fic - fluff, cont. for 2k
Nov. 10th, 2013 10:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thene posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
last_herald_mageThis contines from here. More backstory headcanon, rambling pillow talk, Stef being terrible, etc.
Strange Bedfellows
Pitch dark and trying to remember how I used to breathe, I admit he's finally tired me out. My pride can bear it, after that last day on the road, and it did take two good, satisfying bouts; we disengaged and called for dinner late enough to exasperate and perhaps scandalise the Palace staff, not that we could ever hope to keep our cohabitation from them in any event. For months, they've been the only people who knew for sure we weren't spending the nights together. We were gentler afterward, with night fallen and candles out, the moon passed from our window, and no guide but each other's touch; I'm not sure a man can survive such gentleness, not without being fundamentally made and undone by it.
I'm aching. My toes are aching.
I consider it fortunate that I'm in Vanyel's plush Palace bed; my own attic room back in Bardic can't compare to his comforts, and besides, I want no more than to lie here at his side. Would that he were as spent - physically, he may be, but I can hear the tiptoe of his ever-restless mind - seeming louder than often, perhaps due to the momentary quietness of my own. "What's wrong?" I murmur. A tiny part of me dreads the answer, even though he told me I could stay tonight and he'd never take back his word. He won't take back tonight. But other nights, when other things matter more than me...
His low voice seems wry. "Coming home can be a bit strange. Nothing quite looks as one remembers it. And it's some time since - well, no."
"No what? If - if you don't want me sharing your bed -" and there have been enough well-bred boys who were happy for me to take them to bed and debauch them just so long as I was gone by first light -
"I do," and his voice is so small and sincere and confused that I wish I hadn't reacted by slipping into gutters of memory, I wish I was innocent of all the obscurity men put around love and pleasure. "But Stef, it's been more than some time since anyone - I only just thought about it -" I rise up on one elbow, and all I see of him is a glint of light in his eyes. He closes them. "I've lived here five years - ever since they found dryrot in the beams of my last room in the Old Palace - and the only time I shared this bed before was when Liss came to visit me last year. Her idea," he adds absently, as I gape at him in the dark. "She could have slept in Savil's empty apprentice's quarters, but she reminded me about how she had her own room back when there were only four of us - she and I and Meke and Kastor. I don't quite remember it. I was meant to share with my brothers, but she says I went to her whenever I had bad dreams."
"Was that always often?" I ask.
"No..." and again there's more words behind that and I can't pry them out just yet. It's enough to ease his troubled sleep here and now. I can't make him explain a damn thing. "But. That would be why having company here seems strange to me."
"So you mean to say, I was already the first man you let sleep in this bed?" I ask, immediately latching on to the most important facet of his tale of isolation, and I can hear the sound of him smiling and exhaling where a less restrained man might laugh at me. He puts an arm around me, and pulls me tight against his lean body. I'm not going anywhere, wouldn't want to if he'd let me. I've never felt like this, never wanted more of what I have, not merely more than.
"Silver for your thoughts?" He taps a finger against my spine, strokes into hollow ridges.
"I'll push you to a sovereign yet," I grouse. I can't tell him, can't compare this bed with any other, but he can have the gist of what I was thinking of; "Maybe it's not that it looks different from what we remember. Maybe it is different. It means something, what you see in things - like I swear I never really saw your Tayledras masks before, no matter how artful I thought them."
I know he nods from the sway of his hair as his grip on me slackens. "It took me some time to see home here - you know, I was quite terrified the first time I came to Haven."
He was? "What would frighten you?"
He goes quiet, and I realise what a stupid question it was - how static, as if I thought the he who would answer me were the same as the he whom I asked. I know he wasn't always the exalted hero, and I sensed some time ago that his dauntlessness wasn't him, but a thing cast in fire that he wears as a raiment. He answers his fool lover anyway; "My father, I suppose. And the world. And myself. I was all but exiled and all I could dream of was being able to not care -" and a harpstring shiver goes through his body against mine.
"I was terrified too," and it's an odd point on which to offer my sympathy. "I'd never seen anything like the Palace and had no idea why I was here, and all my assumptions were bad ones. When I finally started to fathom it, it seemed like a dream at first - I got to sing somewhere warm and safe, and they let me learn to play instruments. But then I tried talking to people."
"Put a few backs up, did you?"
"You know me," I accuse. "I had no idea about politicking and fitting in right back then, either. And some people were pretty hard to reason with. Not that I had reasonable expectations myself - it was hard for me to hear what some of them were saying around the silver spoons stuck in their throats. Sorry," I flap a hand against his shoulder. "But I guess it's funny that I often had an easier time with the Herald trainees. Not so many of them looked down on me for not being highborn, and they weren't jealous of my talents."
"Funny," he repeats without humour. "Well - I told you I didn't settle in well. Even before I had any Gifts for anyone to be jealous of, the Herald trainees all closed me out because Tylendel and I were pretending to loathe each other." My eyes widen - now there's a story. "Afterwards," and he sighs, "I guess it's only as one gets older that you start to understand that Gifts can be more like burdens."
"I might not have believed it six months ago," I admit tiredly. I've missed Randale, and I'm not looking forward to seeing him again in the morning. "Gods know they try to drill it into us, what a responsibility we've been handed, and soforth - but all younglings really hear is how special they are and -" I pause delicately. "Then some of them decide that the last people who deserve such responsibility are the landless, feckless poor."
He strokes my back gently. "I can see how that would be - I always got a lot of 'responsibility' talks from my father, and all that did was put my nose in the air. You should never have had to prove anything," and his hand reaches up to my neck, cards through the hair at the back of my head.
"Well, I thought I did." It's soothing me, though, both his touch and his understanding. "And I envied their easy lives as much as they envied my Gifts. I did get a lot better at dealing with them eventually, but by then I'd found that outside of music, I didn't share in Bardic's majority interests." I feel his unasked question. "Drink, drugs, girls," I clarify. "I don't drink much when I'm not trying to get in someone's breeches. I like being in right mind, and," I don't know why I hesitate to tell him, "Being around drunks makes me think of the bad times. I even worry if I'd know if I was taking it too far," I confess, needlessly gloomy. "They never seemed to care! None of them ever had to fear consequences. There's nothing wrong with being a drunk lord -"
"You get shouted down on Council a lot," he informs me. "And you might sober up and find your spouse has gone elsewhere. But you're right, it seems like some people get years-worth of rope before having to bother with hanging themselves."
"I've been such a stuck-up bore about it," I tell him. "Stefen, full of those nasty beggar stories about people rotting in gutters and whoring for drugs. Between that and my Gifts, I felt like I had a crowd of drunken vultures just waiting for each time I slipped up -"
"So you had to be perfect?" he surmises.
"No, just better than any of them." That tiny sigh again. I'm starting to find it affectionate. "And I often wasn't. I had problems with composition classes." A little bitterness I should have set aside long before now. "They expect us to already have the ability to compose, and then they insist on telling us how to do it."
I feel his mood drop as if over an unexpected step, and there's a hanging moment where he realises there's no point miming brittle smiles in the dark, not with me. "That's why Breda couldn't admit me to Bardic. She thought well enough of my playing but I didn't have the Gift and I wasn't composing."
"It's horseshit, you know? There's plenty get admitted with the other two Talents and then start writing their own songs later. They just do it a bit differently. And I think that Dellar found them less aggravating than me, for the most part." He doesn't want to test the wound by asking, but I can feel him wanting to know more. "I'd always made up songs on the streets. It was like having my own language - no one could talk back to me in it, because it was all mine, and that was the only bit of power I had over anything. But it was all about letting off steam and turning out pockets - I couldn't fathom rating my work by any measure other than the coin it produced, and at first, I didn't even understand why the Bards wanted me to write my songs down, never mind how. It just seemed to get in the way." I grinned. "I was barely literate, and next to impossible - I was composing more than boys years older than me, but formally speaking I was a nightmare. Dell told Breda I was 'of feral mind'."
"And what made Dellar come to that conclusion?"
"I kept asking him questions he didn't appreciate."
"About...?"
"Money, mostly. I was told the topic was uncouth, and beneath me as an artist. Then even that dangling carrot got yanked away, when I found out Art certainly didn't mean I could sing about whatever I wanted to sing about." And I can feel his knowing smile. "Finding out I was shaych only made him worse - I once heard him chastising Breda about how she coddled me, because I was confused by my upbringing and needed a father figure. He was quite glad you were willing to be my mentor," I nudge him.
"Oh gods," he groans. "He has no idea, does he?"
"None," I reply brightly. "Not about the least thing."
"Gods," he murmurs again. "If I'd known you when I was young, I may have hated you. I would have certainly found you insufferable."
"You do find me insufferable," I remind him.
"You would have intimidated me," he replies, more seriously than I deserve. "And given what a prig I was..." He turns away from me, and I hear his head thump hard on his pillow. "Nothing felt safe to me, then - not, music, not life at the Palace, especially not being shaych."
"Did it ever?"
"Maybe when I don't think about it too hard." Which is never, and definitely isn't now. "But you, you just..."
I can sense that he understands it, if not well enough to vocalise or absorb my laws of survival. "I don't expect things to feel safe. I'm not sure -" I fall quiet, and he rolls back against me and jabs me with his elbow. "Well, no," I concede. "I guess I do know what it feels like to be sure of something."
He doesn't need words to reply to that.
Strange Bedfellows
Pitch dark and trying to remember how I used to breathe, I admit he's finally tired me out. My pride can bear it, after that last day on the road, and it did take two good, satisfying bouts; we disengaged and called for dinner late enough to exasperate and perhaps scandalise the Palace staff, not that we could ever hope to keep our cohabitation from them in any event. For months, they've been the only people who knew for sure we weren't spending the nights together. We were gentler afterward, with night fallen and candles out, the moon passed from our window, and no guide but each other's touch; I'm not sure a man can survive such gentleness, not without being fundamentally made and undone by it.
I'm aching. My toes are aching.
I consider it fortunate that I'm in Vanyel's plush Palace bed; my own attic room back in Bardic can't compare to his comforts, and besides, I want no more than to lie here at his side. Would that he were as spent - physically, he may be, but I can hear the tiptoe of his ever-restless mind - seeming louder than often, perhaps due to the momentary quietness of my own. "What's wrong?" I murmur. A tiny part of me dreads the answer, even though he told me I could stay tonight and he'd never take back his word. He won't take back tonight. But other nights, when other things matter more than me...
His low voice seems wry. "Coming home can be a bit strange. Nothing quite looks as one remembers it. And it's some time since - well, no."
"No what? If - if you don't want me sharing your bed -" and there have been enough well-bred boys who were happy for me to take them to bed and debauch them just so long as I was gone by first light -
"I do," and his voice is so small and sincere and confused that I wish I hadn't reacted by slipping into gutters of memory, I wish I was innocent of all the obscurity men put around love and pleasure. "But Stef, it's been more than some time since anyone - I only just thought about it -" I rise up on one elbow, and all I see of him is a glint of light in his eyes. He closes them. "I've lived here five years - ever since they found dryrot in the beams of my last room in the Old Palace - and the only time I shared this bed before was when Liss came to visit me last year. Her idea," he adds absently, as I gape at him in the dark. "She could have slept in Savil's empty apprentice's quarters, but she reminded me about how she had her own room back when there were only four of us - she and I and Meke and Kastor. I don't quite remember it. I was meant to share with my brothers, but she says I went to her whenever I had bad dreams."
"Was that always often?" I ask.
"No..." and again there's more words behind that and I can't pry them out just yet. It's enough to ease his troubled sleep here and now. I can't make him explain a damn thing. "But. That would be why having company here seems strange to me."
"So you mean to say, I was already the first man you let sleep in this bed?" I ask, immediately latching on to the most important facet of his tale of isolation, and I can hear the sound of him smiling and exhaling where a less restrained man might laugh at me. He puts an arm around me, and pulls me tight against his lean body. I'm not going anywhere, wouldn't want to if he'd let me. I've never felt like this, never wanted more of what I have, not merely more than.
"Silver for your thoughts?" He taps a finger against my spine, strokes into hollow ridges.
"I'll push you to a sovereign yet," I grouse. I can't tell him, can't compare this bed with any other, but he can have the gist of what I was thinking of; "Maybe it's not that it looks different from what we remember. Maybe it is different. It means something, what you see in things - like I swear I never really saw your Tayledras masks before, no matter how artful I thought them."
I know he nods from the sway of his hair as his grip on me slackens. "It took me some time to see home here - you know, I was quite terrified the first time I came to Haven."
He was? "What would frighten you?"
He goes quiet, and I realise what a stupid question it was - how static, as if I thought the he who would answer me were the same as the he whom I asked. I know he wasn't always the exalted hero, and I sensed some time ago that his dauntlessness wasn't him, but a thing cast in fire that he wears as a raiment. He answers his fool lover anyway; "My father, I suppose. And the world. And myself. I was all but exiled and all I could dream of was being able to not care -" and a harpstring shiver goes through his body against mine.
"I was terrified too," and it's an odd point on which to offer my sympathy. "I'd never seen anything like the Palace and had no idea why I was here, and all my assumptions were bad ones. When I finally started to fathom it, it seemed like a dream at first - I got to sing somewhere warm and safe, and they let me learn to play instruments. But then I tried talking to people."
"Put a few backs up, did you?"
"You know me," I accuse. "I had no idea about politicking and fitting in right back then, either. And some people were pretty hard to reason with. Not that I had reasonable expectations myself - it was hard for me to hear what some of them were saying around the silver spoons stuck in their throats. Sorry," I flap a hand against his shoulder. "But I guess it's funny that I often had an easier time with the Herald trainees. Not so many of them looked down on me for not being highborn, and they weren't jealous of my talents."
"Funny," he repeats without humour. "Well - I told you I didn't settle in well. Even before I had any Gifts for anyone to be jealous of, the Herald trainees all closed me out because Tylendel and I were pretending to loathe each other." My eyes widen - now there's a story. "Afterwards," and he sighs, "I guess it's only as one gets older that you start to understand that Gifts can be more like burdens."
"I might not have believed it six months ago," I admit tiredly. I've missed Randale, and I'm not looking forward to seeing him again in the morning. "Gods know they try to drill it into us, what a responsibility we've been handed, and soforth - but all younglings really hear is how special they are and -" I pause delicately. "Then some of them decide that the last people who deserve such responsibility are the landless, feckless poor."
He strokes my back gently. "I can see how that would be - I always got a lot of 'responsibility' talks from my father, and all that did was put my nose in the air. You should never have had to prove anything," and his hand reaches up to my neck, cards through the hair at the back of my head.
"Well, I thought I did." It's soothing me, though, both his touch and his understanding. "And I envied their easy lives as much as they envied my Gifts. I did get a lot better at dealing with them eventually, but by then I'd found that outside of music, I didn't share in Bardic's majority interests." I feel his unasked question. "Drink, drugs, girls," I clarify. "I don't drink much when I'm not trying to get in someone's breeches. I like being in right mind, and," I don't know why I hesitate to tell him, "Being around drunks makes me think of the bad times. I even worry if I'd know if I was taking it too far," I confess, needlessly gloomy. "They never seemed to care! None of them ever had to fear consequences. There's nothing wrong with being a drunk lord -"
"You get shouted down on Council a lot," he informs me. "And you might sober up and find your spouse has gone elsewhere. But you're right, it seems like some people get years-worth of rope before having to bother with hanging themselves."
"I've been such a stuck-up bore about it," I tell him. "Stefen, full of those nasty beggar stories about people rotting in gutters and whoring for drugs. Between that and my Gifts, I felt like I had a crowd of drunken vultures just waiting for each time I slipped up -"
"So you had to be perfect?" he surmises.
"No, just better than any of them." That tiny sigh again. I'm starting to find it affectionate. "And I often wasn't. I had problems with composition classes." A little bitterness I should have set aside long before now. "They expect us to already have the ability to compose, and then they insist on telling us how to do it."
I feel his mood drop as if over an unexpected step, and there's a hanging moment where he realises there's no point miming brittle smiles in the dark, not with me. "That's why Breda couldn't admit me to Bardic. She thought well enough of my playing but I didn't have the Gift and I wasn't composing."
"It's horseshit, you know? There's plenty get admitted with the other two Talents and then start writing their own songs later. They just do it a bit differently. And I think that Dellar found them less aggravating than me, for the most part." He doesn't want to test the wound by asking, but I can feel him wanting to know more. "I'd always made up songs on the streets. It was like having my own language - no one could talk back to me in it, because it was all mine, and that was the only bit of power I had over anything. But it was all about letting off steam and turning out pockets - I couldn't fathom rating my work by any measure other than the coin it produced, and at first, I didn't even understand why the Bards wanted me to write my songs down, never mind how. It just seemed to get in the way." I grinned. "I was barely literate, and next to impossible - I was composing more than boys years older than me, but formally speaking I was a nightmare. Dell told Breda I was 'of feral mind'."
"And what made Dellar come to that conclusion?"
"I kept asking him questions he didn't appreciate."
"About...?"
"Money, mostly. I was told the topic was uncouth, and beneath me as an artist. Then even that dangling carrot got yanked away, when I found out Art certainly didn't mean I could sing about whatever I wanted to sing about." And I can feel his knowing smile. "Finding out I was shaych only made him worse - I once heard him chastising Breda about how she coddled me, because I was confused by my upbringing and needed a father figure. He was quite glad you were willing to be my mentor," I nudge him.
"Oh gods," he groans. "He has no idea, does he?"
"None," I reply brightly. "Not about the least thing."
"Gods," he murmurs again. "If I'd known you when I was young, I may have hated you. I would have certainly found you insufferable."
"You do find me insufferable," I remind him.
"You would have intimidated me," he replies, more seriously than I deserve. "And given what a prig I was..." He turns away from me, and I hear his head thump hard on his pillow. "Nothing felt safe to me, then - not, music, not life at the Palace, especially not being shaych."
"Did it ever?"
"Maybe when I don't think about it too hard." Which is never, and definitely isn't now. "But you, you just..."
I can sense that he understands it, if not well enough to vocalise or absorb my laws of survival. "I don't expect things to feel safe. I'm not sure -" I fall quiet, and he rolls back against me and jabs me with his elbow. "Well, no," I concede. "I guess I do know what it feels like to be sure of something."
He doesn't need words to reply to that.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-20 09:38 pm (UTC)But seriously this is delicious and just what I needed rn ;___;
no subject
Date: 2013-11-26 01:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-26 12:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-26 01:56 pm (UTC)