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+---- Thread: [P] after it all was filtered out (/showthread.php?tid=5359)
after it all was filtered out - Andras - 08-11-2020
andras
i am angry.
i have nothing to say about it.
i am not sorry for the cost.
A
ndras is a creature of habit.Every day he wakes and walks through the library. Every day the same walls, the same railing, the same endless shelves of books and lanterns. Every day door frames twisted into the wood itself, windows that are drafty but in what seems to be an intentional way.
Every day Andras looks out the window, at the woods, now covered in newly fallen snow (and enough of it to stick to the carpet of pine needles and crumpled fern), and Andras thinks nothing. There is always that single, beautiful moment of absolute emptiness that he drinks like he's a parched man in the desert. Andras takes that moment into the woods with him, toward the city.
Every day the city and his stillness dissolving and falling through the cracks in his hands. Every day the curved streets, the tall arches of the capitol, and Court building that Andras looks balefully at for a moment before wandering to some book store or another. He realizes the irony in his going to book stores when he lives in the library. Andras is a creature of habit.
Today is not like every day. Today Andras wakes, strolls the library, stares out the window, and walks to the city, but when he arrives just around noon and he is staring toward the heart of the Court, something unexpected stirs in him. There is not much to do, without-- well, the unending nightmare of the past year-- just his manic research, the enormous trial of wrestling his magic into something like order so it does not one day splatter him on the wall, and think, and think, and think.
Andras does not like thinking. Andras is too full of bombs to look any of them in the eye. If Andras thinks anything, regularly, it is that as long as he can't see the shrinking fuses they might as well not be there at all.
--But, in spite of his desperate attempts, he has been thinking. Something has been growing in him. It is missing them: the people, the purpose, everything. And, it is is this distinct hole that he feels that brings him to the garden: each hedge capped with snow, still surprisingly vibrant considering the season. We probably have the king to thank for that, I think.
When they do find each other, either by circumstance or divine intervention or a sprinkling of both, Andras looks at Ipomoea for longer than he should, searching for what to say. What does one say? "Good morning, sir." is what he decides, nodding curtly, face drawn into the typical grim lines. "I came to see how you've been."
RE: after it all was filtered out - Ipomoea - 08-27-2020
That day in Illuster feels like only yesterday. He can still see the red-and-gold leaves of the maple tree planted beside her house, and the vines that had grown around and around the walls like so many nooses ready to strangle the life. He can still smell the saltwater that had dripped from the ceiling, and left tear tracks down her face. He can still hear her voice, how wrong it had sounded between her rotting teeth. The cottage they had torn apart with their magic feels like only yesterday, and yet —
And yet it was well into winter now. The colors of fall had been hidden beneath all those layers of snow, burying the smell of death, the blood, the rotten pieces of themselves they had cut away and left in the meadow.
And life had gone on.
More or less.
He walks the streets each day and asks his people how they are doing. He watches the forest for more signs of blood, or darkness, or cold cutting away at their hearts. He tends his garden, a small patch of color in an otherwise colorless world.
He still hasn’t gone to see the Emissary.
It’s easier to pretend she stopped existing, the moment he shut the prison door on her and replaced her world with darkness. It’s easier to pretend the world was right again, and safe, and simple. To kiss his daughters’ bruised eyes awake at noon and not ask them which nightmares had kept them up this time.
But if it was so much easier, why then could he not stop looking to the trees, looking for more shadows, more ghosts, more monsters? Why could he not stop —
He cuts away another blackened camellia flower, prunes wilting leaves from the winter jasmine and ivies. Over and over he goes to work in the garden, bidding new stems to grow for all the ones he cuts away, until the flowers are brighter than they have been every winter before. He can almost forget, while he’s in the garden, that it’s winter again. He can almost remember what it feels like to not look for shadows around every turn.
He knows the warden by his steps alone, by the crackle of electricity that runs through the air around him. Ipomoea does not look up from the winter holly when Andras finds him. The bush creeps to life under his care, more leaves unfurling, more berries reddening, shaking off the snow it had collected overnight. He wishes it were as easy for him, for Andras, for them.
When did they forget how to be soft?
“Good morning, Andras,” it all comes back like a sigh he has been holding back for too long. He straightens up at last, turning to the pegasus with a smile that feels more forced than it used to. “It’s been a while.”
He does not say that it doesn’t feel like it. He doesn’t say that he sometimes goes down to the prisons and stands there just outside her cell, waiting — never going in, but listening for the rasp of her breath, making sure she was still in there.
There are only so many things he can blame on Emersyn.
“I’ve been —“ unable to sleep “alright.” He knows how the words sound. He makes up for it with another smile, to take the edge off. “How about you?”
And he wonders in Andras finds it just as hard to sleep now as he does.
And yet it was well into winter now. The colors of fall had been hidden beneath all those layers of snow, burying the smell of death, the blood, the rotten pieces of themselves they had cut away and left in the meadow.
And life had gone on.
More or less.
He walks the streets each day and asks his people how they are doing. He watches the forest for more signs of blood, or darkness, or cold cutting away at their hearts. He tends his garden, a small patch of color in an otherwise colorless world.
He still hasn’t gone to see the Emissary.
It’s easier to pretend she stopped existing, the moment he shut the prison door on her and replaced her world with darkness. It’s easier to pretend the world was right again, and safe, and simple. To kiss his daughters’ bruised eyes awake at noon and not ask them which nightmares had kept them up this time.
But if it was so much easier, why then could he not stop looking to the trees, looking for more shadows, more ghosts, more monsters? Why could he not stop —
He cuts away another blackened camellia flower, prunes wilting leaves from the winter jasmine and ivies. Over and over he goes to work in the garden, bidding new stems to grow for all the ones he cuts away, until the flowers are brighter than they have been every winter before. He can almost forget, while he’s in the garden, that it’s winter again. He can almost remember what it feels like to not look for shadows around every turn.
He knows the warden by his steps alone, by the crackle of electricity that runs through the air around him. Ipomoea does not look up from the winter holly when Andras finds him. The bush creeps to life under his care, more leaves unfurling, more berries reddening, shaking off the snow it had collected overnight. He wishes it were as easy for him, for Andras, for them.
When did they forget how to be soft?
“Good morning, Andras,” it all comes back like a sigh he has been holding back for too long. He straightens up at last, turning to the pegasus with a smile that feels more forced than it used to. “It’s been a while.”
He does not say that it doesn’t feel like it. He doesn’t say that he sometimes goes down to the prisons and stands there just outside her cell, waiting — never going in, but listening for the rasp of her breath, making sure she was still in there.
There are only so many things he can blame on Emersyn.
“I’ve been —“ unable to sleep “alright.” He knows how the words sound. He makes up for it with another smile, to take the edge off. “How about you?”
And he wonders in Andras finds it just as hard to sleep now as he does.
@
”here am i!“
RE: after it all was filtered out - Andras - 10-01-2020
andras
i am angry.
i have nothing to say about it.
i am not sorry for the cost.
L
“Good morning, Andras. It’s been a while.“ Andras looks at him like he’s searching. He wants to say, I’m sorry. He wants to ask more: are you okay? Am I okay? Is the fact that we seem to be the only haunted men in this lonely country a curse or a blessing? Does it mean that we’re doomed, or that Delumine is better for it? Both? Neither?
What he does say is: “It has. Probably too long.” It comes out like a sigh, like a release after holding his breath for too long. He buzzes away in the silence that is never really silence near Andras. It is still so much quieter today, than he's used to.
When Ipomoea turns to look at him his eyes are wet, and cold, like the heavy snow he shakes off of each leaf in his garden. Andras is suddenly very tired. He does not have to look closely to see the dark circles under his eyes, or the shoulders that just barely sag under the weight of his duty, or the tired strain of his smile. He would find it even if it were not there. He could not bear the thought that he was alone in his suffering.
He never knew how to be soft.
But he wonders if he will ever be right, again, or if this will continue, the endless cycle of boredom and fear that spreads over his undercurrent of anger, or if he will feel torn in two for the rest of his life.
He liked it better, when he was just angry.
I've been alright, the king says, and smiles like a shield. Andra looks at him through the lens of his glasses and turns away, looking over the soft green lawn of the garden, over his winter plants and the few that should not still be growing, but persist nonetheless. He tries not to grimace. He does not try hard enough.
"I'm--" bored? Angry that I'm bored? Tortured day and night by a Solterran with snakes for hair? Afraid that I'm going completely insane? Far more afraid that I'm afraid of anything at all? "--you know. Cold. Tired. The usual."
He fidgets under the king's gaze, unfolding then refolding the wings over his back.
"Are you actually fine?"
RE: after it all was filtered out - Ipomoea - 10-31-2020
There was a time when all this distance between them would have felt unnatural. A time when he would not have worried about all the things Andras did not say but that he can read now like a book arching across his skin. It was a time when there were more flowers in his blood than rage.
But sometimes he thinks that Ipomoea, the one who bruised as easily as violets, was buried now beneath a mountain of cut-off rose thorns.
He is not sure he will survive them.
So he can almost forgive the look in Andras' eyes, even when the buried parts ot his heart are still screaming we cannot live like this. And he lets that silence between them drag on, broken only by the sound of branches shivering beneath their veils of ice. The holly reaches out for him in all that space, leaves brushing against his check. And he tries to keep the storm out of his eyes when he turns to his warden.
He does not tell Andras and tell him that he doesn't need to worry, that he is going to become enough of a monster so that he won't have to.
Because there is still a court that he needs to wake up, and the monster hiding in his closet is only a reminder that there are more monsters out there, always there are more. Isra had told him so, when she ended a war only to go out and find the next one. He had not understood then, but now —
Now, when he should be fine but isn't, now he knows why.
And when he says, “We can't go back to who we were before,” it sounds like, I told you there was a storm coming. “We can only move on." And that too feels like a desert flower dying beneath the weight of all the frost of a hungry winter.
He wants to tell him that it's okay to be angry, that he can turn that anger into a sword and cut out his own boredom, his own pain, his own fear with it. He wants to tell him that it would make them more similar if he did. But in the end he only steps closer and brushes their shoulders together like the promise he does not know how to speak.
"It would seem there's an open sent on the Council now," he says when he goes back to his work. Bits of broken leaves and branches fall at their feet like tears. "Do you want it?"
It almost sounds like a joke, like the laughter he has forgotten how to make. But it's not.
But sometimes he thinks that Ipomoea, the one who bruised as easily as violets, was buried now beneath a mountain of cut-off rose thorns.
He is not sure he will survive them.
So he can almost forgive the look in Andras' eyes, even when the buried parts ot his heart are still screaming we cannot live like this. And he lets that silence between them drag on, broken only by the sound of branches shivering beneath their veils of ice. The holly reaches out for him in all that space, leaves brushing against his check. And he tries to keep the storm out of his eyes when he turns to his warden.
He does not tell Andras and tell him that he doesn't need to worry, that he is going to become enough of a monster so that he won't have to.
Because there is still a court that he needs to wake up, and the monster hiding in his closet is only a reminder that there are more monsters out there, always there are more. Isra had told him so, when she ended a war only to go out and find the next one. He had not understood then, but now —
Now, when he should be fine but isn't, now he knows why.
And when he says, “We can't go back to who we were before,” it sounds like, I told you there was a storm coming. “We can only move on." And that too feels like a desert flower dying beneath the weight of all the frost of a hungry winter.
He wants to tell him that it's okay to be angry, that he can turn that anger into a sword and cut out his own boredom, his own pain, his own fear with it. He wants to tell him that it would make them more similar if he did. But in the end he only steps closer and brushes their shoulders together like the promise he does not know how to speak.
"It would seem there's an open sent on the Council now," he says when he goes back to his work. Bits of broken leaves and branches fall at their feet like tears. "Do you want it?"
It almost sounds like a joke, like the laughter he has forgotten how to make. But it's not.
@
”here am i!“
RE: after it all was filtered out - Andras - 11-17-2020
andras
i am angry.
i have nothing to say about it.
i am not sorry for the cost.
A
ndras winces. We can’t go back to who we were before.This is what the king tells him after an extended silence, after they have both looked at their hooves long enough that they fail to take any memorable shape, like a word said over and over until it no longer sounds like a word.
Andras knows this. Sometimes he thinks he is the only one that knows it. Each time his magic goes back to sleep some door in him closes and seals itself shut. He is running out of conduits for his rage. He is running out of places to keep it. Sometimes Andras watches Po bubbling just beneath the surface, like he does, and wonders what will happen when it all comes to a head. (Then, he wonders what will happen if he, himself, reaches that point. Andras has the sneaking suspicion that he is far more dangerous than anyone thinks. He thinks it is only a matter of time before they find out.)
They can’t go back to who they were before.
We can only go forward.
The warden takes this cue to look ahead, at the slumped shoulders of hedges and the bright red holly berries peeking through the snow where Po has not yet brushed it off of their waxy leaves.
When Po touches his shoulder, an act of solidarity, an attempt to comfort, Andras cannot meet his eyes. A blue fork of static reaches out to catch his weight, or pull him in, or push him away-- even it doesn’t know. Andras wishes he would say it: It’s okay to be angry. But Andras knows. Andras has always known. But there is only the brief touch of their skin, the fork of static, and the cold that sucks into the space between them as they are separated again.
There is an open seat on the council, Ipomoea says. The warden nods. It will need to be filled sooner or later. Sleepy Delumine is at nothing but a disadvantage with their current Emissary locked up and twice over insane. He opens his mouth to respond, to make a suggestion, when he is asked: do you want it?
This all feels terribly familiar.
It feels like a storm on the cusp of summer, fat green leaves clattering together and the distant roll of thunder. Andras had said You’re joking and the king had looked at him with level, blood-red eyes. Too still to be untruthful. Too tired to be insincere.
“Are you--? Me?” he begins to ask, but he knows. So, as Andras always would, because Ipomoea asks it of him, because he would do anything, if Ipomoea asked, he tucks his chin into his chest and nods, grimly.
He always gets the sense that Po knows something he doesn’t, or knows him better than he knows himself. “If you're sure, I’d be honored.”
(Somewhere, in some far-off part of him, Andras is wondering what Pilate would say.)
RE: after it all was filtered out - Ipomoea - 11-24-2020
Somewhere along the line all the quiet became natural for him. Sometime between listening to his flowers as they stretched and grew and bloomed and watched the people of his court struggling to do the same. Somewhere between war and peace, between the destruction of a fire and the new growth that follows in its wake. Somewhere between one heartbeat and the next, the ones he was not sure would follow.
He is not sure when it happened. Maybe it had always been there, another part of him that was hidden beneath the petals he had draped around his heart as a shield. Maybe it happened when he was drowning in the rot of a dying stag, and all he wanted was to feel one more breath of air filling the creature’s lungs. But when he thinks, he can remember it before then — when he listened to the trees welcoming home. When he walked in a golden rain shower with a stranger (and never once did he stop to wonder at the war they would fight in together, years later.) When he felt the earth leading him to a secret he did not know he needed to find.
Somewhere, he had learned to speak the language the earth speaks. And in the process, he thinks he has forgotten the language of his own kind, of his people, of his friends.
But he does not know how to unlearn and relearn anymore.
He knows he should be a better king, a better father, a better gardener of this court he thought he could grow. He should do anything but lift his head to the winter like a birch tree welcoming the death of its cousins. But he does it anyway when he pulls his shoulder from Andras’ and looks into the sky like he can see a warning there, or a promise, or a sign for what is to come.
It reminds him of how it feels to want. Of how that wanting can destroy a world as soon as rebuild it.
He knows it. And Ipomoea will not decide for him because of it. And he wonders when he began feeling less like a man, like an orphan, like a king — and more like a god.
“Take some time. Sleep on it, if you need to.” He brushes the words across Andras’ temple the same way he brushes the snow from his holly bushes. “You can give me your answer in the morning.”
A smile then, the closest thing to a real smile he has been able to form in too many days. The sunlight glinting off of the ice makes his eyes sting when he realizes he has been staring at it for too long. He is always looking at the frost now, at the ice wrapped around the life of his garden like a noose, and wondering, wondering, wondering if the world was only a thing made for consuming.
He wonders when it will be torn apart like a fruit, and if he can stop it.
“Until then, perhaps you can walk with me?” Already he is brushing the ice and the frozen earth from his knees, and heading back towards the warmth of the castle (he is sure Andras would appreciate a warmer place than the garden in winter.) “I heard you have gone to Solterra.”
And his eyes when he glances sideways at Andras are begging for a story, hoping to relearn all the languages he has forgotten.
He is not sure when it happened. Maybe it had always been there, another part of him that was hidden beneath the petals he had draped around his heart as a shield. Maybe it happened when he was drowning in the rot of a dying stag, and all he wanted was to feel one more breath of air filling the creature’s lungs. But when he thinks, he can remember it before then — when he listened to the trees welcoming home. When he walked in a golden rain shower with a stranger (and never once did he stop to wonder at the war they would fight in together, years later.) When he felt the earth leading him to a secret he did not know he needed to find.
Somewhere, he had learned to speak the language the earth speaks. And in the process, he thinks he has forgotten the language of his own kind, of his people, of his friends.
But he does not know how to unlearn and relearn anymore.
He knows he should be a better king, a better father, a better gardener of this court he thought he could grow. He should do anything but lift his head to the winter like a birch tree welcoming the death of its cousins. But he does it anyway when he pulls his shoulder from Andras’ and looks into the sky like he can see a warning there, or a promise, or a sign for what is to come.
It reminds him of how it feels to want. Of how that wanting can destroy a world as soon as rebuild it.
He knows it. And Ipomoea will not decide for him because of it. And he wonders when he began feeling less like a man, like an orphan, like a king — and more like a god.
“Take some time. Sleep on it, if you need to.” He brushes the words across Andras’ temple the same way he brushes the snow from his holly bushes. “You can give me your answer in the morning.”
A smile then, the closest thing to a real smile he has been able to form in too many days. The sunlight glinting off of the ice makes his eyes sting when he realizes he has been staring at it for too long. He is always looking at the frost now, at the ice wrapped around the life of his garden like a noose, and wondering, wondering, wondering if the world was only a thing made for consuming.
He wonders when it will be torn apart like a fruit, and if he can stop it.
“Until then, perhaps you can walk with me?” Already he is brushing the ice and the frozen earth from his knees, and heading back towards the warmth of the castle (he is sure Andras would appreciate a warmer place than the garden in winter.) “I heard you have gone to Solterra.”
And his eyes when he glances sideways at Andras are begging for a story, hoping to relearn all the languages he has forgotten.
@
I figured this can be wrapped up in the next couple of replies!
”here am i!“