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starwardbestrewn2022-02-11 04:02 am
oncedriven) wrote in starwardbestrewn2022-02-11 04:02 am
Entry tags:
as someone told me lately
There's no point in pretending.
On the edge of a battle finished, you sit on the ruins of an armored walker, familiar companion of gun lance across your lap. In theory, you should be tending to it, cleaning the powder from the barrel and checking the blade for nicks.
In practice... Well. In practice, you've the sight of your own face, twisted, your own voice echoing up to a moon that no longer exists -
O brother... Nael! Your name shall live on for eternity!
"An eternity in infamy," you whisper to the haft of the weapon laid across your lap, "was never what I wished for you."
Nael is long past the point where he can hear. The words are comfort to no one, nor explanation to the man you can feel hovering behind your shoulder, whose gaze you refuse to meet.
But there is only so long you can go without acknowledging him.
"...Gaius."
"Darnus," he replies, and that is - the one thing that is always true, no matter what else you are, whether you wear your own face or the mask, the name given to you at birth or the name given to the infant beside you.
Silence. And then Gaius says, cutting in its simplicity, "How long?"
"My brother has been dead for more than twenty years," you say. "If you seek the legatus of the VIIth Legion - there was never any other."
Heavy footsteps, as he comes to stand parallel with you, still too tied up in his dignity as the man who was once a wolf to debase himself by sitting on debris. You, ever a raven, feel no shame in alighting on the remains of war.
"That legatus died upon the fields of Cartenau," he says. Not a question, but not entirely a statement, either. You shift to look up at him, pushing white hair back past your vision.
You say, "I have not the patience for half-thoughts and implications today, Gaius. It may have escaped your notice, but I have had a spectactularly terrible few hours, and I need yet to sew myself up before the Ironworks returns to collect the Weapon and prepare what they can find of the girl for burial. These wounds are not for them to see - had I a say in it, they would not be for you to see, either, but fate has oft laid down her blows without regard for my wants or needs."
It is satisfying to see him flinch, just minutely, at the words what they can find.
You have never known the Black Wolf to abandon weakness once he has seen it, and so you expect him to push. You are prepared, hands curling around the haft of your weapon, but the reply you prepared for like the night before a battle doesn't come. What comes instead is, quiet, "The people of Werlyt practiced sea burial, before their occupation."
As unexpected as the words are, there is only way you can reply. "I will see it done."
Gaius does not thank you. That would be too far outside your expectations, you think. What he says, with a note of old humor, is, "I might have guessed. Whatever I did, you had to be there first, to do it with more effect. I might have guessed - should have guessed - that the same went for being used as a tool of destruction by Ascian hands."
Your shoulders relax, and you huff a laugh. "My hands were my own," you say. "E'en guided by the madness of the red moon as they were, I will not disavow them. To be the first and the best at destroying the realm of Eorzea is not something I hold as a badge of honor, Gaius. The stains of Cartenau will adorn these palms no matter how oft I paint them beneath white."
Gaius stops and assesses you - you can see it in his posture more than in his face. Your faces are unfamiliar to each other, expressions laid bare in a way that is unnatural for the ranks you used to hold, but you spent more than a decade in a political dance of two, the Emperor's favorites, the white omen of destruction and the black wolf he set upon his most stubborn enemies.
You wonder if anyone has told him, yet, that the Emperor you both strived to please was naught more than a shadow, himself. You wonder if that would change him, or if, like the wolf he is likened to, he would still be limited to the ground he walks upon, whilst you soar towards the unjust truths in the heavens.
At length, he says, "Little wonder that I did not recognize you, with how much you have changed. To think that it would be the White Raven who champions the lives of Eorzeans now..."
You laugh, the sound a caw to your heart if not your ears. "You never knew me, Gaius," you say. "I did not permit it e'en before the madness took me. You knew Nael, and though Eula be his twin, she buried much of herself that her brother might live. Things which remained when her bleached bones were unearthed from where the ruins of Dalamud entombed them within the earth, because bones were all that remained."
Gaius returns, "Disclaim all you like - I am no fool. It was much remarked-upon in the courts that the unambitious son of House Darnus was greatly changed by his father's death, lit by a new zeal for glory and the Empire. That he went from a boy who served out of expectation to one who took up his father's mantle of command and went on to surpass him is now no longer such a mystery."
It is your turn to - not flinch, but the way you look away may as well be, equally advertising of the way the blow has landed.
"If the spirit of Nael Darnus lives on in truth," you say quietly, "it is in Alphinaud Levellieur, not I. That much is true. But nei'er could I let the wrongs done to him pass unavenged. Father had no desire for a weak son, nor an improper daughter. I gave him a child who was neither, as a parting gift."
It's the closest you've ever come to admitting it. Gaius, who sees you clearer than you would like, merely replies, "I thought you had no patience for half-truths and implications."
"By the hand of Louisoix was the sin which hangs in my heavens kept from growing any larger," you say. "I repay that in guarding his grandchildren and the realm they adore. All other debts are inconsequential, for I could live to see the next coming of Allag and twould not be long enough to provide restitution for the sins of those days."
You look away from him then, the kind of looking away that would be transparently choreographed through armor neither of you has any right to wear any longer. You look out, across the battlefield, out over the collapsed machine that took the soul of a girl who wanted nothing more than to protect her family and turned it into a monster, and you say, "I can do naught for those who are lost. All I can do is fight for those who yet live - and fight that fight I shall, whatever field it leads me to. Can you say the same, Gaius?"
Have you found yet that clarity of purpose? And if not, how many more will die before you find it?
There is no forgiveness between you, because there is nothing to forgive. Only the debts you both owe to the world, encapsulated in ruby.
Gaius doesn't answer your question, but instead replies with one of his own - "And is that enough for you, White Raven? To fight and die without the glory you once sought so fervently?"
You snort, standing, balancing your weapon over your shoulder. "That's the thing you couldn't see beneath the armor, Gaius," you say, turning away and walking to where the Ironworks team has arrived and is beginning preparations to scavenge the site.
"The glory I won was always in another's name, and that was how I liked it."
On the edge of a battle finished, you sit on the ruins of an armored walker, familiar companion of gun lance across your lap. In theory, you should be tending to it, cleaning the powder from the barrel and checking the blade for nicks.
In practice... Well. In practice, you've the sight of your own face, twisted, your own voice echoing up to a moon that no longer exists -
O brother... Nael! Your name shall live on for eternity!
"An eternity in infamy," you whisper to the haft of the weapon laid across your lap, "was never what I wished for you."
Nael is long past the point where he can hear. The words are comfort to no one, nor explanation to the man you can feel hovering behind your shoulder, whose gaze you refuse to meet.
But there is only so long you can go without acknowledging him.
"...Gaius."
"Darnus," he replies, and that is - the one thing that is always true, no matter what else you are, whether you wear your own face or the mask, the name given to you at birth or the name given to the infant beside you.
Silence. And then Gaius says, cutting in its simplicity, "How long?"
"My brother has been dead for more than twenty years," you say. "If you seek the legatus of the VIIth Legion - there was never any other."
Heavy footsteps, as he comes to stand parallel with you, still too tied up in his dignity as the man who was once a wolf to debase himself by sitting on debris. You, ever a raven, feel no shame in alighting on the remains of war.
"That legatus died upon the fields of Cartenau," he says. Not a question, but not entirely a statement, either. You shift to look up at him, pushing white hair back past your vision.
You say, "I have not the patience for half-thoughts and implications today, Gaius. It may have escaped your notice, but I have had a spectactularly terrible few hours, and I need yet to sew myself up before the Ironworks returns to collect the Weapon and prepare what they can find of the girl for burial. These wounds are not for them to see - had I a say in it, they would not be for you to see, either, but fate has oft laid down her blows without regard for my wants or needs."
It is satisfying to see him flinch, just minutely, at the words what they can find.
You have never known the Black Wolf to abandon weakness once he has seen it, and so you expect him to push. You are prepared, hands curling around the haft of your weapon, but the reply you prepared for like the night before a battle doesn't come. What comes instead is, quiet, "The people of Werlyt practiced sea burial, before their occupation."
As unexpected as the words are, there is only way you can reply. "I will see it done."
Gaius does not thank you. That would be too far outside your expectations, you think. What he says, with a note of old humor, is, "I might have guessed. Whatever I did, you had to be there first, to do it with more effect. I might have guessed - should have guessed - that the same went for being used as a tool of destruction by Ascian hands."
Your shoulders relax, and you huff a laugh. "My hands were my own," you say. "E'en guided by the madness of the red moon as they were, I will not disavow them. To be the first and the best at destroying the realm of Eorzea is not something I hold as a badge of honor, Gaius. The stains of Cartenau will adorn these palms no matter how oft I paint them beneath white."
Gaius stops and assesses you - you can see it in his posture more than in his face. Your faces are unfamiliar to each other, expressions laid bare in a way that is unnatural for the ranks you used to hold, but you spent more than a decade in a political dance of two, the Emperor's favorites, the white omen of destruction and the black wolf he set upon his most stubborn enemies.
You wonder if anyone has told him, yet, that the Emperor you both strived to please was naught more than a shadow, himself. You wonder if that would change him, or if, like the wolf he is likened to, he would still be limited to the ground he walks upon, whilst you soar towards the unjust truths in the heavens.
At length, he says, "Little wonder that I did not recognize you, with how much you have changed. To think that it would be the White Raven who champions the lives of Eorzeans now..."
You laugh, the sound a caw to your heart if not your ears. "You never knew me, Gaius," you say. "I did not permit it e'en before the madness took me. You knew Nael, and though Eula be his twin, she buried much of herself that her brother might live. Things which remained when her bleached bones were unearthed from where the ruins of Dalamud entombed them within the earth, because bones were all that remained."
Gaius returns, "Disclaim all you like - I am no fool. It was much remarked-upon in the courts that the unambitious son of House Darnus was greatly changed by his father's death, lit by a new zeal for glory and the Empire. That he went from a boy who served out of expectation to one who took up his father's mantle of command and went on to surpass him is now no longer such a mystery."
It is your turn to - not flinch, but the way you look away may as well be, equally advertising of the way the blow has landed.
"If the spirit of Nael Darnus lives on in truth," you say quietly, "it is in Alphinaud Levellieur, not I. That much is true. But nei'er could I let the wrongs done to him pass unavenged. Father had no desire for a weak son, nor an improper daughter. I gave him a child who was neither, as a parting gift."
It's the closest you've ever come to admitting it. Gaius, who sees you clearer than you would like, merely replies, "I thought you had no patience for half-truths and implications."
"By the hand of Louisoix was the sin which hangs in my heavens kept from growing any larger," you say. "I repay that in guarding his grandchildren and the realm they adore. All other debts are inconsequential, for I could live to see the next coming of Allag and twould not be long enough to provide restitution for the sins of those days."
You look away from him then, the kind of looking away that would be transparently choreographed through armor neither of you has any right to wear any longer. You look out, across the battlefield, out over the collapsed machine that took the soul of a girl who wanted nothing more than to protect her family and turned it into a monster, and you say, "I can do naught for those who are lost. All I can do is fight for those who yet live - and fight that fight I shall, whatever field it leads me to. Can you say the same, Gaius?"
Have you found yet that clarity of purpose? And if not, how many more will die before you find it?
There is no forgiveness between you, because there is nothing to forgive. Only the debts you both owe to the world, encapsulated in ruby.
Gaius doesn't answer your question, but instead replies with one of his own - "And is that enough for you, White Raven? To fight and die without the glory you once sought so fervently?"
You snort, standing, balancing your weapon over your shoulder. "That's the thing you couldn't see beneath the armor, Gaius," you say, turning away and walking to where the Ironworks team has arrived and is beginning preparations to scavenge the site.
"The glory I won was always in another's name, and that was how I liked it."