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 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.

Not inevitable, no. Never inevitable -- and that's enough, because hope is the greatest power and the greatest motivating force of the world. Hope and love: the mightiest engines of any future the Milliways library can tell of have nothing on them.

In this one track, Enjolras and Prouvaire's thoughts have been running along similar lines; if not the same, at least more or less parallel. (He's probably starting to glow a little again.)

Hope and love, yes--they're enough, they must be, they grow in the heart of man as frail and indomitable as the soft tiny wildflowers pushing up through the heavy forest soil.

A dark-winged butterfly alights on the pocket of Jehan's waistcoat, and he smiles down at it. (Are there butterfly daemons, in that other world? He knows some people who seem like butterflies, whether through delicacy or through frivolity, but he can't truly know, not in this world.)

Enjolras smiles very faintly, too, in response. He doesn't care about butterflies landing wherever they like, on humans or otherwise, but he cares about a friend looking dreamily delighted.

It's some minutes later that he says, "What have you been up to lately?"

"Not nearly enough," Jehan says with a huff of laughter. "This daemon development--I've spent some time looking into that, after I wrote my account for my counterpart from that world. I've written, and read authors after our time, and from other worlds. It's amazing what poetic forms will emerge, and which will endure, or be resurrected." Jehan breaks off for a moment, falling into his own thoughts, before pulling himself back.

"I've...met many strange new people, as I'm sure you have." He shakes his head. "And I've considered what I might do, here. Other than use the Labyrinth to go places where there might be work to be done, which I'll do, but...well. You know the problem, I'm wholly certain. I needn't explain it to you."

"Yes."

Enjolras's voice is very wry; there are layers of understatement in that one word.

He's found enough, between friends and Milliways work, to be able to mostly ignore how much he chafes at the lack of meaningful purpose here. He still feels that hollowed lack, every day.

"I've yet to find a good answer for it. To be a resource for others from other worlds, who might not have learned of egalitarian principles at all, that's something, but--" He gestures with his free hand, a small and eloquent turning up of the palm: but still, it's only a little, it's not enough.

Jehan doesn't need to imagine how Enjolras chafes at enforced uselessness.

"Is there any way," he says, "that we could treat Milliways as a world of its own, with its own needs that might be addressed, as well as a midway place between other worlds? Oh, I know Bar seems to address everything--but surely there's something. I wasn't here for our clash with Security, but surely that reveals a lack...a lack of something, anyway, something we may at least begin to fill?"

"How so?"

It takes Jehan a moment to answer because his attention is diverted by two squirrels chasing each other up an oak.

"I had a vague idea," Jehan says, when the squirrels disappear into the upper branches, "of, perhaps, a newspaper." It's an activity that comes readily to mind, as it's one Jehan knows.

Yes, and newspapers are powerful tools. There's a great deal that can be done by and for and within a community with a free press.

"It's a good thought," Enjolras says slowly.

"With the involvement of the community... --How would you organize it?"

Jehan frowns. "I suppose the first step would be gauging interest from those outside our group. A sign posted on the board in the bar, perhaps."

Enjolras looks thoughtful.

"Free, I assume?"

He means free of charge; that a paper will be free of censorship and government restrictions is a given here, unlike at home.

"Certainly. There would be no reason to charge. And," Jehan laughs a little here, "I believe the challenge will be to induce people here to read it at all, even if they needn't pay."

Enjolras half-smiles, acknowledging the humor.

"Then a question is whether it's better to gauge interest in participation before beginning, or to put out an example and invite others to join in, or some combination of the two."

"Hmm, yes," says Jehan, "and I was thinking the latter would be a better idea? Frankly, I don't even know how to gauge interest in this place, and I feel trying to gauge interest would...simply evoke reactions of indifference and skepticism. Whereas putting out an entertaining but still useful paper would result in people taking it up, if only out of boredom while they drink their coffee...?"

He thinks it might find an audience, but his inherent shyness is always an obstacle when it comes down to the work of communicating with strangers. Never an insurmountable obstacle--he's been surmounting it since he was a child--but it's never shrunk into insignificance, either.

"Mm."

Enjolras is considering this seriously, and visibly so. (Whether the question of shyness in relation to publishing a paper has occurred to him, ever, in his life, is an open question. But he'd take it seriously too if it were under discussion!)

"To say 'a paper,' that's very broad even in our world. Here, who knows? Of course you'll want others involved, but I think you're right. It doesn't make sense to prioritize recruiting before people know what they're being invited to join."

Jehan nods, earnestly. "Yes, and I don't have a very clear or rigid idea of what sort of paper...but, well, if it's to be amusing, then surely Bossuet, Courfeyrac, Bahorel...they'd be excellent for that." He pauses. "I was thinking, something where people could write in with questions, and have the answers published, for the information of all."

Edited 2015-10-14 04:57 (UTC)