wintersday (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wintersday) wrote2022-02-14 04:31 pm
wintersday) wrote2022-02-14 04:31 pm
Entry tags:
- character: fbg: brisk campaigner,
- character: fbg: presbyterate adventuress,
- fandom: fbg: sunless sea,
- fanfic,
- fanfic: length: 1-5k,
- fanfic: rating: teen,
- fanfic: type: f/f,
- format: drabble sequence,
- pairing: fbg: campaigner/adventuress,
- trope: alternate timelines,
- trope: au - canon divergence,
- trope: au - roleswap,
- trope: character study,
- trope: epistolary,
- trope: grief,
- trope: hurt/comfort,
- trope: romantic bittersweetness
Fic: Leaving, Returning
Title: Leaving, Returning
Fandom: Sunless Sea
Major Characters/Pairings: The Brisk Campaigner/the Presbyterate Adventuress
Wordcount: 1,000
Rating: Teen
POV: Second person + first person epistolary
Summary: In Irem, many strange unfinished tales can be found. The Indomitable Campaigner finds one.
Content notes: Canonical character death.
Notes: Originally written as a giftfic for Silvereye on AO3.
You will not be grieving when you find the book in Irem. The person you were might have been, but you will be too full of light and distance. Still: you will walk the pillared, lantern-hung street toward the plaza where they will sell lost tales, white sand and salt crunching underfoot.
A book will catch your eye. It will be zee stained, bound in red thread, marked with a name you recognize. The price will be high, but not higher than you’ve already paid for less. The silver will fall from your hand like water, and you will read.
.
Set out from London, March 12 by that city’s calendar, 19–, aboard the Salt Weasel. Sturdy ship, good crew. Captain’s a novice, but I’m not, and there’s a doctor aboard. She cannot cure it but she means to try.
The zee’s cold soothes me, I think, and the brisk, clean wind. The danger, too. If I die, it will be better to die fighting than from something inside me that cannot be quenched. But these are bleak thoughts, and we make landfall soon – in Whither, where they sell mutersalt for stories. Those I have in plenty. The Exiled Campaigner thinks –
.
Your hand will not tremble, but you will close the book and turn away, into the city.
Even here, people will sell dark coffee to travelers passing through. Irem will offer less danger to outsiders than burning light, red waters, but some who wander here will lose themselves. They’ll want to stay. They will come away changed in ways still unknown to them.
You will not be one of them. You’ll find a bench, plain stone, on an avenue where zee bats will swoop and dive from the eaves. You’ll drink your coffee. Eventually, you will pick up the story again.
.
Tests and tests, the Incandescent Adventuress’s journal will say. Solacefruit and blemmigans. The Campaigner always has a thing she wants to try.
She lets slip little of her exile, except – she wanted too much, tried too rashly. Something about Eight Against Nidah, but if I ever would have condemned that choice, I can’t now. I asked if she hoped to return, and she said there’s no point dwelling on the counterfactual. What is, is. What isn’t is full of snakes, and she can’t abide them. I laughed at that, and felt no warning heat. She made a note: success? Perhaps.
.
You will close your eyes and listen. The Riddlefishers’ songs will carry from the harbor, and the wind will blow from the East, salt and spice and pinewood forests. Your coffee will have long grown cold, and you will still not be grieving. But you will think, with the taste of salt in your throat, about immortality and treachery, and how you will have saved yourself long before you set foot on the shores of this city. The paper beneath your fingertips will be ink-stained, water-damaged, and you will touch it and wonder: will you (could you) have saved her?
.
It had a cost, what we did. My soul burns hotter now, consumes itself faster, though the solacefruit concoction slows the progression somewhat. But no regrets. I’d choose it again. I’ve never shied from danger, and I wouldn’t want to die without knowing what I learned at her hands.
We are candles in the dark, I told her, as we lay together in the ruddy lamplight, with her head on my breast and her hair coming unstuck from its bun. She smiled and told me – she is planning something, I think – that some of us might be more than that.
.
Ah, you will think – just that – and in the chill from the zee you will remember heat, of a feverish and trembling kind you haven’t felt since your condition was altered. You’ll remember that her skin had been cool against your own, her mouth soft, her hands rough, that her silence had broken like waves on strange shores. You won’t forget the shadow of her against your cabin door, with her soldier’s jacket and her weapons, walking to meet the fate she chose.
Every lover will be a traveler leaving, but you won’t regret what she taught you either.
.
My Campaigner left me today, on the shore of our home country. She means to walk from Apis Meet to the Mountain’s foot. A pilgrimage, but not one of atonement; she means to find something there, and will say nothing of what. I wished her luck. I think we were always meant for parting, and I –
She changed me. My blood is the blood of stars now. I burn cold. But I live, however altered, and there are stories still to make. Perhaps I’ll slay that flying thing that haunts the convent. I think I’ve left all earthly vows behind.
.
The wind will change, and change again.
You’ll lift your head, listening. She will walk towards you, slowly along winding streets, as if from a great distance. A stranger. Always a stranger. Always someone you know.
I cannot remember, she will say, whether I burned or fell in battle, but I remember this.
Her hand on your face, not young but strong. Her eyes bright as yours, as alien, and the way she twirls a strand of your hair around her finger, not alien at all. It won’t be grief, that sudden keen feeling, but it will cut as deeply.
.
There’s a place I mean to go. Not North. Not yet. Not East, but northeast – that human word, that mere direction – to a place where past and future bleed together like two rivers meeting. Who I’ll find there, I don’t know, but I’d like to hope I’ll find someone.
A bit of poetry caught my mind as I turned my own ship’s prow for the last time from London’s harbor, and I haven’t shaken it yet: ‘tis not too late. For me, perhaps, it never will be.
There is a sea more sunless. I don’t intend to travel it alone.
Fandom: Sunless Sea
Major Characters/Pairings: The Brisk Campaigner/the Presbyterate Adventuress
Wordcount: 1,000
Rating: Teen
POV: Second person + first person epistolary
Summary: In Irem, many strange unfinished tales can be found. The Indomitable Campaigner finds one.
Content notes: Canonical character death.
Notes: Originally written as a giftfic for Silvereye on AO3.
You will not be grieving when you find the book in Irem. The person you were might have been, but you will be too full of light and distance. Still: you will walk the pillared, lantern-hung street toward the plaza where they will sell lost tales, white sand and salt crunching underfoot.
A book will catch your eye. It will be zee stained, bound in red thread, marked with a name you recognize. The price will be high, but not higher than you’ve already paid for less. The silver will fall from your hand like water, and you will read.
.
Set out from London, March 12 by that city’s calendar, 19–, aboard the Salt Weasel. Sturdy ship, good crew. Captain’s a novice, but I’m not, and there’s a doctor aboard. She cannot cure it but she means to try.
The zee’s cold soothes me, I think, and the brisk, clean wind. The danger, too. If I die, it will be better to die fighting than from something inside me that cannot be quenched. But these are bleak thoughts, and we make landfall soon – in Whither, where they sell mutersalt for stories. Those I have in plenty. The Exiled Campaigner thinks –
.
Your hand will not tremble, but you will close the book and turn away, into the city.
Even here, people will sell dark coffee to travelers passing through. Irem will offer less danger to outsiders than burning light, red waters, but some who wander here will lose themselves. They’ll want to stay. They will come away changed in ways still unknown to them.
You will not be one of them. You’ll find a bench, plain stone, on an avenue where zee bats will swoop and dive from the eaves. You’ll drink your coffee. Eventually, you will pick up the story again.
.
Tests and tests, the Incandescent Adventuress’s journal will say. Solacefruit and blemmigans. The Campaigner always has a thing she wants to try.
She lets slip little of her exile, except – she wanted too much, tried too rashly. Something about Eight Against Nidah, but if I ever would have condemned that choice, I can’t now. I asked if she hoped to return, and she said there’s no point dwelling on the counterfactual. What is, is. What isn’t is full of snakes, and she can’t abide them. I laughed at that, and felt no warning heat. She made a note: success? Perhaps.
.
You will close your eyes and listen. The Riddlefishers’ songs will carry from the harbor, and the wind will blow from the East, salt and spice and pinewood forests. Your coffee will have long grown cold, and you will still not be grieving. But you will think, with the taste of salt in your throat, about immortality and treachery, and how you will have saved yourself long before you set foot on the shores of this city. The paper beneath your fingertips will be ink-stained, water-damaged, and you will touch it and wonder: will you (could you) have saved her?
.
It had a cost, what we did. My soul burns hotter now, consumes itself faster, though the solacefruit concoction slows the progression somewhat. But no regrets. I’d choose it again. I’ve never shied from danger, and I wouldn’t want to die without knowing what I learned at her hands.
We are candles in the dark, I told her, as we lay together in the ruddy lamplight, with her head on my breast and her hair coming unstuck from its bun. She smiled and told me – she is planning something, I think – that some of us might be more than that.
.
Ah, you will think – just that – and in the chill from the zee you will remember heat, of a feverish and trembling kind you haven’t felt since your condition was altered. You’ll remember that her skin had been cool against your own, her mouth soft, her hands rough, that her silence had broken like waves on strange shores. You won’t forget the shadow of her against your cabin door, with her soldier’s jacket and her weapons, walking to meet the fate she chose.
Every lover will be a traveler leaving, but you won’t regret what she taught you either.
.
My Campaigner left me today, on the shore of our home country. She means to walk from Apis Meet to the Mountain’s foot. A pilgrimage, but not one of atonement; she means to find something there, and will say nothing of what. I wished her luck. I think we were always meant for parting, and I –
She changed me. My blood is the blood of stars now. I burn cold. But I live, however altered, and there are stories still to make. Perhaps I’ll slay that flying thing that haunts the convent. I think I’ve left all earthly vows behind.
.
The wind will change, and change again.
You’ll lift your head, listening. She will walk towards you, slowly along winding streets, as if from a great distance. A stranger. Always a stranger. Always someone you know.
I cannot remember, she will say, whether I burned or fell in battle, but I remember this.
Her hand on your face, not young but strong. Her eyes bright as yours, as alien, and the way she twirls a strand of your hair around her finger, not alien at all. It won’t be grief, that sudden keen feeling, but it will cut as deeply.
.
There’s a place I mean to go. Not North. Not yet. Not East, but northeast – that human word, that mere direction – to a place where past and future bleed together like two rivers meeting. Who I’ll find there, I don’t know, but I’d like to hope I’ll find someone.
A bit of poetry caught my mind as I turned my own ship’s prow for the last time from London’s harbor, and I haven’t shaken it yet: ‘tis not too late. For me, perhaps, it never will be.
There is a sea more sunless. I don’t intend to travel it alone.