close to the sun in lonely lands.
The face on the monitor is handsome.
(They always are.)
Edmond listens to the crowd roar and wishes he were anywhere but here.
---
He remembers the day it all started, or he doesn't. (Truth be told, sometimes his memories don't seem to belong to himself anymore; he wonders if he sold them the same day he sold his life back in Jala.)
He thinks of her when he is lonely, which is to say that he thinks of her all the time.
---
Joan is hard where Laura is soft, all lines and angles and pointed smiles.
Edmond watches her on the training field. She is better at this than he is - probably better than everybody else at the Academy, almost inhuman in her inability to err during an exercise.
She was wearing a skirt and blazer and fucking knee socks the first day he met her, like some typical schoolgirl from any other part of the country with her brown hair in neat, twin braids behind her back - attractive enough in a common sort of way but generally unimpressive.
He looks at her and laughs, and remembers that appearances can be deceiving.
(She could kill him with her bare hands.)
---
Christopher is a boy plucked straight out of a Oscar Wilde novel, so fucking perfect on the outside that it practically hurts to step anyplace near the giant shadow he casts being the human equivalent of the sun.
Edmond hates him on the spot, just like he's always hated people who are bright and shiny and generally worshipped by everybody they come across in their lives.
Monarchy is dead, but Christopher is a prince without a throne if Edmond ever saw one, and Edmond is a revolution waiting to happen.
"Prove yourself to me by defeating him," Augustus, the man better known as his grandfather orders in his slow, rumbling voice - "and I will give you anything you want."
There is a smile, slow and sickening, the corners of a drooping mouth turning upwards with careful mocking. It is the first time, Edmond thinks, that he has ever seen the old fucker happy.
(The reason is obvious: not even Edmond can accomplish the impossible.)
---
Edmond has always known he was different. It hadn't mattered back then. Back then, even all the different people had really just been the same, quiet-eyed village folk with dying hope folded firmly inside their breast pockets, waiting on some distant star for a brighter fate than that which they had been resigned to by birth.
Edmond too, had dreamt of shining crystal isles and snowy dragons, and people who began and would one day end in blazes of blue fire, but these dreams were messy, insubstantial things that no more stopped the rising and setting of the white sun than the cocking of the rooster at daybreak.
Laura would light up when he touched her, all yellow hair and big, wet, forget-me-not eyes and mayflower lips. She'd been fourteen; he, only twelve.
She'd burned very brightly that cold winter's night, and he'd fallen in love with her in a way that had nothing at all to do with the girl lying in the melting ice underneath him, and everything to do with the way his fingertips were glowing, too, and the power he'd had coiled for so long inside of him was shruddering and trembling and thundering to be freed. He could feel her gasp below him, could see the dirtless blue of her eyes pool into gaping black holes, and suddenly everything had been very hot and she'd been crying into his chest and begging him to stop, and the black trees had caught on fire like something out of a story-book.
They'd watched everything that had once been white turn to a violent red, and later, when she'd lost conscious and he was trying to keep himself from doing the same, back to black.
This is his clearest memory of her now, but the more he remembers the more she disappears, and the more he forgets to miss her.
---
The day of the contest, Edmond has never been more prepared to win anything in his life. He knows this because he is calm, and fortune favours not the brave but the patient in Artesia; this is a jealous secret he has discovered slowly over the past three years of his life in the city.
Joan kisses him swiftly on the temple and wishes him good luck, and for the first time since he has known her, Edmond sees something of Laura in the expectant way her silver eyes search his face for an answer. But Edmond hides behind his smile like a well-trained mask and waits for the inevitable sound of a gunshot to start the race, and thinks of nothing but victory. He has never trusted Joan, after all (she is too much like him); he will not succumb to her now.
A few meters away, Christopher crouches by the starting line, sweat shimmering across an intricate system of small, compact muscles like a thin a gold blanket across a coiled beast.
Edmond watches, and he waits, and there is a mutual flicker of desperate, messy hate between them before the sirens roar and it is each man for himself.
---
He loses, of course.
Christopher's face, chiseled and perfect and stoic in victory, fills every inch of the giant screen in the sky. There is wild, exultant cheering below, a frenzied crowd nearly collapsing upon itself in ecstasy and triumph. (Of course they would wouldn't they; Christopher was always made to be worshipped and deified, and Edmond forgotten and despised.)
Joan reaches him seconds later, more beautiful than he'd ever remembered and more cold and unfeeling than he will ever forget.
"You've lost," she says, simply and straightfowardly. "They - he - won't let you go home now. My cousin will have to wait. It will break her heart, you know."
"Next time - ," Edmond starts, but Joan shakes her head and there is sadness in the way she looks at him now, a sort of profound, sacred pity he did not know she was even capable of - and after that, something else entirely. For a while, they are both silent, and when he speaks again the bitterness of defeat strains his every syllable. "You wanted me to fail, didn't you?"
A laugh. "Perhaps."
"Why?"
She places a hand, small and white and terribly steady, against his chest. There is a sort of horrifying stillness in the air, a crackling tension that makes his stomach turn in a way he cannot decide is pleasant or unpleasant. Her face, at first, is crisp and smiling - a clear and present danger sloping towards - and then transforms into a blur of white and black and red, a strangely dizzying presence pressing its warm, wet mouth on top of his own.
Edmond listens to the crowd roar and wishes he were anywhere but here.
(They always are.)
Edmond listens to the crowd roar and wishes he were anywhere but here.
---
He remembers the day it all started, or he doesn't. (Truth be told, sometimes his memories don't seem to belong to himself anymore; he wonders if he sold them the same day he sold his life back in Jala.)
He thinks of her when he is lonely, which is to say that he thinks of her all the time.
---
Joan is hard where Laura is soft, all lines and angles and pointed smiles.
Edmond watches her on the training field. She is better at this than he is - probably better than everybody else at the Academy, almost inhuman in her inability to err during an exercise.
She was wearing a skirt and blazer and fucking knee socks the first day he met her, like some typical schoolgirl from any other part of the country with her brown hair in neat, twin braids behind her back - attractive enough in a common sort of way but generally unimpressive.
He looks at her and laughs, and remembers that appearances can be deceiving.
(She could kill him with her bare hands.)
---
Christopher is a boy plucked straight out of a Oscar Wilde novel, so fucking perfect on the outside that it practically hurts to step anyplace near the giant shadow he casts being the human equivalent of the sun.
Edmond hates him on the spot, just like he's always hated people who are bright and shiny and generally worshipped by everybody they come across in their lives.
Monarchy is dead, but Christopher is a prince without a throne if Edmond ever saw one, and Edmond is a revolution waiting to happen.
"Prove yourself to me by defeating him," Augustus, the man better known as his grandfather orders in his slow, rumbling voice - "and I will give you anything you want."
There is a smile, slow and sickening, the corners of a drooping mouth turning upwards with careful mocking. It is the first time, Edmond thinks, that he has ever seen the old fucker happy.
(The reason is obvious: not even Edmond can accomplish the impossible.)
---
Edmond has always known he was different. It hadn't mattered back then. Back then, even all the different people had really just been the same, quiet-eyed village folk with dying hope folded firmly inside their breast pockets, waiting on some distant star for a brighter fate than that which they had been resigned to by birth.
Edmond too, had dreamt of shining crystal isles and snowy dragons, and people who began and would one day end in blazes of blue fire, but these dreams were messy, insubstantial things that no more stopped the rising and setting of the white sun than the cocking of the rooster at daybreak.
Laura would light up when he touched her, all yellow hair and big, wet, forget-me-not eyes and mayflower lips. She'd been fourteen; he, only twelve.
She'd burned very brightly that cold winter's night, and he'd fallen in love with her in a way that had nothing at all to do with the girl lying in the melting ice underneath him, and everything to do with the way his fingertips were glowing, too, and the power he'd had coiled for so long inside of him was shruddering and trembling and thundering to be freed. He could feel her gasp below him, could see the dirtless blue of her eyes pool into gaping black holes, and suddenly everything had been very hot and she'd been crying into his chest and begging him to stop, and the black trees had caught on fire like something out of a story-book.
They'd watched everything that had once been white turn to a violent red, and later, when she'd lost conscious and he was trying to keep himself from doing the same, back to black.
This is his clearest memory of her now, but the more he remembers the more she disappears, and the more he forgets to miss her.
---
The day of the contest, Edmond has never been more prepared to win anything in his life. He knows this because he is calm, and fortune favours not the brave but the patient in Artesia; this is a jealous secret he has discovered slowly over the past three years of his life in the city.
Joan kisses him swiftly on the temple and wishes him good luck, and for the first time since he has known her, Edmond sees something of Laura in the expectant way her silver eyes search his face for an answer. But Edmond hides behind his smile like a well-trained mask and waits for the inevitable sound of a gunshot to start the race, and thinks of nothing but victory. He has never trusted Joan, after all (she is too much like him); he will not succumb to her now.
A few meters away, Christopher crouches by the starting line, sweat shimmering across an intricate system of small, compact muscles like a thin a gold blanket across a coiled beast.
Edmond watches, and he waits, and there is a mutual flicker of desperate, messy hate between them before the sirens roar and it is each man for himself.
---
He loses, of course.
Christopher's face, chiseled and perfect and stoic in victory, fills every inch of the giant screen in the sky. There is wild, exultant cheering below, a frenzied crowd nearly collapsing upon itself in ecstasy and triumph. (Of course they would wouldn't they; Christopher was always made to be worshipped and deified, and Edmond forgotten and despised.)
Joan reaches him seconds later, more beautiful than he'd ever remembered and more cold and unfeeling than he will ever forget.
"You've lost," she says, simply and straightfowardly. "They - he - won't let you go home now. My cousin will have to wait. It will break her heart, you know."
"Next time - ," Edmond starts, but Joan shakes her head and there is sadness in the way she looks at him now, a sort of profound, sacred pity he did not know she was even capable of - and after that, something else entirely. For a while, they are both silent, and when he speaks again the bitterness of defeat strains his every syllable. "You wanted me to fail, didn't you?"
A laugh. "Perhaps."
"Why?"
She places a hand, small and white and terribly steady, against his chest. There is a sort of horrifying stillness in the air, a crackling tension that makes his stomach turn in a way he cannot decide is pleasant or unpleasant. Her face, at first, is crisp and smiling - a clear and present danger sloping towards - and then transforms into a blur of white and black and red, a strangely dizzying presence pressing its warm, wet mouth on top of his own.
Edmond listens to the crowd roar and wishes he were anywhere but here.