Dæmonverse AAU (15/16)
Apr. 6th, 2008 08:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lit_luminaryTitle: Principles of Growth
Author:![[info]](https://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
dominus_trinus
Rating: R
Characters/Pairings: Chase, House/Wilson (established).
Genre: Alternate alternate universe, à la Pullman's His Dark Materials.
Summary: Secrets and stories shared among heretics.
Notes: My sincere thanks toruby_took for various R & D conversations and assuring me this story wasn't too bizarre to post, and to bluerosefairy for the truly excellent beta.
He’s in his childhood bedroom. There are colorful picture books crammed into the shelves alongside ones meant for older children; a miniature desk strewn with paper and crayons and his clumsy, scrawled attempts at handwriting (‘Robertkylie’, joined into one because it made sense that since they were one person they should have one name; he remembers priding himself on having asked Mum for the grown-up spellings). A couple of toy cars are on the floor, a half-deflated beach ball limp by the closet door; picture frames on the dresser hold family photos.
This isn’t how we left this room, Kylie says. It’s how it looked when we were…what, five?
I think so. But although the room’s not the same, they are; Kylie’s still the shape she’s been since they were fifteen, and a glance at the mirror over the dresser confirms that he hasn’t changed, either. We’re dreaming. We can’t possibly be here.
Looking out the window, he can see the expansive backyard, the jungle gym with its slide and swing and climbing-frame; endless blue sky and Mum’s garden in bloom, bright yellow cassias, jonquils, fragrant lemon verbena…
And Mum in the garden among the flowers, her hair shining gold in the sun and Zeru wheeling overhead.
“Mum.” It’s barely more than a breath, lips silently forming the shape of the word; he’s afraid that if he dares speak, dares move, the spell will break and she’ll vanish—
But then Kylie’s moving, running, and he has to run after her unless he wants to be pulled by the heart but he’s glad (out of the bedroom, down the stairs, through the kitchen and out the back door with a bang, haste-clumsy fingers fumbling with the key), because otherwise he might have stood there too long and he’s not sure how long this will last—
“Mum!” Kylie’s voice, not his, but it doesn’t matter—she straightens up and turns to face them, her face lighting with her smile; and Zeru’s circling down toward Kylie and he’s in his mother’s arms, holding and being held tight, and she smells like fresh air and sunlight and home, none of the astringency of alcohol; everything is just as it should be, and in that moment the years fall away and he’s a little boy in the perfect love and safety of her embrace.
And then she lets him go, draws back just a little, her gaze taking him in as Zeru flies from his place beside Kylie and lands on her shoulder. “You’ve grown up so well, Robert,” she says softly, “and I couldn’t be more proud.”
He’s not sure whether to accept her approval or protest, because surely he hasn’t done anything all that great—he’s still ashamed of the passive years in seminary and it’s only since he started to work with House that he’s felt worthwhile… “But I—”
“Have I ever given you empty praise?”
He shakes his head.
“Then believe me: there is a very great deal in you to be proud of.” She pauses, and her smile turns playful. “And if you don’t believe me, House is also proud of you, and he’s significantly more difficult to impress.”
“Don’t we know it,” Kylie mutters.
“Hang on,” he says, because there’s no way she could have known about that unless… “You’ve been—looking after me all this time?”
“Don’t tell me you thought I wouldn’t,” she says. “I promised I’d never leave you, remember?”
“It didn’t end up meaning what I hoped it meant,” he says quietly. Then, meeting her gaze, “But if you really have—then why am I only seeing you now?”
“You were never going to be able to see me as long as you were shutting half yourself away,” she says. “‘If that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without.’”
Part of the full moon ritual. He hasn’t observed an esbat since she died, but he remembers the words and adds, a little wryly, “‘For behold, I have been with you since the beginning.’” He pauses. “I wasn’t trying to shut you out, or any of it—it was just that—”
“There wasn’t a choice,” she says with a nod. “I know. You were as true to yourself as you could be and still be safe. You did the right thing.”
“But after getting how much wrong? I shouldn’t have—if I’d just—”
“Oh, Robert.” She shakes her head, takes his hands. “You need to let the ‘what-ifs’ go. The past is the past, and you’re who and what and where you are. It has to be enough.”
“We know wondering doesn’t change anything,” Kylie says. “It’s just—we miss you so much, and we can’t help asking—”
“What if you’d been able to convince us to go when you were ten,” Zeru says matter-of-factly. “What if you’d been born a full witch and we’d left Rowan and raised you the way daughters are. What if you’d been able to stop us drinking ourself to death.”
He nods, wondering absently how long she’s watched him turn those questions over and over, striving for some resolution like Sisyphus struggling with his stone; and she smiles slightly, sadly.
“One last lesson, then,” she says. “Perhaps showing you the truth of those alternative worlds will give you peace.”
“Alternative…worlds?”
“We know only one life, one fate; but there are uncountable ones we never touch,” she explains. “Every choice takes us down one path, but other paths branch off in a billion directions.” She releases one of his hands and gestures, and all at once the familiar garden dissolves into a tapestry in three dimensions, infinite numbers of gold and silver lines that cross and run parallel, bifurcate and coil in every direction farther than he can see and it’s all—there’s a pattern, he knows, but he could stand here for millennia and never understand it. It’s the Design, the Plan, the Is and Was and Will Be and Could Have Been for all the world at once; and just looking at it is mind-boggling.
Mum reaches to touch one of the lines, murmurs something that makes it reverberate like a guitar-string, and all at once they’re in his bedroom, and—
He recognizes himself, ten years old, and Kylie in her cat form, tucked into bed; and there’s Mum in her witch’s dress, bow and arrows and cloud-pine, only this never happened—she never came back in after Dad yelled at her that night—
“You’re going to go, then?” younger-Chase asks softly, and he sounds pleased and heartbroken at once. Other-Mum nods and gathers him into her arms, and Zeru begins to preen Kylie’s fur.
“For a little while, anyway,” other-Mum says. “Maybe spending half the year with my sisters and half with you would…” She kisses him, then breaks off a spray from the cloud-pine and presses it into his hands. “If you need me, hold that and call, and I’ll come,” she says. “And I’ll be back by winter solstice.”
And then she goes, and that’s when everything starts to go horribly wrong. Just as House had predicted, it’s mere days after the binding spell wears off when he loses his temper with his father, resulting in a rather impressive explosion of dishware, and before long he’s been shipped off to the church with a rucksack full of clothes and a copy of the Bible and nothing else, no lifeline to his mother to call out with.
There are a few days spent with priests and twisting circles of questions, and Chase, watching, fears for his younger self because Mum had taught him to agree with whatever the church said in case of emergency, but not the kind of verbal artistry needed to escape intense inquisition unscathed; he couldn’t have been expected to learn that so young—and they do their best to provoke him, watch stained-glass windows explode into razor shards and murmur to themselves about witchcraft and corruption, and finally they stop the questions and send him to bed.
Alarm bells have to be going off in his younger self’s head, too, but after a few hours have gone by without incident he sleeps, Kylie curled up in her cat form against his side.
A priest enters the darkened room with a steel-and-mesh animal carrier, flanked by several stone-faced nuns, and Chase knows what’s about to happen, feels atavistic terror constrict around his heart—he wants to look away but he can’t, he’s stuck there watching—he kneels and clutches Kylie hard to his chest, and in a moment her whimpering is drowned out by the yowl of younger-Chase’s Kylie as she’s picked up by the priest and stuffed into the carrier and it’s locked and she can’t get out—
Younger-Chase is awake now, pale and trembling and wide-eyed with shock, seems to be struggling to breathe—the nuns restrain him, pin down flailing arms and legs and Chase’s witch-sight flares; he hears the boy’s screaming and the dæmon’s, sees their bond stretch beyond endurance and rend apart in a bright flash like hellfire, and he muffles a hoarse cry in Kylie’s neck.
It didn’t happen to us, she says shakily. We’re one, we’re safe—
All at once the boy stops fighting; he falls limp like a marionette with cut strings, and the nuns carry him to an infirmary, give him a sedative ‘for the shock,’ but it doesn’t do any good: younger-Chase dies hours later, holding a pillow to his heart with a white-knuckled grip.
And then the scene changes and he sees his mother somewhere he doesn’t recognize; she’s flying with her sisters when all at once her face twists in pain. He sees her lips form the shape of his name, and then she’s flying away from the others, circling downward, landing; he watches as Zeru joins her, and now he can hear her speak—
“Persephone Praxidice, exacter of justice…judge me as I deserve for the selfishness of abandoning my child.” And then she’s taking a knife from a sheath at her belt and—Goddess, no!—plunging it into her heart with a cry and a gasp and a bright spray of blood, and in a moment she falls lifeless to the ground, Zeru’s form dissipating like smoke.
This isn’t what happened. But although she’s not the mother he knows, the sheer horror of what she did…
Invoking the Iron Queen’s justice would have condemned her even beyond death.
Suddenly they’re back in the place between, nightmare-visions replaced by the peace of blue-black space and bright lines. He doesn’t let Kylie go—can’t—but after a moment he feels Mum’s hand at his back, circles of reassuring pressure. “You would have—?”
“I couldn’t have lived with myself, knowing I’d left you and that had happened because I wasn’t there,” she says softly, “and I’d hardly have been the first witch to kill herself in grief for the loss of a son. But see? My leaving wouldn’t have made things better for either of us.”
And he does see, and despite the horror there’s a kind of peace in finally knowing her choice had been the right one. She had moments of happiness for several years after that night, and because she stayed he’s alive, whole.
Finally he releases Kylie, looks down at the gold-silver-brown cord connecting their hearts and rises, turns to face his mother. There’s more silver now in her aura than there ever was when she was alive, and the whole thing is so bright it nearly hurts to look at. He blinks several times, wills it away, and for once his sight obeys him.
“Are you ready to see the next one?”
He almost wants to leave well enough alone, because he’s seen enough to know none of these alternate lives are likely to be the perfection he’d hoped, but…
But he knows, too, that it’s not healthy to keep asking ‘what-if’, and that this is the only way he’ll ever be able to stop. He nods, and she stirs another cord; and suddenly they’re in a hospital room, and other-Mum is lying in the bed with Zeru perched on the rail. Her face is flushed and her hair sweat-damp; and she’s cradling a pink-wrapped bundle in her arms, watching the glints of shifting gold light shining through the fabric—the baby’s as-yet-formless dæmon.
He moves closer, looks into the tiny red, squashed face of this other-self he might have been; at downy blonde hair and slightly crossed blue eyes—and then he looks up, because Rowan (or a version of him, anyway) has just burst through the door. He savors the shock and outrage on the man’s face, and the Andromeda in the bed is watching with amusement.
“You said you could predict the sex of the baby!”
“And I did, Rowan. Then I lied to you about it.” She smiles the smile of the cat who’s just gotten the cream and eaten several canaries. “I had the idea you wouldn’t appreciate having a daughter, you see.”
Other-Rowan’s lips move soundlessly; his shocked eyes are fixed on his daughter, as though he can’t quite believe what’s happened; that it’s unthinkable he hasn’t gotten what he expected.
Serves him right, Kylie says, and Chase grins. He’s really, really enjoying this.
“And as soon as I’m feeling up to it, I will be leaving and taking my daughter with me to raise”—there’s a subtle, laying-down-the-law emphasis on ‘my’—“alongside my sisters and their daughters.”
Rowan couldn’t have looked more shocked if she’d slapped him in the face. “But—but—”
“I came to realize shortly after our marriage that you were using me,” other-Mum says cheerfully, “and that my sisters were absolutely right: we need men to breed; it doesn’t mean we have to live with them.” Then, magnanimously, “You’re welcome to explain my absence and hers to your colleagues and clergy however you like.”
This is how his mother should have dealt with his father from the beginning.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Anne!” Rowan says. He’s straightening up, squaring his shoulders, trying to regain control of the situation. “She’s as much my daughter as—”
“Have you forgotten what she is?” other-Mum breaks in. “If you can honestly say you don’t mind, that you’ll let me raise her as a young witch should be raised, then we can make a go of it. Otherwise—”
Rowan storms out.
Chase laughs—because he would, of course—then turns to his mother. “Why didn’t you…?”
“Insist on being who and what I was from the beginning?” She sighs. “Love isn’t rational, Robert. And I did love him, once. This version of me—couldn’t make the choices for her daughter she did for herself, and probably thought long and hard about how Rowan would treat a daughter during her pregnancy.”
“As property,” Chase supplies, “to advance him through her marriage. Which, I guess, would have made that you think—”
“Of exactly how she was being treated, yes.”
Other-Mum names her daughter Rhea, in honor of the Great Mother, and Zeru calls her dæmon Zephyr.
They’re back at the house after two days in the hospital, and at nightfall Andromeda mounts her cloud-pine branch and leaves, bow and arrows at her back and her daughter in a sling wrapped around her torso. Rowan doesn’t protest.
He watches Rhea’s saining, blessings bestowed on her by grandmother, aunts, cousins: “I give the gift of strength…intelligence…bravery…perseverance…sound judgment…” a wealth of good wishes with Goddess and God watching over.
Fragments of her childhood: magic lessons with Mum, where the content is sometimes the same and sometimes different and the attentive face of the little girl at once familiar and jarring (same coloring, same curious-observant gaze, but everything else too different to really see himself in). Flying, with her dæmon a bird of prey beside her; another ritual in adolescence to celebrate her menarche; and then the dæmon’s keening and the girl with her hands pressed to her heart and passionate pain in her face as she walks the wastelands, utterly alone for the first time.
He sees her as an adult, Zephyr a falcon; sees her ability as a healer and her closeness with her mother, with the clan that loves her; sees her joy and freedom and power and knows that it will continue forever.
And it feels like he’s only seeing half the picture, because although there are elements of the self he knows in this woman, she’s fundamentally different; she hasn’t faced his adversities, and though she’s older than he is—must be older—she retains innocence he lost years ago, somehow still a child despite her settled dæmon.
“And the hospital?” he asks Mum. “House?”
The scene changes, and he realizes almost at once that House of this world works alone. He pursues his puzzles with the same single-minded zeal Chase knows, but Wilson isn’t always sounding-board enough and cases can be more difficult. There are a few misses, even; cases that they solved together but House doesn’t quite get by himself.
He needs us more than we thought, Kylie says. We make things move faster, and I think…he gets something out of the teaching that he doesn’t have here.
It’s true: there’s a certain animation, a pleasure in the discussion that he doesn’t see with just House and Minerva firing their own ideas from voice to voice.
Thinking of House makes him remember the recent horror; he hopes he won’t have to see that because he knows he can’t handle it; but as it turns out, this House is never intercised; never has the chance to piss off that fateful church official.
He’s shot by his insane ex-patient months before it would have happened.
Wilson isn’t in his office and no one else is near enough Diagnostics to hear the shots; there’s no one to staunch the bleeding, call a code, keep House stable.
Hypovolemic shock precedes death by moments. Minerva vanishes and House is an empty shell crumpled on the carpet, too-pale features frozen in a death mask and eyes fixed and dull.
Wilson breaks down in tears at the funeral, but no one notices because Rona’s grief-stricken howling drowns out his sobbing.
It’s not real, he reminds himself. It’s not real. In his own fate-line, House is alive and healthy; Wilson’s life isn’t in shambles. Because Chase was in the right place at the right time with the right training to avert the disaster.
“You’re more necessary to him than he’ll ever admit,” Mum says as the grim image disappears and returns them to the in-between. “Lives were saved because you sparked the right idea at the right time, or were there with a critical insight of your own. You’ve kept him alive to keep doing the good he does; and through you, everything he has to teach will go on after his lifetime.”
And House knows that. All of that.
And so should he have, but…it just wasn’t something he’d thought about.
“He’ll be all right now,” he says, half to himself. “With the pain gone—”
“About that, Robert,” Mum breaks in. “I distinctly remember telling you that you were never to—”
“We know it wasn’t safe,” Kylie says, “and we won’t do it again, but…he was worth the risk. We couldn’t lose him the way we’d lost you; not when we had the power to do something.”
She nods. “He’s important to you, I know.” Her smile turns approving, and she adds, “You chose your father well: he’ll fight for you, too, if he ever has to.”
“But our first concern is always going to be for you,” Zeru says. “And we don’t want to see you taking any more chances.”
“We won’t have to,” Kylie says. It’s a statement, not a promise; he knows that if there’s ever something wrong again that medicine won’t fix, he’ll take the same risk—but that’s not likely. Hospital security has been better ever since the shooting (Foreman’s preoccupation with liability and covering his own arse for once working in their favor); and besides the leg, House has no immediately threatening health problems. The liver damage is still a concern, but less of one: without the continual assault of the Vicodin, a good deal of it will heal on its own.
And if anything else goes wrong, House will diagnose and fix it medically long before Chase needs to get involved.
He turns his attention back to his mother. “Mum…weren’t you going to show me…?”
What he could have done to save her. Where he failed.
“I can’t,” she says simply.
“Why not? Both of the others—”
“Were possible,” she breaks in. “But in every case, when I started to drink like that, it killed me no matter what you did. Because it never was anything you could change.”
He remembers House’s words about pain, matches them against Mum’s; realizes the message is the same. That she’s saying that in a billion, billion worlds, he was never able to do anything once she’d made up her mind to drown.
Words won’t come; it’s all he can do to loosen his hold on self-blame, to admit she could be right. He moves forward, lets her hold him.
“There’s nothing you need to be sorry for, Robert. I don’t blame you; I never did. If anything, I’m the one who should be apologizing.”
And there’s a part of him that’s angry, that wants to tell her that apologizing post mortem doesn’t count, but the larger part, the part that’s learnt to cope with the pain of her loss, knows that’s not right. “There were no good choices at that point,” he says. “You did the only thing you could to make it bearable.” He holds her a little more tightly, because of course this can’t last forever and he wants to remember it, absorb the memory into his skin. “I can’t say I really understand. But I can…forgive.”
It’s easier to say that—to mean that—than he’d thought it would be.
“Thank you,” Zeru says, and Mum presses a kiss to his cheek and lets him go. “I love you.”
He just manages to force an answering, “I love you, too,” past the lump that’s risen in his throat; and then the alarm clock blares and the dream shatters.
Continue...
Author's Notes:
The precise meaning of the name 'Rhea' is unknown; it may be related to elements meaning 'flow' or 'stream.' 'Zephyr' is the name of the Greek god of the west wind; his settled form, a falcon, represents good timing, precision, grace, patience and mental acuity.
'Saining' is the Pagan form of Christening. It is also—depending on the tradition—referred to as Paganing or Wiccaning.
The lines Andromeda and Chase quote are from Doreen Valiente's "The Charge of the Goddess", a well-known work within the Pagan community (much-adapted and existing in many different versions. One can be read here).
Author:
dominus_trinusRating: R
Characters/Pairings: Chase, House/Wilson (established).
Genre: Alternate alternate universe, à la Pullman's His Dark Materials.
Summary: Secrets and stories shared among heretics.
Notes: My sincere thanks to
ruby_took for various R & D conversations and assuring me this story wasn't too bizarre to post, and to bluerosefairy for the truly excellent beta.In the Dreaming
He’s in his childhood bedroom. There are colorful picture books crammed into the shelves alongside ones meant for older children; a miniature desk strewn with paper and crayons and his clumsy, scrawled attempts at handwriting (‘Robertkylie’, joined into one because it made sense that since they were one person they should have one name; he remembers priding himself on having asked Mum for the grown-up spellings). A couple of toy cars are on the floor, a half-deflated beach ball limp by the closet door; picture frames on the dresser hold family photos.
This isn’t how we left this room, Kylie says. It’s how it looked when we were…what, five?
I think so. But although the room’s not the same, they are; Kylie’s still the shape she’s been since they were fifteen, and a glance at the mirror over the dresser confirms that he hasn’t changed, either. We’re dreaming. We can’t possibly be here.
Looking out the window, he can see the expansive backyard, the jungle gym with its slide and swing and climbing-frame; endless blue sky and Mum’s garden in bloom, bright yellow cassias, jonquils, fragrant lemon verbena…
And Mum in the garden among the flowers, her hair shining gold in the sun and Zeru wheeling overhead.
“Mum.” It’s barely more than a breath, lips silently forming the shape of the word; he’s afraid that if he dares speak, dares move, the spell will break and she’ll vanish—
But then Kylie’s moving, running, and he has to run after her unless he wants to be pulled by the heart but he’s glad (out of the bedroom, down the stairs, through the kitchen and out the back door with a bang, haste-clumsy fingers fumbling with the key), because otherwise he might have stood there too long and he’s not sure how long this will last—
“Mum!” Kylie’s voice, not his, but it doesn’t matter—she straightens up and turns to face them, her face lighting with her smile; and Zeru’s circling down toward Kylie and he’s in his mother’s arms, holding and being held tight, and she smells like fresh air and sunlight and home, none of the astringency of alcohol; everything is just as it should be, and in that moment the years fall away and he’s a little boy in the perfect love and safety of her embrace.
And then she lets him go, draws back just a little, her gaze taking him in as Zeru flies from his place beside Kylie and lands on her shoulder. “You’ve grown up so well, Robert,” she says softly, “and I couldn’t be more proud.”
He’s not sure whether to accept her approval or protest, because surely he hasn’t done anything all that great—he’s still ashamed of the passive years in seminary and it’s only since he started to work with House that he’s felt worthwhile… “But I—”
“Have I ever given you empty praise?”
He shakes his head.
“Then believe me: there is a very great deal in you to be proud of.” She pauses, and her smile turns playful. “And if you don’t believe me, House is also proud of you, and he’s significantly more difficult to impress.”
“Don’t we know it,” Kylie mutters.
“Hang on,” he says, because there’s no way she could have known about that unless… “You’ve been—looking after me all this time?”
“Don’t tell me you thought I wouldn’t,” she says. “I promised I’d never leave you, remember?”
“It didn’t end up meaning what I hoped it meant,” he says quietly. Then, meeting her gaze, “But if you really have—then why am I only seeing you now?”
“You were never going to be able to see me as long as you were shutting half yourself away,” she says. “‘If that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without.’”
Part of the full moon ritual. He hasn’t observed an esbat since she died, but he remembers the words and adds, a little wryly, “‘For behold, I have been with you since the beginning.’” He pauses. “I wasn’t trying to shut you out, or any of it—it was just that—”
“There wasn’t a choice,” she says with a nod. “I know. You were as true to yourself as you could be and still be safe. You did the right thing.”
“But after getting how much wrong? I shouldn’t have—if I’d just—”
“Oh, Robert.” She shakes her head, takes his hands. “You need to let the ‘what-ifs’ go. The past is the past, and you’re who and what and where you are. It has to be enough.”
“We know wondering doesn’t change anything,” Kylie says. “It’s just—we miss you so much, and we can’t help asking—”
“What if you’d been able to convince us to go when you were ten,” Zeru says matter-of-factly. “What if you’d been born a full witch and we’d left Rowan and raised you the way daughters are. What if you’d been able to stop us drinking ourself to death.”
He nods, wondering absently how long she’s watched him turn those questions over and over, striving for some resolution like Sisyphus struggling with his stone; and she smiles slightly, sadly.
“One last lesson, then,” she says. “Perhaps showing you the truth of those alternative worlds will give you peace.”
“Alternative…worlds?”
“We know only one life, one fate; but there are uncountable ones we never touch,” she explains. “Every choice takes us down one path, but other paths branch off in a billion directions.” She releases one of his hands and gestures, and all at once the familiar garden dissolves into a tapestry in three dimensions, infinite numbers of gold and silver lines that cross and run parallel, bifurcate and coil in every direction farther than he can see and it’s all—there’s a pattern, he knows, but he could stand here for millennia and never understand it. It’s the Design, the Plan, the Is and Was and Will Be and Could Have Been for all the world at once; and just looking at it is mind-boggling.
Mum reaches to touch one of the lines, murmurs something that makes it reverberate like a guitar-string, and all at once they’re in his bedroom, and—
He recognizes himself, ten years old, and Kylie in her cat form, tucked into bed; and there’s Mum in her witch’s dress, bow and arrows and cloud-pine, only this never happened—she never came back in after Dad yelled at her that night—
“You’re going to go, then?” younger-Chase asks softly, and he sounds pleased and heartbroken at once. Other-Mum nods and gathers him into her arms, and Zeru begins to preen Kylie’s fur.
“For a little while, anyway,” other-Mum says. “Maybe spending half the year with my sisters and half with you would…” She kisses him, then breaks off a spray from the cloud-pine and presses it into his hands. “If you need me, hold that and call, and I’ll come,” she says. “And I’ll be back by winter solstice.”
And then she goes, and that’s when everything starts to go horribly wrong. Just as House had predicted, it’s mere days after the binding spell wears off when he loses his temper with his father, resulting in a rather impressive explosion of dishware, and before long he’s been shipped off to the church with a rucksack full of clothes and a copy of the Bible and nothing else, no lifeline to his mother to call out with.
There are a few days spent with priests and twisting circles of questions, and Chase, watching, fears for his younger self because Mum had taught him to agree with whatever the church said in case of emergency, but not the kind of verbal artistry needed to escape intense inquisition unscathed; he couldn’t have been expected to learn that so young—and they do their best to provoke him, watch stained-glass windows explode into razor shards and murmur to themselves about witchcraft and corruption, and finally they stop the questions and send him to bed.
Alarm bells have to be going off in his younger self’s head, too, but after a few hours have gone by without incident he sleeps, Kylie curled up in her cat form against his side.
A priest enters the darkened room with a steel-and-mesh animal carrier, flanked by several stone-faced nuns, and Chase knows what’s about to happen, feels atavistic terror constrict around his heart—he wants to look away but he can’t, he’s stuck there watching—he kneels and clutches Kylie hard to his chest, and in a moment her whimpering is drowned out by the yowl of younger-Chase’s Kylie as she’s picked up by the priest and stuffed into the carrier and it’s locked and she can’t get out—
Younger-Chase is awake now, pale and trembling and wide-eyed with shock, seems to be struggling to breathe—the nuns restrain him, pin down flailing arms and legs and Chase’s witch-sight flares; he hears the boy’s screaming and the dæmon’s, sees their bond stretch beyond endurance and rend apart in a bright flash like hellfire, and he muffles a hoarse cry in Kylie’s neck.
It didn’t happen to us, she says shakily. We’re one, we’re safe—
All at once the boy stops fighting; he falls limp like a marionette with cut strings, and the nuns carry him to an infirmary, give him a sedative ‘for the shock,’ but it doesn’t do any good: younger-Chase dies hours later, holding a pillow to his heart with a white-knuckled grip.
And then the scene changes and he sees his mother somewhere he doesn’t recognize; she’s flying with her sisters when all at once her face twists in pain. He sees her lips form the shape of his name, and then she’s flying away from the others, circling downward, landing; he watches as Zeru joins her, and now he can hear her speak—
“Persephone Praxidice, exacter of justice…judge me as I deserve for the selfishness of abandoning my child.” And then she’s taking a knife from a sheath at her belt and—Goddess, no!—plunging it into her heart with a cry and a gasp and a bright spray of blood, and in a moment she falls lifeless to the ground, Zeru’s form dissipating like smoke.
This isn’t what happened. But although she’s not the mother he knows, the sheer horror of what she did…
Invoking the Iron Queen’s justice would have condemned her even beyond death.
Suddenly they’re back in the place between, nightmare-visions replaced by the peace of blue-black space and bright lines. He doesn’t let Kylie go—can’t—but after a moment he feels Mum’s hand at his back, circles of reassuring pressure. “You would have—?”
“I couldn’t have lived with myself, knowing I’d left you and that had happened because I wasn’t there,” she says softly, “and I’d hardly have been the first witch to kill herself in grief for the loss of a son. But see? My leaving wouldn’t have made things better for either of us.”
And he does see, and despite the horror there’s a kind of peace in finally knowing her choice had been the right one. She had moments of happiness for several years after that night, and because she stayed he’s alive, whole.
Finally he releases Kylie, looks down at the gold-silver-brown cord connecting their hearts and rises, turns to face his mother. There’s more silver now in her aura than there ever was when she was alive, and the whole thing is so bright it nearly hurts to look at. He blinks several times, wills it away, and for once his sight obeys him.
“Are you ready to see the next one?”
He almost wants to leave well enough alone, because he’s seen enough to know none of these alternate lives are likely to be the perfection he’d hoped, but…
But he knows, too, that it’s not healthy to keep asking ‘what-if’, and that this is the only way he’ll ever be able to stop. He nods, and she stirs another cord; and suddenly they’re in a hospital room, and other-Mum is lying in the bed with Zeru perched on the rail. Her face is flushed and her hair sweat-damp; and she’s cradling a pink-wrapped bundle in her arms, watching the glints of shifting gold light shining through the fabric—the baby’s as-yet-formless dæmon.
He moves closer, looks into the tiny red, squashed face of this other-self he might have been; at downy blonde hair and slightly crossed blue eyes—and then he looks up, because Rowan (or a version of him, anyway) has just burst through the door. He savors the shock and outrage on the man’s face, and the Andromeda in the bed is watching with amusement.
“You said you could predict the sex of the baby!”
“And I did, Rowan. Then I lied to you about it.” She smiles the smile of the cat who’s just gotten the cream and eaten several canaries. “I had the idea you wouldn’t appreciate having a daughter, you see.”
Other-Rowan’s lips move soundlessly; his shocked eyes are fixed on his daughter, as though he can’t quite believe what’s happened; that it’s unthinkable he hasn’t gotten what he expected.
Serves him right, Kylie says, and Chase grins. He’s really, really enjoying this.
“And as soon as I’m feeling up to it, I will be leaving and taking my daughter with me to raise”—there’s a subtle, laying-down-the-law emphasis on ‘my’—“alongside my sisters and their daughters.”
Rowan couldn’t have looked more shocked if she’d slapped him in the face. “But—but—”
“I came to realize shortly after our marriage that you were using me,” other-Mum says cheerfully, “and that my sisters were absolutely right: we need men to breed; it doesn’t mean we have to live with them.” Then, magnanimously, “You’re welcome to explain my absence and hers to your colleagues and clergy however you like.”
This is how his mother should have dealt with his father from the beginning.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Anne!” Rowan says. He’s straightening up, squaring his shoulders, trying to regain control of the situation. “She’s as much my daughter as—”
“Have you forgotten what she is?” other-Mum breaks in. “If you can honestly say you don’t mind, that you’ll let me raise her as a young witch should be raised, then we can make a go of it. Otherwise—”
Rowan storms out.
Chase laughs—because he would, of course—then turns to his mother. “Why didn’t you…?”
“Insist on being who and what I was from the beginning?” She sighs. “Love isn’t rational, Robert. And I did love him, once. This version of me—couldn’t make the choices for her daughter she did for herself, and probably thought long and hard about how Rowan would treat a daughter during her pregnancy.”
“As property,” Chase supplies, “to advance him through her marriage. Which, I guess, would have made that you think—”
“Of exactly how she was being treated, yes.”
Other-Mum names her daughter Rhea, in honor of the Great Mother, and Zeru calls her dæmon Zephyr.
They’re back at the house after two days in the hospital, and at nightfall Andromeda mounts her cloud-pine branch and leaves, bow and arrows at her back and her daughter in a sling wrapped around her torso. Rowan doesn’t protest.
He watches Rhea’s saining, blessings bestowed on her by grandmother, aunts, cousins: “I give the gift of strength…intelligence…bravery…perseverance…sound judgment…” a wealth of good wishes with Goddess and God watching over.
Fragments of her childhood: magic lessons with Mum, where the content is sometimes the same and sometimes different and the attentive face of the little girl at once familiar and jarring (same coloring, same curious-observant gaze, but everything else too different to really see himself in). Flying, with her dæmon a bird of prey beside her; another ritual in adolescence to celebrate her menarche; and then the dæmon’s keening and the girl with her hands pressed to her heart and passionate pain in her face as she walks the wastelands, utterly alone for the first time.
He sees her as an adult, Zephyr a falcon; sees her ability as a healer and her closeness with her mother, with the clan that loves her; sees her joy and freedom and power and knows that it will continue forever.
And it feels like he’s only seeing half the picture, because although there are elements of the self he knows in this woman, she’s fundamentally different; she hasn’t faced his adversities, and though she’s older than he is—must be older—she retains innocence he lost years ago, somehow still a child despite her settled dæmon.
“And the hospital?” he asks Mum. “House?”
The scene changes, and he realizes almost at once that House of this world works alone. He pursues his puzzles with the same single-minded zeal Chase knows, but Wilson isn’t always sounding-board enough and cases can be more difficult. There are a few misses, even; cases that they solved together but House doesn’t quite get by himself.
He needs us more than we thought, Kylie says. We make things move faster, and I think…he gets something out of the teaching that he doesn’t have here.
It’s true: there’s a certain animation, a pleasure in the discussion that he doesn’t see with just House and Minerva firing their own ideas from voice to voice.
Thinking of House makes him remember the recent horror; he hopes he won’t have to see that because he knows he can’t handle it; but as it turns out, this House is never intercised; never has the chance to piss off that fateful church official.
He’s shot by his insane ex-patient months before it would have happened.
Wilson isn’t in his office and no one else is near enough Diagnostics to hear the shots; there’s no one to staunch the bleeding, call a code, keep House stable.
Hypovolemic shock precedes death by moments. Minerva vanishes and House is an empty shell crumpled on the carpet, too-pale features frozen in a death mask and eyes fixed and dull.
Wilson breaks down in tears at the funeral, but no one notices because Rona’s grief-stricken howling drowns out his sobbing.
It’s not real, he reminds himself. It’s not real. In his own fate-line, House is alive and healthy; Wilson’s life isn’t in shambles. Because Chase was in the right place at the right time with the right training to avert the disaster.
“You’re more necessary to him than he’ll ever admit,” Mum says as the grim image disappears and returns them to the in-between. “Lives were saved because you sparked the right idea at the right time, or were there with a critical insight of your own. You’ve kept him alive to keep doing the good he does; and through you, everything he has to teach will go on after his lifetime.”
And House knows that. All of that.
And so should he have, but…it just wasn’t something he’d thought about.
“He’ll be all right now,” he says, half to himself. “With the pain gone—”
“About that, Robert,” Mum breaks in. “I distinctly remember telling you that you were never to—”
“We know it wasn’t safe,” Kylie says, “and we won’t do it again, but…he was worth the risk. We couldn’t lose him the way we’d lost you; not when we had the power to do something.”
She nods. “He’s important to you, I know.” Her smile turns approving, and she adds, “You chose your father well: he’ll fight for you, too, if he ever has to.”
“But our first concern is always going to be for you,” Zeru says. “And we don’t want to see you taking any more chances.”
“We won’t have to,” Kylie says. It’s a statement, not a promise; he knows that if there’s ever something wrong again that medicine won’t fix, he’ll take the same risk—but that’s not likely. Hospital security has been better ever since the shooting (Foreman’s preoccupation with liability and covering his own arse for once working in their favor); and besides the leg, House has no immediately threatening health problems. The liver damage is still a concern, but less of one: without the continual assault of the Vicodin, a good deal of it will heal on its own.
And if anything else goes wrong, House will diagnose and fix it medically long before Chase needs to get involved.
He turns his attention back to his mother. “Mum…weren’t you going to show me…?”
What he could have done to save her. Where he failed.
“I can’t,” she says simply.
“Why not? Both of the others—”
“Were possible,” she breaks in. “But in every case, when I started to drink like that, it killed me no matter what you did. Because it never was anything you could change.”
He remembers House’s words about pain, matches them against Mum’s; realizes the message is the same. That she’s saying that in a billion, billion worlds, he was never able to do anything once she’d made up her mind to drown.
Words won’t come; it’s all he can do to loosen his hold on self-blame, to admit she could be right. He moves forward, lets her hold him.
“There’s nothing you need to be sorry for, Robert. I don’t blame you; I never did. If anything, I’m the one who should be apologizing.”
And there’s a part of him that’s angry, that wants to tell her that apologizing post mortem doesn’t count, but the larger part, the part that’s learnt to cope with the pain of her loss, knows that’s not right. “There were no good choices at that point,” he says. “You did the only thing you could to make it bearable.” He holds her a little more tightly, because of course this can’t last forever and he wants to remember it, absorb the memory into his skin. “I can’t say I really understand. But I can…forgive.”
It’s easier to say that—to mean that—than he’d thought it would be.
“Thank you,” Zeru says, and Mum presses a kiss to his cheek and lets him go. “I love you.”
He just manages to force an answering, “I love you, too,” past the lump that’s risen in his throat; and then the alarm clock blares and the dream shatters.
Continue...
Author's Notes:
The precise meaning of the name 'Rhea' is unknown; it may be related to elements meaning 'flow' or 'stream.' 'Zephyr' is the name of the Greek god of the west wind; his settled form, a falcon, represents good timing, precision, grace, patience and mental acuity.
'Saining' is the Pagan form of Christening. It is also—depending on the tradition—referred to as Paganing or Wiccaning.
The lines Andromeda and Chase quote are from Doreen Valiente's "The Charge of the Goddess", a well-known work within the Pagan community (much-adapted and existing in many different versions. One can be read here).
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Date: 2008-04-07 03:36 am (UTC)I can't wait for more dæmon-verse! (no pressure or anything...)
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Date: 2008-04-07 03:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-07 04:12 am (UTC)Beautiful. So, so beautiful.
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Date: 2008-04-07 01:20 pm (UTC)that is just so true <3
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Date: 2008-04-07 04:11 pm (UTC)lovely, melancholy but, somehow, right.
I could relate especially with the second one. House without his fellows in canon, or without Chase here, would be less alive, in a way, and would miss a few diagnosis, too.
Also, I loved the last one and how Andromeda and House are on the same wavelenght about things that Chase could never have changed.
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Date: 2008-04-08 12:51 am (UTC)I'm working on the scene depicting the healing of the intercision now, although it'll take a while to finish. After that, I think I'll move into the ramifications of House's PTSD--basically, the week before this story opened. (Unfortunately, that may have to wait until the semester ends.)
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Date: 2008-04-08 12:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 12:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 12:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-04-08 12:58 am (UTC)And that's true: House's thought process requires others to bounce ideas off of. Otherwise, he ends up losing motivation, momentum, the passion that is his sine qua non.
That insight was, I felt, a fundamental one: chronic pain, whether physical or emotional, operates by the same logic. House knows Andromeda could not have been stopped because he knows exactly what it is to cope with pain by self-destructive means.
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Date: 2008-08-02 12:44 pm (UTC)You must know how much this chapter made me smile, even with misty eyes. I am particularly moved by the inclusion of lines from The Charge. :)
Also, bless you for including the idea that there was absolutely nothing Chase could have done to change her drinking. I thank you, and a million other daughters of alcoholic parents thank you.
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Date: 2008-08-02 01:55 pm (UTC)That's pretty much what I was going for: bittersweetness and smiles through the tears. As for the lines from the Charge, they came before any of the rest of the reunion scene: the rest sprang up around them. (And what can I say--I like including bits of personal experience.)
And re. the idea that Chase couldn't change Andromeda's behavior, I felt that was an absolutely critical point to include, on as large and emphatic a scale as I possibly could--as your thanks illustrates, not just for the sake of the story.