Closed Post: Practice

[sorrowandsorrow]

Thank Christ that wedding dance is over. Janet had felt it looming, like exam season at Brakebills but way, way worse, and it had made her feel like she was being stalked. It's over, and Susan came to keep her company, and she still has a bottle of wine stashed in her closet about it. Spoils of war.

In a better mood all around, Janet's in a sitting room not too far off from the main drag of the mansion. She's cross-legged on a couch, in stocking feet but with her boots tucked up against the side of said couch, and she's essentially playing with dolls.

Okay, it's a little more grownup than that. She has a couple of those ubiquitous green toy soldiers, the ones every kid ends up with whether they want them or not, and she's practicing a Cavaleri Animation, making them march around and aim their tiny plastic guns at each other.

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[sorrowandsorrow]

"I'm fine," Janet says, on auto-pilot, but then she reevaluates just a little bit and adds, "I'm okay." She's been spending a lot of time with Susan, but that doesn't feel like something she wants to go talking about just now. "I think I sent a telegram to Eliot, but fuck if I know whether he got it or not. He'd have to know where this world is to answer, and I don't even know where it is."

[timebethine]

"One of your schoolfriends?" Laertes asks. "Would you tell me of him?"

[sorrowandsorrow]

"And the High King of Fillory," Janet says with a grin. She tucks her feet up closer to herself on the couch, in case Laertes wants to sit instead of standing in the doorway talking to her. "Eliot's my best friend. He's one of the most talented magicians I've ever known -- like, naturally. He doesn't even have to try. Asshole."

[timebethine]

Laertes recognizes the invitation, and takes it--still guarded, but at least he doesn't crunch himself up against the other arm of the couch. "At times, I think that you're cruelest with your words where your heart is most nearly touched," he says mildly. "And if that's so, then I can see how you care for him."

[sorrowandsorrow]

Janet huffs a slightly indignant breath. "Tell me what you really think, why don't you? I just said he's my best friend."

[timebethine]

"I heard. But I'm not sure I would've believed, without the 'Asshole.'"

[sorrowandsorrow]

"He's the High King. I have to keep him in his place." She raises an eyebrow. "So can you do magic yet?"

[timebethine]

With a wry murmur of lux, Laertes summons a werelight into his palm. He raises his brows at her as the fat spindle of it spins.

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Holy shit!" Janet stares at it with sincere interest. "That Nightingale, huh? Is it hard?"

[timebethine]

Laertes closes his hand over the light, snuffing it. "This is the only art I know," he admits. "And at first, it went quite hard with me--the spell has not only a word but a shape, a feeling. For what felt like a long time, it was as though I viewed it through a pane of glass, or heard it like a melody from another room. But then Nightingale said something, and it ... shifted. All at once, I could lay my hand upon it."

[sorrowandsorrow]

She hums sympathetically as she watches the light go out. "Magic is insanely hard. I don't even think this magic is the same magic as mine, but still. That sounds familiar. It's like having a song stuck in your head, but you can't remember the name -- and then suddenly you do, but you can't replicate that for every song. They're all different."

[timebethine]

"Exactly--it's exactly like that." He sits back a little against the couch, letting it hold his weight. "What helped you to learn to hold those songs in your head long enough to sing them?"

[sorrowandsorrow]

Janet grimaces, almost an apologetic expression. "You're not going to like this answer, but... you just have to work your ass off. You spend hours and hours poring over these boring textbooks, getting all the Circumstances just right, and then something clicks. Then you do it again." She snorts out a laugh. "Being held hostage in Antarctica by an insane Russian helped, but I don't think that's an option for you."

[timebethine]

"No, I have no recourse but to be held hostage in this mansion by forces unknown," he says wryly. Then what she said clicks, and he leans in. (The people here have the most alarming habit of saying horrific things as though they're matters of course!) "What happened to you? I can see that you're well, but that must have been a harrowing ordeal."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Oh, yeah, it's..." Janet waves an airy hand. This causes one of her toy soldiers to pitch onto its side; whoops. "Brakebills South. It's a satellite campus. They turn you into geese and have you fly there, and then Professor Mayakovsky -- long story -- takes your voice away. There's no clocks, the sun never moves because you're only a few hundred miles from the South Pole, so you just... learn how to do magic. The nitty-gritty."

[timebethine]

They tortured her. They broke her and remade her. No wonder she can't permit herself to be vulnerable, to show the slightest crack in her resolve--even before she was a queen, she was trained like a vine up a sheer wall. She had to learn to hold on by her fingernails, or fall. "A steep price, for your arts," he says quietly. "Was it worth the cost?"

[sorrowandsorrow]

What a weird question. Janet cocks her head at him for a second. Everyone goes to Brakebills South, after all. She didn't even do the final trial. Only Quentin and Alice were insane enough for that. "If they hadn't sent us, we wouldn't have been good enough magicians to get to Fillory."

[timebethine]

"And Fillory was everything," he hazards. "Or if not everything--the most important thing."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Fillory saved Eliot's life." Of that she has absolutely zero doubt.

[timebethine]

"Will you tell me how?"

[sorrowandsorrow]

She doesn't answer right away, but she doesn't say no either. She looks toward her little array of soldiers, then makes a series of tiny gestures to end the spell. "Brakebills is intense." Obviously. "After you graduate, it can be... hard to figure out what you're supposed to do. Magicians don't have to work. They can, but they don't have to. But suddenly you don't have exams, or classes, or anything you're striving for. We fucked around. A lot. Eliot was going to drink himself to death."

[timebethine]

Something about how she says it cuts right to his heart. He feels it, the helpless certainty of loss that makes every joy a grief. When Sagramore and Janet had parted ways, when Sagramore was drinking as though it were poison and he was late to his grave ... oh, what Laertes wouldn't have done to haul him bodily into any other world than this. "Was he well, as High King of Fillory?" His stomach clenches with a craving for someone to be well.

[sorrowandsorrow]

Janet smiles, a smaller thing than her usual repertoire of smirks and confident grins. "Didn't I say it saved him? Fillory tried to chew us up and spit us back out, but we didn't let it." She laughs. "He's a hands-off king. He left me to run everything for a year and a half while he was off on some stupid quest." That stupid quest saved the very existence of magic and, by extension, Fillory, but: details.

[timebethine]

Laertes decides not to argue that one can be alive but not well; clearly not well is her baseline state. "He wanted purpose."

[sorrowandsorrow]

Janet shrugs. "Doesn't everyone?"