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31_days2005-08-09 06:42 pm
tongari.livejournal.com) wrote in 31_days2005-08-09 06:42 pm
[August 9] [Legend of The Galactic Heroes] seasons we lived in
Title: seasons we lived in
Day/Theme: August 9: Anno mirabilis (Year Of Wonders)
Series: Legend of Galactic Heroes
Character/Pairing: Reinhardt/Siegfried
Rating: PG-13
seasons we lived in
January was a solid block of prefabricated classroom walls shivering under the onslaught of freak blizzards, putting on three layers of clothes just to go down for breakfast, hot coffee in enamel mugs going cold halfway between the pantry and your room, waking up under a layer of snowdrift that had filtered in through the cracks of the windows like a fall of blossom. Sometimes when you were reading and he was huddled under the same rug on your bed, you both kissed to get warm because you weren't old enough to drink and he said, "You smell nice after you brush your teeth," and it felt good, tongues touching and teeth clicking on teeth and missing his mouth sometimes and hearing him laugh when you licked the tip of his nose by mistake.
February rained, constantly, like someone always talking on the phone in the background. When the rain was very heavy it seemed that this background conversation had turned into an argument, as though your parents were fighting downstairs, and you could only lie in bed unable to move out of some irrational fear of making the situation worse. Reinhardt could always break this spell with a simple word, but Reinhardt wasn't always awake and he wasn't always thinking about you.
March he liked because it was warmer and you both did not have to wear so many coats and ran and climbed faster and more quietly across the distances separating you from her. Somehow you thought of her more often then, and he must have, too, but it never once occured to you to ask him if she knew; nor did he tell you not to tell her. Now it was warmer it was slower and gentler and less desperate and sometimes he would just lie on you, beside you, with his breath dry against your throat and his fingers wound like so many strange flowers into your hair. You could feel the sap rising in him then, the way it rose in soil and the plants and the air bursting into first colour on the trees and blue back in the sky and the return of bright quick birds in the garden, one by one, sprout by bud by bloom. It was time to start thinking about studying to pass the exams and preparing for the interviews into the academy, but when he said, "Kircheis," you didn't think to doubt him (or yourself) for a second.
April the month of dragonflies; you'll always remember how they came through the gardens green to your window as you were reading, strange alien ships barely two inches long come to pay you a visit. Listening to them buzzing around you, you always felt there was some wisdom they wanted to convey to you, but it was on a different scale, it would never be useful. Come exams, you'd only have to lift your head in the hall to ease the crick in your neck and someone would be swatting around their heads with their script waving frantically for an invigilator's attention, and you'd always wonder why they never came to you then. Reinhardt never noticed them.
May, the letters came, and suddenly there was no more time and you had to go. The address on your papers was different from the one on his but he wrote the same one on both your baggage tags, stuck them to your suitcases and asked you to book two tickets on the same train, one-way. You didn't think to question him then and it was only much later, having tea with Annerose and listening idly to him chattering about the amazing things you'd been doing and planning to do together, that she looked at you and smiled with such a quick flash of happiness in her eyes you felt as if she'd reached under the table and squeezed your hand. "Nothing's free," he said; he was talking about the virtues of a planned economy, but you dropped the cup you were holding, anyway.
June began out in the sun, on the river, in a boat. You were rowing; he'd started out, zealously, worn himself out and then let you take the oars from him with only a faint sound of complaint. You asked him if he was thinking about tomorrow and he said, "Next year," and you didn't know what to say, and he said, "It's all too slow," and there was only the silence of the sunlight on the water, nothing you knew how to break. You rowed faster then, because it was the only thing you could do, and the silence stayed with you and you didn't hear him telling you to stop until he stood up and flourished his arms to get your attention and the entire boat upended and you both went off to your first engagement at the front lines sneezing your heads off. Oddly enough the silence stayed with you for the rest of the month, even though you're sure you heard him laughing as you towed him up on shore and threw yourselves down on the bank where it sloped, under the trees; the silence that was on the river and in the rushes and sliding under his hands where they drew long and lingering across your hips and thighs and in between each deep wet breath you took, mingled, together.
July was politics even though it was the wrong weather for it; all hot and sleepy and the afternoons long-drawn-out contests between ground and sky trying to outstare each other, white surfaces leaving large swathes of spangled stars across your eyes even after you looked away. At first you didn't think to leave him when he attended these meetings; then, when the stares and the whispers drove you to, he became indignant at your absence and came looking for you. To counter the polite hint of, "We are expecting Reinhardt von Museal," he developed the devastating, simple answer of, "But Kircheis is me!" and brushed past the bemused officer at the door with such supreme confidence in his stride that even you, for a moment, believed him, and followed him in.
August, the desert; the most beautiful place you ever saw that was neither space nor dream. Once, en route to a sortie, he threw his head up to look at the sky, and really he was just looking to see if the ships were on course and at roughly the right altitude and you were worn out with travelling and the heat and the strain of the enemy being maybe just over the next elegant ridge of windblasted sandstone, but against that burning blue sky and with the sun shimmering in his hair he looked like an angel.
September and you realized how much it was wearing him out, how much heavier the shadows under his cheekbones and how ethereal his arms felt around you and the constant fever always just underneath his skin, keeping both of you awake at night. You thought he would collapse and die amongst the fine warm colours of the trees and Annerose would never forgive you. The lines for the execution of his plans were all drawn now and he kept telling you when you were alone how this had to be perfect, how he could not go wrong, how he must not go wrong. He was so sure of himself. Yet even when he was tired he would not go to bed, not even when the entire building and block and city were asleep and his eyelashes fell pale across his eyes. "Imagine it's the last night we have for all we have to do," he said, and you said there was always another day, and he said, "No!" and you didn't say anything but you stayed, and when he fell asleep at his desk you carried him to his room. (Days passed and he never seemed to grow lighter, but a blind man could see he was losing weight; near the end of the month you had dizzy spells, near-fainting fits, and then you realized you'd been matching him, pound for pound.) You always lay down and fell asleep on his bed, fully dressed, after you'd changed him out of uniform and rolled him under the covers. In the morning when you went to shower the stripes of the metal bars and the whorls of the buttons showed up in red lines on your skin, something like the way his teeth used to mark you.
October marked the rise of his star. Explosion after explosion blossomed like chrysanthemums across a continent; his genius, your doing. For the first time you realized you had helped kill all these people without actually watching them die. After the presentation of medals and announcement of promotions you stood to the side and watched him disappear from the crowd, you followed the trail of his absence down a dark stairwell step by step and hand outstretched until you found him where he was waiting and his hand closed around yours. You wanted to ask him if this was fast enough but you couldn't see his face in the dark and as much as you were hurt by what he'd done and what he'd made you do, it was simply not in you to hurt him. The stairs echoed around you and you wondered how much further they went down. "It's like a bottomless well in a fairytale," he said. "The bird that was brave enough to fly down the well, always kept flying. But because the well never ended, the bird could keep--" He stopped speaking, held on to your hand.
November they called the killing month for all the men and women and ships that never came back. Maybe that's why you chose not to keep too many memories, then; just at the end of every time that you were not with him, when you found him again. You'd walk in, quietly, and he wouldn't even seem to notice that you were there. You were careful then because nothing destroys careers faster than the slimmest thread of gossip; you waited, and didn't smile at him, and saluted and left when your report was delivered. When you were allowed back the last of the leaves had fallen from the trees and it was the first in a long time that you were alone with him; you sat with your hands on your lap, wanted to explain everything to him but couldn't find the words. He looked out of the windows at the dead brown landscape, made a disapproving noise, dulled the windows and, reaching across the car, touched your knee with one finger as though you were a strange land he was setting foot on for the first time. "Everyone has been upset with me," he said. "They think we have quarreled and I have told you not to shadow me so closely any more." You saw him smile, then, slowly and beginning with the pleased narrowing of his eyes and flowing down to curve the edges of his mouth. "They're all fools," he said, and you knew he was talking about everyone except yourself and him (and maybe Annerose, waiting for both of you in her beautiful prison not so far away now), because then he leaned across and kissed the corner of your mouth until you felt it curving, too, opening to him.
December, tired like you, faded out slowly in a flurry of decadent balls and soirees and fine women who smiled at you like you knew what they were not saying. You only knew exactly when he needed you to come over and whisper something in his ear, and he knew exactly how to snap to attention and what kind of excuses to dash off before you hustled him out of the ballroom or theatre or garden into the car and away to the shipyard where they were beginning to build her, his ship waiting for him white like a candle amidst the metal folds and fripperies of scaffolding. He was too young to have her then but she would be ready when he made admiral, perhaps in another two years, perhaps in just one. You knew Annerose thought he would still be too young, then.
"Isolde," he said, as you walked together across the catwalk that took you to where the ship's skeleton hung in berth like a great sleeping shell. "And when you get your ship you shall have to name him Tristan."
"I could," you said, "although I think all ships are female. But Tristan and Isolde both died tragically. You wouldn't want that to happen to her."
"No! She's a shieldmaiden, a valkyrie.. she won't die tragically. Easily, anyway."
You laughed with him, then.
"The greatest valkyrie," he said, "Brünnehilde," and he stepped off the catwalk although you reached out to stop him and walked across the smooth curve of her white hull glowing as though with his love. You followed him, like you always did. Later, you remembered in the fable how Brünnehilde in her jealousy had plotted to have Siegfried killed, but you didn't think it mattered; Siegfried was a common name, after all.
Day/Theme: August 9: Anno mirabilis (Year Of Wonders)
Series: Legend of Galactic Heroes
Character/Pairing: Reinhardt/Siegfried
Rating: PG-13
seasons we lived in
January was a solid block of prefabricated classroom walls shivering under the onslaught of freak blizzards, putting on three layers of clothes just to go down for breakfast, hot coffee in enamel mugs going cold halfway between the pantry and your room, waking up under a layer of snowdrift that had filtered in through the cracks of the windows like a fall of blossom. Sometimes when you were reading and he was huddled under the same rug on your bed, you both kissed to get warm because you weren't old enough to drink and he said, "You smell nice after you brush your teeth," and it felt good, tongues touching and teeth clicking on teeth and missing his mouth sometimes and hearing him laugh when you licked the tip of his nose by mistake.
February rained, constantly, like someone always talking on the phone in the background. When the rain was very heavy it seemed that this background conversation had turned into an argument, as though your parents were fighting downstairs, and you could only lie in bed unable to move out of some irrational fear of making the situation worse. Reinhardt could always break this spell with a simple word, but Reinhardt wasn't always awake and he wasn't always thinking about you.
March he liked because it was warmer and you both did not have to wear so many coats and ran and climbed faster and more quietly across the distances separating you from her. Somehow you thought of her more often then, and he must have, too, but it never once occured to you to ask him if she knew; nor did he tell you not to tell her. Now it was warmer it was slower and gentler and less desperate and sometimes he would just lie on you, beside you, with his breath dry against your throat and his fingers wound like so many strange flowers into your hair. You could feel the sap rising in him then, the way it rose in soil and the plants and the air bursting into first colour on the trees and blue back in the sky and the return of bright quick birds in the garden, one by one, sprout by bud by bloom. It was time to start thinking about studying to pass the exams and preparing for the interviews into the academy, but when he said, "Kircheis," you didn't think to doubt him (or yourself) for a second.
April the month of dragonflies; you'll always remember how they came through the gardens green to your window as you were reading, strange alien ships barely two inches long come to pay you a visit. Listening to them buzzing around you, you always felt there was some wisdom they wanted to convey to you, but it was on a different scale, it would never be useful. Come exams, you'd only have to lift your head in the hall to ease the crick in your neck and someone would be swatting around their heads with their script waving frantically for an invigilator's attention, and you'd always wonder why they never came to you then. Reinhardt never noticed them.
May, the letters came, and suddenly there was no more time and you had to go. The address on your papers was different from the one on his but he wrote the same one on both your baggage tags, stuck them to your suitcases and asked you to book two tickets on the same train, one-way. You didn't think to question him then and it was only much later, having tea with Annerose and listening idly to him chattering about the amazing things you'd been doing and planning to do together, that she looked at you and smiled with such a quick flash of happiness in her eyes you felt as if she'd reached under the table and squeezed your hand. "Nothing's free," he said; he was talking about the virtues of a planned economy, but you dropped the cup you were holding, anyway.
June began out in the sun, on the river, in a boat. You were rowing; he'd started out, zealously, worn himself out and then let you take the oars from him with only a faint sound of complaint. You asked him if he was thinking about tomorrow and he said, "Next year," and you didn't know what to say, and he said, "It's all too slow," and there was only the silence of the sunlight on the water, nothing you knew how to break. You rowed faster then, because it was the only thing you could do, and the silence stayed with you and you didn't hear him telling you to stop until he stood up and flourished his arms to get your attention and the entire boat upended and you both went off to your first engagement at the front lines sneezing your heads off. Oddly enough the silence stayed with you for the rest of the month, even though you're sure you heard him laughing as you towed him up on shore and threw yourselves down on the bank where it sloped, under the trees; the silence that was on the river and in the rushes and sliding under his hands where they drew long and lingering across your hips and thighs and in between each deep wet breath you took, mingled, together.
July was politics even though it was the wrong weather for it; all hot and sleepy and the afternoons long-drawn-out contests between ground and sky trying to outstare each other, white surfaces leaving large swathes of spangled stars across your eyes even after you looked away. At first you didn't think to leave him when he attended these meetings; then, when the stares and the whispers drove you to, he became indignant at your absence and came looking for you. To counter the polite hint of, "We are expecting Reinhardt von Museal," he developed the devastating, simple answer of, "But Kircheis is me!" and brushed past the bemused officer at the door with such supreme confidence in his stride that even you, for a moment, believed him, and followed him in.
August, the desert; the most beautiful place you ever saw that was neither space nor dream. Once, en route to a sortie, he threw his head up to look at the sky, and really he was just looking to see if the ships were on course and at roughly the right altitude and you were worn out with travelling and the heat and the strain of the enemy being maybe just over the next elegant ridge of windblasted sandstone, but against that burning blue sky and with the sun shimmering in his hair he looked like an angel.
September and you realized how much it was wearing him out, how much heavier the shadows under his cheekbones and how ethereal his arms felt around you and the constant fever always just underneath his skin, keeping both of you awake at night. You thought he would collapse and die amongst the fine warm colours of the trees and Annerose would never forgive you. The lines for the execution of his plans were all drawn now and he kept telling you when you were alone how this had to be perfect, how he could not go wrong, how he must not go wrong. He was so sure of himself. Yet even when he was tired he would not go to bed, not even when the entire building and block and city were asleep and his eyelashes fell pale across his eyes. "Imagine it's the last night we have for all we have to do," he said, and you said there was always another day, and he said, "No!" and you didn't say anything but you stayed, and when he fell asleep at his desk you carried him to his room. (Days passed and he never seemed to grow lighter, but a blind man could see he was losing weight; near the end of the month you had dizzy spells, near-fainting fits, and then you realized you'd been matching him, pound for pound.) You always lay down and fell asleep on his bed, fully dressed, after you'd changed him out of uniform and rolled him under the covers. In the morning when you went to shower the stripes of the metal bars and the whorls of the buttons showed up in red lines on your skin, something like the way his teeth used to mark you.
October marked the rise of his star. Explosion after explosion blossomed like chrysanthemums across a continent; his genius, your doing. For the first time you realized you had helped kill all these people without actually watching them die. After the presentation of medals and announcement of promotions you stood to the side and watched him disappear from the crowd, you followed the trail of his absence down a dark stairwell step by step and hand outstretched until you found him where he was waiting and his hand closed around yours. You wanted to ask him if this was fast enough but you couldn't see his face in the dark and as much as you were hurt by what he'd done and what he'd made you do, it was simply not in you to hurt him. The stairs echoed around you and you wondered how much further they went down. "It's like a bottomless well in a fairytale," he said. "The bird that was brave enough to fly down the well, always kept flying. But because the well never ended, the bird could keep--" He stopped speaking, held on to your hand.
November they called the killing month for all the men and women and ships that never came back. Maybe that's why you chose not to keep too many memories, then; just at the end of every time that you were not with him, when you found him again. You'd walk in, quietly, and he wouldn't even seem to notice that you were there. You were careful then because nothing destroys careers faster than the slimmest thread of gossip; you waited, and didn't smile at him, and saluted and left when your report was delivered. When you were allowed back the last of the leaves had fallen from the trees and it was the first in a long time that you were alone with him; you sat with your hands on your lap, wanted to explain everything to him but couldn't find the words. He looked out of the windows at the dead brown landscape, made a disapproving noise, dulled the windows and, reaching across the car, touched your knee with one finger as though you were a strange land he was setting foot on for the first time. "Everyone has been upset with me," he said. "They think we have quarreled and I have told you not to shadow me so closely any more." You saw him smile, then, slowly and beginning with the pleased narrowing of his eyes and flowing down to curve the edges of his mouth. "They're all fools," he said, and you knew he was talking about everyone except yourself and him (and maybe Annerose, waiting for both of you in her beautiful prison not so far away now), because then he leaned across and kissed the corner of your mouth until you felt it curving, too, opening to him.
December, tired like you, faded out slowly in a flurry of decadent balls and soirees and fine women who smiled at you like you knew what they were not saying. You only knew exactly when he needed you to come over and whisper something in his ear, and he knew exactly how to snap to attention and what kind of excuses to dash off before you hustled him out of the ballroom or theatre or garden into the car and away to the shipyard where they were beginning to build her, his ship waiting for him white like a candle amidst the metal folds and fripperies of scaffolding. He was too young to have her then but she would be ready when he made admiral, perhaps in another two years, perhaps in just one. You knew Annerose thought he would still be too young, then.
"Isolde," he said, as you walked together across the catwalk that took you to where the ship's skeleton hung in berth like a great sleeping shell. "And when you get your ship you shall have to name him Tristan."
"I could," you said, "although I think all ships are female. But Tristan and Isolde both died tragically. You wouldn't want that to happen to her."
"No! She's a shieldmaiden, a valkyrie.. she won't die tragically. Easily, anyway."
You laughed with him, then.
"The greatest valkyrie," he said, "Brünnehilde," and he stepped off the catwalk although you reached out to stop him and walked across the smooth curve of her white hull glowing as though with his love. You followed him, like you always did. Later, you remembered in the fable how Brünnehilde in her jealousy had plotted to have Siegfried killed, but you didn't think it mattered; Siegfried was a common name, after all.