[Closed Post: Cinnamon Roll]

[timebethine]

A few days' recovery have left Laertes feeling refreshed enough to return to his baking, although not quite ready to dive into anything particularly complicated. Thus, he abandons the more complex direktørsnegl recipe he'd been meaning to try in favor of perfecting the humble cinnamon roll.

The days are getting shorter--even Laertes can feel it, though his sense of time is poor. He can no longer rely on the sunrise to wake him at a decent hour for baking, and so today he's up a little before the sun, kneading the bready dough by hand rather than using the paddle of the stand mixer in the hopes that the physical exertion will wake him up a little. It's not working particularly well; his eyelids keep drooping.

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[timebethine]

"What new plays hast thou read that simulate the act?" Laertes asks, since apparently they're just having this conversation at 7:30 in the morning while cooking breakfast.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Well, for example, there are a number of musicals that feature song and dance about sex acts and include stage directions regarding which to depict," says Susan - who has decided to blame her lack of caffeination for descending into this topic. She flips the kettle back on so she can refresh her tea.

[timebethine]

"Sex set to music! Truly, the future is a parade of marvels," laughs Laertes. "But then, I suppose I should not be startled by it; after all, did not Catullus pen the immortal words, 'I'll fuck you like a boy and wreck your mouth'?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Did he!" Susan checks the time again, and then eases the oven door open to peek at the biscuits. Nearly there, just a minute or so longer. "I clearly have some crucial gaps in my education."

[timebethine]

"He also wrote, 'Sweet, my life, you offer love to me; this love we hold between us shall last eternally.' He knew at least as much of sentiment as obscenity," says Laertes as he turns the second egg onto its plate. There's only the toast to make, now, and his rolls are nearly done rising. By the time Susan's biscuits are done, he'll be able to pop them in the oven. "He hath not Sappho's spear of eloquence, but his poetry was a great comfort to me, in my youth."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"If I might ask, what first drew you to his work?"

[timebethine]

"My tutor gave me a book of poems to copy, when I was a youth," says Laertes. "He set it for me as an exercise, to teach me Latin and patience both--but I think he knew that I was on the cusp of manhood, and wanted a channel for all the raging feelings of fury and desire in me. Catullus showed me that poetry could be such a channel."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan considers this as she takes the biscuits from the oven and sets the tray on the counter to cool. Then, fiercely, with her back to him: "It's good that he did that."

[timebethine]

"Didst not have a channel for thy passions?" Laertes asks softly. "Art seeking one still?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Oh, I stumbled my way into one," Susan says. "With some trial and error." She turns back to face him, setting the towel she used to protect her hands from the heat of the biscuit tray aside. "You're an elder brother. Did you ever find yourself - oh, secondary to your own care and concern for your sister?"

[timebethine]

Laertes takes the opportunity to slide his own rolls into the oven, then sets the timer for twenty-five minutes. "Often. She liked it not; we quarreled over it many a time."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Mine hated it, too." Susan's tone is only lightly rueful. "But when one dedicates so much of one's life to ensuring their happiness and protection, it's not something that can ever be switched off. I sometimes wonder if they - or at least the younger ones - resented when I started growing in ways they did not understand." For the briefest of moments, she allows herself to remember the look on Lucy's face when she'd mentioned how she first coped with their deaths. Then she sets it aside: there's no point in dwelling.

[timebethine]

"At times ..." Laertes hesitates. He gathers himself as he slices bread and slides it into the toaster. "At times, I think I've tried to be a brother to my friends here. As though I could learn to repair the rifts between myself and my sister, if only I could make Annie or Galahad smile." With some self-deprecation, he admits, "I built a boat for Annie because I wished there was some grand gift I could give Ophelia--a token of apology that might make up for all the times I treated her as a child, and not a woman grown."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"That seems a perfectly reasonable inclination to me," says Susan, offering Laertes a soft smile that she hopes speaks of camaraderie. "When I see someone or something that reminds me of Lucy in particular, I either turn tail or lose my mind entirely with the urge to do things the right way, this time."

[timebethine]

"I know that feeling well," says Laertes, and he smiles in answer. "Tell me of her? Of Lucy?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Oh, she was the best of us," says Susan, immediately. The kettle is boiling again, so she adds hot water to her half-drunk tea and takes a fortifying swallow. "The epithet the Narnians gave her was 'the Valiant,' and she was bright and faithful and ebullient and good through-and-through. Lucy was everybody's favorite. Peter's, Aslan's... eventually Edmund's. Mine. Magical things always happened around her, perhaps because she saw magic in everything. It could be the dregs of winter, with everything gray and brown all over, and she'd still look at a slant of light through a broken tree-branch and say, 'Look, Su, doesn't that look just like a dryad's arm?' She had even less of a stomach for war than I did, but she was always first on a battlefield after the fighting stop with medicine and soothing words. She wanted to be a doctor or a nurse, if she couldn't have Narnia."

[timebethine]

Laertes takes in her story quietly, recognizing as he does that it's a tale of grief--that all of Lucy's wonder and compassion, all her bravery and faith are lost to this world. It makes the world feel smaller, and greyer, that a woman like Lucy should no longer be in it. "I should have liked to meet her," he says. "She sounds--" like the first robin in spring. Like a crocus pushing back the snow. "--she sounds well worth knowing."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"She was here, the day we all got our visitors," Susan says, neither her voice nor expression betraying exactly how she feels about that beyond the slightest press of her lips into the faintest of lines.

[timebethine]

Laertes lets himself process the implications of this. "From an earlier time in thy history?" he asks. "Or another future, where her death did not come to pass? Or ..."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"She was given a day pass from Aslan's - from, from Heaven, if you can believe that."

[timebethine]

Like Dante's Beatrice, thinks Laertes, although he knows better than to say it. He tries to imagine what it would be like, to know his sister dead and in Heaven--to meet her as though at the water's edge, after a long absence, and to hear her call out a greeting. To know he has chosen the path of present joy over immortal bliss, and they will never meet again on Earth or in Heaven.

He fears that, like Dante, he would flee without answering.

"Oh, Susan," he says, all compassion. "I know not whether joy or sorrow would have been the keener blade."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"No?" says Susan, and when she meets his gaze, there's the faintest flicker of an emotion in her eyes. "Nor do I." She starts sliding biscuits from the tray onto cooling racks. "Tell me about Ophelia?"

[timebethine]

A smile quickens on his lips. "I think she and Lucy could be friends," he says. "She has the same way of looking upon the world with wonder--she knows the name of every flower in the queen's gardens, and every herb in the field and every weed along the roadsides. She knows them not by rote, abstractly, but with the intimacy of dear friends. She can be sharp in her speech, at times--always clear and direct as a blade. She never learned the trick of speaking prettily when she had nothing to say, which in courtiers is thought an effervescent wit. They thought her rude, when she was a child. But ... I know not how to say it. I miss her sharpness. I miss how she would tease me, and chastise me, and ferret out my hypocrisies. I miss her."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"It does sound rather as if they'd get along," Susan says, hesitating a moment before setting her spatula down and going to rest a hand, briefly, on Laertes's shoulder.

[timebethine]

He turns to smile at her--then the toast pops up, and he nearly leaps out of his skin. Taking the toast out, he spreads it with butter from the crock on the counter. "Wilt thou take jam on thine?" he asks as he reaches for the marmalade for his own.