[Fanfic] Burning Blue
Title: Burning Blue
Fandom: Graceling/Fire/Bitterblue
Author: plalligator
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Fire, Bitterblue; side mentions of Fire/Brigan and Bitterblue/Saf.
Rating/Warning(s): PG-13, major character death
Summary: Homecomings, atonement, departures. As it turns out, advice from Fire's past is surprisingly relevant to Bitterblue's present.
Notes: I think my Bitterblue feelings may surpass even my Fire feelings and my Katsa feelings. That book was a four-hundred-page long, beautifully written punch to the gut.
::
Homecomings (history don’t repeat itself but it sure does rhyme)
The whole of King's City is bathed in the Lady Fire's joy as she returns from the western lands, whether they know it or not.
(Yes, no longer just the lady monster, but in fact, the Lady Fire. Fire, who has cried so many times in her long life, cried of joy on her realization of that. It was a mercy to her, a small and unexpected kindness, that she was a person to them. Not a monster, but a person.)
Brigan can feel it, she knows, as they near the palace, because amusement and pleasure radiate from him, little waves washing up out of the depths of his mind. Pleasure at her joy.
Successful trip? He inquires, from where he's making his way down to meet her as she returns to the green house.
Oh, Brigan, she cries. You have no idea! The girl queen, the lady queen, I should say, of Monsea-
Calm down, love, he sends to her. He is hurrying across the courtyard, his coat hastily thrown on over his shoulders to protect against the chill biting through the air, his hair silver and his eyes as clear and grey as ever. She goes to meet him as fast as her aging legs will carry her, and if there's one thing she never tires of it's the way her heart eases on coming home to him.
"Come on," he says. "Everyone's impatient to hear the news."
::
Nash's office is, as usual, very crowded. Besides Nash at his desk, and Clara and Garan on one of the sofa's, and any number of advisors and important people, there are Nash's children (not so very young anymore, hardly children, really) and her nephew Aran, and Hanna sidling in the door after them, wearing battered riding clothes and smelling of horse and cold. She flings her arms around Fire with an enthusiasm that seems to belong more to her five year old self than the fifty-four year old commander of the King's Army.
"Welcome back, Mother," she says, kissing Fire's cheek. "I take it everything went well? Here," she maneuvers Fire to a seat on the opposite sofa. Fire reaches out across the desk to squeeze Nash's hand in greeting.
"Welcome back, little sister," he says, smiling a quick, fond smile. "Won't you tell us what you've learned?"
"Yes, please do, Fire," says Clara. "Garan has been worrying whether we'll have to spend more money for spies now that the Seven Kingdoms know of us."
"I wasn't," says Garan. "I'm retired. I leave the worrying to other unfortunate souls now."
"I don't think any worrying will be necessary," says Fire, smiling, for this is so very good news.
And she tells them the story of the young queen of Monsea, the daughter of the Graceling boy by the name of Immiker; the daughter of the boy who killed Archer.
"Lord King,” she concludes, “I respectfully advise that we keep communication open with Monsea. They're on their way to stability, and their queen is wise and fair, but she's young and she will need our help."
Garan raises his eyebrows, and asks the question hanging heavy and unspoken in the room.
"You trust the daughter of that man? After what he did? Think carefully, Fire, before you trust someone who was raised by him and borne by him. Even if she is not evil, she may be weakminded or easy to control."
"He killed her mother," says Fire, simply, "and he made the man who was like a father to her commit terrible crimes that drove him out of his mind. There are men who died just months ago, in front of her eyes, because of what Leck did more than ten years ago. There’s nothing of him in her, only the sorrow he forced on her.”
They are all watching her intently.
“Do you know what she said about me when she arrived?” she continues, trying to make them understand. “She said ‘you have brought a woman who controls minds into a castle of people particularly vulnerable to such things,’ and she was ready to turn us all back out into the snow. She had the strongest mind of all of them. I would trust her,” says Fire, nearly fifty years after Archer’s death, “with my life.”
::
A fire crackles in the fireplace of the green house, throwing up shadows onto the wall.
You should have seen her, she whispers into his mind absently. She was crying, Brigan, and she was so full of sorrow, but her mind was so strong. And she stood so tall.
Brigan smiles down at his book, amusement radiating gently from him.
What?
He opens a memory to her. It’s a little faded around the edges but still clear, of Fire from years ago striding through a field hospital, dying soldiers all around her. Sadness is clear on her face, but calm and quiet sadness.
She’s us, says Fire, awed both by his revelation and her own. She’s you and Nash trying to rebuild a broken kingdom, and she’s me in-everything.
In one sense, Bitterblue might have it easier, because she had not loved Leck, and never felt torn between her father and her country. But she also had it harder.
“What do you think?” she asks aloud after a minute.
He shuts his book, considering.
“I agree with your judgement of character, as always, Fire. But we must be cautious. If the Seven Kingdoms really are as unstable as you say-well. We will simply have to choose carefully in our allies.” He pauses for a moment. “I should like to meet Queen Bitterblue. She makes you very happy.”
“Brigan, I-” I never would have thought that I’d reach the point where the fact that my worst enemy survived to live a long and healthy life, and bear children-I never would have thought that I would be thankful for that.
“Things change,” says Brigan. “I am thankful for Cansrel if only because without him, you would not exist.”
::
Atonement (my life is an apology for the life of my father)
“I never would have thought,” says Bitterblue, nearly a year and a half later, at the foot of the bridge over the Winged River as she and Fire watch the river leap and dance in the spring sunlight. “I never would have thought,” she continues, “that I should be so glad for something my father built.” Her mouth turns up at the corners. “My own Winged Bridge, I mean. And for everything in this land. I should think I’d hate it, because he loved it, and was obsessed with it. But I can’t seem to.”
She looks better, Fire observes with not only a monster’s innate sense but with a old woman’s knack for knowing the moods of children. Bitterblue is a lot less pale and wan than she was. Her face has lost the last remnants of baby fat, but her body has filled out, no doubt due to regular meals and the long, slow recede of darkness and evil from her life.
Her hair is braided and looped on top of her head like a crown, and though her clothes are plain, she carries herself like a queen, even against the explosive glory of King’s City, which no doubt overwhelms her.
She hasn’t been crying.
Fire smiles, leans on her cane.
Things change. We can find things to be thankful for in the most unexpected of places.
“Not all places.”
No. Not all places.
“I didn’t love him,” Bitterblue says, dry-eyed. “Never. I’ve never been sorry that he’s dead. Just sorry he was king. I am queen of Monsea, and I would give that up if it meant he had never been king. Or never been Graced. Or never been born.”
When I first met Brigan, says Fire thoughtfully, as Bitterblue offers an arm to Fire for her to lean on, and they begin to walk back to the palace. Or rather, one of the first times I met Brigan, before I had actually spoken to him, when we were both hardly older than you, I was hiding in a stable. In my horse’s stall.
Bitterblue glances sidelong at her.
“Horse’s stall?”
I couldn’t sleep. It was the only thing that brought me comfort enough. I overheard a conversation between Brigan and his mother. He was talking about his duty to the country and to the army, and do you know what he said? He said “My life is an apology for the life of my father.”
She feels Bitterblue’s mind descend into turmoil.
I understood that more clearly than I understood almost anything. Brigan understood. Nash understood. You, too understand. Isn’t that right, Lady Queen?
“Yes,” says Bitterblue, heart in her throat. “I understand that I’m never going to be able to do enough.”
Her mind is filled with everyone she’s ever known, or seen, or passed in the street who had some mark or injury or harm done to them. Like Fire’s missing fingers, the cook Anna’s lame arm, a gardener whose father is dead. How she wonders, every time, if it was her father who did it.
Just as suddenly, though, Bitterblue pushes the thoughts away, and forces the thoughts out of her head. Fire withdraws, feeling a little ashamed for peeking. She should have known better.
Please don’t look into my mind, thinks Bitterblue. But thank you.
::
Departures (I will never leave you)
You’re sad to see them go.
Bitterblue turns from the window where she’s been staring out over the city, even though Katsa and Po have long since galloped out of sight to go raise trouble in Estill or Sunder.
They have to go, Bitterblue thinks to her with precision. They’ll be back.
Her control has improved even more under Brigan’s tutelage, and she can open a thought to Fire while letting none of her deeper thoughts through. Fire understands. For Bitterblue, it is crucial that she knows her thoughts are her own. She sighs.
I’m just so tired of everyone leaving me.
Fire reaches for her hand, entwining Bitterblue’s slim, calloused hand into her own gnarled and wrinkled one. She knows what it is for people to leave, for people to never come back or to never even be there in the first place.
My dear, I will never leave you.
And she knows the love that Bitterblue opens to her is real.
::
Almost five years later, someone enters Bitterblue’s office. Without looking up from the papers she’s studying, she speaks.
“Yes, we do need to keep the vetting process for appointees to the ministries. I know it takes up time, I know the queen should be focusing on more important things, but I need to be involved. We’re building from the ground-up here, and I’m not going to let it go wrong.”
“Sparks,” says a voice from the doorway. She looks up, surprised.
“Saf!”
He’s taller than he was, and his skin more sun-darkened, and he’s such a welcome sight that she nearly knocks over her chair in her rush to embrace him. His arms are strong around her back, but after a moment he takes her forearms and pushes her back to look her in the face.
“Sparks,” he says again, something painful and furtive in his eyes. Like he’s afraid to speak.
“What it is?” she demands. “Bad news from the Dells?”
He looks away, and she is very afraid. Of all the things he’s told her, there’s never been anything so bad he couldn’t look her in the face while he said it.
“It happened peacefully. In her own bed, with her family by her side,” he says softly, and Bitterblue knows what’s happened.
“Oh,” she says, dumbly. Oh. Oh, Fire, Fire, she thinks, pushing her thoughts out, out into empty space. Fire, answer me, please answer me. Tell me it isn’t true. Please, Fire, I can’t stand to lose -to lose-
Saf holds her in his arms again while she cries.
“She asked me to do her a favor,” he says quietly, stroking her hair, “before the end.”
::
Bitterblue dreams that night of a bridge-she’s not sure where. Looking off one side, she can see King’s City in its explosion of color and sumptuousness, the Winged River flowing far beneath. Looking off the other, she can see her own city, and her own river.
Fire is there, in a plain gown and leaning on a cane, her extraordinary hair uncovered. She looks exactly as Bitterblue last saw her, complete with the tiredness in her eyes and the obvious stiffness in her limbs. Somehow, this is comforting. It feels more as if it actually is Fire.
Fire is there, and Fire comes to embrace her, with the river a gently hushing noise in the background and Bitterblue’s own breathing echoing in her ears.
Bitterblue, says Fire, I will never leave you.
::
Bitterblue wakes up, her heart heavy with grief and love.
“I know,” she says, simply. And gets up.
There’s work to be done.
Fandom: Graceling/Fire/Bitterblue
Author: plalligator
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Fire, Bitterblue; side mentions of Fire/Brigan and Bitterblue/Saf.
Rating/Warning(s): PG-13, major character death
Summary: Homecomings, atonement, departures. As it turns out, advice from Fire's past is surprisingly relevant to Bitterblue's present.
Notes: I think my Bitterblue feelings may surpass even my Fire feelings and my Katsa feelings. That book was a four-hundred-page long, beautifully written punch to the gut.
::
Homecomings (history don’t repeat itself but it sure does rhyme)
The whole of King's City is bathed in the Lady Fire's joy as she returns from the western lands, whether they know it or not.
(Yes, no longer just the lady monster, but in fact, the Lady Fire. Fire, who has cried so many times in her long life, cried of joy on her realization of that. It was a mercy to her, a small and unexpected kindness, that she was a person to them. Not a monster, but a person.)
Brigan can feel it, she knows, as they near the palace, because amusement and pleasure radiate from him, little waves washing up out of the depths of his mind. Pleasure at her joy.
Successful trip? He inquires, from where he's making his way down to meet her as she returns to the green house.
Oh, Brigan, she cries. You have no idea! The girl queen, the lady queen, I should say, of Monsea-
Calm down, love, he sends to her. He is hurrying across the courtyard, his coat hastily thrown on over his shoulders to protect against the chill biting through the air, his hair silver and his eyes as clear and grey as ever. She goes to meet him as fast as her aging legs will carry her, and if there's one thing she never tires of it's the way her heart eases on coming home to him.
"Come on," he says. "Everyone's impatient to hear the news."
::
Nash's office is, as usual, very crowded. Besides Nash at his desk, and Clara and Garan on one of the sofa's, and any number of advisors and important people, there are Nash's children (not so very young anymore, hardly children, really) and her nephew Aran, and Hanna sidling in the door after them, wearing battered riding clothes and smelling of horse and cold. She flings her arms around Fire with an enthusiasm that seems to belong more to her five year old self than the fifty-four year old commander of the King's Army.
"Welcome back, Mother," she says, kissing Fire's cheek. "I take it everything went well? Here," she maneuvers Fire to a seat on the opposite sofa. Fire reaches out across the desk to squeeze Nash's hand in greeting.
"Welcome back, little sister," he says, smiling a quick, fond smile. "Won't you tell us what you've learned?"
"Yes, please do, Fire," says Clara. "Garan has been worrying whether we'll have to spend more money for spies now that the Seven Kingdoms know of us."
"I wasn't," says Garan. "I'm retired. I leave the worrying to other unfortunate souls now."
"I don't think any worrying will be necessary," says Fire, smiling, for this is so very good news.
And she tells them the story of the young queen of Monsea, the daughter of the Graceling boy by the name of Immiker; the daughter of the boy who killed Archer.
"Lord King,” she concludes, “I respectfully advise that we keep communication open with Monsea. They're on their way to stability, and their queen is wise and fair, but she's young and she will need our help."
Garan raises his eyebrows, and asks the question hanging heavy and unspoken in the room.
"You trust the daughter of that man? After what he did? Think carefully, Fire, before you trust someone who was raised by him and borne by him. Even if she is not evil, she may be weakminded or easy to control."
"He killed her mother," says Fire, simply, "and he made the man who was like a father to her commit terrible crimes that drove him out of his mind. There are men who died just months ago, in front of her eyes, because of what Leck did more than ten years ago. There’s nothing of him in her, only the sorrow he forced on her.”
They are all watching her intently.
“Do you know what she said about me when she arrived?” she continues, trying to make them understand. “She said ‘you have brought a woman who controls minds into a castle of people particularly vulnerable to such things,’ and she was ready to turn us all back out into the snow. She had the strongest mind of all of them. I would trust her,” says Fire, nearly fifty years after Archer’s death, “with my life.”
::
A fire crackles in the fireplace of the green house, throwing up shadows onto the wall.
You should have seen her, she whispers into his mind absently. She was crying, Brigan, and she was so full of sorrow, but her mind was so strong. And she stood so tall.
Brigan smiles down at his book, amusement radiating gently from him.
What?
He opens a memory to her. It’s a little faded around the edges but still clear, of Fire from years ago striding through a field hospital, dying soldiers all around her. Sadness is clear on her face, but calm and quiet sadness.
She’s us, says Fire, awed both by his revelation and her own. She’s you and Nash trying to rebuild a broken kingdom, and she’s me in-everything.
In one sense, Bitterblue might have it easier, because she had not loved Leck, and never felt torn between her father and her country. But she also had it harder.
“What do you think?” she asks aloud after a minute.
He shuts his book, considering.
“I agree with your judgement of character, as always, Fire. But we must be cautious. If the Seven Kingdoms really are as unstable as you say-well. We will simply have to choose carefully in our allies.” He pauses for a moment. “I should like to meet Queen Bitterblue. She makes you very happy.”
“Brigan, I-” I never would have thought that I’d reach the point where the fact that my worst enemy survived to live a long and healthy life, and bear children-I never would have thought that I would be thankful for that.
“Things change,” says Brigan. “I am thankful for Cansrel if only because without him, you would not exist.”
::
Atonement (my life is an apology for the life of my father)
“I never would have thought,” says Bitterblue, nearly a year and a half later, at the foot of the bridge over the Winged River as she and Fire watch the river leap and dance in the spring sunlight. “I never would have thought,” she continues, “that I should be so glad for something my father built.” Her mouth turns up at the corners. “My own Winged Bridge, I mean. And for everything in this land. I should think I’d hate it, because he loved it, and was obsessed with it. But I can’t seem to.”
She looks better, Fire observes with not only a monster’s innate sense but with a old woman’s knack for knowing the moods of children. Bitterblue is a lot less pale and wan than she was. Her face has lost the last remnants of baby fat, but her body has filled out, no doubt due to regular meals and the long, slow recede of darkness and evil from her life.
Her hair is braided and looped on top of her head like a crown, and though her clothes are plain, she carries herself like a queen, even against the explosive glory of King’s City, which no doubt overwhelms her.
She hasn’t been crying.
Fire smiles, leans on her cane.
Things change. We can find things to be thankful for in the most unexpected of places.
“Not all places.”
No. Not all places.
“I didn’t love him,” Bitterblue says, dry-eyed. “Never. I’ve never been sorry that he’s dead. Just sorry he was king. I am queen of Monsea, and I would give that up if it meant he had never been king. Or never been Graced. Or never been born.”
When I first met Brigan, says Fire thoughtfully, as Bitterblue offers an arm to Fire for her to lean on, and they begin to walk back to the palace. Or rather, one of the first times I met Brigan, before I had actually spoken to him, when we were both hardly older than you, I was hiding in a stable. In my horse’s stall.
Bitterblue glances sidelong at her.
“Horse’s stall?”
I couldn’t sleep. It was the only thing that brought me comfort enough. I overheard a conversation between Brigan and his mother. He was talking about his duty to the country and to the army, and do you know what he said? He said “My life is an apology for the life of my father.”
She feels Bitterblue’s mind descend into turmoil.
I understood that more clearly than I understood almost anything. Brigan understood. Nash understood. You, too understand. Isn’t that right, Lady Queen?
“Yes,” says Bitterblue, heart in her throat. “I understand that I’m never going to be able to do enough.”
Her mind is filled with everyone she’s ever known, or seen, or passed in the street who had some mark or injury or harm done to them. Like Fire’s missing fingers, the cook Anna’s lame arm, a gardener whose father is dead. How she wonders, every time, if it was her father who did it.
Just as suddenly, though, Bitterblue pushes the thoughts away, and forces the thoughts out of her head. Fire withdraws, feeling a little ashamed for peeking. She should have known better.
Please don’t look into my mind, thinks Bitterblue. But thank you.
::
Departures (I will never leave you)
You’re sad to see them go.
Bitterblue turns from the window where she’s been staring out over the city, even though Katsa and Po have long since galloped out of sight to go raise trouble in Estill or Sunder.
They have to go, Bitterblue thinks to her with precision. They’ll be back.
Her control has improved even more under Brigan’s tutelage, and she can open a thought to Fire while letting none of her deeper thoughts through. Fire understands. For Bitterblue, it is crucial that she knows her thoughts are her own. She sighs.
I’m just so tired of everyone leaving me.
Fire reaches for her hand, entwining Bitterblue’s slim, calloused hand into her own gnarled and wrinkled one. She knows what it is for people to leave, for people to never come back or to never even be there in the first place.
My dear, I will never leave you.
And she knows the love that Bitterblue opens to her is real.
::
Almost five years later, someone enters Bitterblue’s office. Without looking up from the papers she’s studying, she speaks.
“Yes, we do need to keep the vetting process for appointees to the ministries. I know it takes up time, I know the queen should be focusing on more important things, but I need to be involved. We’re building from the ground-up here, and I’m not going to let it go wrong.”
“Sparks,” says a voice from the doorway. She looks up, surprised.
“Saf!”
He’s taller than he was, and his skin more sun-darkened, and he’s such a welcome sight that she nearly knocks over her chair in her rush to embrace him. His arms are strong around her back, but after a moment he takes her forearms and pushes her back to look her in the face.
“Sparks,” he says again, something painful and furtive in his eyes. Like he’s afraid to speak.
“What it is?” she demands. “Bad news from the Dells?”
He looks away, and she is very afraid. Of all the things he’s told her, there’s never been anything so bad he couldn’t look her in the face while he said it.
“It happened peacefully. In her own bed, with her family by her side,” he says softly, and Bitterblue knows what’s happened.
“Oh,” she says, dumbly. Oh. Oh, Fire, Fire, she thinks, pushing her thoughts out, out into empty space. Fire, answer me, please answer me. Tell me it isn’t true. Please, Fire, I can’t stand to lose -to lose-
Saf holds her in his arms again while she cries.
“She asked me to do her a favor,” he says quietly, stroking her hair, “before the end.”
::
Bitterblue dreams that night of a bridge-she’s not sure where. Looking off one side, she can see King’s City in its explosion of color and sumptuousness, the Winged River flowing far beneath. Looking off the other, she can see her own city, and her own river.
Fire is there, in a plain gown and leaning on a cane, her extraordinary hair uncovered. She looks exactly as Bitterblue last saw her, complete with the tiredness in her eyes and the obvious stiffness in her limbs. Somehow, this is comforting. It feels more as if it actually is Fire.
Fire is there, and Fire comes to embrace her, with the river a gently hushing noise in the background and Bitterblue’s own breathing echoing in her ears.
Bitterblue, says Fire, I will never leave you.
::
Bitterblue wakes up, her heart heavy with grief and love.
“I know,” she says, simply. And gets up.
There’s work to be done.