Where We Used To Be
I semi-promised not to write this, but what kind of writer am I if I discard my best ideas, no matter how evil? You know who you are, and I'm sorry, I really am.
This was conceived, at least consciously, independently of the referenced work, so...please humor what was intended to be something original but is in fact not at all, upon final review.
"Go on," he prompts Iona, "ask her what she thought."
Iona doesn't know any better, that the pretty lady from the Praetorium is, was, so much more than the pretty lady from the Praetorium, that there's a reason this crucial question is just that, that it matters at all what the Goddess thinks of Grandpa's play.
Everybody loves Grandpa's plays. They say they have drama, and intrigue, and heart, and some longer words that Iona has a little trouble wrapping the last tinges of her lisp around. So of course Miss Fan loved it too.
She is sweet and sensible and very, very smart. Grandpa's told her so, or at least said that of course he doesn't like the Praetor, but Miss Fan is always their honored guest, and so Iona makes her judgement and decides, deduces, that it must simply be because he likes her very much, and Grandpa never likes anybody, after a good long while, without a good reason.
"Miss Fan?" She turns softly, kindly, anchoring herself with her staff. "What did you think of Grandpa's play?"
Cole, from a little ways off, pretending the rheumatic old man in desperate need of a hearing aid more than ever, mutters a curse he's trained himself not to let slip. Oh, bless Iona, she's a darling child, and he didn't try to curb her because no one should ever try to tamp down what is so lovely about the young, but what a juvenile way to ask it. She can't help but flower over it now.
"Why, I thought it was lovely," H- Fan answers, laying palm with neatly folded fingers upon breast, upon bisected Core Crystal. His was shot up the middle with muddy taint, hers was cut in two wholesale, but at least he remembers. Does she even know part of it is missing?
Because doesn't she know? Wouldn't she have to know? The way he quoted her, those words stamped down and out in his mind that "I couldn't imagine having to be the Blade of such a horrid man." Here a cruel miser trumped up for poignance, not to say comic effect, there a miserable Quaestor who needed no intensification nor sandblasting away of nuance. Not so far disguised, but far enough.
Far enough? In his dearest dreams he would have hoped that nothing could ever be far enough to obscure this. The way the mannerisms of the actress playing the main character juddered and faltered, robbed of the formative memories they were and are born and borne upon, the way they were blatantly Haze's, almost to shove the heavy-handed heavy hands in her blank, bleak, blithe face.
Oh, but Iona's right - she'd told him of her impression, of course, and like a truly doddering old fool he hadn't corrected her. Fan is still smart. Fan doesn't need it put over on her. It's not her fault. Any Blade would think the same.
"Very thought-provoking, though I've never been much of a fan of ghost stories." Iona giggles at the wordplay - double entendre? Unintentional, whatever it is, but she's observant, if a little gullible.
Reductive, to call it a ghost story. It was supposed to be a subversion of that, when the ghost is not someone else haunting but yourself, and someone you almost expect must be doing so, in this age-old if not time-honored routine.
Cole looks over, a passing glance, and Iona is crouched in that adorable twin-fisted delight of hers-- Oh. That was...Haze used to do that.
When she'd sat on a fireside log next to him and babbled cheerily about the insects they'd found up in a tree she was picking supplies from, or she and Lora had pulled off a particularly impressive killer combo, or Jin was making her favorite salad and oh Master Minoth you simply must try it, it's delicious and so good for you, and Lady Brighid and I foraged for the ingredients ourselves!
"Eh," he'd say, "I'm not much for veggies - call me an unhealthy eater, but I'm more for the savory stuff. Something filling." Some lumbering cowboy crap or other. It made him cringe to think about the character he'd created for them, a little to the left of the way he truly was, of his barer sensibilities and brusquer attitudes. Well, but he supposed she had inspired that, somewhat. Her terminally happy face was, had been, a different one to Milton's, or even Addam's.
Haze wasn't a girl, wasn't a child, wasn't really just a slip of a thing, the same way Lora wasn't. She was five years young, bright countenance of a twenty-two-year-old, and the same way her Driver - call them sisters, even - was deceptively strong like, well, a whip, Haze was a willow that wouldn't bend, wouldn't weep, not for all the brewing summer simmer of a storm that lurked underneath.
Yes, when Cole looks back at the zany pair, Haze with her natural reddish-brown tresses in as tidy crowning braids as ever (and his had been done up just the same, once...and only once !) and Iona with her inexplicable azure puff of a bob, there's something markedly different between the two girls, and it's not just because one of them carries herself fully as a woman, a true priestess, nowadays.
There's no strength to Amalthus's puppet. Puppets. Haze, Minoth, even Malos.
(Make it Haze, Minoth, Logos for the trilogy, even trinity, if the Praetorium wasn't so anti-holy, and then the grotesquely forced aliases match as well. Something else Amalthus had wiped away, but he'd seen it engraved on the Core. Inexorable, and yet it's gone. Is it like a sick amnesia? For one out of the three, it is. For the other two, the choice has ended up being fitting.)
He saps it however he can, doesn't he, shilling it away like...like bandits pissing in a stream, what an ugly descriptor, but it's ugly, the things he made out of them.
Fan la Norne has a pretty face, is a pretty face, but she is no more. That's not a discredit to Haze, far from it; it's a rejection of the idea that this Blade, this creature, can lay any claim to Haze's, Lora's, Jin's, Torna's legacy.
Torna's legacy. Hugo long dead, the Brighid and Aegaeon who loved that land dead with him. Addam perished as any man would, but not as any man should, Mythra - she had another name but he'd never learned it - still dead-woman-floating somewhere under Leftheria, and Milton a careless casualty. Jin taken down a violent, tragic twist and Lora frozen with him, Mikhail by the only sickly-sickeningly happy turn reunited with him.
He's the only one left. Architect damn it, he's the only one left. Because if Jin doesn't count, this makeshift piece of windy eye candy sure as hell doesn't count. Time to throw his lot in. He's not much of being left himself anyway, anymore.
"My lady," he begins with gentle, noble, shuffling step and hands not moving to clasp generously over her own but bound steadfastly behind his back, "I'm flattered that you even graced our humble playhouse with your presence."
Some presence. She smiles without her eyes. Haze, the real Haze and not this selfsame horrid copy, could smile absolute and real benign benevolence with her eyes alone. This one is vapid in the worst way. She doesn't have her own concerns about anything.
"Of course, I couldn't but stop by when I saw you were putting on a new production. It's almost as if I feel bound from my Core to support your work!"
Cole chokes a polite cough as he lays his hands now on Iona's shoulders. He squeezes them close slightly tighter than usual, but she knows by now that that's his signal, put your hand over mine and we'll get through this. She does, and he sags a little, but she's there, and that's the point.
"So you come by rote? That's...an interesting way of consuming entertainment," he rumbles, trying but failing to be genial. She laughs lightly, "Maybe so," and he wants the tinkling bell to be ugly and incongruous but it's not, if there's one sound he's remembered after all these years, so close behind Addam's voice so proud as he called his name, it's Haze's laugh, and this is it.
The variation of depth is merely that; a variation. An aberration? An off chance that she should sound the same? An off chance that she shouldn't? Or the very ghost, like in the play she'd just so blandly enjoyed?
The tilt of her head is, in fact, incongruous. Cole almost feels threatened. "I couldn't help but overhear - so you don't like ghosts, huh?" A petty joke, a poke at an old fear, they'd made up a half-serious schedule as to whose turn it was to comfort her when the spooks were about, and whose turn it was to scold the woeful tall-tale-teller, if there was one.
Only ghosts aren't real. If ghosts were real, there'd be a spark of recognition in those empty eyes, a little something sizzling at the synapses, a whisking glimmer of anything that really, truly remained.
But there is none. "No," Fan la Norne says, "I don't believe in them. His Eminence says they're just weaker impulses, distracting us from where we're meant to be ahead."
"And what about where we used to be?" Cole asks weakly. "Oh," she says, and she's even more dismissive now than she was a second ago. "That doesn't really matter, does it?"
Later that evening, Cole sits on the side of the bed and watches Iona clear away the plate and cutlery she's brought him here in the back room because Vandham wasn't visiting and he felt especially weak after...that.
"There've been many Ionas before you, you know," he croaks out. Iona stops what she's doing and gazes at him, quizzical. "I thought you always said I was your one and only Iona, Grandpa."
She's not pouting, she's teasing. But she doesn't quite get it. "Well...you know what I mean." He doesn't retread the epithet. "I've never truly been alone here, even before Mr. Vandham, because there was always someone like you around here with me."
Iona fiddles with the fork, wincing at the way it scritches against the plate and attempting other angles, other confluences. None of them work. "Isn't that a little creepy?"
Cole laughs, and it's a real thing unlike those fake chuckles from outside the playhouse. "If you think so. But wouldn't it be creepier if it really was the same you, here over and over again?"
"Like in the play?" she ventures uncertainly, and he nods, grim and grave. "Like in the play." And Iona ceases her fruitless wiggling of the fork and furrows up her eyebrows and stares at the petulant little skirt of the female lead's costume that's hanging on the mannequin about to gather dust once more.
There are sneaky details on it, little loops and bows that he had frilled up and over the top to hide the immartial inside-out-elegant comportment, hide the way the outfit hadn't changed even though the person in it had, and Cole couldn't decide if he was glad about that or not.
"Grandpa...was that play about Miss Fan?" His stare from hooded eyes isn't distracted, unfocused, but it's just gone enough. Iona worries the plate in her hands for the merest second more before clapping it down on the edge of the table and rushing over to fill the hollow in his nigh-to-billowing cloak.
"That's awful, Grandpa, that she didn't realize. I thought she must have been very smart, to be so important, but if she didn't notice that it was about her, then she must not be very smart at all."
Cole's arms are too occupied squeezing his Iona tight to make wise gestures. Not that he's much for those anymore anyway; he stays reticent and unassuming. Oh, he didn't used to be.
"It's not about smarts, my dear. Not everything you're supposed to know always sticks with you, and it's not always your fault." Not your fault. Not her fault. Lora dying wasn't Haze's fault, healer class be damned. Amalthus taking her wasn't her fault, or probably even Jin's.
Iona's legs wobble, and Cole taps a careful, neutral, lukewarm finger on her hip so she'll swing them up and sit on the bed next to him. Instead, she pulls herself up into his lap, and at that his chin only clamps more tightly, lostly, over her delicate shoulder.
"But you remember everything." Ah, yes. Of course. I remember everything. And maybe if I didn't...maybe that would be better.
(Quietly, he crumples up the picture in his fist. Everyone there is a ghost now.)
I'm so, so sorry. Haze, baby, you have my entire heart and you will always deserve the world. Iona, you are the very definition of a sweet summer child and I'm so glad you exist. Grandpa...you're EVERYTHING.