Guardians-vese origfic (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
guardiansverse) wrote2020-09-25 12:27 am
guardiansverse) wrote2020-09-25 12:27 am
(no subject)
AU end part 2 now with extra smarmy sap I'm not sorry.
Part 1: https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/592811.html?thread=3629211819#cmt3629211819
The full story on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22517767/chapters/53807785
Festus woke to a bed in a candlelit room, shaky and feverish but breathing, finding Saul’s dozing weight stretched out and pressed against him: and for a moment he was back in his own home weeks before, waking to realize the boy had saved his life.
Memory rose up, quick yet surprisingly gentle. He took stock. A guest bedroom in the Duchess’s residence in Alsden. Nighttime, but early. The faint sound from a neighbouring room of Anké Stattenholme humming a northern lullaby. Saul, asleep but not deep enough to be dreaming, his pulse strong and slow. Festus’s own body, wrung out and ailing, but nowhere near as bad as it ought to have been after the power he’d spent in the web.
And the link.
He felt it with unspeakable astonishment, beating within him like a second heart. That baffling, by all rights unnatural three-way link. The well of unexpected strength. He probed delicately toward one end of it, found Amika’s soul soaking in her mother’s song, creating her I am from it as a tree grew its rings from sunlight and water. Then, toward the other side, at carefully as he would hold up a newborn’s head —
Saul stirred and opened his eyes.
Memory seemed slow to come back to the lad, too: he blinked once, slowly, then with a hard shake of his head pushed himself up and nearly stumbled off the bed. Festus reached out by instinct to grab his arm and keep him from falling. Only once the contact was made did he realize it should discomfit him. From the look in Saul’s eyes, he too had come to that realization too late to twitch away.
Briefly they froze like this. Looking at each other. Not quite knowing how to detangle the look or the touch.
Saul moved, wildcat-quick, and with one twist and shift was leaning over Festus and holding a knife to his throat. He rasped, “You lied to me.”
Festus had jerked back on instinct, his back pressed against the headboard and knees bending up. But it was awe that made his heart quicken, not fear. He looked up at the boy: the young Guardian, whose full and radiant soul was even now tuned to his own. He’s grown, came the thought, a ludicrous thought with the blade right there ready to end him. But it was all he could think. He will truly be a man.
“I did,” he said, hoarse in turn, “but not about your exile —“
“I know what about,” Saul hissed. “I saw it, when you were — when you saw into me, I saw back.” His breath stuttered; even his grip on the knife, Festus’s own knife, wavered. “Did — did you let me defeat you?”
“No —”
“But you meant to.”
“I did at first. Then I didn’t need to. The blow to my head, I let you have that, but from that moment on I stopped holding back. I never meant to be outfought as I was.”
Saul snarled, “I could’ve killed you.”
“Would you have done it?” Festus asked, and closed his eyes.
He felt Saul trembling, all throughout his body. Felt his soul swirling, too, like the storms on the sea Festus had never seen. He breathed once. Twice. Felt his moving throat press against the cold edge. The knife that was all there was.
All at once, he felt Saul’s hand drop loose on the bed. Heard the knife clatter to the floor.
“I can’t,” the young man said softly. Half strangled with defeat, half full of wonder. “I can’t stay angry with you.”
In his voice, too, there was a kind of awe. He glanced at his hands, then let them drop to his sides, loose, open. Sank back on his knees. There had been hurt, there had been betrayal: there had been misunderstanding and secrets and blood. And, past it all, here they were, now, again. Seeing each other across that door, opened in Saul’s eyes, in Festus’s heart.
“I should,” Saul added abruptly, with a thrust of gentle bitterness. “Before you I knew everything. You made me ask what for. You made me look at the war, and that made me afraid. And when you wouldn’t have me as your soldier, the frightened part was all that was left.” He shook his head, and looked up and met Festus’s gaze. “I can’t be that, domé. Not even for you.”
Festus swallowed under that gaze. Nodded. “I know.”
He forced himself to hold Saul’s eyes, to sit still to hold the door open. Knowing that Saul was seeing back — seeing him and into him. Seeing him whole. And what do you see when you do, lad? “You were right about Karli. That not fighting has its price. That to fight might be the only way through fear. To power.” Saul nodded back, but slowly. Uncertain. “I wanted to spare her, and ended up only denying her that power. Just as I did with Sofia. And you…”
He trailed off. Saul was silent, listening. Listening. Festus started again: “You, I lied to. The only lie great enough to make you fight me. Because that is how Guardians are made — by doing what they know to be impossible. And the way for you to gain that power was through me.”
Saul tilted his head. Listening still, wondering. “You didn’t want me to fight.”
“What does it matter, what I wanted? I had nothing to give you.” One shake of the head. His own hands, too, loose and powerless. His gaze escaping Saul’s to drop down to them. “You were right. I am broken. And I cannot make you bear the weight of that. I can’t give you my dreams —”
“You gave me a life,” Saul said quietly.
Festus looked up abruptly at that, his hands on the verge of convulsing. The words had come out clean into the world. A burst of light, a sudden cloud-break. A life.
“I didn’t see it,” the young man continued, pulling a knee up to cross his arms over it. Quietly musing. Each word measured, unfolded as he found it within himself, held it with great care to raise it up to the light. “All I saw was that you made me stop. And if I stopped, what more was there? I know what the world is.” His face darkened, a hard fraction. “I won’t be…”
He grimaced, twitched his head in some odd jerking gesture: it took Festus a moment to understand he was feeling the bond, where it led. To Amika. Darling Amika in her mother’s arms, safe and pure, spared every cruelty in the world.
It won’t last. Her own mother had come to him knowing as much. She’ll learn. She’ll break. Like any young life…
She’ll move on. She’ll live.
For the first time he saw it clearly, right there in Saul’s face. Not the knife put away, but more than the knife. The life past it. He will truly be a man. Not unbroken: nothing could unbreak, and they knew what the world was. But heal…
Saul was staring at him: a strange echo of the look he had given Festus when they had met again in Alsden, deeply, achingly searching. It was a moment before Festus registered that his own eyes were wet.
Did I make this right? He had opened his soul, and…
“But you came back,” he rasped.
Saul now swallowed. Nodded. “And you let me.”
Later, Festus would not be sure which of them had moved first. An awkward shift, inch by uncertain inch: him raising his hand again, Saul leaning forward. The moment when there was too much closeness to pretend away. Hesitation, the merciless voice in his mind, It’s not and never will be done, healing is only another battle; but the bond tethering his soul ran deeper.
And the last leap: his hand in Saul’s hair, the young man’s head dropping into his touch.
“I came back when I saw you,” he heard Saul murmur, a whisper of air against his wrist. “I saw what you were in peacetime. And I understood. You couldn’t fight and you had no one. I can outfight any man alive, now, and…”
A break, a wavering hesitation: and in it Festus found the memory, the realization. The moment when their souls had touched the closest, tangled and stuck together in the place where both were the rawest. No one will touch you. I lived.
I see you, too, he thought, and murmured back, “And you have me.”
Saul gave a soft involuntary sound: pain, astonishment, relief. Then he relaxed entirely, a storm exhaling its last into a clear and radiant blue sky.
They sat that way for a long time, then sat for longer and even closer, shoulder to shoulder. Not quite leaning on each other but never breaking contact. Every few moments Festus looked down at the young man beside him, feeling his heart leap with uncertain wonder every time; every few moments he caught Saul doing the same. The same wonder. For the first time, each of them looking at the other without a question in his eyes.
Between them breathed the link, steady and golden. Infused with a deep quiescence that told Festus that Amika — faintly at the edge of his consciousness at all times now, like the burbling of distant waters — was asleep. An echo of his probing must have trickled over into Saul’s own awareness, making the young man stir against him, raise his gaze again to say, “It feels different than what I’d expected.”
Festus half-smiled, was pleased to realize there was no bitterness in that smile. “It’s different than what I’d expected to make.”
“What does it make us — the three of us?”
“I barely know myself.” Quietly, but the full truth: he would never give anything else again. “Our souls are linked three-ways. Power flows from me to her and from her to you, and from you back again.”
Another thought came, and startled him with its rightness: “She has the anchor, and you the centre, and I the web. All one.” Not unbroken — but between them, made whole.
He watched Saul think on it. Watched him breathe into his centre in the way of Guardians: a deep breath that filled Saul’s body, seemed to kindle in it and bring to it a presence in the world. Perhaps the first time Saul could truly feel what he was, complete. The first time Festus could truly look at what he had made, and see a future.
“Not all Guardians fight,” Saul mused. Thinking back, no doubt, to a hint of spring called out of last autumn in Alsden.
Festus blinked at him, but found his attention still turned inward. This isn’t a test. “If you were of Hyem, we’d have no choice in the matter. You’re much too powerful to keep off the field. But you aren’t linked to me as a Guardian to his Land’s Own.”
“I’m not of Hyem.” No pain there, now. “But I will be your soldier, still.”
“My man,” Festus corrected softly.
For all that had passed between them, he still was not expecting it: the sudden fierce brilliance in Saul’s eyes, the sheer and shimmering pride.
“I’ll do it,” the young man said, with startling simplicity. “Fortune favours the bold. It’s easy not to fear what I know I can do. Give me something else.” A flashing grin, all cocky, vibrant life. “I know my power, domé. Give me purpose.”
Brat, Festus thought, with a burst of such ferocious fondness as he had never hoped he would feel again.
“You won’t do on the field either way,” he began. Saul nodded, listening intently. “You’ll need a great deal of training to fight alongside and support an organized army. But there are things you know better than any other. You know Alsden, and the Ilyigan borderland.” Saul’s cocky cheer faded at that, gave way to the start of furrowed brows, but he nodded again. “Hyem is going to war, and Adalas will seek to sow dissent and agitation. We know she favours this tactic. This border remains vulnerable: the Ilyigan refugees are an easy target. If they become a cat’s-paw, they’ll suffer by it as much as Hyem would, and worse. I want them kept out of this war.”
“You want me to…” Saul trailed off, unsure.
“Watch over them. Don’t let Adalas achieve a foothold with them — and don’t let any Hyemi abuse them for scapegoats, either. Make it known they have a protector.” He grasped Saul’s shoulder, and the young man automatically put a hand over his own. “You are a Guardian: guard your people.”
He saw Saul begin to hesitate, and then he saw it flash and flare in him. Fortune favours the bold. “Yes, sir.”
Festus squeezed his shoulder tighter. Something there in the link, a hint of disturbance: without thinking of it he drew upon a drop of power, just enough of the web’s gift to warm up a soul, then realized he could not send it through into Saul as he would into any Guardian. It could only go into the cycle of the link: he could not give it to the two others without taking some of it into himself.
Just as he began to hesitate, there was Saul’s hand, warm on his own. The open door. Power’s purpose.
He drew it in and felt it shine all through him: his people, and spring, and the life that could be. Felt it smooth away, not all, but enough of his exhaustion to let him breathe as easily as he ever had since the capitol riot and the worst of winter. Felt it spread and cycle back, made and making whole.
He knew the moment the power flowed into Amika from the child’s soft sigh in her sleep, and he saw it flow into Saul, saw the young man close his eyes. Saw his lips form, Guard them, as soundless yet complete as a prayer.
It isn’t finished. No healing would erase that thought. Perhaps it never would be. War was coming with all it would cost. The fighting. The work. And what comes after?
He had no clean answer; perhaps no one in this world did. But he put his arm around the young man dreaming of his future and thought, We’ll live, and we’ll find out.
Part 1: https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/592811.html?thread=3629211819#cmt3629211819
The full story on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22517767/chapters/53807785
Power's purpose
Festus woke to a bed in a candlelit room, shaky and feverish but breathing, finding Saul’s dozing weight stretched out and pressed against him: and for a moment he was back in his own home weeks before, waking to realize the boy had saved his life.
Memory rose up, quick yet surprisingly gentle. He took stock. A guest bedroom in the Duchess’s residence in Alsden. Nighttime, but early. The faint sound from a neighbouring room of Anké Stattenholme humming a northern lullaby. Saul, asleep but not deep enough to be dreaming, his pulse strong and slow. Festus’s own body, wrung out and ailing, but nowhere near as bad as it ought to have been after the power he’d spent in the web.
And the link.
He felt it with unspeakable astonishment, beating within him like a second heart. That baffling, by all rights unnatural three-way link. The well of unexpected strength. He probed delicately toward one end of it, found Amika’s soul soaking in her mother’s song, creating her I am from it as a tree grew its rings from sunlight and water. Then, toward the other side, at carefully as he would hold up a newborn’s head —
Saul stirred and opened his eyes.
Memory seemed slow to come back to the lad, too: he blinked once, slowly, then with a hard shake of his head pushed himself up and nearly stumbled off the bed. Festus reached out by instinct to grab his arm and keep him from falling. Only once the contact was made did he realize it should discomfit him. From the look in Saul’s eyes, he too had come to that realization too late to twitch away.
Briefly they froze like this. Looking at each other. Not quite knowing how to detangle the look or the touch.
Saul moved, wildcat-quick, and with one twist and shift was leaning over Festus and holding a knife to his throat. He rasped, “You lied to me.”
Festus had jerked back on instinct, his back pressed against the headboard and knees bending up. But it was awe that made his heart quicken, not fear. He looked up at the boy: the young Guardian, whose full and radiant soul was even now tuned to his own. He’s grown, came the thought, a ludicrous thought with the blade right there ready to end him. But it was all he could think. He will truly be a man.
“I did,” he said, hoarse in turn, “but not about your exile —“
“I know what about,” Saul hissed. “I saw it, when you were — when you saw into me, I saw back.” His breath stuttered; even his grip on the knife, Festus’s own knife, wavered. “Did — did you let me defeat you?”
“No —”
“But you meant to.”
“I did at first. Then I didn’t need to. The blow to my head, I let you have that, but from that moment on I stopped holding back. I never meant to be outfought as I was.”
Saul snarled, “I could’ve killed you.”
“Would you have done it?” Festus asked, and closed his eyes.
He felt Saul trembling, all throughout his body. Felt his soul swirling, too, like the storms on the sea Festus had never seen. He breathed once. Twice. Felt his moving throat press against the cold edge. The knife that was all there was.
All at once, he felt Saul’s hand drop loose on the bed. Heard the knife clatter to the floor.
“I can’t,” the young man said softly. Half strangled with defeat, half full of wonder. “I can’t stay angry with you.”
In his voice, too, there was a kind of awe. He glanced at his hands, then let them drop to his sides, loose, open. Sank back on his knees. There had been hurt, there had been betrayal: there had been misunderstanding and secrets and blood. And, past it all, here they were, now, again. Seeing each other across that door, opened in Saul’s eyes, in Festus’s heart.
“I should,” Saul added abruptly, with a thrust of gentle bitterness. “Before you I knew everything. You made me ask what for. You made me look at the war, and that made me afraid. And when you wouldn’t have me as your soldier, the frightened part was all that was left.” He shook his head, and looked up and met Festus’s gaze. “I can’t be that, domé. Not even for you.”
Festus swallowed under that gaze. Nodded. “I know.”
He forced himself to hold Saul’s eyes, to sit still to hold the door open. Knowing that Saul was seeing back — seeing him and into him. Seeing him whole. And what do you see when you do, lad? “You were right about Karli. That not fighting has its price. That to fight might be the only way through fear. To power.” Saul nodded back, but slowly. Uncertain. “I wanted to spare her, and ended up only denying her that power. Just as I did with Sofia. And you…”
He trailed off. Saul was silent, listening. Listening. Festus started again: “You, I lied to. The only lie great enough to make you fight me. Because that is how Guardians are made — by doing what they know to be impossible. And the way for you to gain that power was through me.”
Saul tilted his head. Listening still, wondering. “You didn’t want me to fight.”
“What does it matter, what I wanted? I had nothing to give you.” One shake of the head. His own hands, too, loose and powerless. His gaze escaping Saul’s to drop down to them. “You were right. I am broken. And I cannot make you bear the weight of that. I can’t give you my dreams —”
“You gave me a life,” Saul said quietly.
Festus looked up abruptly at that, his hands on the verge of convulsing. The words had come out clean into the world. A burst of light, a sudden cloud-break. A life.
“I didn’t see it,” the young man continued, pulling a knee up to cross his arms over it. Quietly musing. Each word measured, unfolded as he found it within himself, held it with great care to raise it up to the light. “All I saw was that you made me stop. And if I stopped, what more was there? I know what the world is.” His face darkened, a hard fraction. “I won’t be…”
He grimaced, twitched his head in some odd jerking gesture: it took Festus a moment to understand he was feeling the bond, where it led. To Amika. Darling Amika in her mother’s arms, safe and pure, spared every cruelty in the world.
It won’t last. Her own mother had come to him knowing as much. She’ll learn. She’ll break. Like any young life…
She’ll move on. She’ll live.
For the first time he saw it clearly, right there in Saul’s face. Not the knife put away, but more than the knife. The life past it. He will truly be a man. Not unbroken: nothing could unbreak, and they knew what the world was. But heal…
Saul was staring at him: a strange echo of the look he had given Festus when they had met again in Alsden, deeply, achingly searching. It was a moment before Festus registered that his own eyes were wet.
Did I make this right? He had opened his soul, and…
“But you came back,” he rasped.
Saul now swallowed. Nodded. “And you let me.”
Later, Festus would not be sure which of them had moved first. An awkward shift, inch by uncertain inch: him raising his hand again, Saul leaning forward. The moment when there was too much closeness to pretend away. Hesitation, the merciless voice in his mind, It’s not and never will be done, healing is only another battle; but the bond tethering his soul ran deeper.
And the last leap: his hand in Saul’s hair, the young man’s head dropping into his touch.
“I came back when I saw you,” he heard Saul murmur, a whisper of air against his wrist. “I saw what you were in peacetime. And I understood. You couldn’t fight and you had no one. I can outfight any man alive, now, and…”
A break, a wavering hesitation: and in it Festus found the memory, the realization. The moment when their souls had touched the closest, tangled and stuck together in the place where both were the rawest. No one will touch you. I lived.
I see you, too, he thought, and murmured back, “And you have me.”
Saul gave a soft involuntary sound: pain, astonishment, relief. Then he relaxed entirely, a storm exhaling its last into a clear and radiant blue sky.
They sat that way for a long time, then sat for longer and even closer, shoulder to shoulder. Not quite leaning on each other but never breaking contact. Every few moments Festus looked down at the young man beside him, feeling his heart leap with uncertain wonder every time; every few moments he caught Saul doing the same. The same wonder. For the first time, each of them looking at the other without a question in his eyes.
Between them breathed the link, steady and golden. Infused with a deep quiescence that told Festus that Amika — faintly at the edge of his consciousness at all times now, like the burbling of distant waters — was asleep. An echo of his probing must have trickled over into Saul’s own awareness, making the young man stir against him, raise his gaze again to say, “It feels different than what I’d expected.”
Festus half-smiled, was pleased to realize there was no bitterness in that smile. “It’s different than what I’d expected to make.”
“What does it make us — the three of us?”
“I barely know myself.” Quietly, but the full truth: he would never give anything else again. “Our souls are linked three-ways. Power flows from me to her and from her to you, and from you back again.”
Another thought came, and startled him with its rightness: “She has the anchor, and you the centre, and I the web. All one.” Not unbroken — but between them, made whole.
He watched Saul think on it. Watched him breathe into his centre in the way of Guardians: a deep breath that filled Saul’s body, seemed to kindle in it and bring to it a presence in the world. Perhaps the first time Saul could truly feel what he was, complete. The first time Festus could truly look at what he had made, and see a future.
“Not all Guardians fight,” Saul mused. Thinking back, no doubt, to a hint of spring called out of last autumn in Alsden.
Festus blinked at him, but found his attention still turned inward. This isn’t a test. “If you were of Hyem, we’d have no choice in the matter. You’re much too powerful to keep off the field. But you aren’t linked to me as a Guardian to his Land’s Own.”
“I’m not of Hyem.” No pain there, now. “But I will be your soldier, still.”
“My man,” Festus corrected softly.
For all that had passed between them, he still was not expecting it: the sudden fierce brilliance in Saul’s eyes, the sheer and shimmering pride.
“I’ll do it,” the young man said, with startling simplicity. “Fortune favours the bold. It’s easy not to fear what I know I can do. Give me something else.” A flashing grin, all cocky, vibrant life. “I know my power, domé. Give me purpose.”
Brat, Festus thought, with a burst of such ferocious fondness as he had never hoped he would feel again.
“You won’t do on the field either way,” he began. Saul nodded, listening intently. “You’ll need a great deal of training to fight alongside and support an organized army. But there are things you know better than any other. You know Alsden, and the Ilyigan borderland.” Saul’s cocky cheer faded at that, gave way to the start of furrowed brows, but he nodded again. “Hyem is going to war, and Adalas will seek to sow dissent and agitation. We know she favours this tactic. This border remains vulnerable: the Ilyigan refugees are an easy target. If they become a cat’s-paw, they’ll suffer by it as much as Hyem would, and worse. I want them kept out of this war.”
“You want me to…” Saul trailed off, unsure.
“Watch over them. Don’t let Adalas achieve a foothold with them — and don’t let any Hyemi abuse them for scapegoats, either. Make it known they have a protector.” He grasped Saul’s shoulder, and the young man automatically put a hand over his own. “You are a Guardian: guard your people.”
He saw Saul begin to hesitate, and then he saw it flash and flare in him. Fortune favours the bold. “Yes, sir.”
Festus squeezed his shoulder tighter. Something there in the link, a hint of disturbance: without thinking of it he drew upon a drop of power, just enough of the web’s gift to warm up a soul, then realized he could not send it through into Saul as he would into any Guardian. It could only go into the cycle of the link: he could not give it to the two others without taking some of it into himself.
Just as he began to hesitate, there was Saul’s hand, warm on his own. The open door. Power’s purpose.
He drew it in and felt it shine all through him: his people, and spring, and the life that could be. Felt it smooth away, not all, but enough of his exhaustion to let him breathe as easily as he ever had since the capitol riot and the worst of winter. Felt it spread and cycle back, made and making whole.
He knew the moment the power flowed into Amika from the child’s soft sigh in her sleep, and he saw it flow into Saul, saw the young man close his eyes. Saw his lips form, Guard them, as soundless yet complete as a prayer.
It isn’t finished. No healing would erase that thought. Perhaps it never would be. War was coming with all it would cost. The fighting. The work. And what comes after?
He had no clean answer; perhaps no one in this world did. But he put his arm around the young man dreaming of his future and thought, We’ll live, and we’ll find out.