Disclaimer: Clambrithe and Tren are both mine, intellectual property, baby. Brian Jacques may own the place and the patrol, but I own the plot and the characters.
A/N: More morbid-contemplative from the little idolizer that is Tren. Oh, trivia: You really do see that the hare accent disappears when they become serious. One very clear example is Clary from Mariel, that scene in which he educates Saxtus on the use of a bow. No accent. Look through the books, my suspicions that eventually developed this killer arc of fics all came from actions of the hares themselves. My fiction may not seem to fan-ish, but it is, in its own AU way. *laughs*
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I miss him, in strange ways. I am not supposed to miss him. No one is. It should not be allowed.
To remember is painful. We all know that. Putting the past to rest is a pastime none of us have the stamina or durability to do. We live with it by our sides, we live with it continuously, daily, every passing second. The past is made up of many things - death, blood, guilt. Certainly not topics of civilized conversation, but we hold them dear to us anyway. Maybe because death is the one thing that makes us feel alive, maybe because death is the one purging of the blood that coats our paws, dripping, dripping, always dripping.
They say blood can never be washed off.
That is a flagrant lie.
Blood can always be washed off. That alone is the one reason why we stay sane, why I am sane. Why Jonathan went insane.
I will not be so presumptuous as to attempt to offer insight into his final thoughts, but that is my belief. I knew him - in my own private way - and I take pride and even a little arrogance from that. No one knew Jonathan Clambrithe. He was too dangerous. Too quiet. Too damn introspective. We loved him with our respect, with our adoring eyes, but never with our hearts. He was as he was. There is no dispute. He was a death trap, a means to get to an end. You never stood in his way. Clambrithe was on the path to ascension - whether to the Dark Forest or straight to Hellgates, none of us knew.
Perhaps I was seen as foolish to approach him. Perhaps I am foolish. He keeps me in my own constant recantation of my life's values - they change every day. He kept me thinking even when he never addressed me, kept me watching him, waiting for his words. He was an enigma.
And I miss him because of that.
Days of murder are days of ennui. I learnt that long ago. And even the cold-blooded need their humour, their philosophy, their psychology. We all need the recalcitrant, those oddly reticent ones who keep us guessing, who keep us wondering, why, why, why.
Why, Clambrithe? Why?
You taught me my vocabulary of irony. Sanguine, ensanguine, sanguinity. Such similar words - such eloquent difference. They call it bloodlust in the Old language, the archaic terms that are lost to our current word forms. Sanguine. The colour of blood. Who would associate that which is optimistic to that which is bloodthirsty?
You. Me. Every patroller from here to six feet under. Paint me with bloodied hands, if you ever paint me a portrait, paint me bleeding. Paint me with a silent smile - but paint me not as you would paint Clambrithe.
Clambrithe would be painted painting blood, holding a brush of madness in his paws, calm, composed, completely mad. He would be painted smirking, frowning, laughing. Sardonic. But never pleasant. Never paint him, for he is not one for canvas or one for your words, images, strokes - or mine. Paint him the mercurial - paint him the saturnine - paint him not at all.
Now I sound like the obsequious fool of servitude. And I am.
Can I help it?
As much as Clambrithe could.
Ethos, pathos, logos.
Disposition, empathy. Logic.
He was never logical. I watched him and I never understood him. He was so complex, a bewildering character. A strange hare.
We are so often seen as the cheerful perpetrators of intentional humour - we have spread that attitude only through careful execution. We never show ourselves to others - Redwallers especially. It is only when we become serious - and if one is prudent enough to observe us closely and to listen to use speak - that we become even slightly like ourselves again. Our "slang" disappears, our attitude changes. Very odd. The moment we step outside the mountain stronghold of lies, we become alternative realities of ourselves, grotesque mirror images. We laugh. We cry. We feel. We feel acutely, honing down on the emotions of others around us, thinking, thinking: exploitation, manipulation, information. We take it all in, we observe, we sacrifice. Of course, we never seem to do so. We have our own eccentrics - Hon Rosie from days long past. Colonel Clary, so stoic and so unbearably predictable. Brig Thyme - another predictable soul. They laughed. They ate so that their hearts were full of foreign love unheard of in Salamandastron. They joked in this superficial accent of wots, ballys and jolly-good-ha-ha-ha, made up, unreal, surreal, lies.
We hide our victims well. We burn them, bury them, wash our paws clean of them.
And they never know. The citizens of Mossflower live on in anonymous ignorance. And I envy them, and I pity them.
How is it to know innocence as they know it? How is it to know terror beyond this interminable boredom? What is it to be helpless, to be a victim of death instead the instigator? Surely there is a difference between them and us. We... we are different. So much so. I want to know. I cannot. I must not. Who crosses over that strange border? Who can put down steel and shaft and say 'No more, no more. Death, remove your scythe'? Who has such courage? Who would dare? Not I, not I. I need this murder. I need it badly. I need it to keep me sane, to make me understand that all those previous lives were taken for a reason - the same reason I continue to kill. If I continue to kill, if I have not stopped, it means that I have seen no reason to do so, no shame, no guilt, no wrongness in taking lives. What reason? I do not know. But if I stopped... My mind would know, know as surely as my heart would: Sin. Sin, sin, sin.
So we all keep training those after us as those before us trained us. We continue - none of us want to stop. The weaker ones are eliminated quickly enough, whether by death or by moral guilt and removal. The stronger ones stay on, the officers with the false smiles and the warm cheer. We might be dead inside, but for the sake of our animate corpses we preserver, too afraid, too cowardly.
There is such irony in our existence.
And it takes so much to make us see the irony. We are blind to it, walking around with our eyes wide shut, wanting to block out that which we are subject to and helpless to deny. Parsimony of emotion.
Jonathan opened his eyes.
I do not think he liked what he saw.