"tawny-gold"
Title: tawny-gold
Fandom: um, a mixture of Mary Renault's Fire from Heaven and Plutarch’s Lives (and I’m totally only putting that because I don’t want to put historical RPS :D)
Characters: Alexander, Hephaistion
Word Count: 2129
Rating: PG
Summary: They fought at Chaeronea, and they were victorious - but here, now, there is more in the air than war. This is life and death, at its most elemental. Alexander/Hephaistion, ish.
Warnings: pass
Notes: Written for hc_bingo, (my bingo card is lurking here) for the prompt lacerations/knife wounds. See if you can guess which bingo(/line) I'm doing first. :D ♥
THIS IS REALLY WEIRD, and I don’t know what I think about it - but, I kinda half-like it. That’s a really good selling point, isn’t it? :D So yeah: I FORBID YOU ALL FROM READING THIS. Ttly. Is it a dream, is it not a dream, wtf is going on... All these are questions I have no idea how to answer.
tawny-gold
Alexander is dreaming.
He knows this. For him, there has always been a peculiar sharpness to the quality of his dreams-a sharpness that leaves his waking life feeling dim, like stepping with muted footfalls through mist-shrouded trees-and he feels that sharpness now, seizing his vision. The dream is in him, in his bones and his heart, and it tells him with the voice of a hero, to wait.
He waits.
Brittle grass rustles at his knees, and his bare feel nestle in the cool soil. He wears none of the finery of Persia, of his newly-yoked peoples - he sports simple clothes: the plain chiton of his youth, the bare head of the childish hunt. He has no weapon, no javelin or sword, and he stands upon a plain, gazing off to the mountains in the distance. They are snow-capped, slathers of icy white tracing crevasses in their ancient sides - but they are far away, distant. Nevertheless, he feels like he ought to be able to just reach out and scoop them up into the palm of his hand. They are his, after all-his as much as Macedon or Egypt or the ashen shell of the palace at Persepolis-but the mountains defy him. They are out of his reach.
Autumnal wind curls itself around him, but doesn’t touch him. He feels no cold.
“Do you remember?”
And it is a voice that brings his battered heart to his throat - brings it to his throat and squeezes it to beat faster, faster: an impossible voice, a voice that cannot be. But, he reminds himself, this is a dream. Alexander turns, and the grass rushes against his calves. Bare skin prickles, and he can suddenly feel the breeze.
Hephaistion watches him, eyes liquidly serene. “Do you remember?” he asks, again.
For a moment, Alexander cannot answer, can only look.
Hephaistion is like him, unarmoured, unarmed, barefooted. At his side, with fur that blends to the tawny-yellow grass, sits a lion - and the lion watches Alexander, too, with the same look that is in Hephaistion’s eyes: calmness, darkness, smoothness. Hephaistion’s hand rests on its head, and his fingertips are lost in the shaggy mane. “Alexander,” he says. “Do you remember?”
“I remember,” Alexander answers, softly, and his palms are warm. “What of it?”
Hephaistion’s chiton lies still against him, even while Alexander’s seethes around his thighs like his mother’s pets. The breeze only touches one of them, and the lion’s mane is motionless. “Chaeronea,” Hephaistion says. “This is where we fought. This is where you led, so long ago.”
For a moment, Alexander sees them: the men, their rank and file, ghostly outlines with fear tamped down in their eyes; the horses, trained for battle but feeling the fear on the air. He can’t tell if it’s a memory, or if they are there truly there, in part - his dreaming remembering their spirits. He remembers. “What of it?” he says, again.
“Why does your dreaming bring you here?” Hephaistion asks, and his tone is not that of a question asked - it is Aristotle’s tone: a tone which whispers that the answer is already known, but wishes to be voiced, regardless.
“I am not a soothsayer, Hephaistion,” Alexander says, shortly. “It is not for me to read dreams.”
“But it is your dream,” Hephaistion counters, and the lion stirs, muscles rippling fur like the surface of Ocean’s stream. Hephaistion’s lips turn upwards, in a fond smile. “I know you, Alexander. You do not need some craven mystic to tell you what to think.”
Alexander doesn’t speak. He feels small, suddenly - small in the middle of the empty plain, with grass rippling in the wind, echoing the stroke of Hephaistion’s fingers through the lion’s mane. “The grass,” he says. “There was no grass.”
“The plain was made fertile with blood,” Hephaistion answers, and there’s a sudden darkness to his voice. “With our blood.”
And he is bleeding.
A gash rips down Hephaistion’s chest, splitting his clothes and seeping crimson into the fabric. Alexander takes a step forward, impulsively, but then he doesn’t move - something keeps him there, holds him in place. (It’s just a flesh wound.) And it’s strange, because Alexander’s consciousness didn’t remark on it before, but now that he considers it, he sees that that wound has been rent into Hephaistion’s flesh from the moment he first saw him, unmoved by the wind.
Dreams, Alexander thinks, absently.
Hephaistion looks down, presses his other hand to his chest. Blood sluices from between his fingers. “It was a Theban spear that did this,” he says, almost affectionately - but that dark timbre still runs underneath his words. “In the fighting, after the charge. He tried to rend me in two, but his aim was off. His dead friend hung from his arm.”
“You didn’t say,” Alexander says.
“It’s just a scratch,” Hephaistion says, passing it off as nothing as blood reddens a stain in the paleness of his chiton. “You never noticed the scar, after.”
Alexander thinks of the roughness of Hephaistion’s skin, and the blush that it took under the firelight. “Is this true?” he asks. “Did you bear that scar, or is it my mind, conjuring things it can never now know?” And there is an anger in his tone, now - an anger for things lost, and an anger at his mind for taunting him like this, showing him conjectures that he does not want to see.
Hephaistion’s gaze is black, and the lion licks its jaws, yawning wide, pink and black. “Does it matter?” he asks, answering a question with a question.
Alexander steps forward, brittle grass biting under his toughened feet.
And they are silent, enraptured in one another.
It was always like this, when they were boys - when there was no distraction, and they would spend days wandering the woods, following the vixen’s trail in the snow or stalking the skittish deer through the summer heat. They became wrapped up in each other, above all else, even if only for a moment, and it would be Ptolemy’s laughter or Harpalus’ jeering that would shock them out of it - but now, there is no one else, no one save the lion, and the lion has Hephaistion’s eyes.
Hephaistion’s gaze is heavy. “Do you remember?” he says.
“I remember that you are eight months dead,” Alexander says, and the words stick in his mouth.
A gentle smile curves Hephaistion’s lips. “True,” he says. “And you gloried me.”
Alexander thinks about his rage, and his grief, and the cold roughness of Hephaistion’s cheek as he was placed upon his pyre. “Cleomenes made you a hero,” he answers, even though his tongue feels defiled in speaking that greasy satrap’s name, “in Egypt, where they will remember you, always. It is less than you deserve. More is yet to come, I promise you.” And he does promise, because Hephaistion’s name must be remembered, cannot be forgotten.
The smile is still in place, distorting Hephaistion’s expression, but there is little warmth behind it - just memory, a memory that Alexander cannot read, and sadness. “Maybe,” he says, and the lion butts its head back against his hand. His fingertips scratch its head; it rumbles, low in its throat. “But they will remember you, more than me. Alexander, ringing down the years.”
Alexander laughs, just a little - a derisive laugh, but derision at the words, not their speaker. “Alexander is just a name,” he says, full of scorn. “I have not accomplished all that I can. I will make the expedition to Arabia, in your memory, and then they will remember me, then I will deserve to be great.”
And there is sorrow in Hephaistion’s eyes. “Do you remember?” he asks, haltingly, as if it a question he does not want to know the answer to - and Alexander does.
He breathes, sharply, even though he no longer needs to, and he steps back, startled. “I-” he starts, and sees Craterus, leaning over him, asking him to name a successor before he slips away. “I cannot,” he says, and it means so much.
Hephaistion nods, briefly, and the lion shucks off his hand, rising beside him. Its tail swishes snakelike, riding against its lean sides. “This is not a dream, Alexander,” Hephaistion says, and then pauses, and half a smile twitches his lips - and it’s a real smile, full of that irony and humour that used to thrum in his every living word. “Not unless you wish to call it the last dream.”
“I cannot die,” Alexander says, and he is cold, even though the wind has dropped.
“All men die,” Hephaistion answers, and there is a laconic fringe in his voice, “and none get to choose their time.”
Alexander says nothing to that. There is nothing he can say, really.
The lion watches him. The wind has dropped around them, but now it seems to ruffle through the lion’s mane-corn swaying in the wind-and it steps forward, through the grass. Its paws make no noise in the quiet of the plain, and it pads past Alexander. He turns, unable to help himself, and watches it go. Before long, it is lost in the tawny-brittle grass.
Alexander looks away from the lion, and back to Hephaistion - and there is a relaxed line to Hephaistion’s shoulders. “What is that?” he asks.
The hand that rested in the lion’s fur is now spread across Hephaistion’s bloody chest. “Your life,” he answers, and it’s almost a question. “Your spirit.”
There are many questions on Alexander’s tongue, but the one that he voices is, “It had your eyes.”
The smile that quirks Hephaistion’s lips is almost shy - a smile of their childhood. “You said once,” he answers, with blood in his shirt, “that I was Alexander, too.” (That is answer enough. Aristotle taught them both.)
And the pressure that has been building in Alexander’s chest-building and growing and piling pressure upon his heart-suddenly releases, driving him forward, and his bare feet barely touch the ground as he moves to Hephaistion, to his friend, to the hole that has been in his life for too long, but no time at all. Hephaistion’s hand drops, away from his chest, and the darkness of his eyes is a mirror to the blueness of Alexander’s - and Alexander reaches out, still half a pace away, and presses his palm to the bloodiness of Hephaistion’s chest.
“You should have told me,” he says, softly.
“You were busy,” Hephaistion answers. “You were general for the first time. Your place was with your father, not tending to a friend’s scratch.” And he takes Alexander’s wrist, just gently, and moves his hand. “See? The bleeding has already stopped.”
Nothing more than the edges of the ragged gap in Hephaistion’s chiton are bloody, now, and the wound might still be unhealed, but it is less.
“Still,” he says, and his fingers tighten in the pale cloth, almost without his consent. “You should have told me.”
And he sees that Hephaistion understands, because it’s not about a wound, a tear in his flesh: it never was - just as the plain and the grass and the garb of their youth is irrelevant, too. Hephaistion’s hand moves, and the fingers that were entwined with the lion entwine with Alexander’s hair. “I have missed you,” he says, with darkness and a smile in his dark eyes.
The hardness of Alexander’s lips loosens, turns. “Yes,” he says, and it is an exhalation of the breeze around them.
Hephaistion doesn’t smile, because relief is no time for smiling. His hand curls to the back of Alexander’s head, and pulls him forward, forward, until there is barely a fingerspace between them, and their foreheads touch, ghost together.
“I thought my death would be glorious,” Alexander says, thoughtfully. (It’s not regretful, because there is no point in regretting the inevitable. Perhaps he regrets what he could not do, but that is done, now. It is done.) “That I would die with a sword in my hand - not invalided, with my men squabbling around me.” And there is no bitterness.
“Your death was the death of a great man,” Hephaistion answers. “That makes it glorious, no matter its surroundings.”
Alexander smiles. “Hardly. And you know that.”
“Maybe so,” Hephaistion answers, and he’s smiling, too, a smile that lightens Alexander’s heart, “but it will still do you good to hear it.”
The wound under Alexander’s touch closes, and heals, and fades to a scar.
Hephaistion’s fingers curl in the hair at the nape of Alexander’s neck, like they curled in the lion’s mane, and that touch is a comfort - and it is warmth, in the ambient chill that slides down from the snow-capped mountains; slides down to taunt him with how much he cannot touch.
finis
Fandom: um, a mixture of Mary Renault's Fire from Heaven and Plutarch’s Lives (and I’m totally only putting that because I don’t want to put historical RPS :D)
Characters: Alexander, Hephaistion
Word Count: 2129
Rating: PG
Summary: They fought at Chaeronea, and they were victorious - but here, now, there is more in the air than war. This is life and death, at its most elemental. Alexander/Hephaistion, ish.
Warnings: pass
Notes: Written for hc_bingo, (my bingo card is lurking here) for the prompt lacerations/knife wounds. See if you can guess which bingo(/line) I'm doing first. :D ♥
THIS IS REALLY WEIRD, and I don’t know what I think about it - but, I kinda half-like it. That’s a really good selling point, isn’t it? :D So yeah: I FORBID YOU ALL FROM READING THIS. Ttly. Is it a dream, is it not a dream, wtf is going on... All these are questions I have no idea how to answer.
tawny-gold
Alexander is dreaming.
He knows this. For him, there has always been a peculiar sharpness to the quality of his dreams-a sharpness that leaves his waking life feeling dim, like stepping with muted footfalls through mist-shrouded trees-and he feels that sharpness now, seizing his vision. The dream is in him, in his bones and his heart, and it tells him with the voice of a hero, to wait.
He waits.
Brittle grass rustles at his knees, and his bare feel nestle in the cool soil. He wears none of the finery of Persia, of his newly-yoked peoples - he sports simple clothes: the plain chiton of his youth, the bare head of the childish hunt. He has no weapon, no javelin or sword, and he stands upon a plain, gazing off to the mountains in the distance. They are snow-capped, slathers of icy white tracing crevasses in their ancient sides - but they are far away, distant. Nevertheless, he feels like he ought to be able to just reach out and scoop them up into the palm of his hand. They are his, after all-his as much as Macedon or Egypt or the ashen shell of the palace at Persepolis-but the mountains defy him. They are out of his reach.
Autumnal wind curls itself around him, but doesn’t touch him. He feels no cold.
“Do you remember?”
And it is a voice that brings his battered heart to his throat - brings it to his throat and squeezes it to beat faster, faster: an impossible voice, a voice that cannot be. But, he reminds himself, this is a dream. Alexander turns, and the grass rushes against his calves. Bare skin prickles, and he can suddenly feel the breeze.
Hephaistion watches him, eyes liquidly serene. “Do you remember?” he asks, again.
For a moment, Alexander cannot answer, can only look.
Hephaistion is like him, unarmoured, unarmed, barefooted. At his side, with fur that blends to the tawny-yellow grass, sits a lion - and the lion watches Alexander, too, with the same look that is in Hephaistion’s eyes: calmness, darkness, smoothness. Hephaistion’s hand rests on its head, and his fingertips are lost in the shaggy mane. “Alexander,” he says. “Do you remember?”
“I remember,” Alexander answers, softly, and his palms are warm. “What of it?”
Hephaistion’s chiton lies still against him, even while Alexander’s seethes around his thighs like his mother’s pets. The breeze only touches one of them, and the lion’s mane is motionless. “Chaeronea,” Hephaistion says. “This is where we fought. This is where you led, so long ago.”
For a moment, Alexander sees them: the men, their rank and file, ghostly outlines with fear tamped down in their eyes; the horses, trained for battle but feeling the fear on the air. He can’t tell if it’s a memory, or if they are there truly there, in part - his dreaming remembering their spirits. He remembers. “What of it?” he says, again.
“Why does your dreaming bring you here?” Hephaistion asks, and his tone is not that of a question asked - it is Aristotle’s tone: a tone which whispers that the answer is already known, but wishes to be voiced, regardless.
“I am not a soothsayer, Hephaistion,” Alexander says, shortly. “It is not for me to read dreams.”
“But it is your dream,” Hephaistion counters, and the lion stirs, muscles rippling fur like the surface of Ocean’s stream. Hephaistion’s lips turn upwards, in a fond smile. “I know you, Alexander. You do not need some craven mystic to tell you what to think.”
Alexander doesn’t speak. He feels small, suddenly - small in the middle of the empty plain, with grass rippling in the wind, echoing the stroke of Hephaistion’s fingers through the lion’s mane. “The grass,” he says. “There was no grass.”
“The plain was made fertile with blood,” Hephaistion answers, and there’s a sudden darkness to his voice. “With our blood.”
And he is bleeding.
A gash rips down Hephaistion’s chest, splitting his clothes and seeping crimson into the fabric. Alexander takes a step forward, impulsively, but then he doesn’t move - something keeps him there, holds him in place. (It’s just a flesh wound.) And it’s strange, because Alexander’s consciousness didn’t remark on it before, but now that he considers it, he sees that that wound has been rent into Hephaistion’s flesh from the moment he first saw him, unmoved by the wind.
Dreams, Alexander thinks, absently.
Hephaistion looks down, presses his other hand to his chest. Blood sluices from between his fingers. “It was a Theban spear that did this,” he says, almost affectionately - but that dark timbre still runs underneath his words. “In the fighting, after the charge. He tried to rend me in two, but his aim was off. His dead friend hung from his arm.”
“You didn’t say,” Alexander says.
“It’s just a scratch,” Hephaistion says, passing it off as nothing as blood reddens a stain in the paleness of his chiton. “You never noticed the scar, after.”
Alexander thinks of the roughness of Hephaistion’s skin, and the blush that it took under the firelight. “Is this true?” he asks. “Did you bear that scar, or is it my mind, conjuring things it can never now know?” And there is an anger in his tone, now - an anger for things lost, and an anger at his mind for taunting him like this, showing him conjectures that he does not want to see.
Hephaistion’s gaze is black, and the lion licks its jaws, yawning wide, pink and black. “Does it matter?” he asks, answering a question with a question.
Alexander steps forward, brittle grass biting under his toughened feet.
And they are silent, enraptured in one another.
It was always like this, when they were boys - when there was no distraction, and they would spend days wandering the woods, following the vixen’s trail in the snow or stalking the skittish deer through the summer heat. They became wrapped up in each other, above all else, even if only for a moment, and it would be Ptolemy’s laughter or Harpalus’ jeering that would shock them out of it - but now, there is no one else, no one save the lion, and the lion has Hephaistion’s eyes.
Hephaistion’s gaze is heavy. “Do you remember?” he says.
“I remember that you are eight months dead,” Alexander says, and the words stick in his mouth.
A gentle smile curves Hephaistion’s lips. “True,” he says. “And you gloried me.”
Alexander thinks about his rage, and his grief, and the cold roughness of Hephaistion’s cheek as he was placed upon his pyre. “Cleomenes made you a hero,” he answers, even though his tongue feels defiled in speaking that greasy satrap’s name, “in Egypt, where they will remember you, always. It is less than you deserve. More is yet to come, I promise you.” And he does promise, because Hephaistion’s name must be remembered, cannot be forgotten.
The smile is still in place, distorting Hephaistion’s expression, but there is little warmth behind it - just memory, a memory that Alexander cannot read, and sadness. “Maybe,” he says, and the lion butts its head back against his hand. His fingertips scratch its head; it rumbles, low in its throat. “But they will remember you, more than me. Alexander, ringing down the years.”
Alexander laughs, just a little - a derisive laugh, but derision at the words, not their speaker. “Alexander is just a name,” he says, full of scorn. “I have not accomplished all that I can. I will make the expedition to Arabia, in your memory, and then they will remember me, then I will deserve to be great.”
And there is sorrow in Hephaistion’s eyes. “Do you remember?” he asks, haltingly, as if it a question he does not want to know the answer to - and Alexander does.
He breathes, sharply, even though he no longer needs to, and he steps back, startled. “I-” he starts, and sees Craterus, leaning over him, asking him to name a successor before he slips away. “I cannot,” he says, and it means so much.
Hephaistion nods, briefly, and the lion shucks off his hand, rising beside him. Its tail swishes snakelike, riding against its lean sides. “This is not a dream, Alexander,” Hephaistion says, and then pauses, and half a smile twitches his lips - and it’s a real smile, full of that irony and humour that used to thrum in his every living word. “Not unless you wish to call it the last dream.”
“I cannot die,” Alexander says, and he is cold, even though the wind has dropped.
“All men die,” Hephaistion answers, and there is a laconic fringe in his voice, “and none get to choose their time.”
Alexander says nothing to that. There is nothing he can say, really.
The lion watches him. The wind has dropped around them, but now it seems to ruffle through the lion’s mane-corn swaying in the wind-and it steps forward, through the grass. Its paws make no noise in the quiet of the plain, and it pads past Alexander. He turns, unable to help himself, and watches it go. Before long, it is lost in the tawny-brittle grass.
Alexander looks away from the lion, and back to Hephaistion - and there is a relaxed line to Hephaistion’s shoulders. “What is that?” he asks.
The hand that rested in the lion’s fur is now spread across Hephaistion’s bloody chest. “Your life,” he answers, and it’s almost a question. “Your spirit.”
There are many questions on Alexander’s tongue, but the one that he voices is, “It had your eyes.”
The smile that quirks Hephaistion’s lips is almost shy - a smile of their childhood. “You said once,” he answers, with blood in his shirt, “that I was Alexander, too.” (That is answer enough. Aristotle taught them both.)
And the pressure that has been building in Alexander’s chest-building and growing and piling pressure upon his heart-suddenly releases, driving him forward, and his bare feet barely touch the ground as he moves to Hephaistion, to his friend, to the hole that has been in his life for too long, but no time at all. Hephaistion’s hand drops, away from his chest, and the darkness of his eyes is a mirror to the blueness of Alexander’s - and Alexander reaches out, still half a pace away, and presses his palm to the bloodiness of Hephaistion’s chest.
“You should have told me,” he says, softly.
“You were busy,” Hephaistion answers. “You were general for the first time. Your place was with your father, not tending to a friend’s scratch.” And he takes Alexander’s wrist, just gently, and moves his hand. “See? The bleeding has already stopped.”
Nothing more than the edges of the ragged gap in Hephaistion’s chiton are bloody, now, and the wound might still be unhealed, but it is less.
“Still,” he says, and his fingers tighten in the pale cloth, almost without his consent. “You should have told me.”
And he sees that Hephaistion understands, because it’s not about a wound, a tear in his flesh: it never was - just as the plain and the grass and the garb of their youth is irrelevant, too. Hephaistion’s hand moves, and the fingers that were entwined with the lion entwine with Alexander’s hair. “I have missed you,” he says, with darkness and a smile in his dark eyes.
The hardness of Alexander’s lips loosens, turns. “Yes,” he says, and it is an exhalation of the breeze around them.
Hephaistion doesn’t smile, because relief is no time for smiling. His hand curls to the back of Alexander’s head, and pulls him forward, forward, until there is barely a fingerspace between them, and their foreheads touch, ghost together.
“I thought my death would be glorious,” Alexander says, thoughtfully. (It’s not regretful, because there is no point in regretting the inevitable. Perhaps he regrets what he could not do, but that is done, now. It is done.) “That I would die with a sword in my hand - not invalided, with my men squabbling around me.” And there is no bitterness.
“Your death was the death of a great man,” Hephaistion answers. “That makes it glorious, no matter its surroundings.”
Alexander smiles. “Hardly. And you know that.”
“Maybe so,” Hephaistion answers, and he’s smiling, too, a smile that lightens Alexander’s heart, “but it will still do you good to hear it.”
The wound under Alexander’s touch closes, and heals, and fades to a scar.
Hephaistion’s fingers curl in the hair at the nape of Alexander’s neck, like they curled in the lion’s mane, and that touch is a comfort - and it is warmth, in the ambient chill that slides down from the snow-capped mountains; slides down to taunt him with how much he cannot touch.
finis