dramaturgy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dramaturgy) wrote2006-10-28 11:48 pm
dramaturgy) wrote2006-10-28 11:48 pm
I am an artist - with an e and a beret.
You know you're a nerd when you protest at the spears soldiers of Alexander the Great are carrying in a movie because they are obviously far too short to be a proper sarissa.
Anywho.
I promised Kitty two birthday fics but I've only done one, and it probably won't be much interest to anyone else, so I've devised a picspam instead. :D
Title: The War is Over
Word Count: 2,730.
Rating: PG-13. It's Megthony.
Summary: "Death and life are not the same, my child; the one is annihilation, the other keeps a place for hope." - Hecuba, The Trojan Women by Euripides.
Author's Notes: It's a birthday, and we're celebrating by putting characters through the wringer! :D Also, I've taken the lines from a version of The Trojan War by Brendan Keneally, which isn't so much a translation as a slight adaptation. It's a wonderful version of the tale. Check it out.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter characters aren't mine. Anthony is Kitty's. I don't know what I'm thinking, either.
Megan remembers the day she asked her mother about the middle name she’d given her as clearly as she remembers anything. Hestia told her about the Trojan women, not only Andromache but Hecuba, Cassandra, Polyxena, and Briseis. Women who were mighty, queens, princesses, priestesses, and devoid of their power when their conquerors made them into concubines, slaves, little better than glorified whores. The spoils of war, were Troy’s women. So she finds little comfort in the thought of her namesake, a princess of Troy whose husband was killed and body defiled by his enemy, and her son cast off the high walls of the city to his death by Greeks.
She certainly feels like she fits in the role when Anthony is taken and placed in the Halfblood Sanctuary – for his own safety, of course. Megan could have stood any of her friends or acquaintances being taken out of the world (as many of them have been), but taking Anthony was like taking her air. By all rights she should be there as well, but as a Pureblood for all intents and purposes on any and all records pertaining to her, she’d have trouble even getting close. She can easily imagine Andromache tearing at her hair in a fit of despair and crying until there simply wasn’t anything left to cry out in the privacy of her bedroom as she has done. She can understand the simple, almost basic, instinctual feeling of I don’t want to be without him, take me too. She wants to kick herself – she’s never wanted to be the sort who can only think of herself in connection to another person, but Anthony was so much to her.
Is so much to her, is. Words like ‘was’ get her into trouble.
Still, she does her absolute best not to fall facedown into the pit of despair that all this has set her up for. After all, Anthony is as safe as he could be, gone but not dead. He writes, and she writes him back with equal fervor. It’s a paltry substitute for hugs and kisses and real conversation, but it’s the best that she has for now. Most of all, Megan trusts Anthony to be smart and stay safe. That trust, whenever she begins to worry, calms her and reaffirms her resolve.
“Hope only dies when you resist it, and for too long,” Megan’s mother tells her softly, on one of the rare quiet moments when they can sit and just be mother and daughter, not too long after she sees Anthony for the last time. Megan expects to be going as well, at any time. Hestia’s fingers comb gently through her hair as Megan’s head rests in her lap. “It’s a human’s natural condition, always wanting the best of all possible things.”
She is now alone most of the time, except when she’s working. She works at a greenhouse that supplies the Apothecary in Diagon Alley – war ravaged as the world may be, commerce must continue. Other people work there, but not so many that she can’t go about her business without constantly running into someone. She is able to lose most of her problems and worries in the glass houses teeming with life. That’s what she love the most about her job; when others are out there destroying, she feels like she’s creating. When she isn’t at work, she is at home which is as it ever was, except her mother is home less. She works and is often doing Order work as well, coming home after Megan has managed to fall asleep.
Megan now knows about her mother’s work for the light side and couldn’t be prouder and wants so badly to join or help, but the idea of it makes her ill. She isn’t very brave, like some of her classmates irrespective of their houses, and is as meek as she ever was. So she does what little she can, helping her mother with whatever she needs her for, keeping the house organized (which has always been her job anyway).
She knows that she has friends helping. Terry Boot faded into the woodwork not long after they left school, probably a lot safer than most other Muggleborns. He must be working for the Order, her mother has brought her a parchment scrap on two different occasions, with a familiar handwriting and a ribald joke that only Terry could tell with any sort of panache. Eloise was arrested for attempting to incite a riot, bailed, and wasn’t heard from since. Megan hopes she’s not dead, she’s the sort of person the light needs. Susan’s in the Sanctuary where Anthony is. The only other person she really sees at all is Ernie. He’s very nearly the same as he always was. A bit more worried. Megan thinks he’s kept Hannah away from the Sanctuaries and helped her hide by himself. When she asked after her friend, he said with a light smile, “That’s for me to know.” Ernie walks around with less fear than most, at ten generations of purity. Megan has tried it, and it made her more nervous.
When the whisper of “The war is over” makes its rounds through the workplace, Megan drops the clay pot she was holding and is frozen in terror. The war is over. Andromache has been left bereft and lonely for her Hector, hope for the future thrown off the fortification around her home. Her mother was home that night, vowed that she wasn’t going to stop fighting, nobody in the Order was. Megan doesn’t want to hear anything about the Order or a fight, not really, but her mother talks and Megan is silent as a stone.
A day later, Megan has the chance that Andromache never had. For the first time in months, her heart soars at the sight of Anthony at the foot of the stairs, his wand in his hand and the light from her room shining on his face. She is momentarily wary again, but the breath he releases at the sight of her isn’t something someone who is cleverly disguised in order to hurt her can recreate. It says to her it’s you.
When she hears his protest to the news that the war is over, she manages to keep from clenching her eyes shut and puts her hands on his chest instead, as if to physically stop the verbal outpouring. It’s exactly what her mother was saying last night, and she isn’t sure if she can take more of it. So they make soup. It’s such a simple, domestic act that she’s gotten markedly better at since it became learn to cook for herself or go hungry, but one that they should be doing all the time. They eat in the living room after she lights the fireplace, away from the kitchen (where she could still see the Dark Mark hanging in the sky like the sword of Damocles) and the dining room (which is still cluttered beyond use no matter how she tries).
Megan has never known Anthony to not have an appetite befitting a teenaged boy, but he’s eating the soup as if he hasn’t tasted anything so good in such a very long time. It makes her wonder, not for the first time, exactly what sort of conditions there were in the Sanctuary. She doesn’t ask because it seems so pointless with him sitting right there, mere inches away, and he’s said that he’s not going back – not leaving her.
She takes the dishes back to the kitchen after he finishes his bowl and what was left in hers, and makes it a point to not look out the window to see if there were still vestiges of the Dark Mark that had been there previously. She manages it, although almost gives in and turns back around to look. Her nerves are obviously worn and shaken, though, Anthony rounds the corner from the living room just as she’s about to reach the doorway, and she jumps, a hand jumping to cover her heart, as if that would keep it from flying out of her chest. “Sorry,” he says quickly, catching her hand. “I startled you.”
“You did,” she manages around her wildly beating heart. “Where were you going?”
A look of – guilt? shame? – crosses his features briefly, and he slides his glasses back up his nose with his free hand. “Just following you.”
She knows that there was no affect intended in his explanation, but all the same it made her… sad. “I said I was coming right back,” she says gently.
His focus isn’t on her face at that moment, so she feels safe keeping her eyes on him. “I know.” He tries to play it off as nothing of importance, but his face betrays his tone, as always.
For a very long while, Megan says nothing. She doesn’t know what there could be to possibly reply to this with, and so slowly runs her thumb over the back of his hand that is still clenched over her heart. In a moment, she is so overtaken that she embraces him, dropping his hand to fit as closely as she can. She can see the fire they’d lit in the fireplace over his shoulder, and she stares at it while they stand in the doorway. Megan feels, not for the first time, completely helpless and perhaps more than the feeling itself, she hates how it’s becoming a familiar state of mind.
She makes a very conscious decision.
She pulls herself back from Anthony ever so slightly and like she did before, she takes him by the hand and turns around, leading him up the stairs and pulling him into her bedroom. Her lamp is still on, casting a warm glow over the yellow and sage green décor. Megan hesitates briefly, and all it takes is his hands on her hips to draw her back to the present. “Meg?” he asks gently, a myriad of questions contained in her name.
“I’m all right,” is her automatic answer, even though she’s not sure it answers any of his questions, and she’s not sure if she is. She might be going insane. When she turns around, there are more questions in his eyes. “I love you,” comes out of her mouth unbidden, but with more fire and conviction than anything she’s ever said. She winds her hands tightly around his where they’re still resting lightly on her hips.
“I love you, too,” he answers, and Megan still feels the blush in her cheeks that she’s always felt at those words. They stand in the middle of her bedroom floor, him patiently waiting for her to continue in whatever vein she’s started herself, and her trying to slowly work up the courage to do it. She wasn’t a Gryffindor for a few very good reasons. “What is it?” he finally prompts her with his characteristic, endless patience, brushing hair off her shoulder.
Something snaps in her brain. “… I don’t want to talk,” she says quickly, and pulls him in for a kiss, and another, and another. She prays silently for him to get a hint because if this is all up to her it’s not going to end how she needs it to.
They’ve traveled slowly further into the room until her legs hit the side of her bed and she tightens her hold to steady herself. Anthony catches her around the waist and her breath escapes in a fast exhalation. She’s very conscious of him watching her, his cheeks flushed scarlet. She covers his cheeks with her hands. Her nightgown has fallen off one shoulder and his hand drifts there, tracing the collarbone with every indication of urgency but none of speed. “You want – but – I mean, not that I – your mother,” he finishes clumsily, the subject of the very big three-letter word hanging between them.
Megan sighs, brushing his hair off his forehead tenderly. Her mother is the furthest thing from her mind. She supposes that Anthony has a reason to think of it and consider it, but she can’t bring herself to think about anything outside of her room at that moment. Her mother might return at any minute, but she may not. As far as she knows, she may never see her mother again, but what she needs right now aren’t words or tea or think about what to do when the sun rises on their new world. It’s more immediate, more basic than that. She finally shakes her head no, and kisses him again.
He doesn’t seem to know what to think, and Megan’s stomach clenches more with every second that they’re just standing there. She curls her fingers around the material of his shirt to pull him down with her, but he resists just enough to discourage her into trying anything further. Maybe without meaning to. She drops onto the bed feeling juvenile and very unlike herself, even ashamed. Blinking back tears and her breath coming shakily, she stares down at her own bare feet until they blur and finally disappear as she squeezes her eyes shut. “I’m sorry,” she chokes out before giving a small sob, mentally kicking herself.
“Meg,” Anthony starts gently, sitting next to her on the bed. She doesn’t answer, now feeling very overwrought. “C’mon, don’t cry.”
“I’m sorry, that was stupid of me. I just – I don’t know.” Nothing she could say about this would come out of her mouth quite right.
“Not stupid,” he says, a hand on her back. “Come here,” he added, pulling her closer to him.
She swallows a sigh and tries not to cling, but definitely stays close. Maybe that’s all she really wanted, closeness. I wanted marriage she thinks, putting both her arms around him. But there was no telling what was coming or when, no time like the present – it had really seemed like a good idea in the moment, but now it sounded childishly impetuous. “I don’t know what I’m thinking,” she whispers.
“I think I missed you,” he answers. “You’re probably thinking the same thing?”
“I did.” Her eyes close and she doesn’t feel silly anymore – just safe. And very tired. She cracks her eyes open and glances at the clock on her nightstand – it’s later than she had imagined it was. “I have to work tomorrow,” she murmurs idly.
“Then you need to sleep,” he says in a typical no-nonsense tone that she hasn’t heard since they were in school. “Very important, you know, for being fully functional.”
She pulls back and smiles at him, genuinely. “Prefect as always, aren’t you?”
“Guess some things can’t change,” he said. “Now are you going to go to sleep or do I have to make you?”
“How exactly would you do that?” she teases, reaching over to pull the chain on her lamp. It clicks off, leaving them in semi-darkness. He has stood to give her room to climb into bed. She really is quite tired, but she doesn’t want to sleep. If this has turned out to be all a dream, then falling asleep will take him away. “You can stay in here,” she adds, nearly falling out of bed as she moves over to make room for him.
He hesitates only momentarily, but she seems to have solved a silent dilemma about where he was going to stay tonight. It’s a fairly tight fit, but a comfort. “Tell me something,” Megan sighs tiredly.
“I’m not talking to you, you have to sleep,” he informs her stubbornly.
“I’ll close my eyes,” she promises. “Just tell me something.”
“Something, anything?”
“Something, anything.”
He sighs and thinks about it for a second, before saying the truest thing that crosses his mind. “We’ll be okay. And things’ll keep changing, but that’s okay. We’ll win in the end.”
She’s too tired to reply. Earlier it sounded like an exercise in futility but she knows that he could be right. More than knowing that, she feels like she needs to believe and know it herself. It’s what Anthony believes and what her mother believes, and two people she loves so much can’t be so wrong. She falls asleep with the closing words of The Trojan Women in her ears, which have never felt so appropriate.
The war is over, the war begins – for me.
... Now a happier note!
(All I can think about when I see this photo is Ninja!Adam.)
Anywho.
I promised Kitty two birthday fics but I've only done one, and it probably won't be much interest to anyone else, so I've devised a picspam instead. :D
Title: The War is Over
Word Count: 2,730.
Rating: PG-13. It's Megthony.
Summary: "Death and life are not the same, my child; the one is annihilation, the other keeps a place for hope." - Hecuba, The Trojan Women by Euripides.
Author's Notes: It's a birthday, and we're celebrating by putting characters through the wringer! :D Also, I've taken the lines from a version of The Trojan War by Brendan Keneally, which isn't so much a translation as a slight adaptation. It's a wonderful version of the tale. Check it out.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter characters aren't mine. Anthony is Kitty's. I don't know what I'm thinking, either.
Megan remembers the day she asked her mother about the middle name she’d given her as clearly as she remembers anything. Hestia told her about the Trojan women, not only Andromache but Hecuba, Cassandra, Polyxena, and Briseis. Women who were mighty, queens, princesses, priestesses, and devoid of their power when their conquerors made them into concubines, slaves, little better than glorified whores. The spoils of war, were Troy’s women. So she finds little comfort in the thought of her namesake, a princess of Troy whose husband was killed and body defiled by his enemy, and her son cast off the high walls of the city to his death by Greeks.
She certainly feels like she fits in the role when Anthony is taken and placed in the Halfblood Sanctuary – for his own safety, of course. Megan could have stood any of her friends or acquaintances being taken out of the world (as many of them have been), but taking Anthony was like taking her air. By all rights she should be there as well, but as a Pureblood for all intents and purposes on any and all records pertaining to her, she’d have trouble even getting close. She can easily imagine Andromache tearing at her hair in a fit of despair and crying until there simply wasn’t anything left to cry out in the privacy of her bedroom as she has done. She can understand the simple, almost basic, instinctual feeling of I don’t want to be without him, take me too. She wants to kick herself – she’s never wanted to be the sort who can only think of herself in connection to another person, but Anthony was so much to her.
Is so much to her, is. Words like ‘was’ get her into trouble.
Still, she does her absolute best not to fall facedown into the pit of despair that all this has set her up for. After all, Anthony is as safe as he could be, gone but not dead. He writes, and she writes him back with equal fervor. It’s a paltry substitute for hugs and kisses and real conversation, but it’s the best that she has for now. Most of all, Megan trusts Anthony to be smart and stay safe. That trust, whenever she begins to worry, calms her and reaffirms her resolve.
“Hope only dies when you resist it, and for too long,” Megan’s mother tells her softly, on one of the rare quiet moments when they can sit and just be mother and daughter, not too long after she sees Anthony for the last time. Megan expects to be going as well, at any time. Hestia’s fingers comb gently through her hair as Megan’s head rests in her lap. “It’s a human’s natural condition, always wanting the best of all possible things.”
She is now alone most of the time, except when she’s working. She works at a greenhouse that supplies the Apothecary in Diagon Alley – war ravaged as the world may be, commerce must continue. Other people work there, but not so many that she can’t go about her business without constantly running into someone. She is able to lose most of her problems and worries in the glass houses teeming with life. That’s what she love the most about her job; when others are out there destroying, she feels like she’s creating. When she isn’t at work, she is at home which is as it ever was, except her mother is home less. She works and is often doing Order work as well, coming home after Megan has managed to fall asleep.
Megan now knows about her mother’s work for the light side and couldn’t be prouder and wants so badly to join or help, but the idea of it makes her ill. She isn’t very brave, like some of her classmates irrespective of their houses, and is as meek as she ever was. So she does what little she can, helping her mother with whatever she needs her for, keeping the house organized (which has always been her job anyway).
She knows that she has friends helping. Terry Boot faded into the woodwork not long after they left school, probably a lot safer than most other Muggleborns. He must be working for the Order, her mother has brought her a parchment scrap on two different occasions, with a familiar handwriting and a ribald joke that only Terry could tell with any sort of panache. Eloise was arrested for attempting to incite a riot, bailed, and wasn’t heard from since. Megan hopes she’s not dead, she’s the sort of person the light needs. Susan’s in the Sanctuary where Anthony is. The only other person she really sees at all is Ernie. He’s very nearly the same as he always was. A bit more worried. Megan thinks he’s kept Hannah away from the Sanctuaries and helped her hide by himself. When she asked after her friend, he said with a light smile, “That’s for me to know.” Ernie walks around with less fear than most, at ten generations of purity. Megan has tried it, and it made her more nervous.
When the whisper of “The war is over” makes its rounds through the workplace, Megan drops the clay pot she was holding and is frozen in terror. The war is over. Andromache has been left bereft and lonely for her Hector, hope for the future thrown off the fortification around her home. Her mother was home that night, vowed that she wasn’t going to stop fighting, nobody in the Order was. Megan doesn’t want to hear anything about the Order or a fight, not really, but her mother talks and Megan is silent as a stone.
A day later, Megan has the chance that Andromache never had. For the first time in months, her heart soars at the sight of Anthony at the foot of the stairs, his wand in his hand and the light from her room shining on his face. She is momentarily wary again, but the breath he releases at the sight of her isn’t something someone who is cleverly disguised in order to hurt her can recreate. It says to her it’s you.
When she hears his protest to the news that the war is over, she manages to keep from clenching her eyes shut and puts her hands on his chest instead, as if to physically stop the verbal outpouring. It’s exactly what her mother was saying last night, and she isn’t sure if she can take more of it. So they make soup. It’s such a simple, domestic act that she’s gotten markedly better at since it became learn to cook for herself or go hungry, but one that they should be doing all the time. They eat in the living room after she lights the fireplace, away from the kitchen (where she could still see the Dark Mark hanging in the sky like the sword of Damocles) and the dining room (which is still cluttered beyond use no matter how she tries).
Megan has never known Anthony to not have an appetite befitting a teenaged boy, but he’s eating the soup as if he hasn’t tasted anything so good in such a very long time. It makes her wonder, not for the first time, exactly what sort of conditions there were in the Sanctuary. She doesn’t ask because it seems so pointless with him sitting right there, mere inches away, and he’s said that he’s not going back – not leaving her.
She takes the dishes back to the kitchen after he finishes his bowl and what was left in hers, and makes it a point to not look out the window to see if there were still vestiges of the Dark Mark that had been there previously. She manages it, although almost gives in and turns back around to look. Her nerves are obviously worn and shaken, though, Anthony rounds the corner from the living room just as she’s about to reach the doorway, and she jumps, a hand jumping to cover her heart, as if that would keep it from flying out of her chest. “Sorry,” he says quickly, catching her hand. “I startled you.”
“You did,” she manages around her wildly beating heart. “Where were you going?”
A look of – guilt? shame? – crosses his features briefly, and he slides his glasses back up his nose with his free hand. “Just following you.”
She knows that there was no affect intended in his explanation, but all the same it made her… sad. “I said I was coming right back,” she says gently.
His focus isn’t on her face at that moment, so she feels safe keeping her eyes on him. “I know.” He tries to play it off as nothing of importance, but his face betrays his tone, as always.
For a very long while, Megan says nothing. She doesn’t know what there could be to possibly reply to this with, and so slowly runs her thumb over the back of his hand that is still clenched over her heart. In a moment, she is so overtaken that she embraces him, dropping his hand to fit as closely as she can. She can see the fire they’d lit in the fireplace over his shoulder, and she stares at it while they stand in the doorway. Megan feels, not for the first time, completely helpless and perhaps more than the feeling itself, she hates how it’s becoming a familiar state of mind.
She makes a very conscious decision.
She pulls herself back from Anthony ever so slightly and like she did before, she takes him by the hand and turns around, leading him up the stairs and pulling him into her bedroom. Her lamp is still on, casting a warm glow over the yellow and sage green décor. Megan hesitates briefly, and all it takes is his hands on her hips to draw her back to the present. “Meg?” he asks gently, a myriad of questions contained in her name.
“I’m all right,” is her automatic answer, even though she’s not sure it answers any of his questions, and she’s not sure if she is. She might be going insane. When she turns around, there are more questions in his eyes. “I love you,” comes out of her mouth unbidden, but with more fire and conviction than anything she’s ever said. She winds her hands tightly around his where they’re still resting lightly on her hips.
“I love you, too,” he answers, and Megan still feels the blush in her cheeks that she’s always felt at those words. They stand in the middle of her bedroom floor, him patiently waiting for her to continue in whatever vein she’s started herself, and her trying to slowly work up the courage to do it. She wasn’t a Gryffindor for a few very good reasons. “What is it?” he finally prompts her with his characteristic, endless patience, brushing hair off her shoulder.
Something snaps in her brain. “… I don’t want to talk,” she says quickly, and pulls him in for a kiss, and another, and another. She prays silently for him to get a hint because if this is all up to her it’s not going to end how she needs it to.
They’ve traveled slowly further into the room until her legs hit the side of her bed and she tightens her hold to steady herself. Anthony catches her around the waist and her breath escapes in a fast exhalation. She’s very conscious of him watching her, his cheeks flushed scarlet. She covers his cheeks with her hands. Her nightgown has fallen off one shoulder and his hand drifts there, tracing the collarbone with every indication of urgency but none of speed. “You want – but – I mean, not that I – your mother,” he finishes clumsily, the subject of the very big three-letter word hanging between them.
Megan sighs, brushing his hair off his forehead tenderly. Her mother is the furthest thing from her mind. She supposes that Anthony has a reason to think of it and consider it, but she can’t bring herself to think about anything outside of her room at that moment. Her mother might return at any minute, but she may not. As far as she knows, she may never see her mother again, but what she needs right now aren’t words or tea or think about what to do when the sun rises on their new world. It’s more immediate, more basic than that. She finally shakes her head no, and kisses him again.
He doesn’t seem to know what to think, and Megan’s stomach clenches more with every second that they’re just standing there. She curls her fingers around the material of his shirt to pull him down with her, but he resists just enough to discourage her into trying anything further. Maybe without meaning to. She drops onto the bed feeling juvenile and very unlike herself, even ashamed. Blinking back tears and her breath coming shakily, she stares down at her own bare feet until they blur and finally disappear as she squeezes her eyes shut. “I’m sorry,” she chokes out before giving a small sob, mentally kicking herself.
“Meg,” Anthony starts gently, sitting next to her on the bed. She doesn’t answer, now feeling very overwrought. “C’mon, don’t cry.”
“I’m sorry, that was stupid of me. I just – I don’t know.” Nothing she could say about this would come out of her mouth quite right.
“Not stupid,” he says, a hand on her back. “Come here,” he added, pulling her closer to him.
She swallows a sigh and tries not to cling, but definitely stays close. Maybe that’s all she really wanted, closeness. I wanted marriage she thinks, putting both her arms around him. But there was no telling what was coming or when, no time like the present – it had really seemed like a good idea in the moment, but now it sounded childishly impetuous. “I don’t know what I’m thinking,” she whispers.
“I think I missed you,” he answers. “You’re probably thinking the same thing?”
“I did.” Her eyes close and she doesn’t feel silly anymore – just safe. And very tired. She cracks her eyes open and glances at the clock on her nightstand – it’s later than she had imagined it was. “I have to work tomorrow,” she murmurs idly.
“Then you need to sleep,” he says in a typical no-nonsense tone that she hasn’t heard since they were in school. “Very important, you know, for being fully functional.”
She pulls back and smiles at him, genuinely. “Prefect as always, aren’t you?”
“Guess some things can’t change,” he said. “Now are you going to go to sleep or do I have to make you?”
“How exactly would you do that?” she teases, reaching over to pull the chain on her lamp. It clicks off, leaving them in semi-darkness. He has stood to give her room to climb into bed. She really is quite tired, but she doesn’t want to sleep. If this has turned out to be all a dream, then falling asleep will take him away. “You can stay in here,” she adds, nearly falling out of bed as she moves over to make room for him.
He hesitates only momentarily, but she seems to have solved a silent dilemma about where he was going to stay tonight. It’s a fairly tight fit, but a comfort. “Tell me something,” Megan sighs tiredly.
“I’m not talking to you, you have to sleep,” he informs her stubbornly.
“I’ll close my eyes,” she promises. “Just tell me something.”
“Something, anything?”
“Something, anything.”
He sighs and thinks about it for a second, before saying the truest thing that crosses his mind. “We’ll be okay. And things’ll keep changing, but that’s okay. We’ll win in the end.”
She’s too tired to reply. Earlier it sounded like an exercise in futility but she knows that he could be right. More than knowing that, she feels like she needs to believe and know it herself. It’s what Anthony believes and what her mother believes, and two people she loves so much can’t be so wrong. She falls asleep with the closing words of The Trojan Women in her ears, which have never felt so appropriate.
The war is over, the war begins – for me.
... Now a happier note!
(All I can think about when I see this photo is Ninja!Adam.)