Disclaimer: It's all Jacques', yes it is.
A/N: Warning: 'Tis dark. Very dark, very worthy of it's PG-13 rating. Suicidal themes here. Hm. This fits into the same universe as my growing Hares-Are-More-Than-They-Seem-Series. Would make MUCH more sense if you read, even slightly, The Mindlessness of Intuition and/or Set Me Free. Once again, themes here are unlike any themes I have ever seen expressed for hares (or any OTHER Redwall creature, for that matter), and I pulled it off the best that I could for one with as little experience as myself.
*
It was another cold night. He wondered if the nights would ever get warmer. Moving closer to his bed partner, he gently nuzzled her neck. She stirred, awakening and smiling.
'Hello,' she whispered in reverence for the night that blossomed above them. He did not smile. She said nothing, only resting her head on his shoulder.
'I go tomorrow,' he murmured into her ear, unperturbed. She stiffened so minutely in his arms.
'You... go?'
'Of course,' he said, confused.
There was nothing for him here. No permanence. Of course it was best that he leave now. He had been gone for so long. Three months away from duty - a season of madness in a world of insanity. There was nothing for him here.
'Does this mean nothing to you?' she whispered fiercely, ignorant of burning stars that wheeled above them, ignorant to the fury of the heavens that was as easily imparted as the cloaking velvet of the night sky. He turned to her, dead eyes inquisitive and brow furrowed in confusion.
'I must go,' he reiterated more urgently, wishing that she understood.
'How can you?' she pleaded, appealing to that side of him that he never wanted to exist.
There were just too many voices. Every time he stared into the curve of her face, he saw them. Falling, one after another, dying, dying, dead. He heard their screams echoed in her cries, saw their agony in her pleasure. It was a elixir of eternal death, death, death. It screamed at him through even the most sacrosanct of eyes, staring at him, gazing and unrelenting. Splayed across the grave of the living, he slept in the coffin of the dead. Of course he could no stay. He moved ever so minutely, an action barely perceptible to her but oh, so verily obvious to him, to his tutors, to them all.
'You cannot begin to understand,' he hushed her, kissing her softly, daring to hope for silence, final silence. How does one stop screams that originate from phantoms of the dead? Family, friends, enemies, they meshed together, overlapping, body over body, blood mixing with blood until it was a potion so thick that he was heady from the drink of it, from the taste and from the smell. Enamoured, but so wanting to wretch, yet hardened bodies do not kneel to bodily chills, and he stood, he lay, forever immobilized in a cage of death, death, death.
'Make me understand,' she urged aggressively, wanting to understand, wanting to know how it was to live like this. He choked out a short laugh.
'You want to understand?' he echoed, a note of slight hysteria entering his voice. 'You here, a distraction from the very duties that hold me dear to Salamandastron, want to understand what it is like to live there? To be there?'
'If you lay here next to me, if you share with me everything but your thoughts, what honour could your worth possibly amount to?'
Such a quick witted counter, one rarely, if ever used. He huffed, wondering again how he managed this insanity. There was no balance, no balance between the good and the bad anymore. The screaming was just too horrible, too grotesque that even in his daily ablutions, he saw their faces in the reflection of water, in the reddened horizon rising, turning, revolving, smothering him. He felt nauseous. What magic was this? What witchery?
'You want to know? You want to know death?'
She remained silent.
'You are honourable hares, you do not deal death.'
'Then what do you think we deal? What do you think we give, and receive, every time we go out into the field? What do you think? There is honour, yes, but bloody honour, honour bordering on obsession! I need to return. I have to return!'
Like an obsession that he could not be rid off. Like a need, gnawing at the very veins of his consciousness. Duty, duty, duty, death. Need, must, want. Such preposterousness.
'Why? Why, when you could live here, with me? Away from such regiments and conformity?'
Why, indeed? Why live with somebeast that did not understand? Why live with somebeast that obviously had not even the slightest comprehension of those thrice-damned voices in his head, telling him stories that he saw replayed night after night, in nightmares and in dreams, in solace and peace and in passion and in any fall from grace. How? Why? Why, indeed. He did not know.
'Let us speak no more of it,' he dismissed, wanting nothing but to give himself to earth and to give himself away, to lie there on cold soil and rot, rot away, as long as blissful silence could erupt from the orchestra of his thoughts.
'Do not say that to me!' she burst out, every muscle corded and tense. He remained aloof, too many lessons on keeping still, too many lessons on the importance of fluidity, too many lessons embedded in his brain, too many, too much.
'I'll tell you, then,' he responded quietly. 'I'll try to tell you how it is like to see death in every action, to see death in every move. I'll teach you of insanity, I'll teach you of madness, is that what you want? Do you want to feel the awe of blood draining away from countless dead corpses, as I have seen? As I long to feel again, as I long to feel because they drain away these endless soliloquies in my mind? In my consciousness? Do you want to know how it is like to need death? Do you? Do you?'
She recoiled. He lost his composure.
'Yes! Yes, recoil from me! Turn your face aside, as anybeast ought to, faced with murder! Faced with this foe which none of you can understand! Can comprehend! I want this death, sweet, silent, all-encompassing death! There is no passion save for the passion of death's embrace! None from you, none from anybeast who could approach me! Stay away from dark strains, sing not the dirges of insanity!'
'I...' she stammered, 'I...'
He cast his eyes aside, standing and pulling his tunic over his head properly. She stared at him, stared at this Long Patrol hare, so like her in face, yet so unlike her in mood.
'Where are you going?' she ventured, too afraid. He turned his head away from her as he bent, with all the handsome, artistic grace that she had seen in him a season ago, and picked up his thin rapier-blade, the crier of no words, but tears of compassion and tears of silent compliance to the scythe that cut them all. He was so beautiful, basked in the moon, but so strange, with that light born not of stars or nebulae in his pupils', with that odd fluidity that spoke less of grace and more of alien emotion. He was matyrism personified, such wonderful, compact, bubbling sensation, intuition, thought. Yet, as fascinating as he was, he seemed so dark, so immersed in silence that talk seemed of no purpose, so entrenched in the aesthetic meandering of his wandering blade that all else but the sheen of crimson on steel satisfied his thirst, that unquenchable thirst for something, anything.
He turned and graced her with one smile, a smile so practised and forged she was sure he kept them in stores for moments such as this. She pulled the blanket about her shoulders, shivering from a feeling not born of cold.
'I am sorry,' he told her, but she was not sure whom for: her, or himself.
He strode out of the glade with nothing but the clothes on his back, pinned over with medals and commendations and ribbons for his bravery and courage, and that blade over his shoulder, the blade that even now left a drip-drip-drip of liquid thicker that blood down over the path he trod, a trial of madness and intoxication following him like a stalking shadow of the night. But then, when he was almost out of hearing range, he stopped, and he turned around to face her. Some dark cloud passed over his face, and he suddenly hurried back, running at a gallop, unsheathing the blade as he ran.
He was exhilarating, but terrifying to watch. So enchanting to watch, lithe, sinuous madness encased in that form, running at her with all the practice of a dancer to unheard music, waving a keen blade of silver and moonlight, charging at her, intentions unknown. She stifled a whimper of apprehension - then he stopped, just as abruptly as he had begun, and fell to his knees, sliding to a stop, and reaching for her paw. Panting with animalistic dementia, he pressed the blade into her paws.
'I'm sorry,' he choked out again, and for an instant she thought she saw tears gather at the corner of his stone eyes. 'But I must.'
She felt him grip her paw with a firmness that disturbed her greatly.
'But I hate the voices,' he gasped, 'I hate them.'
He tried to thrust the blade backwards into himself. Horrified, she retracted.
'No!' she cried out, terrified and bewildered by the attempt at suicide. Pulled the blade backwards, tossed it away, ignoring the glittering arc that reflected the cloudless sky, like shattering fragments of glass-encased tears. Shoulders heaving, he let out a soul-searing sob and threw himself into her arms, crying, crying as she was sure he had never done before.
Through the night, she held him, even as she herself fell into reverie.
The next morning, he was gone, and although there was no evidence of his leaving, for he was too skilled a hare to leave tracks behind carelessly, she could tell from the scent of death the way he had gone. The invisible droplets still washed the soil beneath her, and the path led West - West into the setting sun, descending like quiet death permeates all, towards the sea. She watched the fiery chasm settle beyond the horizon, not moving for all her grief - for herself, for him, for them both. She knew what lay past the miles and the rivers, trees, rock, soil and sand.
Salamandastron.