Disclaimer: I am not Patricia C. Wrede. Because I am not Patricia C. Wrede, I eat a lot of chocolate, but this does not make me Patricia C. Wrede, no matter how hard I try.
Summary: This is a 'Sorcery and Cecilia, or ther Enchanted Chocolate Pot' fic, if you've ever read that miniseries. Thomas has been sent off to war by his father, but the fact takes some time sinking in.
Warnings: blood and other related bodily fluids, much strangely-depicted angst, war, and some slight battlefield carnage.
Please review once you've read this; I don't care if you just say " it's good" or if you write me a huge monologue about how it sux and you r stupid and why do you evn writ fanfix you cant writ shite etc, etc, etc.
Sinking In
England was at war with France.
Thomas knew this; everyone did. It was just taking a little while to sink in. He could say the phrase over and over again, but it had no meaning; empty syllables played over his lips, repeating their senseless refrain.
Since England was at war with France,Thomas enlisted. He did this because as the younger son of a great house it was expected of him, not because he particularly wanted to. He was to receive an officer's position, not get killed, and return home victorious. (Not killed.) His personal opinion did not matter, because, after all, Lord Schofield reasoned, at that age, young men only have opinions to spite their betters.
At which point Lady Sylvia looked rather smug.
(She later reminded her husband that it was at exactly that age that he had had an opinion about rings in the general sense and engagement rings in the particular, especially about their placement. The placement in question was Sylvia's finger. As opposed to on any other woman's. As in, Sylvia becoming his wife. Which was most definitely an opinion that he had held.)
In Lord Schofield's opinion, which did matter, it would do his younger son good to stop fiddling around with magic and books and whatnot. That Sir Hilary chap was civil, certainly, and had a good head on his shoulders, no denying that, but it really wasn't the thing. Thomas needed to see the world, get some good fresh air. (Even though the air he breathed would be the chokingly thick air of the battlefield, and the part of the world he would be seeing would be the war-torn, bloodied wreckage.) Make a man out of him. Perfect for the lad, really.
On a train headed for a training camp, Thomas sat in an empty compartment with a few small bundles and odds and ends. He was sitting in a compartment by himself, waiting for the train to finally start. He amused himself by snapping his fingers and casting a selective version of the fiat lux, which enable the caster to manipulate a small amount of light with mental, physical, or verbal commands. Even while the train's whistles blew and mothers sent their sons off, trying to smile and cry at the same time, Thomas did not know what the fuss was about.
England was at war with France.
France was at war with England.
Napoleon, Napoleon, Napoleon.
War, war, war.
England, France, England, France.
What was all the fuss about? As Thomas absentmindedly trickled light from one palm to the other, he simply did not know. War? Well, he supposed it would be very horrible. Horrendous, in fact. Nasty. So why didn't he care?
Why didn't he care? He couldn't have said. It hadn't quite sunk in yet.
The train began to move, and the door slid open rather hurriedly. Thomas snapped his light out of existence. A brooding sort of young man stood in the hall with a knapsack and a rather dark expression. He had very large black eyebrows.
"Can I sit here," he asked, "or are you saving that seat for anyone?"
Thomas was rather alarmed. Someone was talking to him, and glowering at him, and wanted to sit across from him, in the same compartment. And England was at war with France.
"No," Thomas replied, when he realized he had been gaping, rather. "I mean," he hastily amended, "no, I'm not saving it, which would be yes, you can sit here."
"Oh," said the brooding young man. He smiled rather suddenly, showing very white and even teeth. "My name is Tarleton, James Tarleton." On closer examination, James was not sulking or brooding, but his dark eyebrows made him look so, if he was not smiling.
James stuck out his hand, obviously waiting for Thomas to introduce himself.
"Thomas Schofield," Thomas said, shaking the outstretched hand firmly. This was because he had heard it said somewhere that people judge other people by their handshakes, and he didn't want to seem weak or something like that. James' grip was rather firm, but his hands were cold and a little sweaty on the palms.
"Nervous?" Thomas asked with a little smile, as though being nervous was perfectly normal, which indeed, since England was at war with France, it was. Thomas, not having had it sink in yet, was of course not nervous in the least.
"A bit," James admitted, somewhat shakily. "Are you?"
"Not really," Thomas said, with as much nonchalance as he could muster from his indifference. And, since they are considerably alike, it was quite a bit of nonchalance. "I enlisted because my father wanted me to, really. I don't care whether I go or not, but since he does, I thought it would be better to oblige him."
James stared closely at Thomas' face for a few moments, as thought he couldn't tell whether Thomas was teasing him or being serious. When James read the latter in the expression on his companion's face, he frowned thoughtfully.
"Women?" he inquired musingly. "Or cards?"
Thomas had no idea what this strange phrase meant. Was it a military code that he had yet to learn? Seeing the bemused expression on his face, James hastened to explain further.
"I mean, what did you get into trouble for?"
Thomas was shocked, and reacted as such. Through his offended spluttering and blustering, James managed to make an apology. Of sorts.
"Well, I didn't mean—well, of course I didn't, but you must admit—I'm only saying it seemed the sort of thing—well, I don't know you very well, Thomas Schofield, and—I'll call you what I want to, you ridiculous little man—no, it's just a figure of speech—of course I'm not intentionally insulting you! I only wondered, since you seem so glad to get out of England, what you might have done there to make you want to leave!"
"Well, for your information," Thomas huffed, feeling rather affronted, "I have done nothing of the sort. I have, until recently, been attempting to complete my magical studies with my tutor Sir Hilary."
James looked rather intrigued at this statement. "You're a magician?"
"In training," Thomas admitted, rather ruefully. "I'm not quite finished studying to the point where I could call myself certified."
Thomas stared out the window, unseeing, at the passing countryside, thinking of how small and absurd he had felt when Sir Hilary had summed up, in his own words, how much Thomas still had to learn in order to call himself proficient. It was quite a lot.
Suddenly he realized that James had been saying something.
"I'm sorry, what was that?" he asked, feeling rather sheepish.
James gave him a rather strange look and said, "Never mind."
"No," Thomas protested, "really, what did you say? I'm not trying to be snappish or anything; I haven't been able to concentrate very well today. What did you say?"
"Nothing," James said. "Nothing that matters."
Thomas, of course, thought James was being rather strange, not to mention stubborn, and probably because he thought he had been ignored on purpose, instead of accidentally. Well, that was James' own business. Thomas absentmindedly snapped his lux back into existence, idly twirling question marks and crosses in its malleable substance. He failed to notice the widening of James' eyes.
James murmured, "I thought you said you weren't certified?"
" 'M not."
"What's that, then?"
"It's light."
"I know that," James sighed in a long-suffering way, (which was a patently ridiculous thing for him to do, only having known Thomas Schofield for a little less than half an hour), "but how do you fiddle around with it?"
"It's spelled." Thomas muttered, as though this were a disgraceful thing.
The conversation turned to more mundane matters, such as articles and words and magic and tea, and the countryside passed sedately by.
This sort of talk was easy for Thomas. It was something he knew. He was on solid ground here. He couldn't have held a conversation about the training to come, or the war, or anything of that sort, because even though England was at war with France, he couldn't reconcile the fact. He hadn't been able to understand those seven empty little syllables; those ridiculous little words, absent of meaning, or truth, or art, or form. He couldn't quite, in so many words, get it. It hadn't quite sunk in yet.
In the training camps, Thomas was yelled at, demoralized, stripped of all excess fat and converted into a thing of muscle and sinew, given no particular special treatment, and made into "excellent officer material." He refused the commission offered to him, because he didn't particularly care about it.
England was at war with France, but what did that have to do with Thomas? What did that have to do with his fitness to lead a body of men? Thomas' mind was a tightly stretched canvas globe; it allowed nothing of war inside. No wars or deaths or bloodied corpses could sink in.
He and James bunked together, trained together, and were ranked exactly the same. James was an excellent shot with a musket, Thomas was better with a pistol, but they were in the same squadron of troops, a group of men that they would learn about, bond with, and eventually lose.
France was at war with England, but what did that have to do with Thomas and James? What did that have to do with a friendship that caused Thomas to stay awake with James when his nightmares troubled him, or caused James to take hours away from his scant free time to help Thomas in his physical training? What had a war to do with circumstance? Thomas' mind was glass and marble and diamond; impenetrable, impassable, unable to be shattered. It was unsullied by the grossness and unspeakable humanity of such a thing as war.
On the transport, Thomas and James sat next to each other. James and the other men in their division were falsely jovial, uneasily swapping jokes; forced laughter rankled in everyone's ears.
Thomas alone sat silently, staring at his hands. They were by now calloused from many hours of push-ups, and weapons-training, and unarmed combat training, and peeling potatoes. (Because you never get anywhere up from a fusilier if you don't do kitchen duty. Everybody knows that.)
The men were going to France. The soldiers were going to France because France was at war with England. Everybody knew that. Thomas knew it superficially. It just hadn't sunk it yet.
Thomas looked over at James surreptitiously; there were circles under his eyes, and he was looking a bit pale. His nightmares had been getting better, but he wasn't getting enough sleep, putting in extra hours of firing practice, unarmed combat, exercises, everything. The skin of his face was stretched tightly over his jaw; too tightly. His dark eyebrows looked darker than ever in his pallid face. Thomas reminded himself to make sure James had a good hot dinner and a full night's sleep, come what may.
What had this fraternal feeling to do with the war? What had this brotherly love and camaraderie, this friendship that went beyond mere friendly acquaintance to do with England and France and a man named Bonaparte who believed he could rule an empire? What had a bond that caused two men to look after each other like brothers to do with the blood-soaked streets of Paris, the dead bodies of priests and nuns, the fury and self-righteous wrath of the revolutionists? Thomas' hands twisted, his fingers writhing around each other like snakes, knuckles cracking and re-aligning, calluses sliding and disappearing and reappearing. It hadn't quite sunk in yet.
In the aftermath of their first skirmish, James was a little shaken but burned the more fiercely for each fallen Englishman. Thomas could not reconcile the bodies of dead men and the groaning, miserable cries of the injured with reality. Since James insisted on being of use, Thomas joined him in the sick bay, tending the wounded.
Even as Thomas wound bandages and stripped bloody sheets from now-empty beds, he could not understand that this was real. The smell of blood and vomit and gangrene and gunpowder was a smell from some kind of hell, but Thomas knew, he knew that it was not an earthly thing. He knew that this was a surreal sort of dream. War? What was meant by war? He did not understand the word. Nothing could touch him; not the cold, not the physical exhaustion, not the blood that wouldn't come off of his clothing. His stained uniform eventually had to be burned; he wore a different set, but nothing could touch his mind. England was at war with France, but it hadn't quite sunk in yet.
After his second battle, Thomas turned, and through the smoke and sweat and muck, he saw that James was not standing next to him. James was lying on the ground unconscious; his chest was soaked with blood.
Thomas suddenly understood, keenly and plainly, what was going on. Everything clicked. England was at war with France. England and France were at war. War meant death. James' death. James was shot. James was dying. Thomas bent down and slowly touched the stain on the front of James' shirt. His fingertips came away warm and wet with blood. Suddenly everything was real, too real.
Thomas gathered James carefully into his arms. He was still breathing, but his face was shockingly white against the red of blood and black of grime.
Even though Thomas moved like a man in a dream, he knew that he had only just truly awoken.
The war had sunk in.
As Thomas paced outside the medical tent, the doctors drew a bullet out of James' body. Through the anesthetics, James mumbled and groaned. Thomas waited.
As Thomas waited, a white-clad nurse beckoned him in. The doctor spoke a few short words. James would be fine.
As Thomas watched, James slept, healthily, deeply, and without nightmares. For Thomas, the nightmare had also ended.
Now he had only the reality to face:
A reality of war.
-finis-
-it is finished-
-the end-
-goodbye-
-adios-
-sayonara-
-see you later-
-alligator-
-etcetera-
-etcetera-
– seri