lightbearinglord | [ closed post: the heavy is the root of the light ]

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[ closed post: the heavy is the root of the light ]

His promise has been kept. Gideon has seen Aornis' body, and the conclusive nature of her death can't be denied. When Lan Wangji drew back the covering of his own robe, there was nothing, no lingering spirit. There was only a body.

He finds his way to the game room for the third time that day, weary. It has emptied of all its occupants now. The television has been shut off. Lan Wangji suspects that he spots one of SecUnit's drones, but he doesn't have the heart to look more closely. He is not trudging -- not in reality, not when he has his body trained so impeccably to obey him -- but he feels a certain heaviness of limb as he crosses the room's threshold again. His robes are flecked with blood and there are still traces of dried blood on his face, though the glass shard wounds that bled there are scabbing over by now. Memories keep plucking at him with demanding fingers, trying for his attention, and he continues to dismiss them as best he can, with every scrap of discipline that he has.

The room has been emptied, more accurately, of all its occupants but one. Claudius, who waited to meet him just as he asked. Lan Wangji could easily make an excuse for this request -- he and Claudius worked together on this plan for so long, coordinating what felt like a thousand game pieces and meticulously documenting every move and discovery they made. It would be easy to tell himself that he merely wants to bring finality to their efforts by going over the details of the battle, nothing more. It isn't untrue. But he knows that, in fact, most of what he wants is to see his friend. He wants the comfort of his presence and of the fact that they've accomplished what they meant to accomplish, as unclean as it feels now. They're done, and no one else had to die for it.

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"Those who are willing to look beyond what is already known. Amateur or not." Lan Wangji looks at him, not smiling, not yet, but soft around the eyes, glad for all the things they can now anticipate without fear. Little coils of memory are still nagging at him, small things, the way Wei Ying smiled at him during one lost afternoon -- he imagines they will keep coming, because he was sent in circles so many times, because Aornis made such a fool of him. But she is gone.

She is gone, and Claudius is with him. There are thoughts Claudius needs to untangle, too -- a knot of emotion he swallowed in this same room with Shen Yuan, the dawning realization that he might've caught Aornis sooner if it weren't for the obvious obstacle. But for once, he isn't afraid of the future here. Peace seems not fragile, but pulpable. He'll have other talks with Lan Wangji, more chances to share confidences, or to meditate side-by-side. He looks fully forward to it. In the present, he smiles and says, "'Tis so -- thou art no amateur at all, and yet thou art always willing to look alongside me. I welcome thy company."

Lan Wangji sits with that for a moment, with salt and blood dried on his face, his robes beyond saving, one robe a room apart and draped over a corpse. He is, obviously to a discerning eye, thinking, deciding whether he wants to say something. And then he does. "I'd like your opinion about something."

"Needst only ask, brother. Thou knowest mine is opinion easily gifted -- at least," he allows, thinking of countless times in his life when he's bit his tongue and kept an opinion to himself, "to thee."

That earns Claudius a flickering glance of fondness before Lan Wangji retreats into his thoughts again. He wants to keep Nina's confidence as much as it is possible to do so, but he is also aware of how much this matter has been gnawing at him, a termite eating slowly away at a piece of his foundation. "Nearly a year ago," he says at last, "Nina asked me to hold something for her." They hardly knew each other then; he is still not certain what led her to choose him, but he recalls the surprising treasure of her trust with warmth. "Something dangerous and addictive, and its antidote. She asked me to give it to no one, including her, no matter how they begged." He fixes his gaze on Claudius' hands in his own. "I have kept it with me since then." In fact, he has it now.

"After Shen Yuan's death, she came to me. She wanted it, believing it could enable her to bring him back. I refused."

“Ah.” The significance strikes Claudius immediately, though he takes time to turn the situation around in his head, to consider all the angles. He doesn’t know Nina well. She was the first and last woman here to discover his weakness for tears — when Tress cried in front of him, he’d taken such care to make space for her sadness, it defused any panic her tears could have caused. Nina, he kept at a concerned and careful distance, made more careful once he discovered her closeness with Luo Binghe. At the time, it was because he couldn’t let it slip how much Luo Binghe had hurt him, couldn’t handle that revelation with someone he already found unapproachably fragile. Until he found out she already knew and cared little, if at all. Enough to stop it, perhaps, and he willed himself to be grateful for that much, boxing away his feelings of betrayal.

So he can’t start from a place of knowledge of Nina. Only his knowledge of addiction, the withdrawal he didn’t realize was withdrawal, the desperation for any drug that could give him rest that brought him close to overdosing. He told Galahad — I tried to numb myself from despair using someone poorly-made remedy, and if it killed me, I don't think I would've cared. And that was all for the promise of sleep. Laudanum wouldn’t bring Laurel back from the dead, because Laurel never truly died, and if a ghost of him existed it was in the eyes of a man Claudius swore to never see again. How much easier would it be to overdose on a drug that gave him hope, even a faint hope, of not just numbing despair but having the power to undo it?

(Even here, he has to correct himself, the black-and-white words of his workbooks standing stark in his mind: despair can’t be undone, only avoided. Power can make the pain more bearable, but there it’s no different than laudanum, a numbing agent and not a cure.)

“Addiction,” he says, after he’s thought it through, “has a way of making us strangers to ourselves. We do things we aren’t proud of, say things we don’t mean, debase ourselves … and beg. She was right to warn thee of that possibility.” And remembering how quickly he caved when Nina cried, Claudius can imagine how difficult most would find it to deny her. He sees the trust she placed in Lan Wangji, not just to carry something dangerous to her, but not to be manipulated out of it — or use it to manipulate her. It would be so easy, for someone less scrupulous, to hold that antidote like a leash. “I take it that she was less than pleased with thy refusal?”

Edited 2024-09-20 12:33 (UTC)

"Mn." The knowing note to Claudius' voice doesn't escape him, the measured the way he speaks of the properties of addiction. There are so many ways to steer oneself through pain; Lan Wangji hates too much to lose control over himself to ever have considered that variety of numbness, but how can he fail to understand its temptations? And the jurda parem has such promises within it, the promise of unfathomable power, the ability to reverse death. "She wept. She accused me of judging unfairly, because it was Shen Yuan who died."

“So thou hast seen for thyself, the way those afflicted will say things they do not mean.” But he says it with a certain unassuming gentleness — taking it as a matter of course that Nina didn’t mean it, not in her right mind, but fully aware of how hard it is to tell. For Nina and Lan Wangji both, he thinks. “Didst hold to thy purpose?”

"I still refused her." Now, with Shen Yuan's return all but assured, it is easier to hold onto his conviction. At the time, he was doing so by sheer force of will. "She asked, too, if I would make a different choice if Magnus had died instead."

Claudius turns through the angles of this, too — this time, he thinks he owes it to Lan Wangji to speak his thoughts aloud. If it seems cold, Lan Wangji has never begrudged him for seeming coldness. “Were it Magnus,” he says, “thou dost have a duty to Magnus, who has given up the sword, and looks to thee for protection. And were I still thy friend, but not thy friend who asked thee to help put politics behind him … were I Prince Claudius, I would tell thee thou may’st have a duty to Nina, to protect her from that with which she entrusted thee, but she no longer wishes that protection. I would call thee by name, look thee in the eye, speak to thee in smooth, reasoning tones. Thou canst not be too good, I would say. Goodness, growing to a pleurisy, dies in his own too-much. It would be entirely selfish. Thou wouldst do well to ignore a man who tries to convince thee oaths are trifling and must be dispensed with by necessity; he wants something. I would want thee to bend for Magnus’s sake, because I know what he means to thee and to Galahad. But thou gavest Nina thy word. Were it Magnus, thou wouldst mourn the choice more … but I still believe thou wouldst make it.” He shakes his head — for all he felt he had to share his thinking, it’s beside the purpose. “It must have been painful, to be asked to envision it.”

It may be cold, but Lan Wangji follows the logic of it, or perhaps the illogic -- valuing one human life over another is a dangerous prospect, even when it is irresistibly tempting to do so, even when he loves Magnus specifically so much that it defies reason. "Yes," he allows. "I thought of Mo Xuanyu. He gave his life, and I have Wei Ying again because of it. But I wouldn't have asked him to make that sacrifice."

"No," Claudius agrees. He remembers that heady cocktail of mixed-yet-strong respect he had for Nie Huaisang. (Perhaps, he thinks wryly to himself, he really will name a cocktail for that man someday.) It's the respect once chess player has for another, when both sides sees their losses as abstract positioning on a board. A pawn can be swapped for any other piece, and count it an improvement, but it's never a true transformation. A piece always ends up discarded. "Thou couldst not," says Claudius, gently sure, "persuade a man who's lost hope that it's better to die. Not even if he desired 't of thee. Nor couldst thou accept the sacrifice of a woman who, in grief for a friend, decided her life was of no moment. Thou saidst this substance was a danger to her."

"Nina told me that it would increase the danger to her by tenfold." Lan Wangji can't help but remember the way Nina blinked back tears as he said that, his useless effort to counter her question about Magnus. He should have said much more, should have made himself clearer, but it is behind them now. "She is the only person who has ever survived it without the antidote. I would not let her take that chance a second time."

Despite himself, Claudius can't help being curious about what substance the antidote is made from, what chemicals it interactions with in the body. "To call it an antidote it surprisingly honest," he remarks. "It admits what she wanted from you was poison. To be fair, many medicines are poisons, the only difference the dosage. But ..." He sighs, thinking back to some bitterly foolish nights as a youth. "Surviving an overdose once can change your perception of what's lethal."

That idle sentiment wrenches Lan Wangji back to the present. His brow pinches with a tiny frown as he looks back up at Claudius' face. "There is a reason you know that." He stops there, wanting not to compel Claudius to tell him anything he would rather not share, but, as he often does, wishing concurrently that they could have met, and been what they are to each other now, sooner.

"I ... sometimes wonder whether I was sent to war too young," Claudius says, and he doesn't know why it feels like letting go of a leaden weight to admit it. "I was not well-suited for it. Often I think my brother must have sent me to Normandy because he wanted me to fail and fall in combat -- but I never found proof of a plot, or heard it from his mouth. I only know there was no compelling reason to send a prince to the front when he was little more than a child." But though he can say it with something approaching conviction, he also knows why he agreed. "Except, of course, that my brother had been a prince who served alongside his soldiers. He became a king who leads from the front. And I would've looked more the coward, if I refused the assignment in front of the entire court. Of course I proved myself a coward in battle regardless, and that may've been enough for him. But I wasn't entirely useless. Though I had no power to raise the dead, thou knowest I had an interest in alchemy and -- not to say it too delicately -- a familiarity with remedies for pain. That's something, at least, for dying men and wounded soldiers without a proper hospital. Medicine can be a poison, but war-time medicine is the most desperate kind: when the choices are poison or nothing, most soldiers will take poison. I found that easy to forget, when I returned to court. Not the remedies, if anything I'd improved their strength considerably, but that there are doses only the desperate should take. The courtly life holds fewer mortal risks, yet it wasn't a life without pain, and I gave myself the same doses for nightmares that I would give a soldier who'd lost a leg. I took them with wine, which is worse. As I said. It changes one's perception. The more a man can insist I survived it once, the better he can avoid the question of whether he still needs to survive that way. Whether there's another way -- which I think Nina wanted to find, when she put her trust in thee. Her choices were not poison or nothing, however it must have felt."

They have often skirted this topic, or mentioned it in passing, the fact that they were both sent to war young. Lan Wangji was better-suited to it than Claudius, and he could hardly have refused the call to defend his already-ravaged home, but he wonders still what might have been if the Sunshot Campaign had not demanded his service, had not turned him into Hanguang-jun before he was twenty years old.

He curls his fingers tighter around Claudius' again, helpless against the protective urge that washes through him. He can vow as often as he likes that he will be a better, gentler brother to Claudius, and he can mean it as much as he likes, but no oath of his, no matter how sincere, can reach backward in time and excise the cruelty that was already inflicted. Claudius is the one with surgical experience; he would have already sliced out his own pain if it were possible. No wonder he had bad dreams, and no wonder he found too much respite in his own medicine. Lan Wangji breathes through the feeling, circulating qi. "No. She gave the choice to me, and I made it for her. Even if she had never forgiven me, I would be grateful that I was able to protect her from making it." He directs another troubled little frown downward. "And I am grateful for every time you survived, so that you could find kinder remedies in time."

"There's something to this talking and meditating the latest remedy books recommend," Claudius says wryly, curling closer so he can nudge Lan Wangji's shoulder with his own. "I share thy gratitude. No matter how long, historically speaking, it took.

Lan Wangji looks down at him, overpoweringly fond, and lets himself relax just slightly, just enough, to lean against him. His body is not tired, but every other part of him is weary, and Claudius has offered his shoulder more than once. "I am glad to help with the meditating. Talking is your area of expertise."

"Then I am glad to help thee with the talking," Claudius says, warm and comfortably near. "Dost feel unburdened somewhat?"

"Yes," Lan Wangji says, at the conclusion of a long, careful moment during which he weighs his answer to this in the pursuit of telling Claudius the truth. "Nina has forgiven me, but I was certain she would not. And..." For once, he trails off, gathering a fresh set of thoughts like Claudius gathering new flowers for the welcome table. He carried Nina's choice for her. He carried the choice to kill Aornis on behalf of the mansion. He carried more sessions of Inquiry than he could remember, the last few of them longer and more grueling than any Inquiry he has ever before played. He carried the fear of his memory slipping away again. He carried his own unkind bitterness at the sureness of Shen Yuan's return, at how easily he could speak to those he loved, when Lan Wangji himself spent thirteen years in the silence of Wei Ying's death and expected to remain there for the rest of his life. He carried several sets of grief, knowing that it was not his grief, that listening and bearing it for others was the least he could do. He would change very little of what transpired, or at the least of the parts that were under any of his control, but--

He shuts his eyes and gives himself a slow, deliberate exhale. "Yes. I think that Sagramore was right. He came close to warning me that I would need to accept care before long."

“He spoke from experience,” Claudius says with fondness for them both. “So do I. During those same years I came back from war, I had my first fights with Gertrude …” So many memories from his youth are disorganized, full of static snow like the screen in the game room before it forms a picture. But even fights with Gertrude were too precious to lose. “Whene’er she tried to treat me with care, I felt she was treating me as a child, and I had many foolish ideas about manhood and what my fellows would think. And, as thou knowest, I was used to solving problems mine own way.” ‘Solving’ said with utmost irony. “I see an echo of that in Magnus. A little soldier boy, too used to self-sufficiency to listen to adults’ advice. I have to bury my advice in a lesson for him to hear it. An it aids thee, think thou art setting an example: accept care the way thou wouldst he did, if he needed it from thee.”

"Mn. Sagramore and I discussed that, too." He's loosened his grip on Claudius' hand now, not letting him go, but a little easier, more certain that he doesn't need to hold onto him with all the will he has. "How Magnus is so young. I do not remember ever feeling as young as that."

"Nor do I," Claudius admits wryly. "Dwale addles the memory. But I admit, I counted the years Magnus spent in Valhalla to his age, and was mistaken. Age is measured in experience, experience young death denied him." He looks around the game room, suddenly fiercely glad Magnus wasn't crammed in there with them. Fighting and death were experiences he'd had more than enough of -- and for all that Claudius was told war made a man of him, it's another thing to learn to live peaceably among one's peers and learn navigate those little dramas which were less than life-or-death. Like telling a friend some news that might sadden him.

Lan Wangji follows Claudius' gaze, and he is just as glad that he told Magnus, in such certain terms, not to be a part of this whatsoever. "Valhalla is a facsimile of war. Magnus has died again and again, and killed, but it was reversible there." He speaks of it with distaste regardless. The pain is real, and it is an outsized cruelty to inflict on children or on anyone. "You and I have lived through real wars. The lives I have taken could not be given back."

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