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.

Comments

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Seriously?" Sure, Janet's read Hamlet. She'd probably know if there was a scene where Laertes hung out with his friends or got laid or something. But actual Laertes, in the flesh, is so much nicer than she is. How is she the one who had friends before the mansion? "Well, I'm not Miss Manners. But I've had a lot of shitty boyfriends."

[timebethine]

"Any who treated you with all the care and honor that you deserve?"

[sorrowandsorrow]

Janet laughs, because what else is she supposed to do when someone says something like that to her? People don't say shit like that. Besides, Sagramore was one of the nicest guys she'd ever fooled around with, and look how that ended up. "They don't make them like that in my experience."

[timebethine]

Her experience also involved being kidnapped to a frozen wasteland to learn magic in compelled silence under an unmoving sun, but Laertes isn't about to bring that up. "No," says Laertes. "Men can choose to treat you well, and haven't. It isn't that they're incapable of it; it's that they've chosen not to. And they may say, 'My station forbids me bestow my heart where I will,' or 'I feared to do thee injury by speaking the truth'--but those are lies and cowardice. Ay, even in Sagramore, it was a cowardly lie, and you know I love him as I do sunlight. If a man cannot treat you as you deserve, then it falls upon him to treat with you not at all."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"You are unreal," Janet informs him. Her tone is on the mean side, which Laertes might now have realized means she's trying not to feel something. "Don't worry. I can take care of myself. The man who pissed me off the most before Sagramore got thrown into a wall. He cried. So I actually went easy on Sagramore."

[timebethine]

"You did," he agrees. "And he knows it."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Well." She gives Laertes a flinty look. "Good. I'm trying to say we can still hang out." And a little grin. "If you're not too scared."

[timebethine]

"No. I was, at first," he admits. "I dreaded you and admired you as one does a fatal meteor. You were a queen, a great beauty, a towering sorceress--in all things out of my star." He hesitates, then lays one hand on the couch cushion between them. "I would know thee as a neighbor, and a friend."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Jesus Christ," Janet says, but she's smiling. "Again: you are unreal." Still, she reaches for his hand, looks at him thoughtfully for a second, and then shakes it -- firmly, of course.

[timebethine]

He shakes back, and grins. "To hear Claudius tell it, we all are."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Aw." Janet wrinkles her nose. "I guess he told you about the play."

[timebethine]

"He did, as did Grantaire, and even Shen Yuan, although he only knew an adaptation with lions." Laertes leans back. "I know not what to think. Thinking on it too long is like staring at the sun; that way lies madness."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Shen Yuan told you about The Lion King?" This laugh is so unexpected it comes out as more of a snort. "What a piece of shit. Yeah, I -- actually, I never even meant to tell Claudius I knew he was from a play, but he found out from someone else. I wasn't going to mention it to you. We read it in school, you know."

[timebethine]

"Do I want to know what its story holds for me?" Laertes asks, like probing a wound.

[sorrowandsorrow]

Janet presses her lips together for a moment. "I don't know. Do you?"

[timebethine]

"I know it's a tragedy," says Laertes. "I ... suspect that my death is part of its climax."

[sorrowandsorrow]

Janet looks at him for another moment, or maybe two. It might even be three. The body count of Hamlet is not something she thought would ever bother her, ever. "Good thing you're here and not there, then."

[timebethine]

It's confirmation. A flicker of recognition passes through Laertes--a ghost of foreknowledge; the feeling of a rapier parting flesh. He's been wounded before in dueling, but only lightly. The scars are faint. He does not know what a mortal wound feels like. He imagines it as a rush of fear and heat, then cold that spools out to eternity.

"It is," he says at last. "Dost thou think ... dost thou think we could be spirited back to our own stories as suddenly as we came here? Left to play out some unchangeable fate, knowing that another life was possible?"

[sorrowandsorrow]

"I don't know," Janet says, bluntly honest. "That's not how travel between worlds worked for us, but I didn't get here the usual way, either. But come on -- even if you got sucked back to Denmark, you don't think you'd have free will anymore?"

[timebethine]

"I thought I had it, when I was in Denmark, but it seems I was a mere fiction with a circumscribed part to play." He shrugs. "How will I even know whether I'm exerting my will, or whether some unseen hand directs my every choice? What now seems impossible may with time and circumstance come to seem so necessary that I could imagine doing nothing else."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Oh, come on." Janet lifts her chin stubbornly. "Fine, so I can't look at the sky and find out for you if there's some omnipotent force making you do everything. Nobody can say that for sure. But don't you think it's bullshit to get all defeatist about it? You have a working brain. Maybe someone made it for you, but it's yours now. You get to do what you want with it. Trust me, Laertes in the play doesn't shoot guns with a queen from Fillory or learn how to do magic from a hot British magician."

[timebethine]

Laertes can't help smiling. Of course Janet isn't concerned with questions of philosophy--she's a woman of action, and that's one of the things he admires in her. "He is very handsome," he says. "Although no rival for the queen of Fillory."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"You're laying it on pretty thick today, pal," Janet says, but she sounds a little bit pleased about it.

[timebethine]

"If I had been braver when we met, I think I would have tried to win thy love," says Laertes, although it still sends an old thrill of terror through him to say it. "But although that moment's passed, I do admire thee, and I defy anyone to prevent me from declaring it."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Huh." Janet studies him, picturing how that might've gone. Laertes is so completely not her usual type. Maybe that would be a good thing. "That's fun. Very missed connections of us."