when in doubt, quote Swinburne (tainted4life) wrote in terzarima, @ 2008-10-17 18:28:00 |
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Entry tags: | body&soul 100, character: aurelia, opinions plz, post: original fic, style: experimental, verse: lions |
[LIONSverse] [Theme 1/100] [Aurelia; Tom, Lupus] [Rated T] Graduation Day
Title: Graduation Day
Theme: 001. Accomplished
Fandom/Pairing: LIONSverse; Aurelia (some Tom, some Lupus)
Rating: ESRB Rating of T for Teen < implied character death, experimental style >
Summary: When Aurelia gave her Valedictorian Speech, she spoke of herself and her squad, but she was thinking about someone else entirely...
Notes: Highly experimental style. I may try this again someday. Also, I'd really like opinions on it (hence why it's here, and not at escalator2heavn.)
The crowd is waiting. Aurelia de Lucrezia steps onto the stage, but doesn't move toward the podium. 'As Second-in-Command of Squad Lupus,' she thinks to herself, repeating the lines over and over, trying to make sure she remembers not only the gist of what she wants to say but also the specifics. 'I speak for all of us when I thank you.'
Tom reaches out a hand to steady her, his fingers lightly brushing against her arm. His voice is strange and breathy.
"Ready?"
She nods.
"If you're nervous," Lupus tells her, and she listens because everybody listens to Lupus, "then just close your eyes and imagine home."
It will work, she thinks. She hopes. She looks over the podium at a veritable sea of faces. It even has tides of people who are looking at her and looking at the program and looking at each other. She taps the microphone once, twice, then closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and imagines
The sunroom, where she and Tom and Lupus spent most of their early years in a kind of homeschool, never actually looked the way she remembers it. In her dreams and memories, there's a soft golden glow over everything and the windowshades are always pulled up. The afternoons spent in lessons are always hazy, seen in sepia tones. They weren't that way, of course.
Her memory is correct in the details. The sunroom was made of white marble, just like everything else in the Citadel that was worth owning (the Citadel is concrete and marble, all of it, even the newest additions; they've taken to importing white marble from off-world, which is technically illegal but nobody cares), and had an entire wall of windows with sunshades and saffron curtains. As a cub, she liked to play with the curtain pulls, would bat them about and watch them dangle. As a child, she would wrap them endlessly around her fingers while trying to pay attention to her lessons.
And all the items in the room, her mind's eye has those right. A writing desk (How is a raven like a writing desk? Lupus would ask her, reading from a human novel) and books, stacks and stacks of books, shelves full of books. Lewis Carrol, Mjernava Diavavtors, Canus de Legatus. All the books by all those authors, every book all their parents could find and wanted to buy. And lamps, of course, and a couple of rough posts to scrape your claws against.
But the light in that room wasn't gold, the place wasn't sunny or hazy or sepia, no matter how she remembers it. Except for one sticky yellow afternoon, spent
With Tom Macmangan beside her, she can do anything. Aurelia cracks her knuckles, a painful human gesture she picked up from Lupus. It causes him a mild sort of ache, but her knuckles were not made to pop like this and it actually causes genuine pain. She does it anyway.
She lifts her head, looks at the viewscreen with the names on it. Lupus's hand clenches on hers, but she isn't afraid. She knows exactly what they'll see: they'll see their names in the PASS column. She knows it in her bones, is sure of it with all the certainty of a child's faith.
Because with Tom beside her, she can do anything, can
Be anything you want to be," Keefe told her on that sticky yellow afternoon, his ears set in a small smile as he gave her a lemon-flavored shaved ice.
"Beacuse I'm just as good as any boy," she remembers saying proudly, thrusting her thumb at her chest, just like Lupus did.
And Keefe laughed and smoothed the fuzz on her face that would later grow into fur. "Aye, and that too, but not what I meant. I meant you've already the beginnings of a whole Mreetsai squad behind you."
She does indeed have the faith of a child, because she answers him, "And the Mreetsai can do anything!"
She believes it.
She really honestly believed
In the Mreetsai, you have to make room for a sense of loss. The more you train to kill--and they were already so well trained, she and Tom and Lupus--the less life means. Your comrades and suitemates die, entire squads wiped out, people you knew, people you didn't know, and you go to the mandatory weekly memorial service and stare at the memory wall and feel nothing.
She stares at the memory wall, its holographic, often three-dimensional, slideshows of the MIA and KIA, its private home videos suddenly displayed for all Aztangard Mreetsai Academy to see. She looks long and hard and tries to find distress, unhappiness, sadness, anything. But she can't.
The dry humor, the grim teachers, the physical training, the exams have left her so exhausted that she can barely think. Much less admit to herself that she misses the people she recognizes. That there are holes in her life and now they'll never be
full of potential, they say, Miss Aurelia just is absolutely brimming with promise.
That's what her tutors tell her parents. Her mother (Vice Commander Luca de Lucrezia, they call her mother, using her full name to add formality, to remind themselves that they're talking to someone really quite important) takes the news serenely. She smiles a human smile, allows her ears to twitch in what other Keedrow would recognize as a smile, and then looks proudly at her daughter.
Her father takes it even more calmly than that. Benitus de Lucrezia allows his eyelids to flicker and then asks, "And what made you decide this?"
"Her intellectual potential was greater than either of the boys' from the beginning," says one tutor. "But the recent test scores only confirm it."
"And you know what happened in our session last week," adds the gruff ex-Mreetsai who teaches their martial lessons when their parents don't have time.
Aurelia sits alone at the writing desk, ignoring all other people in the sun room. She has her nose stuck in a book, and only looks up to say, "I told you girls are smarter than boys." She then returns to the adventures of Alice in her Wonderland, imagining
Myself as a Mreetsai," Aurelia says, careful not to be too loud on the microphone so she doesn't lose her audience, so the
"People ask why I joined, and I tell them it's in my blood. I joke about knowing I'll always have an easy job... But the truth is, I don't know why I joined. I only know that ever since I was a little girl, all I could imagine being was Mreetsai."
In one sense, it's the truth she's telling her fellow graduates. In another sense, it's a complete lie. The issue of her joining has never been "why did you join," but "why are you in your current squad?"
The truth is, she could be
Captain," Aurelia says in a broken voice, through a clenched throat and eyes full of tears. Another memory swims past, slip-sliding through her brain (Graeme, Aurelia, my name is Graeme. I'm not your squad leader, so go ahead and call me that.) and she sobs. Her shoulders heave with the effort. Tears hurt, tears burn her eyes and she wishes she could stop crying.
But you have to make room for a sense of loss in the Mreetsai, and that's what she's doing. This was a man she knew. He's gone on to become a hole in her life, dropped out of the world in a blur of light. Not precisely an explosion, because space doesn't have those, and not precisely a fire, because space can't have those either. But it was a surgically precise laserblast, and what could explode did, and now she's out a suitemate to drink coffee with at three in the morning.
"Graeme, I'm so sorry."
But the memory wall only hosts slideshows and home videos. It's no high-tech Ouija board, to speak with the dead.
Captain Graeme Mcgowan smiles on at
Her voice trembles just a little as she speaks. In the back, on the balcony, she sees her mother. In uniform, of course. And her father is seated somewhere near where her mother stands, she's sure of it because she can see Daria, so elegant in the dress she bought in a human shop, seated near Luca.
"And as we celebrate moving into a new life, without homework, without cafeteria food, without professors who hate their jobs, it's only fitting that we have a moment of silence for the people who should be here today but aren't. The people who never came home, and thus, in a sense, never left. Please close your eyes with me and join me in remembering the people who should have graduated today."
She clasps her hand over her heart, claws splayed. The Mreetsai salute. Her eyes drift closed as she thinks of Graeme Mcgowan, Joshu Kincaid, Leome Evans, and all the squads she never cried for. In the Mreetsai, you have to make room for a sense of loss. This moment, the final line of her speech, is
That room--the sun room--is always yellow, in her mind. Something about the gauzy saffron curtains and the memory of slow, lazy afternoons and lemon-flavored shaved ice will always paint the shaded afternoon sunlight a gorgeous gold.
And in her mind, though she often took lessons alone--the boys were a distraction and she was a distraction to them--green-eyed Lupus and golden-eyed Tom are always beside her. Tom is curled up in his favorite armchair with an unloaded gun, the gun he uses to fidget acceptably. It's the same revolver with which he learned to manage his claws while he pulled the trigger.
She cannot think of that room, of those memories, without smiling. Despite her graduation, her squad's success, the fact that she is another year closer to Tom being hers again, those memories are what make her smile as she looks up through heavy lashes and is recognized for the hard work she put in for the past three years.