Cross-posted to myriadwords.
Title: Dawned above despair
Summary: Now, mortals all, take hold!
Author's Notes: A riff on labellementeuse's bandom!AU. Because I have a theme. Written and posted with encouragement.
Title from Seigfried Sassoon's Secret Music. Summary from D. H. Lawrence's Autumn Sunshine.
Lone One -- he doesn't use his old name even in his own thoughts, now -- is miffed, amused, and unsurprised when he hears that Myriad's Nita Callahan and Kit Rodriguez have returned from an unexpected vacation to stun Rolling Stone with their elopement.
He thinks for a moment about an appropriate tribute, then orders his assistant to arrange for a carefully specified floral arrangement.
He addresses it, personally, to Nita Callahan.
***
Nita's been practically buried in reporters, inundated with gifts, so it isn't that she's surprised to get one more. It's more that she's surprised to have something so simple, even if she isn't all that surprised by the choice of last name or by the sender's name. It isn't a name Kit would recognize; she and Dairine are two of perhaps five people in the world who know Lone One's real name.
The bouquet is four flowers, a lovely purple-pink azalea with a deep blue petunia and the small, palely violet-pink of sweetpea, surrounded by the myriad tiny white blossoms of coriander, and it comes with a blank sheet of white paper.
Nita stops unwrapping gifts and scolding, laughing notes to look up the language of flowers, and when she's found all four she buries her head in her hands laughing. Even if the laughter is sharp and slightly choked.
Coriander for lust, she thinks. That's like him. Petunia for resentment (maybe, possibly, its other meaning, and Nita isn't sure what to think if he had meant to tell her that her presence soothed him). Azalea for their fragile, strange attachment (had he meant that she should take care of herself for him?).
And sweetpea for goodbye, thanking her for a lovely time. That was the surprise.
It had been a lovely time, she knows, in a baffling way that occasionally has her waking from odd dreams.
She looks up one more thing, then she grabs her cell to beg a favor from her press secretary, the one Carl had made her get used to when Myriad started getting big enough that Nita needed one.
***
Among Lone One's mail today is a single flower, the five-starred white petals of stephanotis purely, starkly beautiful in his pale hands.
He tucks the flower into his long red ponytail, still laughing, and casts one more glance at the blank sheet of notepaper Nita Callahan-Rodriguez had sent with it.
Happy in her marriage, is she? He wishes her joy of it, for the moment.
Everything, Lone One knows, passes sooner or later. So will this.
-- Finis
Summary: Now, mortals all, take hold!
Author's Notes: A riff on labellementeuse's bandom!AU. Because I have a theme. Written and posted with encouragement.
Title from Seigfried Sassoon's Secret Music. Summary from D. H. Lawrence's Autumn Sunshine.
Lone One -- he doesn't use his old name even in his own thoughts, now -- is miffed, amused, and unsurprised when he hears that Myriad's Nita Callahan and Kit Rodriguez have returned from an unexpected vacation to stun Rolling Stone with their elopement.
He thinks for a moment about an appropriate tribute, then orders his assistant to arrange for a carefully specified floral arrangement.
He addresses it, personally, to Nita Callahan.
***
Nita's been practically buried in reporters, inundated with gifts, so it isn't that she's surprised to get one more. It's more that she's surprised to have something so simple, even if she isn't all that surprised by the choice of last name or by the sender's name. It isn't a name Kit would recognize; she and Dairine are two of perhaps five people in the world who know Lone One's real name.
The bouquet is four flowers, a lovely purple-pink azalea with a deep blue petunia and the small, palely violet-pink of sweetpea, surrounded by the myriad tiny white blossoms of coriander, and it comes with a blank sheet of white paper.
Nita stops unwrapping gifts and scolding, laughing notes to look up the language of flowers, and when she's found all four she buries her head in her hands laughing. Even if the laughter is sharp and slightly choked.
Coriander for lust, she thinks. That's like him. Petunia for resentment (maybe, possibly, its other meaning, and Nita isn't sure what to think if he had meant to tell her that her presence soothed him). Azalea for their fragile, strange attachment (had he meant that she should take care of herself for him?).
And sweetpea for goodbye, thanking her for a lovely time. That was the surprise.
It had been a lovely time, she knows, in a baffling way that occasionally has her waking from odd dreams.
She looks up one more thing, then she grabs her cell to beg a favor from her press secretary, the one Carl had made her get used to when Myriad started getting big enough that Nita needed one.
***
Among Lone One's mail today is a single flower, the five-starred white petals of stephanotis purely, starkly beautiful in his pale hands.
He tucks the flower into his long red ponytail, still laughing, and casts one more glance at the blank sheet of notepaper Nita Callahan-Rodriguez had sent with it.
Happy in her marriage, is she? He wishes her joy of it, for the moment.
Everything, Lone One knows, passes sooner or later. So will this.
-- Finis