[FICATHON] Perception of Excellence, for gileonnen
Title: Perception Of Excellence
Author: speak_me_fair
Play: Henry IV, Part I
Recipient: gileonnen
Character: Hotspur (Henry Percy)
Warnings: None
Rating: PG-13 or equivalent
Notes: Character driven ficlet, approx. 1700 words.
Summary: Hotspur sees the centre of the perfect round....
The first time he fell in love, it was with war. Not with stories, not with old heroes, not with all the tales of bravery everyone had been willing to share with him since the second he breathed, but with war itself, with the stink and the energy of it, with the pulsing, breathing fight that had its own life, that could surround and encompass and subsume all at once. He was in love, wholly and completely, utterly consumed and absorbed by this centre that was somehow greater than its own entirety.
The first time he went to war, he knew what he was born to, he knew his place upon the earth, even while it fell to ruin around him, even while he rejoiced in the singing feel of knowing victory to the touch, rather than the mere word of it.
He loved even the cold and mud and pain, and found himself exulting when everything and everyone around him was pushed past endurance.
(But not his own endurance, for like all living examples, he did not know what he was.)
They told him, as a child, that Alexander's first love was for a horse. Hotspur knew that he must only have truly felt it when he rode Bucephalus into battle for the first time, because before that, how could he have been alive enough to know what he felt? Before then, how could he have truly breathed, how could Alexander have even known that he breathed, without feeling the air thick with burning, with blood, with the raw fierce energy that scorched the air like lightning, striking the ground too close?
He himself loved no steed above another, no man more than another, held no-one in regard enough to claim a man for his own in companionship, so long as each man served the need of his love. He wondered, when he was very young, in the days when he could still comprehend that he might well be flawed even in his comprehension of entirety, in his perception of excellence, if it made him less of a general.
(It made him a better leader, if not a more beloved one, for he loved all men, all horses, all battle equally.)
Later, the cry that ran through him faster than his pulse, the belief in more than God, in more than victory, his own faith that he voiced only as Esperance, drowned out those wonderings. He could, by then, out-clarion the loudest call, his voice never catching on any exhortation, though it thickened and halted when he felt he must press a point in council, or when he was, unwillingly, held (trapped) in quiet conversation with those he was expected to at least hold in reverence, even if he could not love them as he knew should. He was, always and unknowingly, without prejudice save to have the thing done well, and he expected the same from those around him.
(They could not always match his expectations.)
He never hated his opponents, enemy a great unknown to him, though he knew and understood the word. No man who fought with valour, with spirit, with skill and fervour and a drive that came close to matching his own - no man could be enemy to him. Not that he loved them, or would call them brother, or would hesitate in the moment between life and death, that severing of the invisible barrier with his sword, but he did not hate. What was there to hate in the eternal battle for hope triumphant, what could he ever find there that might speak out against all he had come to embrace?
(Mark and glass, copy and book.)
*
He came to know hatred as something small and poisonous, as creeping as foot-rot, something that began slowly, and had set in before he knew it. It first showed itself, quiet and itching and a small hard kernel of reality, in a cloying sense of dissatisfaction that he breathed in at court. It gleamed out of rich fabrics and blazed from jewels, made itself heard in swallowed letters that rounded out already too-smooth voices. Quietness and silken comfort became enemy, the easily offered pleasantries that rang hollow and clothed themselves in the guise of promises became a battle without honour, for they had no purpose and no cause, no guerdon to hold as a sign of victory.
It seemed to him impossible, at first, and then recognition of the truth made swallowing it the more bitter, stuck in his throat and caught at his speech still more, as he finally accepted this was a battle he had found, at long last, that he would never want to win.
(His grief and impatience for what and who he loved would always outweigh the need for caution.)
Fight for me and you fight with me, fight beside me and be mine. Despising all overt notes of seduction in others, he never saw the power of his own blunt vision, nor the strength with which he imposed it. From his all-unknowingly held throne, from his peak above the snows of fear, he laughed at all those who would woo to a cause, seeing only self-evidence in the ones he chose and unable to perceive the inherent courtship that his sense of right bestowed on him. He never saw his conviction as a prison, and wore its chains so lightly that those around him never saw them for what they were.
The name he gloried in was never the one they bestowed on him, though he accepted it as his due. In his own mind, he was Percy, and the rest grace-notes, love-tokens.
He was as content to be Kate's Harry as ever he was to be the Hotspur of the North, all of it a glittering, enchanted favour to wear at life's tournament, something to display with pride and joy and no assumption of self, for he had never bestowed any title save warrior on his existence.
(He never knew how many facets the jewel of his being held within it.)
He knew perfection could only be called so at the centre of the whirlwind, at the heart of the storm, the calyx of the rose and the faint bloom of bee-pollen held there. There, in the calm still surrender of a pause, where the beauty all men so easily admired was meaningless, it meant the most. In the place where only the absolution and negation of self together mattered, where actions counted for nothing but their own summation, they were most potent. The greatest of all things was not love, but hope, belief, faith. All one to him, so far apart in others.
When he called Bolingbroke a canker, he chose his terms deliberately, though they thought him incensed, knew in his soul that he was striving, in his own halting way, to express all that he had believed from the first moment his sword was bloodied. There was, in his life, so many things to fight for, so many things to give a battle love, to breed war, and they were perfection and right and honour. In all these things, he found his joy, as the rose found its scent and the storm its power.
(Why would he fear nettles, when the sting was so brief?)
And to all these things came blight and dissolution, and to the land and to his wars, a living blot on the escutcheon of the realm he fought for, on the very purpose of his existence, had come the Henry whose namesake he would never be. All talk and yet pallid inaction, a living pettiness borne on a sickening wave of false perfume and an insidious, loathsome care of a dignity that did not exist.
Bolingbroke was the canker, the rot, the ichneumon in the chrysalis of greatness that the monarchy had been, and that foul disease was spreading to all that Hotspur held in his heart of hearts, all that he called love and lived for. He hated, then, and hated enough to give him unlooked for and unwanted clarity, the kind that had, before that moment, only come to his mind in the still centre when the barrier of death was visible. He hated and saw enough to know the plant of this bought and traduced kingship was beyond saving, must be dug up, eradicated, its very roots annihilated by salt and burnt earth.
(Contempt and shame and banished honour, and all this for the sake of a title, and no name.)
He did not want men to follow him because they could find glory. He wanted them to fight because it was true, and real, and of worth.
He wanted them to fight because they saw, as he did, what was right. He wanted them to fight to redeem the honour that men talked of so easily, and felt not at all.
(The leap into the moon was an easy one, in the end.)
It took the betrayal of all he had ever held to be of value to teach him what it meant to fight for hate, to fight for the worth of a name, for the glory of an idea, for a truth greater than war or love.
The great essential, and the great inessential, both at once, both himself. Hotspur and Harry both mattered as much, in the end, to who he was. They were both love, they were both hope, they were both the tiny stamens of the calyx that was his soul.
Esperance. Percy.
He would go with the whole of his heart and joy to a fight that he knew all the time was not his, and yet had become utterly so, as much as any reason he had ever given to his existence.
Achilles absent is Achilles still.
(The final truth of a hero's becoming is to be alone.)
Author: speak_me_fair
Play: Henry IV, Part I
Recipient: gileonnen
Character: Hotspur (Henry Percy)
Warnings: None
Rating: PG-13 or equivalent
Notes: Character driven ficlet, approx. 1700 words.
Summary: Hotspur sees the centre of the perfect round....
The first time he fell in love, it was with war. Not with stories, not with old heroes, not with all the tales of bravery everyone had been willing to share with him since the second he breathed, but with war itself, with the stink and the energy of it, with the pulsing, breathing fight that had its own life, that could surround and encompass and subsume all at once. He was in love, wholly and completely, utterly consumed and absorbed by this centre that was somehow greater than its own entirety.
The first time he went to war, he knew what he was born to, he knew his place upon the earth, even while it fell to ruin around him, even while he rejoiced in the singing feel of knowing victory to the touch, rather than the mere word of it.
He loved even the cold and mud and pain, and found himself exulting when everything and everyone around him was pushed past endurance.
(But not his own endurance, for like all living examples, he did not know what he was.)
They told him, as a child, that Alexander's first love was for a horse. Hotspur knew that he must only have truly felt it when he rode Bucephalus into battle for the first time, because before that, how could he have been alive enough to know what he felt? Before then, how could he have truly breathed, how could Alexander have even known that he breathed, without feeling the air thick with burning, with blood, with the raw fierce energy that scorched the air like lightning, striking the ground too close?
He himself loved no steed above another, no man more than another, held no-one in regard enough to claim a man for his own in companionship, so long as each man served the need of his love. He wondered, when he was very young, in the days when he could still comprehend that he might well be flawed even in his comprehension of entirety, in his perception of excellence, if it made him less of a general.
(It made him a better leader, if not a more beloved one, for he loved all men, all horses, all battle equally.)
Later, the cry that ran through him faster than his pulse, the belief in more than God, in more than victory, his own faith that he voiced only as Esperance, drowned out those wonderings. He could, by then, out-clarion the loudest call, his voice never catching on any exhortation, though it thickened and halted when he felt he must press a point in council, or when he was, unwillingly, held (trapped) in quiet conversation with those he was expected to at least hold in reverence, even if he could not love them as he knew should. He was, always and unknowingly, without prejudice save to have the thing done well, and he expected the same from those around him.
(They could not always match his expectations.)
He never hated his opponents, enemy a great unknown to him, though he knew and understood the word. No man who fought with valour, with spirit, with skill and fervour and a drive that came close to matching his own - no man could be enemy to him. Not that he loved them, or would call them brother, or would hesitate in the moment between life and death, that severing of the invisible barrier with his sword, but he did not hate. What was there to hate in the eternal battle for hope triumphant, what could he ever find there that might speak out against all he had come to embrace?
(Mark and glass, copy and book.)
*
He came to know hatred as something small and poisonous, as creeping as foot-rot, something that began slowly, and had set in before he knew it. It first showed itself, quiet and itching and a small hard kernel of reality, in a cloying sense of dissatisfaction that he breathed in at court. It gleamed out of rich fabrics and blazed from jewels, made itself heard in swallowed letters that rounded out already too-smooth voices. Quietness and silken comfort became enemy, the easily offered pleasantries that rang hollow and clothed themselves in the guise of promises became a battle without honour, for they had no purpose and no cause, no guerdon to hold as a sign of victory.
It seemed to him impossible, at first, and then recognition of the truth made swallowing it the more bitter, stuck in his throat and caught at his speech still more, as he finally accepted this was a battle he had found, at long last, that he would never want to win.
(His grief and impatience for what and who he loved would always outweigh the need for caution.)
Fight for me and you fight with me, fight beside me and be mine. Despising all overt notes of seduction in others, he never saw the power of his own blunt vision, nor the strength with which he imposed it. From his all-unknowingly held throne, from his peak above the snows of fear, he laughed at all those who would woo to a cause, seeing only self-evidence in the ones he chose and unable to perceive the inherent courtship that his sense of right bestowed on him. He never saw his conviction as a prison, and wore its chains so lightly that those around him never saw them for what they were.
The name he gloried in was never the one they bestowed on him, though he accepted it as his due. In his own mind, he was Percy, and the rest grace-notes, love-tokens.
He was as content to be Kate's Harry as ever he was to be the Hotspur of the North, all of it a glittering, enchanted favour to wear at life's tournament, something to display with pride and joy and no assumption of self, for he had never bestowed any title save warrior on his existence.
(He never knew how many facets the jewel of his being held within it.)
He knew perfection could only be called so at the centre of the whirlwind, at the heart of the storm, the calyx of the rose and the faint bloom of bee-pollen held there. There, in the calm still surrender of a pause, where the beauty all men so easily admired was meaningless, it meant the most. In the place where only the absolution and negation of self together mattered, where actions counted for nothing but their own summation, they were most potent. The greatest of all things was not love, but hope, belief, faith. All one to him, so far apart in others.
When he called Bolingbroke a canker, he chose his terms deliberately, though they thought him incensed, knew in his soul that he was striving, in his own halting way, to express all that he had believed from the first moment his sword was bloodied. There was, in his life, so many things to fight for, so many things to give a battle love, to breed war, and they were perfection and right and honour. In all these things, he found his joy, as the rose found its scent and the storm its power.
(Why would he fear nettles, when the sting was so brief?)
And to all these things came blight and dissolution, and to the land and to his wars, a living blot on the escutcheon of the realm he fought for, on the very purpose of his existence, had come the Henry whose namesake he would never be. All talk and yet pallid inaction, a living pettiness borne on a sickening wave of false perfume and an insidious, loathsome care of a dignity that did not exist.
Bolingbroke was the canker, the rot, the ichneumon in the chrysalis of greatness that the monarchy had been, and that foul disease was spreading to all that Hotspur held in his heart of hearts, all that he called love and lived for. He hated, then, and hated enough to give him unlooked for and unwanted clarity, the kind that had, before that moment, only come to his mind in the still centre when the barrier of death was visible. He hated and saw enough to know the plant of this bought and traduced kingship was beyond saving, must be dug up, eradicated, its very roots annihilated by salt and burnt earth.
(Contempt and shame and banished honour, and all this for the sake of a title, and no name.)
He did not want men to follow him because they could find glory. He wanted them to fight because it was true, and real, and of worth.
He wanted them to fight because they saw, as he did, what was right. He wanted them to fight to redeem the honour that men talked of so easily, and felt not at all.
(The leap into the moon was an easy one, in the end.)
It took the betrayal of all he had ever held to be of value to teach him what it meant to fight for hate, to fight for the worth of a name, for the glory of an idea, for a truth greater than war or love.
The great essential, and the great inessential, both at once, both himself. Hotspur and Harry both mattered as much, in the end, to who he was. They were both love, they were both hope, they were both the tiny stamens of the calyx that was his soul.
Esperance. Percy.
He would go with the whole of his heart and joy to a fight that he knew all the time was not his, and yet had become utterly so, as much as any reason he had ever given to his existence.
Achilles absent is Achilles still.
(The final truth of a hero's becoming is to be alone.)