historical RPS: fissure
fissure
Alexander/Hephaestion, Alexander I of Russia/Napoleon I.The desert is timeless.
Egypt told Alexander he would die. That was the prophecy he heard at the shrine of Zeus Ammon. That was it. There was nothing else. It told him that he might have been the son of his mother and a half-god, but Egypt's sands and pyramids and perfume-scented candles could only tell him that there was nothing more to say. Immortals would always be immortals. Mortals, however blessed with immortal blood, would always be mortals and, so being, die.
Yet Egypt's gods promised him victory and glory like a sick, diseased wind, sweeping across the world, crippling his enemies. Egypt's waters promised him love like rain, brief and rapid and always leaving him thirsty. And Egypt's heat, though solid and dry, curled around him as it promised him life until death, coy and lithe and all encompassing. I already have life until death, Alexander replied; give me something else. 'I'll give you life even beyond death,' it countered. 'But I'll have to take something else in return.' And then it had laughed, short and stirring up more sand in Alexander's face, while he wondered what else Egypt would emptily promise him before it demanded that he die.
The desert sent Alexander back to Hephaestion as a tired, weary, half-broken man, a man who suddenly realized that he was a man, and that all the empires in the world could never give him any kind of immortality.
Hephaestion, though, slowly worked the life back into Alexander's body. Hephaestion was a tall man, taller than Alexander, with big hands, and frail, but he was incredibly warm everywhere, and when the desert was cold or the wind at night too much for Alexander, he liked to crawl back towards Hephaestion, who was always warm and with his hands could rub Alexander's skin and hold him until Alexander felt somewhat human, safe, and warm again.
Alexander was always and had always been cold. As a child his father liked to order him out into the sun to warm up, but his hands when he came back would still be like something carved from rocks in the winter, a gleaming white marble and just as cold. Cold all over, and not even a frightened cold. A chill, like eyes glazed over or something apathetic and indifferent, countered by Alexander's eyes and the curve of his mouth, always smiling. But there was something attractive about that cold. Men had always loved Alexander, even as a child. As a youth, not even an adult and barely away from being a child, Alexander was always in a sick way pleased with watching Phillip's guests lust after him. At banquets, he had played the part of the host's gracious son a little too well, touched the guests a little too much, smiled a little too long, was eager at just the right moments, and Alexander, half-asleep in his bed afterwards, had gotten a perverse fun out of imagining just what the guests were dreaming of, asleep or having sex or thrashing violently in their beds, an image of a boy with blond curls and skin cold enough to burn unwittingly rising into their minds in the dark of their own bedrooms. He was a strange child.
In their desert tent, alone with Hephaestion, those broad warm hands stroking up and down his smaller colder arms, Alexander would tell Hephaestion stories about the men Alexander had laid with, telling him about how their fingers would trail fire down Alexander's cold cheeks, how their weight against him was like the desert sun, how when they took him he would scream out from the warmth, and Alexander delighted in the fact that Hephaestion would tremble listening to him, helplessly and angrily aroused at the sound of Alexander's voice. I'm cold, I've always been cold, Alexander would whisper into Hephaestion's ear, taking care to lean all of his back against Hephaestion's chest as he maneuvered his head so that it lay on Hephaestion's shoulder, soaking in that warmth.
I'll warm you up, Hephaestion would promise, and those arms that came around from behind Alexander to hold them both together were enough to make Alexander believe in anything again.
Egypt gave him a prophecy of his own death and its throne. Egypt offered Alexander a city, a river, and a line of relatives born from the sun. But what Alexander remembered of Egypt was Hephaestion on the night Alexander came back from the desert temple. Hephaestion had immediately arranged from them to be alone, and in the dark, surrounded by Hephaestion's warmth and the sounds of the desert lurking, cold and dismal in the background, gently smoothed Alexander away into a calm and careful submission. Hephaestion's hands were soothing on Alexander's neck and shoulders, his head in Hephaestion's lap. Alexander liked touching Hephaestion's hands when they were together.
"How did they bear to let you go away with me?" Alexander asked, touching the creases of Hephaestion's palm and kissing the little mounds where the finger melted into the palm.
"They heard that you were a god," Hephaestion answered, lowering his head so that his lips brushed against Alexander's forehead as he talked. "They heard you were immortal and you were golden, of the sun." Hephaestion's hands tracing circles on his arms and his chest. "I told them I believed in you."
That night Hephaestion rocked Alexander to sleep in his lap, his head bent over Alexander's ear and whispering until Alexander couldn't hear anymore, the heat in Hephaestion's breath sliding honey-like through Alexander's body, so that when he woke up and Egypt made him a pharaoh, he was warm under the sun, something akin to the air and the sun grazed hand.
Egypt promised Alexander life until death, and the desert promised to give him life even beyond death, in return for something else. In Egypt Hephaestion had promised warmth and love, had promised forgiveness and comfort, had promised Alexander his life, had promised to remain philalexandros, friend of Alexander, even if Alexander never needed him again, promised him courage and truth and a way for Alexander to compete against himself and win. In Egypt what the desert stole from Alexander's soul, Hephaestion gave it back through his fingers and his words, and in Egypt, with Hephaestion, Alexander, for once in his life, forgot that he was cold, and always would be cold.
Seven years later the heat, like the desert, stole Hephaestion away from Alexander. Then the desert heat came back for Alexander. Life beyond death, it promised before it took his life. 'I took what I wanted from you anyway. And now I have you.'
(When Alexander was dead one of his foot soldiers held his wrist briefly before flinching as if burnt and shrinking away. "What's wrong with you?" a general asked, bewildered. The man was shaken and crying as he answered, "General, he is warm, sir." And the general, too, was shocked to find Alexander, in his death, warm like the desert air, a scorched unforgiving kind of warm, like a fever that could never stop.)
*
Alexander has never seen the desert, but in his dreams sometimes he's lost in it. He imagines it to be an awful lot like Russian winters, except with more yellow and cream and orange, curiously like the yolk of an egg splattered on a painter's canvas. Alexander would just substitute the snow with sand in his mind, trudge through the dunes of sand that would circle his arms and his legs, and in his dreams he'd keep walking, and walking, and walking, but he would never get anywhere anytime, and then he would wake up.
Alexander has never seen the desert, but he has a vague idea of what it's like. What he isn't sure about Napoleon fills it in for him, talking about the pyramids stretching infinitely large and looming over the finger-sized people in the sand, the sun so hot and so infinite and so immense that just never stops shining, and Alexander had liked listening to Napoleon's voice fall up and down, up and down, that night in Tilsit, just the two of them sprawled out on the floor, so drunk Alexander couldn't walk a few paces without wavering. They couldn't stop laughing either, and everything seemed funny to them that night, even the fact that their faces and bodies had been so close their wine glasses would hit the other person's face when they tried to take a drink. Alexander, one of Europe's most powerful monarchs, giggling like a child when Napoleon explained how the sand would get in your pants and your shoes when you trudged through the desert. How small that sand was. How much you could hold in your hand.
"Like power," Napoleon had said.
"Like power," Alexander had repeated, thinking how sand made glass, and how their fingers made the glass move, how the light in that half-inebriated room made the glass come alive, like Napoleon's voice and his story, Napoleon's words like sand, sitting slow and glinting in Alexander's hand.
And the funny thing was that even though Napoleon was drunk enough to be red in the face and even though Napoleon was talking of the desert like some kind of errant lover, Napoleon's skin was cold under Alexander's fingers. Alexander had accidentally scrambled across Napoleon's hand a few times in the dark, but later, when they were half undressed and kissing, Alexander had noticed just how cold Napoleon was, like he was a frozen core with a feeble ineffective sheet of silk for skin. Compared to Napoleon, Alexander was burning. Napoleon was like a half-alive corpse.
"I'm cold, I've always been cold," Napoleon said to Alexander, and later Alexander would find out just how cold Napoleon really was. Not just his skin, or his fingers, or even his heart, but something deep inside Napoleon struck cold, like it never was quite born from his mother and was trying to pull Napoleon back into the grave. Or it might be something else. Alexander doubts that he was named after Alexander, but sometimes he wonders. As a child he would scour the library for a mention of Alexander the Great. After Alexander met Napoleon he would sometimes drift off thinking about Alexander, and those two would mix and tangle and come alive as one person. It might be Alexander's voice calling from the grave, making Napoleon cold with a death he hadn't tasted yet, and threatening him with all the sand, all the grandeur, and all the tragedy power could contain.
Napoleon was first consul of France by the age of Alexander's death. Alexander, in his own time, was a rotting corpse by the time Napoleon told Alexander that they could rule the world together, he and Napoleon, twin pillars of light and strength and revolution in a world grown old and weary with kings. Alexander was nothing more but dust by the time Napoleon wrote home to Josephine saying, "If Alexander were a woman, I would make him my mistress."
Alexander likes to play with that line, saying, Alexander of the living is Napoleon's mistress, and Alexander of the dead has made Napoleon his mistress.
And Alexander once saw the desert with his lover Hephaestion with him. Now it is Napoleon telling Alexander what the desert is like, vast and empty. Alexander, when he closes his eyes, can still see the image Napoleon had painted for him that night in Tilsit, a gaping hole of a place that Alexander can only compare to snow. So empty even though Napoleon could see the footprints of his soldiers. A place that would scare even a godless immortal commander who resurrected his country.
A place that would scare someone much braver than Alexander. And Alexander was brave that night in Tilsit. His hands were warm like they were cupping sand akin to power, and when he touched Napoleon, Napoleon was warm, bare skin and all. Alexander was brave that night, cutting his knees on broken wine glasses when he kneeled at Napoleon's feet. Someday he will be that brave in the day. Someday he will be brave in the desert.
Not now, though, and maybe not ever, but never, never with Napoleon. Alexander had died, true; but Alexander had died for himself and his country, and this Alexander will not die for Napoleon, nor force his country to die for Napoleon. Alexander may not have been named for Alexander, may not have seen the desert, may not have cared for horses afraid for their own shadows, but Alexander knows what courage is. He's never been brave in a place where you fill up with sand, so he can't make judgments about Napoleon running away from Egypt, but he knows that he can't run away from what he knows will happen. He may not be as brave as Napoleon, but he won't make himself a coward for Napoleon either.
Napoleon is Alexander's desert, Alexander's Egypt, Alexander's sand. Alexander will always be Napoleon's heat, Napoleon's mistress, Napoleon's pillar, but these are all things Napoleon can live without and things that Alexander knows Napoleon can live without. Napoleon took what he wanted from Alexander, and though Alexander will never take the things he wanted the most from Napoleon, that's something Alexander can live without, as well.
(Marching towards Moscow, Napoleon puts his head down in his arms one night, thinking of Alexander. In his mind Alexander is warm, just a pool of warmth gently trailing down from Napoleon's forehead to his collarbone and resting somewhere in the cavity of his chest. The wind outside sounds almost alive and unfriendly. In the end, just wind. Somewhere in between this all Napoleon falls asleep. When one of his soldiers later wakes him up, Napoleon is shocked to find a tear slide down the crease his sleeves make on his face. It's cold somehow. Napoleon knows that it's been on his face for a long while. The soldier asks him what's wrong and Napoleon replies, "Nothing, only this cold--", trying to keep himself from thinking of Alexander, far removed and warm in his palace, letting Napoleon slowly freeze himself to death, colder than he's ever been in his life.
Colder than he was when Alexander finally told him, no more.)
A/N: YES I KNOW IT IS HISTORICALLY INACCURATE. By the time Alexander I and Napoleon met, Napoleon was a rather fat guy, aging, and not at all handsome. And it was just NOT romantic. But I had this idea for Alexander/Napoleon when I saw the picture of Napoleon holding a French flag as he looks over his shoulder, it's just such a beautiful picture, and Napoleon looks almost heartbroken in it, as if he was mourning something even though he should be celebrating. His skin was so white in that picture! And, you know, Napoleon promising Alexander they could rule the world together, and when Napoleon does write to his wife saying how he would make Alexander his mistress. Oh my god. *dies* Anyway. No one really knows what the priests told Alexander the Great at the temple of Zeus Ammon. *shrugs* And I know there wasn't a huge connection between the two halves of the stories, but it seemed to easy for me to connect them, Alexander with Napoleon, Hephaestion with Alexander, and then a circular path.
Alexander/Hephaestion, Alexander I of Russia/Napoleon I.The desert is timeless.
Egypt told Alexander he would die. That was the prophecy he heard at the shrine of Zeus Ammon. That was it. There was nothing else. It told him that he might have been the son of his mother and a half-god, but Egypt's sands and pyramids and perfume-scented candles could only tell him that there was nothing more to say. Immortals would always be immortals. Mortals, however blessed with immortal blood, would always be mortals and, so being, die.
Yet Egypt's gods promised him victory and glory like a sick, diseased wind, sweeping across the world, crippling his enemies. Egypt's waters promised him love like rain, brief and rapid and always leaving him thirsty. And Egypt's heat, though solid and dry, curled around him as it promised him life until death, coy and lithe and all encompassing. I already have life until death, Alexander replied; give me something else. 'I'll give you life even beyond death,' it countered. 'But I'll have to take something else in return.' And then it had laughed, short and stirring up more sand in Alexander's face, while he wondered what else Egypt would emptily promise him before it demanded that he die.
The desert sent Alexander back to Hephaestion as a tired, weary, half-broken man, a man who suddenly realized that he was a man, and that all the empires in the world could never give him any kind of immortality.
Hephaestion, though, slowly worked the life back into Alexander's body. Hephaestion was a tall man, taller than Alexander, with big hands, and frail, but he was incredibly warm everywhere, and when the desert was cold or the wind at night too much for Alexander, he liked to crawl back towards Hephaestion, who was always warm and with his hands could rub Alexander's skin and hold him until Alexander felt somewhat human, safe, and warm again.
Alexander was always and had always been cold. As a child his father liked to order him out into the sun to warm up, but his hands when he came back would still be like something carved from rocks in the winter, a gleaming white marble and just as cold. Cold all over, and not even a frightened cold. A chill, like eyes glazed over or something apathetic and indifferent, countered by Alexander's eyes and the curve of his mouth, always smiling. But there was something attractive about that cold. Men had always loved Alexander, even as a child. As a youth, not even an adult and barely away from being a child, Alexander was always in a sick way pleased with watching Phillip's guests lust after him. At banquets, he had played the part of the host's gracious son a little too well, touched the guests a little too much, smiled a little too long, was eager at just the right moments, and Alexander, half-asleep in his bed afterwards, had gotten a perverse fun out of imagining just what the guests were dreaming of, asleep or having sex or thrashing violently in their beds, an image of a boy with blond curls and skin cold enough to burn unwittingly rising into their minds in the dark of their own bedrooms. He was a strange child.
In their desert tent, alone with Hephaestion, those broad warm hands stroking up and down his smaller colder arms, Alexander would tell Hephaestion stories about the men Alexander had laid with, telling him about how their fingers would trail fire down Alexander's cold cheeks, how their weight against him was like the desert sun, how when they took him he would scream out from the warmth, and Alexander delighted in the fact that Hephaestion would tremble listening to him, helplessly and angrily aroused at the sound of Alexander's voice. I'm cold, I've always been cold, Alexander would whisper into Hephaestion's ear, taking care to lean all of his back against Hephaestion's chest as he maneuvered his head so that it lay on Hephaestion's shoulder, soaking in that warmth.
I'll warm you up, Hephaestion would promise, and those arms that came around from behind Alexander to hold them both together were enough to make Alexander believe in anything again.
Egypt gave him a prophecy of his own death and its throne. Egypt offered Alexander a city, a river, and a line of relatives born from the sun. But what Alexander remembered of Egypt was Hephaestion on the night Alexander came back from the desert temple. Hephaestion had immediately arranged from them to be alone, and in the dark, surrounded by Hephaestion's warmth and the sounds of the desert lurking, cold and dismal in the background, gently smoothed Alexander away into a calm and careful submission. Hephaestion's hands were soothing on Alexander's neck and shoulders, his head in Hephaestion's lap. Alexander liked touching Hephaestion's hands when they were together.
"How did they bear to let you go away with me?" Alexander asked, touching the creases of Hephaestion's palm and kissing the little mounds where the finger melted into the palm.
"They heard that you were a god," Hephaestion answered, lowering his head so that his lips brushed against Alexander's forehead as he talked. "They heard you were immortal and you were golden, of the sun." Hephaestion's hands tracing circles on his arms and his chest. "I told them I believed in you."
That night Hephaestion rocked Alexander to sleep in his lap, his head bent over Alexander's ear and whispering until Alexander couldn't hear anymore, the heat in Hephaestion's breath sliding honey-like through Alexander's body, so that when he woke up and Egypt made him a pharaoh, he was warm under the sun, something akin to the air and the sun grazed hand.
Egypt promised Alexander life until death, and the desert promised to give him life even beyond death, in return for something else. In Egypt Hephaestion had promised warmth and love, had promised forgiveness and comfort, had promised Alexander his life, had promised to remain philalexandros, friend of Alexander, even if Alexander never needed him again, promised him courage and truth and a way for Alexander to compete against himself and win. In Egypt what the desert stole from Alexander's soul, Hephaestion gave it back through his fingers and his words, and in Egypt, with Hephaestion, Alexander, for once in his life, forgot that he was cold, and always would be cold.
Seven years later the heat, like the desert, stole Hephaestion away from Alexander. Then the desert heat came back for Alexander. Life beyond death, it promised before it took his life. 'I took what I wanted from you anyway. And now I have you.'
(When Alexander was dead one of his foot soldiers held his wrist briefly before flinching as if burnt and shrinking away. "What's wrong with you?" a general asked, bewildered. The man was shaken and crying as he answered, "General, he is warm, sir." And the general, too, was shocked to find Alexander, in his death, warm like the desert air, a scorched unforgiving kind of warm, like a fever that could never stop.)
*
Alexander has never seen the desert, but in his dreams sometimes he's lost in it. He imagines it to be an awful lot like Russian winters, except with more yellow and cream and orange, curiously like the yolk of an egg splattered on a painter's canvas. Alexander would just substitute the snow with sand in his mind, trudge through the dunes of sand that would circle his arms and his legs, and in his dreams he'd keep walking, and walking, and walking, but he would never get anywhere anytime, and then he would wake up.
Alexander has never seen the desert, but he has a vague idea of what it's like. What he isn't sure about Napoleon fills it in for him, talking about the pyramids stretching infinitely large and looming over the finger-sized people in the sand, the sun so hot and so infinite and so immense that just never stops shining, and Alexander had liked listening to Napoleon's voice fall up and down, up and down, that night in Tilsit, just the two of them sprawled out on the floor, so drunk Alexander couldn't walk a few paces without wavering. They couldn't stop laughing either, and everything seemed funny to them that night, even the fact that their faces and bodies had been so close their wine glasses would hit the other person's face when they tried to take a drink. Alexander, one of Europe's most powerful monarchs, giggling like a child when Napoleon explained how the sand would get in your pants and your shoes when you trudged through the desert. How small that sand was. How much you could hold in your hand.
"Like power," Napoleon had said.
"Like power," Alexander had repeated, thinking how sand made glass, and how their fingers made the glass move, how the light in that half-inebriated room made the glass come alive, like Napoleon's voice and his story, Napoleon's words like sand, sitting slow and glinting in Alexander's hand.
And the funny thing was that even though Napoleon was drunk enough to be red in the face and even though Napoleon was talking of the desert like some kind of errant lover, Napoleon's skin was cold under Alexander's fingers. Alexander had accidentally scrambled across Napoleon's hand a few times in the dark, but later, when they were half undressed and kissing, Alexander had noticed just how cold Napoleon was, like he was a frozen core with a feeble ineffective sheet of silk for skin. Compared to Napoleon, Alexander was burning. Napoleon was like a half-alive corpse.
"I'm cold, I've always been cold," Napoleon said to Alexander, and later Alexander would find out just how cold Napoleon really was. Not just his skin, or his fingers, or even his heart, but something deep inside Napoleon struck cold, like it never was quite born from his mother and was trying to pull Napoleon back into the grave. Or it might be something else. Alexander doubts that he was named after Alexander, but sometimes he wonders. As a child he would scour the library for a mention of Alexander the Great. After Alexander met Napoleon he would sometimes drift off thinking about Alexander, and those two would mix and tangle and come alive as one person. It might be Alexander's voice calling from the grave, making Napoleon cold with a death he hadn't tasted yet, and threatening him with all the sand, all the grandeur, and all the tragedy power could contain.
Napoleon was first consul of France by the age of Alexander's death. Alexander, in his own time, was a rotting corpse by the time Napoleon told Alexander that they could rule the world together, he and Napoleon, twin pillars of light and strength and revolution in a world grown old and weary with kings. Alexander was nothing more but dust by the time Napoleon wrote home to Josephine saying, "If Alexander were a woman, I would make him my mistress."
Alexander likes to play with that line, saying, Alexander of the living is Napoleon's mistress, and Alexander of the dead has made Napoleon his mistress.
And Alexander once saw the desert with his lover Hephaestion with him. Now it is Napoleon telling Alexander what the desert is like, vast and empty. Alexander, when he closes his eyes, can still see the image Napoleon had painted for him that night in Tilsit, a gaping hole of a place that Alexander can only compare to snow. So empty even though Napoleon could see the footprints of his soldiers. A place that would scare even a godless immortal commander who resurrected his country.
A place that would scare someone much braver than Alexander. And Alexander was brave that night in Tilsit. His hands were warm like they were cupping sand akin to power, and when he touched Napoleon, Napoleon was warm, bare skin and all. Alexander was brave that night, cutting his knees on broken wine glasses when he kneeled at Napoleon's feet. Someday he will be that brave in the day. Someday he will be brave in the desert.
Not now, though, and maybe not ever, but never, never with Napoleon. Alexander had died, true; but Alexander had died for himself and his country, and this Alexander will not die for Napoleon, nor force his country to die for Napoleon. Alexander may not have been named for Alexander, may not have seen the desert, may not have cared for horses afraid for their own shadows, but Alexander knows what courage is. He's never been brave in a place where you fill up with sand, so he can't make judgments about Napoleon running away from Egypt, but he knows that he can't run away from what he knows will happen. He may not be as brave as Napoleon, but he won't make himself a coward for Napoleon either.
Napoleon is Alexander's desert, Alexander's Egypt, Alexander's sand. Alexander will always be Napoleon's heat, Napoleon's mistress, Napoleon's pillar, but these are all things Napoleon can live without and things that Alexander knows Napoleon can live without. Napoleon took what he wanted from Alexander, and though Alexander will never take the things he wanted the most from Napoleon, that's something Alexander can live without, as well.
(Marching towards Moscow, Napoleon puts his head down in his arms one night, thinking of Alexander. In his mind Alexander is warm, just a pool of warmth gently trailing down from Napoleon's forehead to his collarbone and resting somewhere in the cavity of his chest. The wind outside sounds almost alive and unfriendly. In the end, just wind. Somewhere in between this all Napoleon falls asleep. When one of his soldiers later wakes him up, Napoleon is shocked to find a tear slide down the crease his sleeves make on his face. It's cold somehow. Napoleon knows that it's been on his face for a long while. The soldier asks him what's wrong and Napoleon replies, "Nothing, only this cold--", trying to keep himself from thinking of Alexander, far removed and warm in his palace, letting Napoleon slowly freeze himself to death, colder than he's ever been in his life.
Colder than he was when Alexander finally told him, no more.)
A/N: YES I KNOW IT IS HISTORICALLY INACCURATE. By the time Alexander I and Napoleon met, Napoleon was a rather fat guy, aging, and not at all handsome. And it was just NOT romantic. But I had this idea for Alexander/Napoleon when I saw the picture of Napoleon holding a French flag as he looks over his shoulder, it's just such a beautiful picture, and Napoleon looks almost heartbroken in it, as if he was mourning something even though he should be celebrating. His skin was so white in that picture! And, you know, Napoleon promising Alexander they could rule the world together, and when Napoleon does write to his wife saying how he would make Alexander his mistress. Oh my god. *dies* Anyway. No one really knows what the priests told Alexander the Great at the temple of Zeus Ammon. *shrugs* And I know there wasn't a huge connection between the two halves of the stories, but it seemed to easy for me to connect them, Alexander with Napoleon, Hephaestion with Alexander, and then a circular path.