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]

"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?"

[timebethine]

A hum of acknowledgment. "Have you found a purpose here?"

[sorrowandsorrow]

She gives him a Look, one that deserves the capital L. "What do you think?"

[timebethine]

Laertes raises both hands in defeat. "I had rather ask than assume."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"All right, sure. No." She looks almost embarrassed for a second. "Obviously I'm not going to be the ruler of this mansion. Fine, whatever. But I hate thinking about Fillory going on without me."

[timebethine]

"You had shaped it into something precious," says Laertes, whose heart still throbs every time he sees Annie's boat somehow, impossibly still floating. "There's no better thing than to see something you made, thriving."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Yeah, and..." Janet's something bordering on petulant about this. It's just not fair. "Fillory almost ended. I mean, really almost.¹ We were going to rebuild. I had ideas. And then I ended up here."

¹This was the Fillorian equivalent of The Last Battle, but Janet doesn't know that.

[timebethine]

"Christ." Laertes runs his hands back through his hair. "What a time for a land to lose her queen."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Exactly!" She scowls, crossing her arms across her chest and leaning back against the couch cushions. "Eliot can handle it. Or Poppy. Even Josh is smarter than he looks. But..."

[timebethine]

He waits for that but to land.

[sorrowandsorrow]

"But how am I supposed to live here when that's all out there for me? Or maybe not for me anymore, just for the other three, which is even worse?"

[timebethine]

"It seems to me," says Laertes, "that you can live to be there, and bend all your will toward a return--or you can live to be here, and say that you chose rightly in your friends in Fillory and can find a new purpose in this place. To hang between the two is only to court madness."

[sorrowandsorrow]

Janet doesn't answer right away. She drums her fingers against her own knees. "You know," she says, "I hate it when men are right."

[timebethine]

"Fortunately, it seldom happens."

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Don't I know it," she says, without too much enthusiasm. "It just makes me so fucking mad."

[timebethine]

"I'll listen," he says, and doesn't let his gaze waver. "Or go, if you would have me go."

[sorrowandsorrow]

Janet eyes him. "Do you think I'm mad at you because of Sagramore? I'm not. I'm like a heat-seeking missile. He's the one who pissed me off."

[timebethine]

"No, I don't," says Laertes. "But I think that seeing me recalls him to you, and there may yet be pain in the remembrance that I would spare you."

[sorrowandsorrow]

She shrugs again, dismissive. "Maybe. But that would be a really stupid thing for me to get hung up on. I've weathered weirder."