pro_patria_mortuus | (no subject)

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It's a fine autumn day: not too cold, with a light breeze and a clear sunny sky.

Also it's beautiful, or so Prouvaire has informed him with great certainty, although he sighed briefly over the lack of dramatically thunderous clouds. Enjolras is willing to take his word for it. He doesn't see the appeal of thunderous clouds, except that rain is necessary for crops, and so far as he can tell Prouvaire thinks nearly every day is beautiful in its own (sometimes dismal) way, but he has no particular opinions to the contrary.

They're walking arm in arm on the far side of the lake, not too far from the forest verge. It's a good day to walk with a friend. (They're both agreed that that, too, is true of nearly any day.)

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Jehan sighs. He doesn't trouble to keep it silent, but it's also not a loud sigh for dramatic effect. It's simply an unwitting expression of melancholy.

They walk on, and Jehan looks pensive, scanning the sky.

Enjolras studies him, sidelong.

"You're thinking of that other France?"

It's only half a question.

Jehan gives a startled semi-laugh. What a very Enjolras way of describing it. But--

"Yes," he says. "The daemons. Melpomene, of course, and the others too."

Enjolras nods.

"A strange world."

He doesn't say it with criticism, nor any distaste; only reflectively. It was strange, and the strangest part is the memory of that utter certainty that the strange thing would be to not have your soul live as an animal outside your body.

"Very strange," Jehan agrees, "all the more so becuse of how right it was. Would you have your--Jeanne--outside you, again, if you could?"

Enjolras considers the question seriously, and at some length, as they stroll onward.

It's not something he's asked himself. It hadn't occurred to him. Certainly he's thought about his other self often enough, but it's always been about the cause, their France, their hopes and their chances; even when he's thought about more personal details of that other self's life, he hasn't asked himself what he'd share of it if he could.

(What he'd have of it if he could: France, with his friends alive at his side, and the ability to strive for her sake.)

"I don't know."

"In that world, that -- version of myself, he had never known anything but life with Jeanne beside him. I've only ever known myself with all my heart and soul inside of me. Intangible, imperceptible. In either case, I'm complete as I've always been."

"If I... acquired her somehow, if it merely happened, then so it would be. I don't mean that I'd object. But I don't feel the need to have her as an eagle outside my body. My soul isn't altered or lessened by its location. And the greatest flight is that of the mind's ideals, in any world."

He doesn't know if Prouvaire agrees on the heart of this, but he's sure that whether or not he does, they see the matter very differently. That's all right. It's one of the reasons he values Prouvaire's friendship so deeply.

Jehan nods. It's the answer he'd expected from Enjolras, and it's not wrong.

"I would have Melpomene outside again, if I could," he says. "She's still in me--I can feel that--so it's not as though she's absent, but...it's as though she's trapped, or stifled, somehow. She can't speak for herself. No one's daemon can. If everyone had part of their soul manifested outside, we would, perhaps, understand each other's natures better, and the nature of each society, and of all humanity. There would still be confusion and mystery, but a higher order of it, perhaps. And," Jehan concludes with a sigh, "it would be beautiful."

Edited 2015-10-12 00:03 (UTC)

Thoughtfully, "They didn't always, in that world."

It's not exactly disagreement, all the same. Just another dimension; but Prouvaire is right too, that it's a different kind of confusion, with the truth plainer to see.

After a moment, he asks, "Do you feel trapped?"

Well.

"Now, more than before?"

"They didn't always get things right, no," Jehan says, also not exactly disagreeing.

He pauses before answering Enjolras's question. Not because the answer is difficult to know, but because conveying the right sentiment to accompany the answer is tricky. "I feel as though I'm looking for something, and I know where it is, but it's always just out of my grasp. Something hidden, but it wants to be found, and I'm stumbling blindly in search of it."

Enjolras presses his arm again, lightly, and soberly.

It's a hard feeling; he knows enough of it, in different contexts and different ways, and he has no answers or advice. Only fraternity.

Jehan smiles slightly, and falls silent. They walk on, and the Milliways woods chirp and whisper around them.

After a few minutes, a snake slithers across their path, and the sight sets Jehan to thinking. Of snakes, and swans, and eagles, but also of wolves and rats and vultures.

"Do you remember," he says, when he emerges from his reverie, "if any advantages incurred to you, in that other world, by virtue of the shape of your daemon?"

"As opposed to other shapes?"

He thinks back to those distant dreamlike memories, and the even more dreamlike scraps of another Jean-Sébastien's childhood when Jeanne could shift her shape. Though even then, he thinks, she spent more time as an eagle than otherwise.

"We could see," he says, thoughtful, abstracted. "Physically, that is -- very far."

"And she couldn't fly far or too high, but sometimes it was enough. For reconnaissance, she was a help."

He shrugs slightly, coming back to himself from the little ways he'd gone. "Every shape had its own advantages, and disadvantages too. An eagle's no better than anything else."

"Of course not," Jehan says, with a fond half-smile, "just like a bourgeois is no better than a gamin, but our France--and theirs--assigned very different importance to each. I can't remember if, or how, daemon shapes figured into the world's false hierarchies. Were eagle daemons more highly esteemed than snake or wolf daemons? And if so, how did that combine with the aristocracy of birth? If the crown prince had a wolf daemon, could he claim the throne?"

Jehan laughs quietly, and shrugs. "I remember naught of it, I simply wonder."

He remembers --

not the details, not really, but a certain suppressed touchiness on the subject.

"I think... some people thought so. I don't remember how widely. But we were -- conspicuous."

Well. He is anyway; he knows it, like it or not, and in some ways he even uses it. But.

"I don't think it was so codified as that, but I'm not sure."

"I asked because I wondered what would be different in that world--which injustices would be worse, and which would be better, and how they would all work differently," Jehan says, with a sympathetic press to Enjolras's arm. He can imagine the conspicuousness Enjolras refers to, and knows Enjolras would find it an irritant at best. "I've held--I still hold--that to be free to live as one's true self is the greatest joy, and both the guarantor and the goal of a good society. So, then, to see a world where each has his soul outside him, and yet there is oppression...it doesn't convince me otherwise, but it gives me to think."

It is what it is, and there are much greater injustices to fight. Jean Prouvaire has his own conspicuousness, after all, and only some of it is chosen.

"We've known that the fight for a truly equal world is a longer road than we hoped. But still a road upwards, and at each rise the dawn is brighter. You're still right, my friend. A society must allow each of its citizens to live as himself, equal to all others, given opportunity to make of himself what he wills, so long as he respects their rights in turn."

"The trouble in that world is the same as ours, at root: that society chose to blind itself to certain of its members in favor of others, by reason of chance and birth."

Jehan is all too aware of his own conspicuousness, both the chosen and the not, and how it ties into brutalities far worse than what he's endured himself.

"Yes," he says, "but it--" He laughs a little, knowing he will sound childish. "It ought not to be. It's absurd enough to put one man above another when all can see their bodies are made from the same clay, their minds are aware and think and feel, but when all can see their souls! How much more ridiculously cruel. Or so it seems to me." Jehan sighs again, and shakes his head. "You're right, at root it's the same. But each society has its own self-justifications, its own excuses for injustice, its own mechanisms for enforcing it. What would those be in a society with daemons? I can think of many possibilities, but I don't have a clear notion. Do you remember, or have a guess?"

He's aware that Enjolras isn't the likeliest candidate for whimsical speculation, but he's curious nonetheless.

Silence falls for another few steps, while Enjolras thinks.

"The Church was very powerful," he says slowly. "If I'm remembering right. With all the hierarchies of sin institutionalized."

"And -- I don't remember well enough. Some of it was the same old troubles of nobility and despotism, voices unheard and then dismissed. But I don't remember the details."

Jehan listens, and remains silent for a few minutes after Enjolras speaks.

"The Church," he repeats, when he finally speaks. "Yes--I don't remember its role exactly, or how it differed from the Church in our world...but it had strong views on daemons, I remember. Strong and not wholly favorable. There was something about daemons being associated with sin, somehow..."

He pauses, and a thought occurs to him. "Perhaps we found Milliways earlier, within our lifetimes, in that world, because our daemons led us here." It's a fanciful idea, but Jehan is no stranger to those.

It is, and Enjolras looks at him with tolerant fondness.

"Perhaps."

Who knows?

"Though I don't remember any of them saying anything of the sort."

And he doesn't remember any feeling that he and Jeanne would ever hold something back from -- each other? Themselves? Whatever the right word is.

Jehan nods. "Neither do I. I merely wondered--if they know things our minds don't consciously know, and if, being embodied separately, they could tell us things directly, things that in our current forms we would only dimly sense as truths held deep within us."

"You'll have more thoughts on that matter than I, my friend." This is a little wry, but entirely sincere.

Prouvaire's thoughts will very possibly be correct ones! And Enjolras is more than willing to listen to as much metaphysical speculation as Prouvaire feels like giving voice to, for as long as he likes.

But Enjolras's own thoughts on the subject of what deep truths the soul whispers to the mind can be summed up with a shrug.

Jehan is well aware of this, and expects no different answer. He smiles faintly, and continues their walk in silence. The sunlight trickles down to them through the thick dark leaves overhead, casting a green murky glow upon the roots and stones. When Jehan casts a sideways glance at Enjolras, his friend's face has the eerie look of one of the fae.

Occasionally Jehan looks up at the lacework canopy of leaves, but his gaze mostly drifts downwards, alighting on a bright pebble here, a delicate bloom there.

It's sure a forest path, all right.

The sunlight filtering through the leaves still provides plenty of light to see by at this hour, at least.

They walk on in silence, unhurried, each in his own thoughts. Enjolras is thinking of that other France with its daemons: what he can remember of their struggles, and the causes for hope. Even if they never return to this version of Milliways, and read their dead other selves' dossiers, it's still possible that they'll avoid the awful fate of their own '32. Other worlds have; that Paris that Joly and Combeferre found in the Labyrinth, with one night without rain and a little more popular fervor to tip the balance, did.

Jehan sees an enormous mushroom nestled into the crook of a winding beech root. It looks like a thick floppy hat, albeit one of a dubious color, perhaps shading the head of some forest-god or sun-shy gnome.

He, too, thinks of the other '32. In the Paris with the Otherworld, where he met the minotaur who spoke of Enjolras and the shimmery blue creature who spoke of Feuilly, the uprising of 1832 had blossomed into a true revolution, instead of being smothered in the cradle. Perhaps the daemon-world, with its more obvious spirituality, went (would go?) the same way. With their souls battling alongside their bodies, how could they fail?

...Jehan's imagination helpfully provides several ways in which they could fail, but there is no reason to think it inevitable, at least.

They come upon a small patch of violets, and Jehan chooses to take that as a hopeful sign. He marks the location; he can come back here later with a pot and a spade, and dig them up to grow them in his room.