Restless

[chanson_de_maupin]

She does not dream, for she does not sleep after the manner of men--she does not dream, but for a moment her mind is idle, and in its idleness it fixes on something near to hand. A bolster, stuffed with down until even down is firm; a hand loosely curled upon the patterned silk as though inviting her to take it.

"It means nothing," she tells herself, striving to fix her unseeing eyes on a star, a ship, a tree swaying in the fresh breeze off the sea.

"Julie," says her husband, while she lies back against the bolster and sweats until each bead of sweat feels cool and solid as a hailstone. "Julie, take my hand--"

In the mullion-veined sunlight, she thinks, This is how it ends, then. The darling of the Paris Opera House. The menace of the streets. The terror of noble popinjays and the downfall of cloistered sisters, the woman who could ride and fight and laugh until the world burst open in applause--

She cannot make her hand close on his. She tries to raise it from her side, but her pulse is thready and her muscles are fever-slack.

This is how it ends: Alone, with her husband at her bedside, not yet forty, not yet finished living.

As often and as diligently as Julie d'Aubigny has combed the history books, as carefully as she has scanned the novels of Dumas and de Laclos and Diderot, the only Julie they care about is Rousseau's insipid heroine. Julie d'Aubigny has passed beyond recalling. Her life has gone unremembered, her death unremarked.

In the remnant of the most mortal and ordinary part of her, the part that once dreamed at night, Julie turns her eyes away from the bolster and fixes them on the distant horizon.

"Mine will be an immortal legend," she whispers, while Fuyuki drowses on.

Comments

[girlwiththegandrshot]

Julie d'Aubigny does not dream, but her Master does, late at night in the Edefelts' Japanese home, hair loose from its braids and tumbled over the sheets like blood on snow. She sleeps and she wakes -- and in the darkness of her room, she sees the sunlight still broken under her eyelids.

Now is not the time to sleep, she tell herself. It is called the witching hour for a reason. Now is the time to spin her web through the city, to see through her familiars' eyes, to feel for the presence of magecraft. Now is the time to choose her next opponent, and determine that the next fight will be more than a back-alley brawl.

So she tells herself. But the dreams lingers, and she does not move. Only her fingers curl, as if around an invisible hand, and for the first time in her young life she clearly imagines death.

Now is not the time to cry, she tells herself. Tears track from her eyes, and she closes them. Enough. Now is the time for war.