Disclaimer: Not mine, never was, and the way things are looking, never will be.
A/N: Yes, well, haven't been a very good writer recently, yes? So here's my retort to my own muses for now; a little drabble, again part of the Series Which Has No Name. This one is not so dark as the other few that precede it, but still hints at the constant madness. Clambrithe returns!
*
It was sunny that day. I remember it well. Very sunny. The kind of sunny where the skies are their at their cliched best: blue, cloudless, unbearably beautiful. One needs to look to the sky sometimes. You forget the true colours and hues of the cirrus-painted horizons; sometimes you forget that the sky does not always stay a standard shade of azure, sapphire, cerulean blue. But that day, that day was a day unaccountable in the annals of days upon endless days that had come before it, that eventually came after it. For the moment, the skies were blue. And the sun shone.
I remember it well.
I was with Major Clambrithe's patrol. He used to have one, when he was alive, just before his promotion to major. They say he jumped to his death, but nobeast really knows. The uppers never talk of it, and when we buried the mysterious human-turned-vermin, or whatever she was, we seemed to have buried Clambrithe right alongside her, whether metaphorically so or not.
I miss him. He used to understand, understand as well as anybeast could possibly understand.
He understood me when I finally did it. He was standing right there beside me when I did it, too. He watched, watched with those damnable blue eyes of his, mirroring the sky yet so bloody cold in contrast, so god forsaken and detached and absolutely lifeless. He stood beside me, watching, as I did it. He did not even put his blade by mine, did not even bother to lift a helping paw. He just waited. I will never be sure if that was his form of support, or if that was his own personal, morbid way of reminding himself of innocence lost, but oh, the agony and the ecstasy.
Now I understand what they mean by obsession, addiction, revelation.
The sky was blue. So were his eyes.
I forgot, that day. I forgot to look to the skies, forgot to look to each star at night and wonder how they shone. I forgot to do all the things that I used to love doing, I forgot how to forget and I forgot how to remember. I engaged in the Moment, and the Moment swallowed me whole, drowning me in every emotion, in every sensuous torture of madness and more madness and madness again. I never stopped living in the Moment. I never can. I would go insane.
I think that's what Clambrithe did. And for that, I say he is a fool.
Who can turn away from this? We can smile, certainly, we can laugh. We can play our foolish little games, with our leverets, with our friends, with ourselves. Try to fool the world, fool each other, fool our own inner conscience. It would never work if we bothered to be retrospective, contemplative philosophers. Death is a topic best left for those who never engage in it, who never feel its intimate brush, who never learn to savour it, to love it, to be it.
I became death that day.
And when I pulled my blade - soaked for the first time in my life with the lifeblood of my enemy, your enemy, our enemy - out of the shuddering carcass beneath me, I froze and the world became but a series of minute jerks on my nervous system, action and reaction and condescension. Who wanted life, who wanted life, who could possibly want life when there is such death? Who would want tattered cotton, knowing that he lives, when one can have rich velvet, knowing one lives more in that moment than the pathetic example who fell before him? Who could possibly want to settle for knowing that one can survive, when one could know that he survives last amongst other survivors, other refugees, other victims of this perilous, perilous, damned perilous society of ours? Of yours. Of mine.
Clambrithe put his paw on my shoulder. I remember staring past him, past his white tunic that somehow never got stained red while my own green one had turned crimson. I remember staring past his rank, captain, bar bar bar, sewn there onto the sleeve for all to see, resplendent in golden glory. Staring past it all into the darkened, golden sky. I never realized that so much time had passed. All I could do was tremble, tremble and attempt not to cry.
The beast on the ground was dead. And I was alive.
And I loved that feeling.
The raw tenderness of your nerves, such sensitivity that you feel born again, receptive to each breath of wind and each glance of sunburst and glory. The shaking of your feet, the grip of your blade, the feeling that denotes that you are alive. The colours deepen, and the sounds become rich, and all the universe seems resplendent in a glory that could be only your own, in this glory of knowing that you lived when others died, that you remained standing. That you are alive. That you are alive.
And Clambrithe knew it. Gods yes, he knew it. He was a premier officer. No officer becomes as decorated as him without first achieving some sort of personal Nivarna, some sort of personal acceptance to life and to death and every little thing in between. He knew how it was to love death and to love life, to be caught in this marriage of sin and of evangelism of the pithy of existence. He knew how it was to love and to hate. He knew it. Yet he just stood there, watching my conversion from saint into sinner, watching me turn from innocence into guilt unknowing.
I think I cried two tears in that instant: one for myself, and one for the world. Then Clambrithe came over to me, still impassive, still so very cold, and placed his paw on my shoulder. I shook. He had never previously shown such perception of humane depth, such understanding of innate compassion. For an instant, the sky remained blue.
Then he kicked the many-notched blade of my fallen opponent away, and turned his eyes aside.
'Get over it.'
I do not think I ever did. That night before sunset, as I sat shivering by the fire on my watch, Clambrithe came and sat by me. Why, I doubt I will ever know: I was only a runner, a young male leveret fresh off the ranks and thrust into one of the most active patrols because of a good domestic record and plenty of youth just waiting to be deconstructed. His tunic was off, leaving just his undershirt, and when I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye, I could almost pretend that he was any other normal hare, any other normal hare who had never taken a life and took no pleasure from it.
Clambrithe just sat there, with one knee raised and bent and the other curled beneath him. He rested his arms over that bent knee of his, allowing long, calloused fingers to brush the ground just so, just so, and his fur rippled in the dusky wind. He looked ahead, beyond the fires, into them, somewhere, somewhere I had not, at that time, yet reached. He was not Clambrithe then, oh no, he was Jonathan, and Jonathan was never a secure man to begin with.
'Sir,' I remember myself saying, and I questioned warily as to his well-being, just as any proper subordinate officer should.
'Tren A'varn,' he had sighed, and he turned those cursed eyes of his on me. I swallowed and turned away. What did I see?
Guilt. Rumination. Abhorrence. Helplessness. Despair.
No, I never wanted to see my reflection in his eyes again.
'Sir.' I offered as a form of closure, and we, just the two of us, sat there, back to back, watching the sun set in the West, always in the West. Our hearts went with that sustaining ball of fire, globe of rage, revenge, murder and relish. It set in the West, and it painted the sky red. Blood, blood, blood. Salamandastron lay there, lay where our secret desires, our secret vices buried themselves with the countless dead.
I smiled, maybe at the sky, maybe at Clambrithe, or just maybe at the world at general. I will never know. I just know I smiled.
Get over it.
It was my life then, after all. It is my life now. I never got over it. I still am trying. Getting over it. Getting over it all.
He died. I am not sure why.
I think he got over it at last.
I think he committed suicide.
Clambrithe, I whisper at night, just sometimes, just when the sky turns purple and I cannot bear to remember that blueness. Jonathan, I wish I understood.
Sometimes even now I stare into the fire, trying to figure out just what it was he saw in the embers, sparking, living, dying, ash. My own subordinates never disturb me, and I cannot bring myself to infringe upon their personal space. Not the way Clambrithe did, not the way Jonathan saved me.
Get over it.
I have been trying. I will understand some day. Until the day I do, I will sit here, here by the generic fire, watching this generic sunset. I never watch the sunrise. Only sunset.
Because it sets in the West.
Get over it.
Because it sets in the West.