F L E U R
de
L I S
- Dim Aldebaran -
I. P R É L U D E
It was a tribute to his memory to come unseen: he had always appreciated subterfuge.
She stood after Juliet in the line. She didn't care that the person behind her kept bumping into her and saying 'excuse me' then staring for a moment as if not believing he could have ever talked to the air; didn't care that maybe/maybe-not he could hear her sniffles and that it reminded him of his little girl, left at home because funerals were too dreadful for children.
Tears had never been acceptable to him: and so they were not shed. Lies, however, were exchanged in great multitude, for those had been his subsistence in those few short years, and if they were enough for him surely they were enough for the starved, enough for her and enough for the family/friends that came to the feast.
The sun had the decency to hide behind a veil of clouds; his father wept before the heavens, and the eulogy dissolved in a tearfall, words and phrases carried along in a broken torrent of emotion.
She had never really noticed the father before this: she had never cared for straight men, preferring ones so crooked, so twisted, so bent out of shape they looked like Dada sculptures… but here, she could not help but flinch as each word broke like a whip across her back, each false virtue he recalled as good as a memory as she fell under the weight of the blows until she was curled on the ground by the casket, not sobbing but close enough for shame.
And after, after the eulogy, after the funeral, words echoed through her head: not the fictitious fluff of the father, but of those final moments:
Him, her, them: Butler drove. Holly by the window; Artemis in the middle, the French girl's head on his shoulder.
There's something you should know, he had said—(like Hell there is, she thought)—something about her—
—lovers. How blunt of her; like an ill-made mace, crushing the heart artlessly.
No, she's—
Fire; smoke; pain; as good as unconsciousness, though she had still heard the silence between the explosions, the lack of screams. He had died instantly; there had been no final words, no tearful goodbyes.
He was there and then he was gone.
There is no metaphor for such finality.
There were two funerals that day, for Artemis and the girl he had brought home; two families, mourning apart though their children had died together; two caskets, both empty.
She only wept for one.
It began to rain: no one wept for her.
Now, I've gotten some Very Mean Emails regarding this piece, so I'm giving full warnings here so it's your own bloody fault if you read it:
There is slash, femslash, sexual content, suicide and suicide references, swearing, anti-religious remarks, and general "immoral behavior" regarding just about everything you can think of. None of it is gratuitous; it's writing, pure and simple. The style is also different from the norm, which one person found "insulting to the very nature of literature" and another "the sort of thing you get when you select words at random". If you don't like it, bugger off. If you do, I'll just assume you've read the works of James Joyce.
Now, the nice stuff: I've tried to end this at 12,000 words, 20,000 words and 30,000 words respectively, but I love this piece to death so it looks like it will be novellength. It is in several fanfic challenges I am in, including fanfic100, 30angsts and 12LH. This is beta'd by the wonderful Natasha, who corrects my terrible French and pokes me when I'm having too much fun. I also owe some thanks to people like Whilily, since they're wonderful and encouraging even when they're raising their eyebrows at me.