Fic: Year to Year (Last Exile)
I was going back through old story files and dared to glance at the horror of my years-old fanfic100 claim for Last Exile. Imagine my surprise when I found a completed story I'd never posted. WTH, self? And yet, it's strangely heartening.
I made no attempt to edit or polish it. It's god knows how old, in a fandom with about three members, and if I start poking at it I'll only drive myself crazy. So.
Title: Year to Year
Author: ravenclaw42
Fandom: Last Exile
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: None of it belongs to me and I'm not making any money off it. Sadly.
Summary: Delphine always gives Dio birthday gifts that he didn't quite want but can't quite live without.
Notes: One of 100 LE stories I'm writing forfanfic100. I've paired each of the 100 prompts with a quote from one of four long T.S. Eliot poems, and the title is taken from that quote. This is prompt #91, "Birthday." Quote from "The Waste Land."
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Year to Year
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“A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.”
-----------
I remember once, when I was very young, a trick my sister played on me. She came to my playroom late in the evening and asked me how I would like it if Father never came home. I was disbelieving, and asked her how she could say such a thing. What if he is dead? she asked me. What if I were dead? She knelt beside me and spoke with such grave intent that I became terrified that what she was asking had already come true; I wept and wept and would not be consoled until I saw my father again and touched his hand to make sure it was real. His hand when he stood barely touched the top of my shoulder. I loved my father.
That was the first of my birthweeks that I can remember. Delphine always gave me gifts I couldn’t forget.
Father died later that year, and it was worse than my nightmare fantasies could have contrived. Delphine was too young to undergo the Covenant ceremony and attempt the Trial of Agoon, but even though the Council held the regency during her minority, she tested her power endlessly -- on the servants, on Cicada. On me.
At the end of that year she gave me Lucciola.
I remember when she was changed -- her birthweek, not mine. Hers was in what surface-crawlers would call the winter months, though there were no seasons above the clouds. I said goodbye to her at the door to the Covenant chamber, and hours later I stood witness to her Trial with two Council elders. Lucciola stood close behind me and didn’t flinch when I snuck my hand into his out of the elders’ view, even when I squeezed his fingers so tight I thought they might break. He didn’t grip back, but I felt his thumb touch the back of my hand.
I was so scared. I had never liked Delphine much -- never known her much, for an older sister -- but it had been a childish dislike, an irreconcilable divergence of personality, her scientific curiosity against my abstract whimsy. But now she had become different. Her eyes were so empty. They had been calculating before, hard and bright. Now the brightness was sharper and the hardness shallower. The edge she had always possessed had become razor-sharp and I knew that it wouldn’t be long before she started testing that edge, first on Cicada, then her personal servants, and then me.
The elders asked me if I perceived my sister’s grace and I nodded. I wanted to run away. She was killing other noble children. There was blood. I’d never seen blood before. Lucciola, Lucciola’s breath was warm against the back of my neck. Had he shifted closer to me when he heard the rapid, shallow flutter of my breath?
After Delphine won the Trial and ascended to the throne, I was told that upon my eighteenth birthweek, I would receive the same honor: Covenant, Agoon, adulthood, ascention. I think I threw a fit and broke some of the more delicate decorations in the room. The elders watched dispassionately until I exhausted myself, then informed me that the Maestro was waiting to receive me in the throne room and expected my sincere congratulations.
The throne room was so white and so empty and so huge that I felt like I was going to fall over the edge of the world with every step I took. Delphine kissed my hand with cold lips and didn’t seem to see me at all. As soon as I was out of that place I ran back to my playroom, where I held Lucciola like a favorite doll and cried all night. He only returned the embrace when I asked him to, looping his arms lightly around my shoulders, as barely-there as the touch of his thumb on the back of my hand.
I thought about leaving, but I had no way down from the skies. I thought about rebelling, but I didn’t know how -- other than by breaking things. It had always worked before. But Delphine had servants replace the things I destroyed, and she never spoke of my fits except when she felt like it. Conversation with her happened on her own time. All the world seemed to run on her time.
With no real reprimand forthcoming, I eventually stopped doing anything at all. I had lessons (beneath me) and Lucciola (my friend, my friend, my only friend, even if it wasn’t true, even if he didn’t believe it, always and forever mine). I had vast halls with glass floors from which I could watch the tops of clouds forming the mountains and valleys of other worlds.
My need to run grew and inflamed until I could barely stand it, and when I began taking it out on the servants (only the ones without names -- not Lucciola, never my Lucciola) to such a degree that even she couldn’t ignore it, she handed me the means of my escape. She gave me my own starfish and the finest flight instructor of the Guild academy. It was the cruellest gift she could give, because even after I surpassed my instructor and sped as fast and as far away from the flagship as I could, I could feel how much I owed her in every ounce of my being. My debt to her burned under my skin and no barrel roll or Immelmann turn could dislodge the anchor that kept drawing me back to the only place I had ever called home.
Over the years Lucciola grew silently, steadily better at understanding what I needed. When, on my fifteenth birthweek, I told him I wanted to see the surface, he nodded once and followed me to the hangar without a word. I know he was supposed to report my location to one of Delphine’s personal guard, as he always had before, and of course I hadn’t minded because it had never occurred to me that he should do any different or that I could go somewhere outside the Guild fleet without Delphine’s knowledge. But when he met my eyes and followed me, deliberately passing each guard in the royal suite without a single whispered word to tell them where we were going, a thrill ran up my spine. I wasn’t going to come back this time, I told myself. I would never come back again.
No Covenant, no Agoon. I could fly forever and never grow old. I never had be like my sister.
I was glad Lucciola was on the other side of the starfish, though I’m sure he heard my hitched breath through the headset. All he said was, “Lord Dio, rainbirds at five o’clock,” so I spun the ship around to see. Laughing, I followed them -- at least for a while.
Delphine never came looking for me. Darkness drove me back. I found myself increasingly afraid of the vastness of a clear night sky full of the dizzying eddies of stars -- it reminded me of the feeling of walking across the pure, empty throne room floor so many years ago.
After that I didn’t stay in the royal suite on the flagship, but even with my newfound freedom I couldn’t completely escape the Guild. Its clean familiarity drew me back time and time again. I flew with the military fleet. I joined a starfish squadron. I drifted from outpost to outpost and observed more surface-crawler battles than I could count. Those hunks of inelegant metal they called airships aroused a curiosity I couldn’t begin to understand -- just as I didn’t understand them, the round-ears, their tans and sweat, their dialects, their heaviness. What force kept them on the ground? And what strength did it take to pull upwards, away?
To the sky.
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I made no attempt to edit or polish it. It's god knows how old, in a fandom with about three members, and if I start poking at it I'll only drive myself crazy. So.
Title: Year to Year
Author: ravenclaw42
Fandom: Last Exile
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: None of it belongs to me and I'm not making any money off it. Sadly.
Summary: Delphine always gives Dio birthday gifts that he didn't quite want but can't quite live without.
Notes: One of 100 LE stories I'm writing forfanfic100. I've paired each of the 100 prompts with a quote from one of four long T.S. Eliot poems, and the title is taken from that quote. This is prompt #91, "Birthday." Quote from "The Waste Land."
------------
Year to Year
------------
“A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.”
-----------
I remember once, when I was very young, a trick my sister played on me. She came to my playroom late in the evening and asked me how I would like it if Father never came home. I was disbelieving, and asked her how she could say such a thing. What if he is dead? she asked me. What if I were dead? She knelt beside me and spoke with such grave intent that I became terrified that what she was asking had already come true; I wept and wept and would not be consoled until I saw my father again and touched his hand to make sure it was real. His hand when he stood barely touched the top of my shoulder. I loved my father.
That was the first of my birthweeks that I can remember. Delphine always gave me gifts I couldn’t forget.
Father died later that year, and it was worse than my nightmare fantasies could have contrived. Delphine was too young to undergo the Covenant ceremony and attempt the Trial of Agoon, but even though the Council held the regency during her minority, she tested her power endlessly -- on the servants, on Cicada. On me.
At the end of that year she gave me Lucciola.
I remember when she was changed -- her birthweek, not mine. Hers was in what surface-crawlers would call the winter months, though there were no seasons above the clouds. I said goodbye to her at the door to the Covenant chamber, and hours later I stood witness to her Trial with two Council elders. Lucciola stood close behind me and didn’t flinch when I snuck my hand into his out of the elders’ view, even when I squeezed his fingers so tight I thought they might break. He didn’t grip back, but I felt his thumb touch the back of my hand.
I was so scared. I had never liked Delphine much -- never known her much, for an older sister -- but it had been a childish dislike, an irreconcilable divergence of personality, her scientific curiosity against my abstract whimsy. But now she had become different. Her eyes were so empty. They had been calculating before, hard and bright. Now the brightness was sharper and the hardness shallower. The edge she had always possessed had become razor-sharp and I knew that it wouldn’t be long before she started testing that edge, first on Cicada, then her personal servants, and then me.
The elders asked me if I perceived my sister’s grace and I nodded. I wanted to run away. She was killing other noble children. There was blood. I’d never seen blood before. Lucciola, Lucciola’s breath was warm against the back of my neck. Had he shifted closer to me when he heard the rapid, shallow flutter of my breath?
After Delphine won the Trial and ascended to the throne, I was told that upon my eighteenth birthweek, I would receive the same honor: Covenant, Agoon, adulthood, ascention. I think I threw a fit and broke some of the more delicate decorations in the room. The elders watched dispassionately until I exhausted myself, then informed me that the Maestro was waiting to receive me in the throne room and expected my sincere congratulations.
The throne room was so white and so empty and so huge that I felt like I was going to fall over the edge of the world with every step I took. Delphine kissed my hand with cold lips and didn’t seem to see me at all. As soon as I was out of that place I ran back to my playroom, where I held Lucciola like a favorite doll and cried all night. He only returned the embrace when I asked him to, looping his arms lightly around my shoulders, as barely-there as the touch of his thumb on the back of my hand.
I thought about leaving, but I had no way down from the skies. I thought about rebelling, but I didn’t know how -- other than by breaking things. It had always worked before. But Delphine had servants replace the things I destroyed, and she never spoke of my fits except when she felt like it. Conversation with her happened on her own time. All the world seemed to run on her time.
With no real reprimand forthcoming, I eventually stopped doing anything at all. I had lessons (beneath me) and Lucciola (my friend, my friend, my only friend, even if it wasn’t true, even if he didn’t believe it, always and forever mine). I had vast halls with glass floors from which I could watch the tops of clouds forming the mountains and valleys of other worlds.
My need to run grew and inflamed until I could barely stand it, and when I began taking it out on the servants (only the ones without names -- not Lucciola, never my Lucciola) to such a degree that even she couldn’t ignore it, she handed me the means of my escape. She gave me my own starfish and the finest flight instructor of the Guild academy. It was the cruellest gift she could give, because even after I surpassed my instructor and sped as fast and as far away from the flagship as I could, I could feel how much I owed her in every ounce of my being. My debt to her burned under my skin and no barrel roll or Immelmann turn could dislodge the anchor that kept drawing me back to the only place I had ever called home.
Over the years Lucciola grew silently, steadily better at understanding what I needed. When, on my fifteenth birthweek, I told him I wanted to see the surface, he nodded once and followed me to the hangar without a word. I know he was supposed to report my location to one of Delphine’s personal guard, as he always had before, and of course I hadn’t minded because it had never occurred to me that he should do any different or that I could go somewhere outside the Guild fleet without Delphine’s knowledge. But when he met my eyes and followed me, deliberately passing each guard in the royal suite without a single whispered word to tell them where we were going, a thrill ran up my spine. I wasn’t going to come back this time, I told myself. I would never come back again.
No Covenant, no Agoon. I could fly forever and never grow old. I never had be like my sister.
I was glad Lucciola was on the other side of the starfish, though I’m sure he heard my hitched breath through the headset. All he said was, “Lord Dio, rainbirds at five o’clock,” so I spun the ship around to see. Laughing, I followed them -- at least for a while.
Delphine never came looking for me. Darkness drove me back. I found myself increasingly afraid of the vastness of a clear night sky full of the dizzying eddies of stars -- it reminded me of the feeling of walking across the pure, empty throne room floor so many years ago.
After that I didn’t stay in the royal suite on the flagship, but even with my newfound freedom I couldn’t completely escape the Guild. Its clean familiarity drew me back time and time again. I flew with the military fleet. I joined a starfish squadron. I drifted from outpost to outpost and observed more surface-crawler battles than I could count. Those hunks of inelegant metal they called airships aroused a curiosity I couldn’t begin to understand -- just as I didn’t understand them, the round-ears, their tans and sweat, their dialects, their heaviness. What force kept them on the ground? And what strength did it take to pull upwards, away?
To the sky.
-------