrive, it is called history. -- Paula Gunn Allen (1939-2008), Native American novelist, poet, biographer, academic, literary critic and activist.
Summary: Morgana, through lives, deaths, and history.
Author's Notes: Many thanks to zeldaophelia , tempestsarekind and especially significantowl for reading and helpful comments. The title draws on the Louis XV quote Après-moi, le deluge, (also attributed to Madame de Pompadour). Written for femgenficathon 09.
There are times when they are buried namelessly. It happens in times when none but the most important are honoured with a monument or an inscription, it happens in times when bodies are burned and not buried, and it happens in times of war, when all the dead are shuffled into common graves and covered as quickly as possible. Morgana can accept that. It helps that she was no longer alive herself when the time to bury loved ones came, those times.
This, she can’t accept. Gwen’s husband has a stone raised on his wife’s grave - with an inscription that says only His Wife.
Morgana goes to argue with him. She knows that talk will spread, that those who don’t already consider her mad certainly will after this. Gwen’s husband smiles at her and says that it’s only traditional and right. And besides, he will be buried there as well, in time, and then there’ll be names enough on that stone. If it now matters that much. Morgana is ushered out, furious.
A year later she hears that he has remarried. Morgana knows that he’ll end his days in a grave next to this second wife. And Gwen’s grave will forever be lonely, left as somebody’s nameless wife, abandoned by someone who never loved her enough, and who is still allowed to define her memory, and define her only in relation to himself.
Morgana takes a bottle of thick black paint, a brush and a candle and walks to the churchyard in the night. The moon is half-full, the night light eerie, small animals scuttle out of sight. She finds the mood suiting. Soothing, almost. Huddled in front of this simple grey tombstone, she uncorks her bottle of paint and draws bold, curling letters. Gwen. Loved - Missed, In Past and Future.
The flame of the candle flickers, casting strange shadows over the words, as Morgana gets up to walk home again through the darkness. She leaves it there to burn out the night.
It is a small satisfaction, symbolic. Morgana remembers Gwen, always would, but sometimes she needs her remembrance as bold black words. Visible.
---
Morgana has lived many lives by now. She doesn’t always remember the lives that have come before. She’s never figured out the logic of it, in all these years. Why she’ll get to live a few lifetimes here and there completely from scratch, a blank slate, like anyone else (as a farmer’s wife, as a banker’s daughter), and then in the next life have memories from every single life she’s lived come crashing down on her. It is usually in those lives she goes mad. If the wave of memories is particularly violent she gets lost in the maelstrom of them, careening wildly through time and space, forever gone from the present.
---
The time Gwen died of tuberculosis, Morgana cared for her while she was ill. She did it at Gwen’s wish, and her own. Gossip said that it was quite a kindness of Gwen’s husband, wasn’t it, to let that old spinster help out. Doing her a favour, giving her a purpose in life. They didn’t know how right they were.
---
Sometimes she seeks the madness, takes refuge in it. It is the most intense - the only - freedom. It’s freewheeling, a lack of constraints. She’s the cry of wild birds.
Other times, Morgana resists the claws of insanity scraping at the edges of her mind with all her might. She seeks destiny, purpose, history.
---
She spends more time observing history than taking part of it, if history means war. And it always seems to do.
---
The late 20:th century is not a time when madness means freedom. It’s a time when those who are prisoners of their own minds are made prisoners in flesh as well, and when the freest minds are shackled for the peace of mind of the earthbound.
Morgana holds her sanity close, values it above all else. She becomes a historian, a scholar. When she grew up, in this now, she always knew small things she wasn’t supposed to. She saw the pictures in the history books and found fault - the clothes were odd, imaginary things, and they wouldn’t have been eating tomatoes, for god’s sake. Of course she has to find proof for the things she knows instinctly - remembers - , but when she doesn’t she calls it theorising, and then she can talk about her past and no one calls her mad.
Her teachers, and later her colleagues, say that she has a flair for history, an incredible feeling for where to start searching.
She doesn’t study war. Therefore people tend to say that she does women’s history. It is, in its own way, maddening.
---
It’s odd to have her memories turn to folklore, to see everyday realities treated as myth and uncertain, while the mess and madness and exaggerations of armies moving across countries gets treated as historical facts.
---
She meets Merlin. It’s the middle of the 19:th century, during the pause of a concert. She sees him from the back, recognises the tuft of dark hair and those ears at once. He stands out against the rich velvety feel of the room, against the people milling about in it exchanging pleasantries. He isn’t changed. She doesn’t know if he dies and is reborn like her, or if he just goes on and on, living. Morgana excuses herself, and leaves her friend behind to step over to him.
“Merlin,” she says and he goes incredibly still.
“Morgana,” he replies, and it’s a statement of fact more than a greeting.
It could be surprise, that nonplussed expression, or disappointment, that it is she and no one else who’s there to call him by name at last.
“How are you?” he asks.
“Well enough. I suppose. Lacking.” Morgana pauses between the words, considering and reconsidering. She feels no urge to surround her words in cushioning pleasantry, no need to embellish. Merlin gets the essentiality of it, she believes.
“In what?”
“Purpose. I’ve been observing for too long.”
“You’re a catalyst, Morgana. History always does happen around you, after you.”
“I’ve had enough of it,” she says and then the pause is over and they head back into the music, washing over them like rivers, history, floods.
---
She’s been married a few times - for obligation, convenience or even affection. She’s even had children - only in lives when she didn’t remember, but even then she was never a very good mother. It’s crystalline clear in retroperspective - she was never entirely there, never content and satisfied. She was a farmer’s wife with dreams of something bigger, better, further away. She was a woman who’d stand at the edge of the fields and notice the arrowhead formations of geese across the sky more than she’d notice her child clinging to her skirts.
She was a mother who had nightmares of her little girl, her darling little Edda who always tried too hard to please everyone (especially her mother who kept getting lost in distant moments that Edda always thought were somehow her fault. Morgana didn’t realise until much, much later.). She dreamt of Edda drowning (her pink mouth open in a silent waterfilled cry) among the waterlilies in the pond, in a clearing behind the house. Morgana awoke screaming, and her husband tried to comfort her, unused to this much emotion from her, patting her back with big farmer’s hands as she trembled and cried into his neck.
She forbade Edda to ever go near that clearing, and made it perfectly clear that she’d prefer if she never went into the woods at all. Edda is eager to please, but she’s also a curious child, and in this battle her curiosity wins. She finds the pond with the waterlilies. Probably she wants to pick some for Morgana, because she knows that beauty tends to make her smile.
Edda can’t swim. Her mother has kept her away from all water, in fear.
Her father finds her, late in the afternoon after he’d started wondering why she wasn’t with Morgana and Morgana said that she’d thought Edda had gone to meet him. He comes back to their cottage with his daughter’s drenched body in his arms, her head lolling back, waterlily petals caught among the strands of her hair.
That is the only time Morgana knows she went mad without the heavy weight of too much past on her mind.
---
She doesn’t usually go by Morgana anymore. It’s too noticeable a name, often. And besides, she has parents, and they name her differently. She still thinks of herself as Morgana. Morgana is her unchanging self - the sum of her memories. Anne, Christine and Matilda are bodies she’s lived in.
---
Gwen keeps coming back, too. When Morgana finds her she’s always a friend, an anchor.
---
A hundred years later or so, Morgana thinks about that conversation with Merlin, about purpose, as she decides to drive an ambulance in London. Her father (her father the politician) threatens to disown her if she goes through with it, threatens all manners of things. Her mother only weeps.
They were both very proud of her brothers when they went to fight, but that was then. Now they are lost forever to an unknown battlefield and there’s only Morgana: too proud, too stubbornly independent, and too beloved by her parents for them to let her endanger herself without putting up a fight. They lose that battle.
It’s the beginning of the Blitz.
By the ambulance, the first day, there’s a small, short woman with blond curls and eyes the colour of storm clouds, wearing blue overalls.
“I’m Vera,” she says, taking Morgana’s hand in a strong grip. “The mechanic of our little group.”
“Marianne,” says Morgana.
There’s something about Vera, that wide glittering smile despite circumstances. That feeling grows stronger over the coming days, weeks. Watching Vera’s unshaking determination and feeling the iron of her behind her smile, Morgana thinks yes, there’s something bigger about her. Something Gwen.
She can’t tell if or how much Vera remembers of being Gwen. She doesn’t mind: actually, she finds that she doesn’t want to know. Morgana wants this to be nothing but them: Vera and Marianne playing a part in history with nothing but their own frail human courage to carry them through.
“War isn’t quite what your history lessons make you think,” Vera remarks one day, perched on the footstep in the back of the ambulance, smoking a cigarette. It’s one of the calm days, one of those with the silent threat of the calm before the storm hanging in the airs.
“No. It really isn’t,” Marianne answers, watching the grey of the smoke against Vera’s pale hair and thinking about all of the fires in all of the homes.
“You know, people often talk about history like it’s something that happens over our heads, inevitable. I don’t think that’s true. History doesn’t just happen, history is made. By men,” she continues.
Vera’s smile is crooked, unusually sad. “We’re making it,” she replies. “With fire and dust and blood.”
There was a child left in the house, the one that more resembled a house of cards ready to slide down into a flat heap than a human habitation. Marianne got her out, set her down on what was left of the front steps. As the girl ran towards her brother, standing safely out by the ambulance, Marianne smiled and took a deep breath and Morgana thought that yes, this is right, this is the way to make history.
That was when the front wall of the house fell, a waterfall of dust and grime and bricks, raining down on her.
She’s half-lucid when they get her out from underneath it, burning with pain and odd flashing visions, dust and fire.
“Gwen?” she says. “Gwen!”
Vera holds on to her hand. “There, there, I’m here. I’m here.”
“I’m sorry,” Morgana gets out past her breaking lips. There isn’t enough air. “Sorry I’m leaving… you - here - now. With this. History. Gwen…”
For a moment she feels all of her lives fill her, that grandness of it all together, and then only Vera’s hand strong and warm around hers, and then she’s gone.
Vera sighs, bone-weary, and straightens, dragging the back of her hand across her eyes.
“Gwen. Do you know who that is?” asks the Irish nurse, Kate, quietly beside her.
“Me. Well, who I used to be,” Vera replies.
Kate makes a surprised sound. “You knew each other before? Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“Yes. Yes, we did.”
The clouds are the colour of Vera’s eyes. Kate wishes they would weep, give claps of thunder.
There’s always been something about Vera that said she’d lost too much, too early - in her quietness and the stubbornness of her smile. It’s different now, Kate observes to another of the young nurses on a quiet day. Marianne changed Vera. Her grief is stronger and more open, but grief doesn’t seem to make her weak. It’s like she draws on all her emotion, uses it like a well of energy, and goes on almost frighteningly bright and strong.
All of them know loss and grief too well, but none of them know what to do with it. They’re young and covered in ashes and their city is burning. Kate makes Vera tea and leaves her to her sorrow in the small moments of quiet.
Marianne’s father’s grief is a raging thing. He comes to wage war against war.
---
Morgana doesn’t believe in eternity, in neverending neverchanging values or things. Merlin seems to be immortal and she herself keeps coming back, and they are both the same but still not quite. History shapes and reshapes them.
A rose is a rose is a rose, love is love is love and Morgana is Morgana is Morgana. But always different. Morgana is Morgana. That is a non-definition.
---
Morgana holds a presentation at conference, about the changing views on individuality throughout history. She’s just finished, people are getting up to stretch their legs and head to the loos before the next speech. Morgana wants tea, badly. She’s tired and slightly frozen because the air-conditioning in the hall is going on overdrive.
Walking towards the door, she’s stopped halfway by a very old little lady in a deep blue jacket. She has white hair curling at her temples, eyes the colour of old storm clouds, skin like wrinkled paper. She looks like a gust of wind would snap her in two, but that’s an illusion, Morgana thinks. This one is strong.
“Hello, dear,” the lady says. “I’d like to have a few words with you.”
“All right. Would you like to come with me to the cafeteria? I need some tea.”
And over a small paper cup of lukewarm, over-sweetened tea, the little lady takes Morgana’s hand and says: “I’m Vera”.
Oh. Of course.
Morgana remembers Vera’s smile, the iron strength of it, and notices that she still smiles the same way. Only a little softer, more tired. With Vera’s hand in hers, Morgana suddenly remembers not only living before, but also dying. The sense of finality in it, of having lived a life and then died, finished, left it behind and moved on, is oddly comforting.
She drinks a mouthful of tea.
“They tell me you do women’s history,” Vera says.
“Because I don’t do war,” Morgana huffs with an almost-laugh, too tired to be derisive.
The timbre of Vera’s voice is steely. “So show them. The history of women is the history of war.”
Morgana empties her paper cup, studying Vera’s eyes and wondering how much they’ve seen. The war went on when Marianne died, and Vera lived through all of it - she must have, as she’s still here - and Morgana wonders for a fleeting moment what Marianne’s death did to her, how she handled it. Morgana doesn’t know how Marianne was buried - did she get a stone, a memorial? No doubt, she thinks, did her parents honour her memory with something grand and remarkable, tried too hard and ended up with a grave that seemed like a stranger’s, not very reminiscent of their headstrong daughter.
Morgana sometimes needs visual markers, unyielding facts incarnated in objects she can touch, needs them to anchor her in time and space when her mind threatens to break loose and spin her away and out of control. Physical memorials might be less important to Vera, she thinks. Gwen never seemed to risk getting lost in the blurring lines of time.
The old woman who’s Vera seems frailer, from age perhaps, and yet stronger than the young Vera Morgana remembers. She thinks that it’s a very Gwen-like quality - to be able to live through the darkest of sorrows and emerge upright, the iron of her forged and hardened into steel in the fire of her hardships.
“You could start by letting me tell you my story of war, while I’m still around to do it,” Vera says.
Morgana does.
Eventually it becomes an anthology - women and war across time and space. Seeing one of her own lives as a part of that history is fascinating - she’s hardly more than a footnote, so small in the grander scheme of things, and yet she can follow threads from her life and death and see what they resulted in. She thinks about her father the politician and his war against war, and she thinks about Merlin, and about catalysts.
---
A journalist asks her if she still sees herself as primarily a scholar of women’s history - although she’s moved on to study war, her new book gives it a distinctly female perspective.
Morgana calmly answers that she’s never seen herself as such. “On the topic, however, an old friend of mine once said that the history of women is the history of war. I think that sums it up quite nicely.”
Later she says: “What I do is telling the same story in a thousand different variations. And the moral of the story is this: the history of the world is not the history of soldiers. It is much, much more.”
Author: emei
Fandom: Merlin
Rating: PG13
Lenght: 3050 words
Warnings: Warning for character deaths.
Prompt: 105) I have noticed that as soon as you have soldiers the story is called history. Before their arrival it is called myth, folktale, legend, fairy tale, oral poetry, ethnography. After the soldiers arrive, it is called history. -- Paula Gunn Allen (1939-2008), Native American novelist, poet, biographer, academic, literary critic and activist.
Summary: Morgana, through lives, deaths, and history.
Author's Notes: Many thanks to zeldaophelia , tempestsarekind and especially significantowl for reading and helpful comments. The title draws on the Louis XV quote Après-moi, le deluge, (also attributed to Madame de Pompadour). Written for femgenficathon 09.
There are times when they are buried namelessly. It happens in times when none but the most important are honoured with a monument or an inscription, it happens in times when bodies are burned and not buried, and it happens in times of war, when all the dead are shuffled into common graves and covered as quickly as possible. Morgana can accept that. It helps that she was no longer alive herself when the time to bury loved ones came, those times.
This, she can’t accept. Gwen’s husband has a stone raised on his wife’s grave - with an inscription that says only His Wife.
Morgana goes to argue with him. She knows that talk will spread, that those who don’t already consider her mad certainly will after this. Gwen’s husband smiles at her and says that it’s only traditional and right. And besides, he will be buried there as well, in time, and then there’ll be names enough on that stone. If it now matters that much. Morgana is ushered out, furious.
A year later she hears that he has remarried. Morgana knows that he’ll end his days in a grave next to this second wife. And Gwen’s grave will forever be lonely, left as somebody’s nameless wife, abandoned by someone who never loved her enough, and who is still allowed to define her memory, and define her only in relation to himself.
Morgana takes a bottle of thick black paint, a brush and a candle and walks to the churchyard in the night. The moon is half-full, the night light eerie, small animals scuttle out of sight. She finds the mood suiting. Soothing, almost. Huddled in front of this simple grey tombstone, she uncorks her bottle of paint and draws bold, curling letters. Gwen. Loved - Missed, In Past and Future.
The flame of the candle flickers, casting strange shadows over the words, as Morgana gets up to walk home again through the darkness. She leaves it there to burn out the night.
It is a small satisfaction, symbolic. Morgana remembers Gwen, always would, but sometimes she needs her remembrance as bold black words. Visible.
---
Morgana has lived many lives by now. She doesn’t always remember the lives that have come before. She’s never figured out the logic of it, in all these years. Why she’ll get to live a few lifetimes here and there completely from scratch, a blank slate, like anyone else (as a farmer’s wife, as a banker’s daughter), and then in the next life have memories from every single life she’s lived come crashing down on her. It is usually in those lives she goes mad. If the wave of memories is particularly violent she gets lost in the maelstrom of them, careening wildly through time and space, forever gone from the present.
---
The time Gwen died of tuberculosis, Morgana cared for her while she was ill. She did it at Gwen’s wish, and her own. Gossip said that it was quite a kindness of Gwen’s husband, wasn’t it, to let that old spinster help out. Doing her a favour, giving her a purpose in life. They didn’t know how right they were.
---
Sometimes she seeks the madness, takes refuge in it. It is the most intense - the only - freedom. It’s freewheeling, a lack of constraints. She’s the cry of wild birds.
Other times, Morgana resists the claws of insanity scraping at the edges of her mind with all her might. She seeks destiny, purpose, history.
---
She spends more time observing history than taking part of it, if history means war. And it always seems to do.
---
The late 20:th century is not a time when madness means freedom. It’s a time when those who are prisoners of their own minds are made prisoners in flesh as well, and when the freest minds are shackled for the peace of mind of the earthbound.
Morgana holds her sanity close, values it above all else. She becomes a historian, a scholar. When she grew up, in this now, she always knew small things she wasn’t supposed to. She saw the pictures in the history books and found fault - the clothes were odd, imaginary things, and they wouldn’t have been eating tomatoes, for god’s sake. Of course she has to find proof for the things she knows instinctly - remembers - , but when she doesn’t she calls it theorising, and then she can talk about her past and no one calls her mad.
Her teachers, and later her colleagues, say that she has a flair for history, an incredible feeling for where to start searching.
She doesn’t study war. Therefore people tend to say that she does women’s history. It is, in its own way, maddening.
---
It’s odd to have her memories turn to folklore, to see everyday realities treated as myth and uncertain, while the mess and madness and exaggerations of armies moving across countries gets treated as historical facts.
---
She meets Merlin. It’s the middle of the 19:th century, during the pause of a concert. She sees him from the back, recognises the tuft of dark hair and those ears at once. He stands out against the rich velvety feel of the room, against the people milling about in it exchanging pleasantries. He isn’t changed. She doesn’t know if he dies and is reborn like her, or if he just goes on and on, living. Morgana excuses herself, and leaves her friend behind to step over to him.
“Merlin,” she says and he goes incredibly still.
“Morgana,” he replies, and it’s a statement of fact more than a greeting.
It could be surprise, that nonplussed expression, or disappointment, that it is she and no one else who’s there to call him by name at last.
“How are you?” he asks.
“Well enough. I suppose. Lacking.” Morgana pauses between the words, considering and reconsidering. She feels no urge to surround her words in cushioning pleasantry, no need to embellish. Merlin gets the essentiality of it, she believes.
“In what?”
“Purpose. I’ve been observing for too long.”
“You’re a catalyst, Morgana. History always does happen around you, after you.”
“I’ve had enough of it,” she says and then the pause is over and they head back into the music, washing over them like rivers, history, floods.
---
She’s been married a few times - for obligation, convenience or even affection. She’s even had children - only in lives when she didn’t remember, but even then she was never a very good mother. It’s crystalline clear in retroperspective - she was never entirely there, never content and satisfied. She was a farmer’s wife with dreams of something bigger, better, further away. She was a woman who’d stand at the edge of the fields and notice the arrowhead formations of geese across the sky more than she’d notice her child clinging to her skirts.
She was a mother who had nightmares of her little girl, her darling little Edda who always tried too hard to please everyone (especially her mother who kept getting lost in distant moments that Edda always thought were somehow her fault. Morgana didn’t realise until much, much later.). She dreamt of Edda drowning (her pink mouth open in a silent waterfilled cry) among the waterlilies in the pond, in a clearing behind the house. Morgana awoke screaming, and her husband tried to comfort her, unused to this much emotion from her, patting her back with big farmer’s hands as she trembled and cried into his neck.
She forbade Edda to ever go near that clearing, and made it perfectly clear that she’d prefer if she never went into the woods at all. Edda is eager to please, but she’s also a curious child, and in this battle her curiosity wins. She finds the pond with the waterlilies. Probably she wants to pick some for Morgana, because she knows that beauty tends to make her smile.
Edda can’t swim. Her mother has kept her away from all water, in fear.
Her father finds her, late in the afternoon after he’d started wondering why she wasn’t with Morgana and Morgana said that she’d thought Edda had gone to meet him. He comes back to their cottage with his daughter’s drenched body in his arms, her head lolling back, waterlily petals caught among the strands of her hair.
That is the only time Morgana knows she went mad without the heavy weight of too much past on her mind.
---
She doesn’t usually go by Morgana anymore. It’s too noticeable a name, often. And besides, she has parents, and they name her differently. She still thinks of herself as Morgana. Morgana is her unchanging self - the sum of her memories. Anne, Christine and Matilda are bodies she’s lived in.
---
Gwen keeps coming back, too. When Morgana finds her she’s always a friend, an anchor.
---
A hundred years later or so, Morgana thinks about that conversation with Merlin, about purpose, as she decides to drive an ambulance in London. Her father (her father the politician) threatens to disown her if she goes through with it, threatens all manners of things. Her mother only weeps.
They were both very proud of her brothers when they went to fight, but that was then. Now they are lost forever to an unknown battlefield and there’s only Morgana: too proud, too stubbornly independent, and too beloved by her parents for them to let her endanger herself without putting up a fight. They lose that battle.
It’s the beginning of the Blitz.
By the ambulance, the first day, there’s a small, short woman with blond curls and eyes the colour of storm clouds, wearing blue overalls.
“I’m Vera,” she says, taking Morgana’s hand in a strong grip. “The mechanic of our little group.”
“Marianne,” says Morgana.
There’s something about Vera, that wide glittering smile despite circumstances. That feeling grows stronger over the coming days, weeks. Watching Vera’s unshaking determination and feeling the iron of her behind her smile, Morgana thinks yes, there’s something bigger about her. Something Gwen.
She can’t tell if or how much Vera remembers of being Gwen. She doesn’t mind: actually, she finds that she doesn’t want to know. Morgana wants this to be nothing but them: Vera and Marianne playing a part in history with nothing but their own frail human courage to carry them through.
“War isn’t quite what your history lessons make you think,” Vera remarks one day, perched on the footstep in the back of the ambulance, smoking a cigarette. It’s one of the calm days, one of those with the silent threat of the calm before the storm hanging in the airs.
“No. It really isn’t,” Marianne answers, watching the grey of the smoke against Vera’s pale hair and thinking about all of the fires in all of the homes.
“You know, people often talk about history like it’s something that happens over our heads, inevitable. I don’t think that’s true. History doesn’t just happen, history is made. By men,” she continues.
Vera’s smile is crooked, unusually sad. “We’re making it,” she replies. “With fire and dust and blood.”
There was a child left in the house, the one that more resembled a house of cards ready to slide down into a flat heap than a human habitation. Marianne got her out, set her down on what was left of the front steps. As the girl ran towards her brother, standing safely out by the ambulance, Marianne smiled and took a deep breath and Morgana thought that yes, this is right, this is the way to make history.
That was when the front wall of the house fell, a waterfall of dust and grime and bricks, raining down on her.
She’s half-lucid when they get her out from underneath it, burning with pain and odd flashing visions, dust and fire.
“Gwen?” she says. “Gwen!”
Vera holds on to her hand. “There, there, I’m here. I’m here.”
“I’m sorry,” Morgana gets out past her breaking lips. There isn’t enough air. “Sorry I’m leaving… you - here - now. With this. History. Gwen…”
For a moment she feels all of her lives fill her, that grandness of it all together, and then only Vera’s hand strong and warm around hers, and then she’s gone.
Vera sighs, bone-weary, and straightens, dragging the back of her hand across her eyes.
“Gwen. Do you know who that is?” asks the Irish nurse, Kate, quietly beside her.
“Me. Well, who I used to be,” Vera replies.
Kate makes a surprised sound. “You knew each other before? Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“Yes. Yes, we did.”
The clouds are the colour of Vera’s eyes. Kate wishes they would weep, give claps of thunder.
There’s always been something about Vera that said she’d lost too much, too early - in her quietness and the stubbornness of her smile. It’s different now, Kate observes to another of the young nurses on a quiet day. Marianne changed Vera. Her grief is stronger and more open, but grief doesn’t seem to make her weak. It’s like she draws on all her emotion, uses it like a well of energy, and goes on almost frighteningly bright and strong.
All of them know loss and grief too well, but none of them know what to do with it. They’re young and covered in ashes and their city is burning. Kate makes Vera tea and leaves her to her sorrow in the small moments of quiet.
Marianne’s father’s grief is a raging thing. He comes to wage war against war.
---
Morgana doesn’t believe in eternity, in neverending neverchanging values or things. Merlin seems to be immortal and she herself keeps coming back, and they are both the same but still not quite. History shapes and reshapes them.
A rose is a rose is a rose, love is love is love and Morgana is Morgana is Morgana. But always different. Morgana is Morgana. That is a non-definition.
---
Morgana holds a presentation at conference, about the changing views on individuality throughout history. She’s just finished, people are getting up to stretch their legs and head to the loos before the next speech. Morgana wants tea, badly. She’s tired and slightly frozen because the air-conditioning in the hall is going on overdrive.
Walking towards the door, she’s stopped halfway by a very old little lady in a deep blue jacket. She has white hair curling at her temples, eyes the colour of old storm clouds, skin like wrinkled paper. She looks like a gust of wind would snap her in two, but that’s an illusion, Morgana thinks. This one is strong.
“Hello, dear,” the lady says. “I’d like to have a few words with you.”
“All right. Would you like to come with me to the cafeteria? I need some tea.”
And over a small paper cup of lukewarm, over-sweetened tea, the little lady takes Morgana’s hand and says: “I’m Vera”.
Oh. Of course.
Morgana remembers Vera’s smile, the iron strength of it, and notices that she still smiles the same way. Only a little softer, more tired. With Vera’s hand in hers, Morgana suddenly remembers not only living before, but also dying. The sense of finality in it, of having lived a life and then died, finished, left it behind and moved on, is oddly comforting.
She drinks a mouthful of tea.
“They tell me you do women’s history,” Vera says.
“Because I don’t do war,” Morgana huffs with an almost-laugh, too tired to be derisive.
The timbre of Vera’s voice is steely. “So show them. The history of women is the history of war.”
Morgana empties her paper cup, studying Vera’s eyes and wondering how much they’ve seen. The war went on when Marianne died, and Vera lived through all of it - she must have, as she’s still here - and Morgana wonders for a fleeting moment what Marianne’s death did to her, how she handled it. Morgana doesn’t know how Marianne was buried - did she get a stone, a memorial? No doubt, she thinks, did her parents honour her memory with something grand and remarkable, tried too hard and ended up with a grave that seemed like a stranger’s, not very reminiscent of their headstrong daughter.
Morgana sometimes needs visual markers, unyielding facts incarnated in objects she can touch, needs them to anchor her in time and space when her mind threatens to break loose and spin her away and out of control. Physical memorials might be less important to Vera, she thinks. Gwen never seemed to risk getting lost in the blurring lines of time.
The old woman who’s Vera seems frailer, from age perhaps, and yet stronger than the young Vera Morgana remembers. She thinks that it’s a very Gwen-like quality - to be able to live through the darkest of sorrows and emerge upright, the iron of her forged and hardened into steel in the fire of her hardships.
“You could start by letting me tell you my story of war, while I’m still around to do it,” Vera says.
Morgana does.
Eventually it becomes an anthology - women and war across time and space. Seeing one of her own lives as a part of that history is fascinating - she’s hardly more than a footnote, so small in the grander scheme of things, and yet she can follow threads from her life and death and see what they resulted in. She thinks about her father the politician and his war against war, and she thinks about Merlin, and about catalysts.
---
A journalist asks her if she still sees herself as primarily a scholar of women’s history - although she’s moved on to study war, her new book gives it a distinctly female perspective.
Morgana calmly answers that she’s never seen herself as such. “On the topic, however, an old friend of mine once said that the history of women is the history of war. I think that sums it up quite nicely.”
Later she says: “What I do is telling the same story in a thousand different variations. And the moral of the story is this: the history of the world is not the history of soldiers. It is much, much more.”