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daekie · 7 years ago

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the entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell

(unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time. forget the dragon, leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness. let’s jump ahead to the moment of epiphany, in gold light, as the camera pans to where the action is) - richard siken, litany in which certain things are crossed out

Happy holidays, @heavenseveneleven, who I can’t @ for some reason! Your SS mentioned you liked Jodariel and Pamitha’s dynamic, so I thought about the fact they’re both soldiers who committed war crimes, regretted them, and ran from there.

Crossposted to AO3 where...the formatting is better, haha, sorry. Fic under the cut.

This much is simple – Jodariel has never had any love lost for Harps, except maybe too far back in her childhood for anyone in the Downside with her to know; her blood family is long gone, years and years, lost to disease and age and the war (and the Downside, once; she remembers little of her uncle, thrown to the depths when she was a child, far younger than their stowaway girl – she doesn’t even remember his crime, because it was never important to know – well, it was never important for her to know). She has never thought kindly of a Harp except in the privacy of her own unconscious – She freed those fledglings and knew her guilt immediately, heavy on her shoulders like an unfathomable weight; there was no one to stop her when she turned herself in, no one to reach to her and beg and whisper. She told no one. It was quick and quiet and they chained her to the cage like they would any dissenter, any criminal, and the Archjustice was a looming figure with slender black-gloved hands clasped around his gavel and it was simple, simple like an execution, like the way a blade is a weapon regardless of what you do with it because it shouldn’t be on its’ own. Jodariel thought that, maybe, she would have died there on the rocks like so many others, her body dashed into the waters, her death a penance repaid the only way she could –

Nothing is ever that simple.

She drags herself out of the wreckage of her cage and takes one of the snapped bars as a weapon, sharpening it against the rocks, using other broken aspects of the cage to splint her wounds. Let Howlers come. She is not dead, and maybe she won’t be, and maybe that’s her true punishment – to live where her fellows-in-arms died, to do something they would have never condoned and to live through it all, and to live and to live and

(jodariel has not been in the downside the longest; but for those who entered human, and those that are still alive and no longer human, she could be a rallying point. she doesn’t want to be. she doesn’t think anything about herself is worthy of glory, anymore.

for years and years she doesn’t think about hedwyn or any of her children, not-blood but that doesn’t matter, because all she can picture is how disappointed any of them would be in what she did and what she’s done. she should be no one’s captain. she doesn’t deserve it.) ------ This much is simple - Pamitha is not born to glory. Few Harps are, anymore; they are a dying empire, driven back further and further every year by the Commonwealth’s soldiers on the Bloodborder – because you must train a Harp for battle, careful; but they can teach a Cur to hold a knife in its’ mouth and send it out to die, and there are fewer Harps than there are everything else. They send fledglings out to battle, nowadays, and Pamitha used to care less about that, because the Commonwealth, the Commonwealth has taken everything from them –

She cares a lot about it, now; but oh, darling, there’s nothing she can do down here. It’s easier to drink your troubles away, instead, because tales of the Nightwings and their talent and their ability to let one go free are old. Those stories are so old she doesn’t know who tells them, anymore; Crones, mostly, and there are whispers here-and-there about benefactors who will reward you if you bring them old Nightwing robes, sigils, symbols, anything that could let that triumvirate raise again – it’s just all stupid fucking stories. Pamitha doesn’t care. The Nightwings won’t come for her, and even if they did and somehow her-and-Tamitha won (even that is a far-off dream, because Tamitha speaks to her rarely or not at all; it’s hard to reconcile this vicious warhawk with the little girl she remembers years ago, a little girl who had nightmares of soldiers coming for her and snatching her twin away), she wouldn’t deserve it. Scribes only know Pamitha doesn’t deserve anything better than this.

Talking to Tamitha is like ripping open a wound every time. They are not allies. They are not friends. Tamitha shudders and turns away every time Pamitha calls her sister, sister (most times, but some times she lashes out and screams and scratches and Pamitha knows she’s not wanted and she runs, she runs) and it makes something ugly and silver-vicious curl up in her gut like do you know what I fucking sacrificed for you, do you know what I would have given for you, they lied but that shouldn’t mean anything now sister sister sister please and she says nothing and keeps drinking. The alcohol never ends. It doesn’t taste good but she doesn’t deserve something that tastes good. ------ Jodariel used to be a weapon. She still is. She just isn’t wielded anymore. ------ Pamitha was raised to be a weapon and she cut down her sister. Or she might as well have, anyways. What does it matter she didn’t mean for this to happen? It’s all her fault the way Tamitha looks at her nowadays. ------ (Hedwyn looks at her like she’s done nothing wrong. She’s proud of him, after all this time, but she can’t help but have to bite back that reflexive hatred when he talks about the woman he was in love with because she’s a Harp, Hedwyn, you know what they did to your mother, you know what they did to her entire patrol, she was toying with you and she wasn’t cast down so she wanted this to happen to you because Harps don’t care about you or any of us but she swallows it down. She doesn’t tell him her opinions on Fikani and he doesn’t ask, and in time, it passes from an uneasy quiet to less of a worry.) ------ Pamitha flirts like it’s a game, because it is, and she always did even before all of this – it was typical, really, because if you were too close to someone and they were shot down you’d have nothing left. It was typical for her regiment; they were all sisters-in-arms, close as could be, but if they weren’t blood-sisters none of them were too close. You won’t suffer lover’s-loss grief if you weren’t close like that, was always the thought, and that’s how it is; she should not mourn her lost, she should look towards what she can do, but -

there’s nothing she can do down here. It was all for nothing. All of it was for nothing. Nobody ever gets out of here. ------ Nobody ever gets out of here. ------ Nobody ever gets out of here. ------ Except, the thing is, sometimes they do. ------ Jodariel doesn’t expect anything. She’s trained herself not to expect anything; the concept of a literate person only being exiled now only brings scorn to her. How would it be kept so quiet, with a skill like that, after years and years and so many generations only hearing of reading-and-writing as the ultimate crime? It’s not that she necessarily must agree with her country’s traditions, but it’s been so long and it’s what she has to hold onto; her morality, her rules, in the face of who-knows-how-long-here, forever and ever and ever. Downside is a disorderly wasteland and always will be; the land breathes death and nomadic lifestyles are a necessity. There’s no rules to be made in that.

The Reader is not the first. But she is the first still alive.

Sometimes, Jodariel thinks, this brave young woman might make the world better. This woman, almost still a girl in comparison, who knows the ghosts of the past lurking in these crystals and is looked at by the Minstrel like a child savior. She tries to keep herself realistic, because there is nothing but harm in that hope, but – still. Sometimes. She can see what might be, when the weight of her horns is too much for her, and it lets her get up for one more day like it’s not so agonizing, and things hurt a little less. There’s hope, maybe. Sometimes it’s even possible to believe in it. ------ Pamitha wakes up every day and hates it, for months, for years; all she thinks is that she’s ruined it, she’s ruined her life and Tamitha’s life and for nothing except the fact that some Commonwealth citizens didn’t die then. Looking back, it seems pointless, and why has she done any of it? What has she gotten out of this? Every day is more of the same. She drinks, she lounges, she plays up the careless hedonist role that half of the flock there thinks she is. There’s no hope for anything to get better. Until there is.

She’ll look back on it in years to come and think that this ridiculous caravan trundling through the territory, a woman in a robe and a woman with horns and strains of song, was the best thing for her. Not now, though. Now she just doesn’t know what to think of these people – unafraid of the Harps threatening them, even cocky, but not threatening too much violence either.

The conversation is easy. It feels so easy, after the words are out of her mouth. Even during the match when she can feel Tamitha’s glare at all times, bloody eye burning holes in her skin, she can ignore it; she can think I’m a Nightwing, I’m one of them, this is how people escape and I could be part of this story and part of this legacy and she can ignore it for a little while. (They win and she goes with them and it doesn’t feel like home, not really, not yet; but there is a tousle-haired girl with too-clear eyes and a young man with a kind, even voice and she might be the only Harp there – and Captain Jodariel won’t give her the time of day, but it’s fine, really, it’s fine - well, it will be, someday. She doesn’t feel so alone anymore. Everyone in this triumvirate is an outcast just like her. She isn’t so alone anymore.

If the Reader gets drunk off of Pamitha’s moonshine and she has to suggest moderation, then the realization that she might be a guiding figure isn’t as harsh as it would have been only some moons ago.) ------ The Nightwings are a home for the downtrodden and the unseen and the odd nowadays. Have you heard the whispers? They field Cur-Harp-Savage and Demon-Wyrm-Crone with equal abandon, no care for how the races usually divide; their tactician, their Reader, is a woman who couldn’t be too far into adult age – or that’s what the whispers say. The whispers say, too, that the Nightwings are good people at heart if distracted, never able to stay, always packing up and leaving for some far-off fight as the stars prophecy every night.

Sometimes people say the way their Harp, with her wild hair and her leisurely way of speaking, looks at their Demon – they say it borders on the intimate.

But that wouldn’t be true, would it? Captain Jodariel would never do more than tolerate a Harp. We all know exiles who used to be soldiers; they’re all like that, aren’t they?

Aren’t they? ------ It’s a glance here and there, skin touching for a long moment before they pull apart; it takes time. Any relationship takes time. There is the Reader with her favorite ghost – they’ve all met Sandra and the Beyonders, by now, have been through those trials and emerged stronger (and more than a little bit disoriented for a few minutes after) – and they’ve heard how fondly both women talk of each other, like despite their differences – but that, too, took years to build. People have gone home. Rukey Greentail – she waved him goodbye as the light took him back to his home.

Pamitha has thought about ascension a few times and she’s found it lacking. The Commonwealth still exists, and her race gets smaller and smaller every day; even if through some unknowable logic the Reader decided it was her time, she could never fit in with her brethren if they let her leave and go home, really go home. You don’t just regrow parts of your wings like that.

The Minstrel says nothing about her troubles. She wonders about him, when the days are bad and she finds refuge in drink, or when a rite goes poorly and she can’t help but feel her reactions were too slow and she ruined it for the rest. Him and the Gate Guardian (and what a woman that Guardian is; might as well have been chiseled out of stone, so physically perfect Pamitha always has to do a doubletake because she always expects something – humanizing, maybe? But no, no; Celeste’s eyes have kindness in them but that seems to be it, there’s nothing secret she can find, no hidden wishes or hidden worries) look at each other the way she thinks she used to look at Tamitha. (Well. The way she thinks she used to look at Tamitha. Thinking about her sister isn’t like tearing open a wound, anymore, but it still hurts and it always will. There’s nothing there she can save, and she was never going to save anyone in the first place with her betrayal, and she will have to live with her failure for as long as she draws breath.)

These things take time. Pamitha stops feeling like her entire life has to be repentance and Jodariel learns there’s more to learn than hatred and that people can make something new, down here. Something different. Something better.

There is time to build their own little peace treaty. Just the two of them. ------ (One day Pamitha falls asleep on Jodariel’s shoulder, head inclined; and Jodariel knows that she would do anything for this woman - this woman who would have once been her truest enemy. She's free to be tender. Her ghosts are quiet now. She's laid them to rest as she should have so long ago.

One day one of them might go free without the other, and they both know this, but for now – for now they have each other.)

#sggsecretsanta17 #pyre #heavenseveneleven #pamitha theyn #daestuff #jodariel (pyre)#sgg

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