Title: Not With the Empty Hollowness
Author:
angevin2Recipient:
speak_me_fairPlay: Richard II
Characters/Pairing: Richard/Anne, Richard/Aumerle, Richard/Robert de Vere, with reference to Richard/Isabel and Richard/minions
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1876
Warnings: Somewhat graphic illness and decay; medieval English attitudes toward the Irish; gratuitous vomit;
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Comments 14
ANYWAY.
Images that stood out for me and were just so immediate and perfect that I ached: Anne singing. Oh God. That just -- there is no comfort possible for Richard having witnessed that.
Robert's desperation: his own eyes were red-rimmed and wet, and his voice sharp. Because sharpness in someone's voice is so often used to mean anger, and here it's despair, and that's perfect.
Richard knowing what he's doing to Edward and unable to stop -- I kept thinking of the quote at this point "The wood of the Cross is cut from the Tree of Knowledge", and marvelling at how apt the whole thing was.
The tomb. Just that entire little perfect section ( ... )
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Also you were a pretty major influence on the bits with Edward especially. And I kind of get now why people don't usually write Richard/Aumerle from Richard's POV; it's really hard to strike the right balance between affection and toxicity (of course in the Victorian AU Richard talks about it all the time, which helps, though I think writing Richard's POV would still be hard).
(Also also, I was especially proud of the tomb part myself. :D)
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(and you should be. Because it was SIMPLY AMAZING.)
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...which probably does make for a more effective Richard POV, but still!
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I realized belatedly that my epigraph should have been the "thou King Richard's tomb, and not King Richard" bit. I've changed it to that for the AO3 version.
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These two sentences say everything about how much pain Richard is in. I want to hug him and tell him that everything will be all right...and it won't. And I wish that I could give him his Anne and his Robbie, because he loves them both so much, and what's a life without love?
Also, I want to smack Henry for not going to Richard's funeral. I'm sure that, being Henry, there were good and sufficient reasons for that--mostly political--but I still want to box his ears for not going.
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To be entirely fair to Henry, he did attend the requiem mass held in London, but the actual burial was a very low-key affair. There's a really interesting section in Paul Strohm's England's Empty Throne about Richard's burial and reburial.
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