Fic: Thick-Eyed Musing
Title: Thick-Eyed Musing
Author: speak_me_fair
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Kate/Hotspur (Douglas)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: This second tetralogy AU is set primarily during WWI and just before it. Terrible liberties are taken with real history in both directions :-) and probably horrible things to the characters as well...
Summary: Kate, on a train to Oxford, thinks of adapting, dreams, and socks.
Notes: With love to the usual AU suspects, and my darling quoshara, who did a really sterling beta job on this and battered it into coherency. Fits just after No Man Than Yourself
This AU is very much in progress, and I have no idea where it will end up. But if anyone has any ideas as to what other characters might be up to during this time, feel free to discuss it with me!
Also, I wanted to show off the shiny shiny banner made for me by lessy37. Well, wouldn't you?
Thick-Eyed Musing
If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.
Kate doesn't remember the last time she was nervous. She's been frightened, because who hasn't been, and it's always gone hand in hand with anger, to the best of her knowledge, but she's never been nervous before, as far as she can recall.
She's tried, hard, to think of another time when she felt like this, just to remember how to deal with it, why breathing slowly doesn't help, why the muscles in her calves are knotted so tightly they're trembling all on their own. But she can't remember and she can't stop it, and the last time she was this aware of her body it was all pleasure, which somehow makes it all worse.
Apparently, just as with fear comes anger, with nervousness comes resentment. For her, anyway.
She's nervous because she knows what she wants to do and she knows it's what she's supposed to do, and having the two things be one and the same feels utterly, terribly wrong, in some part of herself she's fairly sure it wouldn't pay to probe into too deeply.
The main problem is, she's headed off to deal with a fact she doesn't want to look at in the slightest, and her mind keeps bouncing off it at Harry-like tangents, which makes her wonder if in fact marriage makes mental processes catching, like measles.
"It's just it's Somerville," she says rather helplessly to the thankfully silent and empty carriage, as the train coughs its way slowly down the line from London. She pulls off her gloves, knowing she will regret it later and unable to bring herself to care, and lights a cigarette with a hand that, unlike her legs, is perfectly steady. The smoke hazes over the window in a warm cloud, and she puts up a finger to touch the glass. There is still frost on the outside, closing her in with a film of slowly-melting rime.
That's not the answer, of course. Even being honest out loud can't help with all of the problems, and putting things into words has never helped her in her entire life, so why she thought it would start now, on a cold train, is beyond her. Somerville isn't the problem, or not exactly. Somerville being a hospital is definitely a problem, because it's another thing that tips the world off its axis into the growing insanity of the war, mostly because Somerville is now full of men. Which is either cause for hysterical laughter or a long hard think about the sheer oddness of Government decisions - both of which Kate has indulged in at some length - but either way bears no resemblance to recognisable fixed marks.
No, Somerville isn't the problem, or rather it's not a problem in itself, but it is in what it stands for; and what it stands for is the whole crux of it. The little shining world she had thought to call her own has turned and inverted too often and too suddenly in the last few and too-quickly passing years to leave her anything but constantly reeling. She lives in a world now in which she is struggling to adapt over and over again, her mind rebelling against itself and what she knows must be. These days, when she sleeps, like Harry on that one terrible leave, she cries out in the night, but with no-one to wake her.
She knows this because she wakes herself in the forcing of sound through her dreams, because, just as there are for Harry, there are too many names that haunt her mind for her to be able to rid herself of them, list them, or purge them by nightmare over the course of a single night.
She dreams and dreams and dreams of the dead and the living, and even her waking mind confuses them into one long fear. Nervousness is a relief compared to that, so why the resentment?
Because it's not Harry, says the small still voice she has never quite learned to silence, and still flinches away from, the voice that told her at fourteen that the way to keep Harry Percy was to never try and hold him with anything but straightforward touch, the voice that can be crude and cutting and unkind and never feels emotion. Because your world is inverted and tilted and reversed and wrong, and if there were any sort of God, you'd be on this train debating the right of Somerville to be a place of recuperation with nothing but gladness that you got Harry home for a bit. Because even with all that, even without what you want, what you need, what you crave, you're still glad it's Doug who's hurt, because there's one person home, one man you love here, one small bit of time in which one of them is safe.
The voice shuts up then, mercifully, and leaves her alone in the carriage with the realisation that when she decided to give herself over to loving Harry with all her heart and soul, she got Doug, too, in some kind of warp-and-weft, interwoven, undetachable concrete thing that doesn't even make sense but seems to be the only stable thing left in her world.
Kate Percy, with a bag stuffed with cigarettes and a bottle of whisky and six rather small and squashy oranges and three books and a badly-knitted jumper that at least is going to be warm, and not knowing what the hell she is going to say to the one person in the world whose temporary safety she cannot resent and yet still does, looks out of the train window and swallows down tears that make as little sense as everything else.
When her vision clears, she sees that there is snow still iced onto the hawthorn bushes by the side of the track, and thinks - maybe I should have brought socks. But then, Doug will like the whisky better, and she hasn't learnt how to knit socks, yet.
When she gets to Oxford, she decides, she'll buy some wool. There's bound to be someone who can teach her how you turn a bloody heel.
It's all about adapting, after all.
*
Author: speak_me_fair
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Kate/Hotspur (Douglas)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: This second tetralogy AU is set primarily during WWI and just before it. Terrible liberties are taken with real history in both directions :-) and probably horrible things to the characters as well...
Summary: Kate, on a train to Oxford, thinks of adapting, dreams, and socks.
Notes: With love to the usual AU suspects, and my darling quoshara, who did a really sterling beta job on this and battered it into coherency. Fits just after No Man Than Yourself
This AU is very much in progress, and I have no idea where it will end up. But if anyone has any ideas as to what other characters might be up to during this time, feel free to discuss it with me!
Also, I wanted to show off the shiny shiny banner made for me by lessy37. Well, wouldn't you?
Thick-Eyed Musing
If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.
There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.
Kate doesn't remember the last time she was nervous. She's been frightened, because who hasn't been, and it's always gone hand in hand with anger, to the best of her knowledge, but she's never been nervous before, as far as she can recall.
She's tried, hard, to think of another time when she felt like this, just to remember how to deal with it, why breathing slowly doesn't help, why the muscles in her calves are knotted so tightly they're trembling all on their own. But she can't remember and she can't stop it, and the last time she was this aware of her body it was all pleasure, which somehow makes it all worse.
Apparently, just as with fear comes anger, with nervousness comes resentment. For her, anyway.
She's nervous because she knows what she wants to do and she knows it's what she's supposed to do, and having the two things be one and the same feels utterly, terribly wrong, in some part of herself she's fairly sure it wouldn't pay to probe into too deeply.
The main problem is, she's headed off to deal with a fact she doesn't want to look at in the slightest, and her mind keeps bouncing off it at Harry-like tangents, which makes her wonder if in fact marriage makes mental processes catching, like measles.
"It's just it's Somerville," she says rather helplessly to the thankfully silent and empty carriage, as the train coughs its way slowly down the line from London. She pulls off her gloves, knowing she will regret it later and unable to bring herself to care, and lights a cigarette with a hand that, unlike her legs, is perfectly steady. The smoke hazes over the window in a warm cloud, and she puts up a finger to touch the glass. There is still frost on the outside, closing her in with a film of slowly-melting rime.
That's not the answer, of course. Even being honest out loud can't help with all of the problems, and putting things into words has never helped her in her entire life, so why she thought it would start now, on a cold train, is beyond her. Somerville isn't the problem, or not exactly. Somerville being a hospital is definitely a problem, because it's another thing that tips the world off its axis into the growing insanity of the war, mostly because Somerville is now full of men. Which is either cause for hysterical laughter or a long hard think about the sheer oddness of Government decisions - both of which Kate has indulged in at some length - but either way bears no resemblance to recognisable fixed marks.
No, Somerville isn't the problem, or rather it's not a problem in itself, but it is in what it stands for; and what it stands for is the whole crux of it. The little shining world she had thought to call her own has turned and inverted too often and too suddenly in the last few and too-quickly passing years to leave her anything but constantly reeling. She lives in a world now in which she is struggling to adapt over and over again, her mind rebelling against itself and what she knows must be. These days, when she sleeps, like Harry on that one terrible leave, she cries out in the night, but with no-one to wake her.
She knows this because she wakes herself in the forcing of sound through her dreams, because, just as there are for Harry, there are too many names that haunt her mind for her to be able to rid herself of them, list them, or purge them by nightmare over the course of a single night.
She dreams and dreams and dreams of the dead and the living, and even her waking mind confuses them into one long fear. Nervousness is a relief compared to that, so why the resentment?
Because it's not Harry, says the small still voice she has never quite learned to silence, and still flinches away from, the voice that told her at fourteen that the way to keep Harry Percy was to never try and hold him with anything but straightforward touch, the voice that can be crude and cutting and unkind and never feels emotion. Because your world is inverted and tilted and reversed and wrong, and if there were any sort of God, you'd be on this train debating the right of Somerville to be a place of recuperation with nothing but gladness that you got Harry home for a bit. Because even with all that, even without what you want, what you need, what you crave, you're still glad it's Doug who's hurt, because there's one person home, one man you love here, one small bit of time in which one of them is safe.
The voice shuts up then, mercifully, and leaves her alone in the carriage with the realisation that when she decided to give herself over to loving Harry with all her heart and soul, she got Doug, too, in some kind of warp-and-weft, interwoven, undetachable concrete thing that doesn't even make sense but seems to be the only stable thing left in her world.
Kate Percy, with a bag stuffed with cigarettes and a bottle of whisky and six rather small and squashy oranges and three books and a badly-knitted jumper that at least is going to be warm, and not knowing what the hell she is going to say to the one person in the world whose temporary safety she cannot resent and yet still does, looks out of the train window and swallows down tears that make as little sense as everything else.
When her vision clears, she sees that there is snow still iced onto the hawthorn bushes by the side of the track, and thinks - maybe I should have brought socks. But then, Doug will like the whisky better, and she hasn't learnt how to knit socks, yet.
When she gets to Oxford, she decides, she'll buy some wool. There's bound to be someone who can teach her how you turn a bloody heel.
It's all about adapting, after all.
*