Wheel of Time was the first internet fandom for me and here we are…17 years later? I’m approaching this from a perspective of ‘huge-ass books, itty-bitty episodes, there’s going to be a lot of changes, and that’s okay’.
Lan and Moiraine, fighting evil, babysitting ta’veren, riding the best horses.
➳ Lan and Moiraine searched for the ta’veren for about 20 years
➳ The ta’veren were about 20 when they found them
In conclusion, Moiraine and Lan interacted with kids aged newborn to young adults in their search for the dragon reborn. In year 1, looking for a ~1 year old who fulfilled the prophecy, etc.
BUT CAN YOU PICTURE Moiraine, stoic and composed, sweating over trying to handle a crying newborn. Lan, totally at home with a kiddo in his arms. Moiraine trying to have a serious conversation with a 6-year-old’s mother in a village while Lan runs around a field with the kid on his shoulders.
Title:A Sword Left To Rust, Chapter 5 - A Dance of Death
General Warning: This fic will deal with specifics that happened during Moiraine’s imprisonment in the Tower of Ghenjei and the traumatic effects of that.
Chapter 5 Warning: Moiraine point of view, battle and canon-typical violence, blood and gore.
Summary:Moiraine-centric Moiraine/Lan/Nynaeve fic, set post-series, but with minimal spoilers because it’s very character/relationship focussed.
Lan and Moiraine are attacked by a band of trollocs. Violence ensues.
Teaser:‘ Moiraine always channeled the same way that she danced. In both circumstances, her body seemed to be given over to something beyond her, something that took over every fibre of her. Here, her music was saidar, and it moved her like an ocean current, sweeping through her as a wave might claim a beach. Always in motion, a grace and beauty to it, but a deadly strength contained only by her will threatened and promised in every sharp tug of her body or clenching of her fingers. He could not see the weaves of white energy that she commanded, but he could always imagine them, flowing between her fingers like rivers of silk, entwining around her in glowing nets of power, enveloping her body like a second skin. He would have to paint this when they returned to Malkier.’
Lan watched as Aldieb trotted over and placed her big body between them, giving Moiraine a shield to hide behind as she buried her face and hands into her mane, drawing her close. The distance that had separated them since her death and rebirth seemed to expand into a gaping chasm now, consuming the space between. It hurt him to see her this way. It hurt more that he no longer felt he knew how to help. The scars they both carried from the end of the world ran deep, but this was the only one that was truly unbearable to him.
As she withdrew, he saw her face, expression fixed and resolute once more. His heart lurched as he realised that she was going to leave him. She was going to leave, and she was not going to come back. She was going to leave, and he would never see her again. His last memory of her would be of the slow fading outline of her upon Aldieb, riding away from him, growing more and more distant until she was gone. All at once, he realised he could not stand for it to end like that. Not after everything they had been through. They had to fix this. He had to fix this.
Reaching out, he took her hand in his as it dropped from Aldieb’s mane. She flinched slightly, startled, but he gentled his hand around hers, rolling her knuckles absently between the pads of his fingers as he used to do when they were sore from intricate channeling. A thing that was intimately theirs, that she would associate with him before anything else. Indeed, it calmed her, and she looked from their joined hands up into his face, steadily meeting his gaze.
“Don’t leave,” he murmured quietly, not having the time or the patience for flowery words or impassioned speeches.
They were not the sort of thing she would respond to, anyway. Not in this. A direct, honest plea, something that came so achingly from the heart, and could not be doubted or refuted, that was what she needed from him.
“Don’t leave me again,” he said, fingers pulsing around hers like a heartbeat, seeking to anchor her to him once more, “Stay here in Malkier. At least for a time,” he said, giving her a faint smile to seal the request and mark it as warm and genuine.
Moiraine was not herself. A fool with only a passing knowledge of her could see that. Lan was not a fool, and, despite the distance between them, still likely knew her best of anyone left upon this world. They all carried wounds after what they had been through, but where his had begun to slowly heal over, Moiraine’s were openly bleeding, festering, and draining the life from her. He could not let her go like this. Nynaeve had been right: if she left him again, like this, with their relationship still in the ruins they had left it after her confrontation with Lanfear, he would never forgive himself.
There was shock in her eyes, true shock, something he’d only seen a handful of times from her in all their years together. It hurt him more deeply than he could ever articulate that his asking her to stay had caused that in her. That should have felt natural, and right, not something that rattled her to her core. She belonged here with him, as Nynaeve had said the night she arrived. He had to make her see that as well.
Her mouth had opened to answer him when something changed in her. It was subtle, something he doubted even Nynaeve would have picked up on, but it was a reaction he had learned to watch for keenly as they travelled. Like a cold breeze suddenly sweeping through the land, heralding a storm, she darkened before him. Her eyes narrowed, the surprise shifting to calculated intensity as her gaze swept the clearing around them with the efficiency of a predator. At once she sat up straighter, coming alert, and the hair at the back of his neck rose as it did each time she started to pull upon saidar.
His hand instinctively went to the sword he carried at his back and drew it with a smooth rasp of steel. Lan scanned the trees in the direction she was gazing, he searched for the threat she was reacting to. Before he could make out more than a flicker of dark movement, his view was obscured by a sudden rush of water. For one wild moment he expected it to gush over him, drenching him to the bones, as it had that night they had first met over twenty years ago. Then he realised, as he rose to his feet without conscious thought, mirroring Moiraine, that she had channeled it around them in a cocoon of swirling water, shielding them from all sides in a column of controlled power, rising up thirty feet beyond his head. Within the rushing torrents, he caught the heads and shafts of arrows, swept up, burying themselves in her water, rather than in his flesh.
“Trollocs,” she said simply, meeting his eyes and answering the unasked question.
“I didn’t sense them,” he frowned, the words not meant to doubt, but to confirm a suspicion.
“Nor I,” she returned smoothly, face neutral and composed, as though she was doing nothing more strenuous than pouring them tea, “They brought a channeler to mask them.”
“Delightful,” Lan grunted, spinning the sword in his hand and settling the comforting weight in his grip once more.
Moirine eyed the blade and said, with the suggestion of a smirk, “I hope you haven’t gotten rusty in my absence.”
He snorted derisively as his only response to that, and the twitch of her lips stretched into what was unmistakably a smile this time.
“Shall I bring them closer to dance with you, then?” she offered lightly.
The smile he gave her in return was wolfish and more eager than he’d ever have admitted to his wife, “If you’d be so kind.”
Her expression dropped, matching the cold steel of his drawn blade. She nodded, waited for him to nod in turn, then they both moved as one.
Moiraine always channeled the same way that she danced. In both circumstances, her body seemed to be given over to something beyond her, something that took over every fibre of her. Here, her music was saidar, and it moved her like an ocean current, sweeping through her as a wave might claim a beach. Always in motion, a grace and beauty to it, but a deadly strength contained only by her will threatened and promised in every sharp tug of her body or clenching of her fingers. He could not see the weaves of white energy that she commanded, but he could always imagine them, flowing between her fingers like rivers of silk, entwining around her in glowing nets of power, enveloping her body like a second skin. He would have to paint this when they returned to Malkier.
The wall of water she had commanded around them unravelled and peeled back like a curtain revealing performers on stage. It swept towards the trees then pulled towards her like a tide, bringing with it almost a dozen startled trollocs. Lan comfortably sliced the heads from seven of them in a powerful forehand swing, using the momentum of Moiraine’s wave to lend strength to the cut. Then he relieved the last of them of their heads with a graceful turn and arcing shear, Moiraine bringing them in close to him. For a moment, she seemed to channel a bloody banner before them, the waters dyed crimson with blood. But the might of the nature she had called to her aid could not be overtaken so easily, and they bled blue once more.
Breathing a little more heavily, his eyes swept the trees and picked out the horde of trollocs that had them surrounded, closing in inch by inch. Lan cleaned his sword off in the waters that frothed and bubbled around Moiraine’s feet like storm clouds. For the moment they were tame and docile like a beloved hunting hound at its mistress’s heel, a leashed predator waiting to be given the command it longed for.
A volley of arrows showered towards her back like a sudden downpour of furious rain. Lan deflected them with his sword in a single, fluid sweep, then met her eyes. She nodded, and he fell into stance behind her, the two of them standing back to back, protecting and attacking in a way that covered the others’ blindspots. A part of him was surprised at how naturally he fell into these rhythms with her, reading the subtle shifts and patterns of her body to tell what she would do and how she would move. Most of him simply accepted this as a facet of life. He would not forget how to breathe, or how to walk, or how to love. Nor would he forget how to fight with Moiraine Sedai at his side. These things simply were. An integral part of his Pattern, something no amount of time, or distance, or burning of the threads that joined them would destroy.
Moiraine inhaled deeply, all the signal she gave him, all the signal he needed, before she lashed out once more with the tempest she had leashed to her. Lan moved, intercepting the two trollocs that charged her, horns pointed at her heart. She curved out of the way of the slice of his blade, which gutted both of the monsters in a single sweep. Then she pulled blades of ice from her roaring waters and finished them with slashes across both throats. She deflected another hail of arrows, launched for him this time, hardening the water to ice around him so they clattered harmlessly against it and fell to the ground at her feet.
Though their lives were on the line, every heartbeat falling like a blacksmith’s hammer against the world’s anvil as though it knew it could be his last and it had to make it count, he had missed this. The bright rush through his body he felt now was the same as the one that had burned through him during the brief chase she had initiated earlier. There were few feelings like dancing with his Aes Sedai this way, with blade, and Power, and death.
Even without the bond, they moved seamlessly together in perfect rhythm. Each in step with the other, keeping perfect time, as though they had never stopped doing this, as though their bodies would continue it long after they’d been put in the ground.
He loved to watch Moiraine channel like this. She was skilled in many areas with saidar, and he had seen them all over the years. Healing, tracking, trapping, hiding, deceiving, manipulating - but this, this, was where she excelled. She was a hidden blade concealed within a sleeve or beneath a cloak, something that could be useful in many circumstances, but it had been made to fight, to protect, to be drawn in the last defence of life and justice. In that regard they were the same. He was a soldier, a general, a scout, and a tracker, but his true skill was in this, in combat, in fighting, and protecting, and killing. She was Aes Sedai, a counsellor, a mentor, a healer, and a legend, but like him, there was a song in her blood that only sparked to life in answer to the call to battle. Had the Wheel not willed it, neither of them would have been so. Moiraine had chosen the Blue Ajah for a reason. He had not been given the chance to make a choice at all. A sword had been placed in his cradle with him before he’d even been able to hold it. It ached at his heart, sometimes, that the world had forced them to fight and kill, when at their cores, neither of them were the soldiers they had become. Yet in spite of that, he could not deny the majesty that was Moiraine let loose upon a battlefield of those who sought to undo the peace she had worked so hard to forge.
Extending her arms out to her sides, she caught his eye, and he instinctively stepped out a little more, giving her space. With a deep inhale she rose up onto her toes, hands lifting towards the sky as though she meant to take hold of it and tear the heavens apart. In a smooth motion, she drew them back down, exhaling steadily, and the water around her responded at once. Like a thousand snakes charmed to do her bidding it separated into many tongues of water, each one whipping around her in a frenzy. They snatched arrows from the air, darted out and speared trollocs through the heart before they had gone two paces, wove around her as if she were a leviathan at the heart of a storm-tossed ocean, furious at this intrusion upon her domain.
Lan flowed in and out of the weaves of water as though he were one of them, feeling completely safe even surrounded by a cacophony of death and violence. A spear launched from the trees towards him, and he remained in place, cutting down a trolloc that had come close enough to hurt Moiraine. Her waters shattered it before it even came close to threatening him, as he had known they would. He barely even registered it as more than a sharper heartbeat amidst all the rest, instinct reacting to his impending death, even as his mind had known she would protect him from it.
There was a beauty in what she did, in the way she fought. Lan had been in wars often and early enough in his life that he had dismissed many of the poets and what they had to say about it. There was little glory to be found in a battle. Only survival, if you were lucky, and death, if you were not. Yet it was hard to stand shoulder to shoulder with a woman like Moiraine, who seemed to seize hold of the Wheel itself in these moments and demand that it weave its Patterns at her command, reshaping the world the way an artisan might shape clay into a sculpture, and not find wonder in it. Even as he waded through the blood, and atrocity, and grim reality of it all.
She never approached two battles in the same way. Each time she liked to use elements of the world around her to her advantage. Now she manipulated the water from the pond, having it rear up around her, snapping at the heels of their enemies, slicing through them, shattering tree branches and pinning them in place. He had seen her before use the foundations of a building to halt an advancing army. Another time the cookfires of a Whitecloak camp had burst into roaring infernos at her command. She had brought trees to life to defend their forest homes, commanded the winds of a storm to batter shadowspawn into their oblivion, and bid the seas to rise and crush the advance of a Fade in Tear. It stopped her from being predictable, she said, or easily countered, always inventing new weaves and new approaches to combat. He suspected, too, that a part of her found a deep thrill in it, in adapting, and improvising, and using what was around her as something like a challenge for herself.
Moiraine felt alive to him, for the first time since he had seen her in Malkier— in truth, for the first time since he had watched her throw herself through that archway with Lanfear, the bond breaking like the world. Finally, it was real to him, as it had not been until this moment. She was alive. She had survived. She was really here. She had truly come back to him. Only now, in the heat of combat, with the light of saidar in her eyes, the power radiating from every pore of her being, the faint, wild smirk that pulled at the corner of her mouth in spite of the calm she embraced to channel, did he finally recognise her as his Moiraine.
A shield of water rose before him, several tendrils weaving together to form it, slowing the spear that punched through a moment later, though not stopping it. With a soft smirk, he understood her intent, and caught it in his off-hand. Then he pivoted with it, capturing and harnessing the momentum of the throw. When he turned back to where he had before, Moiraine ducked down smoothly out of the way, anticipating his actions. With a rough shout, he launched it forwards, punching through the chest of an archer nestled in the trees out of reach of Moiraine’s waters.
That all meant that he was looking in that direction as the second archer next to the one he had just killed raised his bow. Lan watched as he aimed steadily for Moiraine, tusked fangs bared. Heart pounding, he saw with aching clarity as the cruel point of the arrow was loosed directly at her heart. Lan did not think. He did not pause. He did not even waste the time it would take to draw in a breath to brace himself. His body moved with a speed and strength only the desperation to protect someone he loved could birth. He set himself in front of her, as he had a hundred times before, and would do a hundred times again, arms spread wide to cover her. The sword he wielded was not in the right position to deflect the shaft, having just thrown the spear, so he took the sharp bolt in the chest with a grunt of pain, staggering backwards. The perfect rhythm of their beautiful dance of death abruptly halted, like the strings of a harp being cut mid-note.
***
Moiraine felt it the moment Lan was struck. They had no bond, so she did not experience the echo of his pain, but she knew it as the rhythm of their fight came to a sudden, shuddering halt. He moved out of step, his body colliding with hers rather than flowing deftly around her, the river that circled the solid rock of power she formed at the centre of their dance suddenly dried out. Frowning, she caught his eye, and understood immediately what was happening. A grimace of pain burst briefly across his face before it was smoothed away by discipline and training. His body shuddered with the impact of the thick bolt that she knew, from the look in his eyes, and the way he shifted his body to shield hers, that he had taken for her. Burn him to ashes, he was a king! A king, with a wife, and an Aes Sedai, neither of whom were her. Selfishly, too, she felt another stone drop into her stomach, weighing her down, more guilt for her to carry at the pain she had caused this man.
Her heart clenched with fear as Lan fell beside her, but old instincts kept her focused. She was as much a soldier as him, and they both knew what had to happen now. The arrow had dug deeply into his flesh, but it was not an instantly fatal wound. She maintained her control over the water that frothed and bubbled around her feet like foam at the mouth of a rabid hound. They were still in danger. Dropping to her knees and fussing with him would only get both of them killed.
Rage erupted through her with such intensity it was almost frightening. She had fought, and bled, and suffered, and died to protect this world. This was Malkier, this was Lan’s home, consumed by the Blight for almost fifty years before becoming a bastion of light and hope. These creatures had come here, they had hurt Lan, they had bathed this calm, peaceful forest in the blood she constantly had a phantom taste of upon her tongue. Paranoia had whispered at her for months that there would be trollocs hiding in the shadows between the trees. It had been paranoia for a reason. How dare they make it real? How dare they intrude upon Lan’s happiness? How dare they try to take him from her? How dare they try to destroy what she had given everything and more to gain? How dare they?
When she’d been younger, she’d been known to have a temper, a reckless, impulsive streak that ran in her family. She had learned to leash it well at the White Tower, which did not stand for that kind of thing. They taught that, to wield the One Power, a woman had to be composed and calm. Channel with your will, and your intelligence, not with your emotion. The Wheel could take and burn that advice right now. Her feelings had been a roiling mess within her since the Finn had used them as their own personal theatre for over a year. They could damn well be of some use to her now. This was not a little flare of temper from a young girl who had not learned her own heart. This was the justified fury of a woman caged within her own skin and bones for over a year, finally given a chance to unleash it.
Gritting her teeth, Moiraine did what she had always been taught was not right for an Aes Sedai to do. She clamped down on the Power like a dog with a bone between its teeth, seized it, and pulled it to her. All thoughts of opening herself like a flower before the sun were gone. She was the sun. She burst with light, and power, and raged with it, letting it boil through her veins to the point that she knew it was dangerous, but did not care. It brought her to life as nothing else had. She felt. And it was not cold, oppressive gloom, or twitching, feral anxiety, always on edge, always unsettled. It was power. And it was hers.
Before, she had been content to underplay her power. She had wanted to bait the other channeler protecting the trollocs out of hiding, and knew she would have to face them. In that scenario, she did not want to reveal her full capabilities. She did not want them to escape, nor did she want them to know all that she could do when they inevitably clashed. She no longer cared about that, either.
Weaving with one hand she grabbed the air around the trollocs, all thirty of them still left peppered between the trees. Then she pulled. At the same time, with her other hand, she pushed, sending thirty tendrils of water spearing outwards in all directions around her. She felt like the heavens of the earth, opening up and sending a torrential downpour of wind, and rain, and fury to the world that had displeased her. Cold raw power channeled through her angreal and she took hold of the very air within the trollocs lungs and drew it out. Then she forced water into them in its place. She held it. Standing there, eyes intent, she scanned the area for her true prey, patience withering like a delicate blossom before a raging fire. The awful sounds of terrified, panicking, drowning, dying creatures filled the glade, but she did her best to block them out. Once there had been peace, and calm, and pleasant things here. Then Moiraine Sedai had entered this place, and death had followed her.
Movement to her left caught her eye as a thick stream of dark black flame roared for her face. She did not draw back the water she was drowning the trollocs with. Nor did she move. She locked eyes with the channeler she saw beyond and wrapped the fire in weaves of her own Air, strangling the life from it as she had with the trollocs, causing it to die inches from her face.
Breathing heavily, a woman dressed in black to blend with the shadows of the forest stepped out to confront her. If she was rattled by Moiraine’s display of power, she did not show it. There was even a glint of confidence in her eyes, a lust to challenge herself, to match herself against a worthy opponent. Moiraine had felt that, years before, when she and Lan had first started travelling together on their quest to find the Dragon. It had been an intrigue, an excitement almost. She had spent the last six years, and more beside, in truth, preparing for one test or another, determined to beat it, to best it. This had felt like a worthy extension, a new goal, something else to push her, something else to achieve. What a fool she’d been. There was no glory, no success, no achievement to be found in battle. Just another day to survive, with more scars, and more things to make each day after that harder than the one before. There was no eagerness in her as she turned to face this. Only grim resignation and a set jaw. This would not be the end of her, for that would mean the end of Lan, and that was unacceptable.
The channeler opened her mouth to say something to her - goading, or taunting, or grandstanding- but Moiraine didn’t have the patience for any of it. She interrupted her with an impatient storm of ice blades hurled at her face. That, fortunately, ended the preemptive chitchat and pitched them firmly into the duel. There was enough posturing in a standoff between channelers as it was. Simply hurling raw strength at an opponent rarely worked, unless the power disparity was utterly laughable. A woman who could shield and guide over fifty trollocs through the heart of Malkier was not one Moiraine could crush between her fingers as she might a fly.
They paced in a slow circle, occasionally spitting quick whips of Air, or small motes of Fire, to test the other’s reflexes and strength in different weaves. This channeler, like Moiraine, seemed to be well-balanced in all areas, with perhaps a slight favouring towards Air. As if to illustrate this theory, she found a shower of needle sharp bolts of Air flying towards her face a moment later. Bending aside, she used the movement of her body to dodge the incoming missiles in her own channeling, sending them back. The other channeler didn’t move, remaining firmly in place, simply throwing up a shield of Air against which her own projectiles exploded harmlessly.
A lull fell then, the two of them eyeing one another up across the clearing. It was Moiraine’s turn to show what she could do. There was a part of her, the part trained by Lan, that warned her not to fall into the expected patterns of a duel like this. To wait. To force the other woman to get impatient and tip her hand. Unfortunately, Moiraine herself had started this impatient, and was not growing any less so as it dragged on, not with Lan wounded. She wanted this over and that meant she had to end it.
So she pulled on her water again, drawing it from the dead trollocs surrounding them, throwing it towards the Black Sister from behind. Again she remained in place, not attempting to move aside. At first she attempted to seize control of Moiraine’s weave, which was a mistake, and ended up sending up another shield of Air, less polished than the last one from the haste at which it was created. Some of the impact of Moiraine’s attack broke through and she staggered slightly, dabbing briefly at her bloodied nose. Moiraine smiled, just a little.
Retaliation came swiftly. Asserting herself on the field once more with a rooted stance, her opponent dug deeply into the ground, feet sinking in a few inches, then jerked her hands upwards, fingers extending towards the sky like the Seven Towers. Holes erupted around Moiraine’s feet, and she danced deftly aside, up on the balls of her feet, feeling for a moment as if she was in ballet lessons at the Sun Palace with the hard-faced tutor smacking at her feet with a narrow fencing foil to reinforce the proper steps. If she made them, she would not get hit. Often she had left her lessons with bloody toes. Pain was a harsh but effective teacher. As she dodged the craters in the ground, she felt the sharp branches of the tree clawing like fingers at her back, digging in. Hissing in irritation, she ducked and flowed away from it, putting it from her mind, circling Lan protectively.
Growling in the back of her throat, Moiraine crystallised her pond water into a thick column of ice, then sheared it off in thin, razor edged sheets, like throwing stars. She launched them towards the other channeler, countering before the other’s attack was complete, increasing the speed and ferocity of their duel. The Black Sister was good, only caught off guard by this for a moment, and not long enough to be hit. With a snarl, she wove fire, a blinding white blaze that melted Moiraine’s weapons to water once more inches before they buried themselves in her throat.
As Moiraine seized the tongue of fire that lashed for her a second later and turned it aside, remaining in place herself this time, simply grabbing hold of the weave herself and taking control of it. The other Sister, as expected, fought this, pouring all of her strength into maintaining her control. Moiraine let go as soon as she did. Then she sliced at her side with a sharp whip of Air that she did not deflect quickly enough, earning her a burning glare from across the clearing as a spray of red blood stained the grass.
The other Sister was good. The Black Ajah trained their recruits well, particularly when they were as powerful as this woman. Yet Moiraine still felt the teachings of the White Tower in her, in the way she fought. As part of their Oaths, Aes Sedai were not expected to use the One Power to fight unless absolutely necessary. It was a final resort, one the Tower was supposed to frown upon. As such, they were not commonly taught how to fight and kill with Saidar. Though, as with most things, the Tower had found loopholes to it. Such hypocrisy was rooted in every facet of the culture of Aes Sedai. So much of the time was spent teaching them how to undermine and circumvent the laws and principals they apparently held in such lofty esteem. Still, the other sister was using a form of adapted relaxation and stretch postures known as Earth Stances. Very good for grounding oneself after a difficult day practising weaves, it also worked very well as a technique for duelling another channeler.
Moiraine herself favoured no particular form. Not anymore. When she had left the Tower she had been greatly enamoured with Air Poses, which involved a consistent set of elegant movements designed to keep the body noble. They were also deliberately meant to confuse and distract an opponent from the weaves that could be hidden within them. Lan had taught her the error of her ways in that regard, when he’d managed to lodge a practice blade into her abdomen when they were sparring one day, despite the fact she’d been in the process of launching a tsunami’s worth of water at him at the time. Knowing stances, and katas, and movesets was good, he’d told her. Good for practice, good for training. But it was bad for combat. It made her predictable, and predictable made her dead. Moiraine hated being predictable.
Drawing her hands up on either side of herself, forming a common weave for a flurry of fireballs, Moiraine drew the dagger sheathed at her hip in the same fluid motion. Bringing her hands up over her head, she thrust them forwards in a rough burst, sending a chaotic torrent of fire streaming towards the Dark channeler. As she hurled her fire, she threw the dagger in its midst, just as Lan had taught her. She’d laughed at him when, within the first few months of their travels together, he had gifted her the pair of blades she kept sheathed at her hips to this day, and insisted she learn how to use them. They had saved her life almost as often as he had. Indeed, the channeler comfortably countered her fireballs, standing defiantly in place, projecting power and confidence, not ducking to move out of the way of them, as she hadn’t any other time, a hallmark of Earth Stances. The fire was smothered into a harmless cloud of smoke and ash, but she neither saw nor reacted to the flash of steel that flew true and emerged from the black haze to pierce into her abdomen. Not quite where Moiraine had aimed, which Lan would have tutted at, but close enough.
Eyes widening, the Black Sister staggered back, staring down in utter shock at the mundane blade protruding from her belly, a pulse of blood darkening the black fabric of her tunic. Moiraine did not give her time to recover her wits. Before the dagger impacted, she was flying forwards herself, launched by reckless weaves of Air that shoved her across the distance between them. She threw those weaves ahead of herself as she landed, crashing into the other channeler and sending them both to the ground. Her weaves of Air rushed down and pinned her in place, giving Moiraine time to seize the second dagger at her waist and plunge it deep into the channeler’s heart. Her eyes went wide, a choked sound bubbling from her lips a second before a trickle of dark blood followed it. The light went out of her in a moment, and she slumped dead in the grass.
Silence took the glade once more, broken only by Moiraine’s heavy, panting breaths. Adrenaline still pounded through her like a frantic hammer, desperate to get out, but she was not done yet. Abandoning the body of the woman who had nearly killed her, Moiraine half staggered, half crawled to Lan’s side, concerned that he had barely moved from where she had left him. If she’d had her way, she’d have tied him up with weaves of Air to stop him doing anything foolish, like trying to continue fighting. As she hadn’t had a chance to do that, she’d been certain that would have been exactly what he attempted to do. His lack of dramatic heroics was a worry.
As she reached him she sank to her knees and crouched over him, taking his face between her hands. Jaw clenching with concern, she noted the glazed pain and delirium in his glassy eyes and cursed, guessing that the arrow had been poisoned. Tearing open his shirt so she could see it confirmed that. Black spider webs of corruption spread from the ugly wound in his chest. Cursing again, she braced one hand against his ribs, muttered a grim apology, then yanked the arrow out. He grunted slightly with pain, still semi-conscious, and his eyes locked on to hers for a moment, even as she pressed her hands to the wound to stem the pulse of blood that erupted from it.
“Moiraine-” he choked hoarsely, breathing harsh and ragged as he struggled to remain conscious.
“I’m fine,” she assured him brusquely, resting one bloodied hand on his forehead to calm him, knowing that the fool man was about to pass out, poison coursing through his system, but still needed to know that she was well.
Indeed, he slumped in relief, nodding faintly, and gave in to unconsciousness a moment later, faintly whispering his wife’s name as he did. Moiraine’s heart clenched at the thought of Nynaeve feeling what had just happened to him through the bond. She made her a silent promise to take care of him, then began to focus her weaves on his body, looking to Heal, rather than harm this time.
The wound resisted closing. The poison refused to cleanse itself from his body and she hissed with anger. She had seen this in a few of the towns she had passed through. The remnants of the Dark One’s forces could no longer rely on brute force and intimidation, and were resorting to assassination and stealth. That, apparently, included the creation of poisons that could not be touched by the One Power. A forkroot derivative was believed to be used, but it meant she could not remove it. Fortunately, she had already developed a tactic for dealing with this, and pushed down her rising panic with the logic of what she could do to help him.
She could not cleanse the poison, but she could still control it. Closing her eyes, she felt inside of him, deftly separating the poison from his blood. She stored it in a layer of fat in his arm, near the surface, where it could be reached easily with a needle and syringe. Nynaeve could extract it and find an antidote for it through her herb lore. The knowledge her old skills as a Wisdom were still useful, despite her strength with Saidar, would probably have pleased her, if it hadn’t been for her husband being her first test subject.
Lan had already absorbed some of the poison, however, and so, as a precaution, she used the Power to slow his body, putting it into a protective state healers had referred to as a ‘coma’, similar to an animal’s hibernation. Hopefully, it would minimise the amount of poison he absorbed, and the damage it could do, before Nynaeve found a cure. Finally, she used weaves of Air, woven together in a pattern Siuan had taught her years ago, mirrored from fishing nets, and sealed the wound in his chest. It would not Heal, while the poison remained in his system, but this would effectively stitch and bind it up securely to stop it tearing further or bleeding.
Suddenly exhausted, Moiraine sat back on her heels, looking around them. The once peaceful glade was now bathed in blood and gore. She and Lan sat at the centre of it, and from that heart exploded a ring of death and violence extending all the way to the treeline beyond. Moiraine sighed. Though, logically, she knew that this had not been because of her, guilt and grief still rose up in her throat, threatening to choke her as surely as the water she had drowned the trollocs in. Where she went, death seemed to follow, stalking her better than her own shadow. At least she had managed to help Lan. Resting a hand on his head again, she gently stroked his hair, lips trembling as she looked down at him. So much pain. So much suffering. And it was not over. It seemed that it never was.
Starting, she reached for the Power again, spinning to look over her shoulder, as a thin bar of light rent the air just above Lan’s head. She relaxed a moment later as it opened into a Gateway and revealed Nynaeve, eyes wide, mouth set in a tight line of worry, as she emerged beside her husband, looking decidedly pissed.
it has Arrived. the grand angst piece of suffering i’ve been working on since the finale. part 1 of 2. more suffering to follow as soon as I’ve written it. enjoy.
Title:Let Me Back In - Chapter 1 ‘As You Are Mine’
Warning:Spoilers for episode 1x08 of the show. Mature rating for dark themes/content. Moiraine is in a fairly deep depression and is dissociating quite a lot. She’s sunk very deeply into an apathetic torpor and it may be uncomfortable/unsettling to read - be aware and be safe if this is a potential problem.
Summary: Post 1x08 - after what happened at the Eye, Moiraine is struggling to cope. Lan has given her time and space to grieve, but after almost a week of apathy and with no signs of improvement, he finally attempts to reach out to her and encourage her to let him help.
Teaser:‘ Today had brought a slight change in her, though he did not think it was for the better. Staring blankly into space without seeming to see anything. Head all that was visible beneath the mountain of blankets she seemed to be trying to drown herself within. Somehow, the Wheel had finally managed to break Moiraine Sedai. It had made her into a small, fragile thing, a thing she would have despised a week ago. Had he not been able to hear the gentle sounds of her breathing in the silence of the room, he’d have believed her a corpse.’
The healers of Fal Dara, talented though they were, had been at a complete loss as to what to do for his Aes Sedai.
When he and Moiraine had returned from the Eye, he had been carrying her for half a day. Her legs had given out from under her without warning in the middle of the Blight and she had been unable to move. Where before she would have clung to every rotted branch and twisted trunk to drag herself on, and stubbornly clawed herself out on her stomach if forced, against all sense or reason, she had simply huddled on the ground, eyes closed, expression bleak. There had been not a word of protest uttered when he had lifted her into his arms to carry her back.
In the week since, she had not improved. He had stayed with her as much as he had been able to, only leaving to fetch things for her. At first she had argued against it, insisting that he do more important things, that they were not bonded now, and he was no longer obligated to assist her. He had ignored her, and after the first day, she had fallen silent. Not because she had changed her mind; simply, he was sure, because she was too exhausted to argue.
None of the healers he had consulted had made the slightest difference to her. Even Nynaeve had been taken aback by the state of her when she had finally consented to visit and examine her after Lan all but begged her. Eventually, after many examinations and concerned conferences, the best they could recommend had been bed rest. For the first time since he had known her, likely the first time in her life, Moiraine had heeded that suggestion. She had not left her chambers, or her bed, in almost a week.
This was so terrifyingly unlike the woman he knew. The woman who had been stubbornly outrunning trollocs on horseback as a deadly poison coursed through her veins, killing her, mere weeks ago. More than once he’d wondered if perhaps the Dark One had not somehow taken his Moiraine at the Eye and replaced her with this false shadow. Yet every time he met her eyes he knew that it was her. He saw in them their history reflected back at him, the life that they had shared together. That, and the mirror of the pain he felt every waking moment at the loss of their bond.
Light knew she was entitled to break, to utterly shatter, after what she had been through. He did not blame her for that at all. If she had been anyone else he would not have been surprised if they had refused to rise from bed for three months. But she was not anyone else. She was Moiraine.
As long as he had known her she had been a woman of action. A woman who did things. A woman with an almost compulsive need to do things. They had not stopped for twenty years. Not for rest, or pleasure, or grief. The Wheel had assigned them a task, and she would see it done, or see herself broken in the attempt. When she had faced obstacles, or grief, or pain, it had only increased her fervour and her drive, as she pushed through and ignored her own hurts. That had worried him, too, but it had been familiar, and something he had learned how to handle. Now she seemed content to simply sleep through what looked like the end of days and he had no idea how to respond.
Standing guard over her rooms was starting to feel more and more like he was standing vigil at her wake; nothing to protect now but a corpse and a memory.
She had slept more in the past week than he thought she had in the year preceding it. Except when the nightmares woke her. Then she would scream herself hoarse until he came to her, and held her, and swore upon his mother’s name that she was safe. Once the panic faded and reality asserted itself once more, she seemed to decide that it was worse than whatever she had seen that made her thrash and claw at the world as if her very blood was being boiled in her veins. Then she would sink back into those twisted dreams with a hollow resignation.
Lan had allowed her that weakness. Mother knew she took little enough rest, even this toxic almost self-destructive kind. Yet each time he watched her succumb to that again, he felt her die. It was a quiet death, a surrendering to an abyss deeper and darker than any he had ever claimed, but that was its purpose. He had felt it before, years ago, when his grief had driven him to the Blight to end his war with the Shadow once and for all. Not the end that he wanted, nor even the end he deserved, but the only one he had been able to see. That was when Moiraine had found him. She had been the flame he had needed to lead him from the void he had lost himself within. Now he had to be her light, and help to guide her home.
Fear, both for her, and the lingering roiling of it within him that could only have been calmed by feeling her once more through the bond, had him staying in her chambers with her. There was a small room attached to hers that he could retreat to for privacy or sleep, though he had sought little of either. He did not want to leave her alone.
Today had brought a slight change in her, though he did not think it was for the better. Staring blankly into space without seeming to see anything. Head all that was visible beneath the mountain of blankets she seemed to be trying to drown herself within. Somehow, the Wheel had finally managed to break Moiraine Sedai. It had made her into a small, fragile thing, a thing she would have despised a week ago. Had he not been able to hear the gentle sounds of her breathing in the silence of the room, he’d have believed her a corpse.
Unable to bear sitting there watching her like that, he had left to fetch her something to eat. As he returned, he knocked on the door, not wishing to startle her, then cautiously pushed it open. He had done his best to make the sparse fortress chambers feel warm and comfortable, somewhere safe for her to recover. There was a large fire roaring in the hearth, candles scattered around to create small pools of light everywhere, banishing shadows where paranoia or fear could hide. He had even found a small bunch of flowers and set them in a vase by the window. Yet with the cold darkness that seeped from her, it may as well have been a graveyard he had left her in.
As he entered the room again, his eyes went straight to the bed where he knew she would be. She was as he had left her. They might have replaced her body with a doll for all the change in her. A doll with too pale skin, and too large eyes, who had wasted away to a fragment of the woman he loved in mere days.
Forcing himself to push that thought aside, he smiled warmly instead. She had no response to his smile, or his return, and though he had not expected anything else, and knew it would have been unfair to do so, his heart still withered away a little more.
Stepping towards her, he lifted the items in his hands to draw attention to them. A small plate of food, and a platter with a tea-set upon it, one steaming cup already poured for her. She looked at it, then at him, with lifeless eyes. After a moment’s pause, she nodded vaguely in acknowledgement, jerking her head at the table beside her. He took the hint, and set them down there, easily within reach. When he lifted the cup and tried to hand it to her, she simply rolled over again, turning her back to him and pulling the covers more tightly around her body, as though seeking to protect herself from him.
Lan almost left. He almost let her give in to this. She deserved that. Mother preserve him, but she deserved it. Not only for this, but for all that the Wheel had asked her to endure in its weavings. How could he push her when she was like this? How could he ask more of her when she had already given everything? How could he demand that she be strong again when she had spent her life being stronger than it was possible for any person to be? How could he whip her like a horse that had run for a thousand leagues, then a thousand more, and finally dropped from exhaustion?
The answer was as simple as it was harsh: this was killing her. Surely as rot from the Blight taking root within a heart, or the trolloc poison that had almost claimed her after leaving the Two Rivers. It was killing her, and he could not simply stand by and let that happen.
So instead he sat himself firmly on the edge of her bed. Not wanting to be too close and crowd her, he settled down by her feet, which she had tucked up against her chest, one on top of the other. Gently, he rested a hand on top of them, a gentle pat, to remind her that he was there. The lines around her eyes deepened for a fraction of a second, before they were smoothed by apathy once more. Other than that she did not react to him choosing to stay, or to the contact. She just lay there.
“You’ve barely eaten anything since the Eye,” he murmured, his tone very carefully light, as though merely commenting on the weather, with no sense of chastisement or judgement in his words.
There was silence for a long time. When she finally spoke, the sound of her voice made him wonder if he might not have preferred that.
“Really?”
That was not Moiraine. Surely. That hoarse, toneless rasp of sound, utterly devoid of her music, that could not be his Moiraine. Somehow it was. It was all that he had left of her. A last, feeble, desperate thread of her Pattern that he had to use to weave her back into the woman that she was. He held onto it for all that he was, and swore that nothing short of his death could force him to let it go.
“Really,” he agreed very gently, for there had been no sneer or derision in her words. They had simply sounded lost.
For a moment, he thought she might rebuke him for the faint note of pity in his voice that had slipped through before he could stop it. For a moment he hoped that she would. If only so he could find something in her that told him someone still lived behind those empty, haunted eyes.
“How can you tell?” she muttered, still sounding blank and confused, as though she had received a sharp blow to the head and it was disorientating her, “Without the bond,” she added, as if to clarify her uncertainty.
She sounded so small to him, all of a sudden, her voice so blank and confused. She had asked him that as she might have asked him how he knew that there would be rain later. Each word seemed to cost her a great effort to force out as well, as though she had to forcibly drag it from a deep pit of cloying toxic mud found within the Blight.
“I do have eyes, you know,” he joked lightly, patting her feet, a feeble attempt at humour, which felt as welcome here as it might have at a funeral pyre.
She nodded vaguely, the small movement seeming to sap the last of her energy, leaving her looking as tired as though he had just made her walk back to the Two Rivers again without pause or rest. Finally she looked up at him and actually met his eyes.
“Thank you for the tea, Lan,” she said in a rigid, mechanical voice that was too refined to be truly her.
It was the voice of Lady Damodred, the polished noblewoman who fell reflexively back upon politeness and courtly manners. Not her at all. Just a thing that could prop her up and puppet her. A face that could pretend to be her for long enough to tell him what she thought he wanted to hear then be rid of him.
“Now if you would please go,” she said, in that same voice, one that she had not used with him for years now.
Her body, already slight and somehow frail, for all the strength he knew it belied, seemed to crumple further, melting down into the bedding until she was barely distinguishable, in the semi-darkness she kept her chambers in.
From that heap of fabric and despair that she had collapsed into, a final whisper reached him, hopeless and limp, “I would like to be alone.”
Lan hesitated, teetering on the edge, feeling like a boy in his first battle, having to steel his nerves and brace himself as he prepared to leap into the fray for the first time. His courage almost failed him, as it had on that day. Years ago, he had told Moiraine that, his great secret, and his great shame. Al’Lan Mandragoran, Last Lord of the Seven Towers, Dai Shan of Malkier, had almost fallen to cowardice before he had ever been risen to legend. One of the most renowned warriors of his time had almost never seen the sun, swallowed by the shadows of fear. Yet today, as then, he found his strength from somewhere, and did not shy from his duty, no matter how painful or how much it terrified him.
Taking a deep breath, he remained sitting firmly on the end of her bed, and shook his head, “No,” he told her, with all the authority of a general giving orders to his soldiers.
Slowly, those words seemed to dawn upon her. More slowly still, she turned her head to look at him. Her eyes gleamed in the dark, for a moment seeming solid black, consumed by shadow.
“Excuse me?” she said, voice as cold as a winter snow, with all the harsh disbelief of a queen being questioned upon her throne.
“I am not leaving you alone right now, Moiraine,” he told her, the words calm, direct, and simple. Though there was a slight tremble to his voice that he knew she, and she alone, would hear.
At this, she actually sat up, which he would have taken as a hopeful sign, had her eyes not narrowed, her face twisting with contempt and something he could have called disgust.
“Do you really think that you can help me?” she hissed at him with derision, her voice sounding like the twisted, corrupting whispers of Machin Shin, also seeking to rend his soul from him. “Do you think that you can protect me from this? Do you think that your sword can shield me from the agony that I am in?” she sneered, an awful dark mirror of the woman that he loved, “Do you think that you can even begin to understand what I am experiencing at this moment? Let alone do anything to stop it?”
She sounded almost pitying when she said those last words. As though she looked at him and saw a naive, ignorant fool who thought to comfort her with empty words and false promises of hope.
Perhaps he was that fool, for he did still hope for her, had to still hope for her. But he was not so much a fool that he did not see her own foolishness, her attempts to cut him off, to protect him from this pain, as she had tried to protect him from the Blight. This time she also sought a way to sink further into her pain and darkness, as it called to her like a toxic lover, dragging her further into misery and despair. Away from him. This prickly wounded creature was all he had left of her, and he would not let her go, no matter the damage it did to him.
“No,” he murmured simply, “I don’t. I don’t understand what you’ve lost,” he told her, knowing that he would never be able to even come close, “I don’t understand what’s happening to you. The bond-” he broke off, closing his eyes at the visceral reminder of it.
The absence of the bond felt like a physical wound. As though someone had hollowed out a section of his soul with a blade and left the wound open and weeping. A constant source of distress and pain, without any prospect of healing. Even with that, he knew he could not begin to imagine what she was going through. She was suffering the severing of hundreds of bonds, thousands, to something far deeper and more consuming than he. He would not diminish or minimise her pain by pretending to understand it. His role was not to understand, it was to simply be here with her.
“I miss you,” he whispered, gently tapping his heart, “But even enduring our broken bond, I know that I cannot even begin to imagine what this feels like for you,” he told her gently. Then he reached out and rested a hand on her hip, the swell of it something of her he could find beneath the covers, “But I will stay with you anyway,” he swore, as solemn and binding as the first oath he had given her twenty years before, when she had taken him as Warder. “I will not let you push me away again,” he said softly.
A deep pang of guilt and sorrow lurched in him as he remembered the last time she had manipulated him into leaving her alone. So different, the warm, gentle encouragements to be with his adoptive family, and with Nynaeve. Part of it had been a ruse to allow her to slip away and spare him the horrors of the Eye. But part of it had been genuine, a want for him to feel happiness and find comfort in others. Yet it had been intended to have the same outcome as the visceral, seething venom she had spat at him now. This time he saw what she was doing, and he would not let it happen. A warrior knew never to take a wound in the same place twice, for they learned how to guard against such from their first failure. He would not fail her again.
Finding her eyes, watching him, distant and unknowable as the furthest, coldest star, he held that frozen, unwelcoming gaze, and said quietly, “You can hit me, and scream at me, and curse my ancestors back to the creation of the Wheel itself.” She swallowed tightly and turned away, a flicker of shame in her, but he went on, needing to make it absolutely clear, “You can insult me, and deride me, and use each of my flaws to burn a little more of me away. You can do all that you may think of, Moiraine, and more, but I will not leave you this time,” he murmured, shaking his head flatly.
He did not know what he expected of her in response to that. Apathy. Or scorn. Or even anger. He might even have welcomed further rage and frustration. The derision she had met him with had hurt, but it had been something, it had been more than what he’d seen from her since they had returned from the Eye.
Nothing in his life had ever prepared him for her to look him straight in the eye, her gaze piercing like an arrow to his soul, and ask in a fragile, broken little voice, “Why not?”
The question felt so vast to him. As though she had asked him to describe and define every drop of rain in a thunderstorm. How could he tell her all of the reasons that he loved her? How could he even begin to explain what she meant to him? How could he answer her without simply recounting every moment they had spent together over the last twenty years? How could she even ask him, having shared all of that with him?
In the end, he simply said the first thing that had come to him, the honesty and simplicity of it striking a chord within his heart.
“I am your Warder,” he murmured with quiet sincerity, meaning every inch of it.
Every word spoke of a far deeper aspect of his self, forged from fire, and light, on the day that they had bonded. Protecting and guiding her on the quest they shared had become such an integral part of who he was, he did not think he would recognise the man he would have become without her. If indeed he had become anything at all, and not simply died as another nameless, faceless casualty of the Blight. Everything that came with being a Warder, the pride, the honour it was to be bonded to her, the trust that they shared, the commitment to one another. And that he was hers, her Warder, her friend, the other half of her soul, his Pattern the perfect mirror for hers.
The things she had hurled at him in a final, desperate attempt to be rid of him seemed to have utterly drained her of the little energy she had managed to cling to for today. Now she slumped in the bed once more, looking haunted and harrowed, as if she had been fighting off a dire illness for years, and sensed it in the final stages of its grisly work. She looked so frail, so small, so utterly unlike herself that it was all he could do not to pull her into his arms, and hold her, and refuse to let her go for fear that she would slip away from him.
“You cannot be my Warder any longer, Lan” she said, her voice flat and distant as the look in her eyes as she gazed past him at something he could not see, and could no longer feel.
He felt his heart lurch, for all that he knew she was not herself at the moment. He had failed her. He had let this happen to her. He had let her go, alone, without him. If she did not want him, did not trust him now-
“To be a Warder you must have an Aes Sedai,” she said, and he dragged himself from his own emotional turmoil to focus on her, on what she was saying to him. She met his eyes and, with a sad, ironic little smile, she told him softly, “I am not an Aes Sedai any more.”
Her small, flat voice was such a contrast to the heaving, violent roiling of his emotions. Emotions that she did not share, but must still see in him. She had to swallow tightly to stop herself from breaking, eyes squeezed tight, face twisting in a grimace of pain once more. He had seen this woman endure all sorts of agony through their years together. Their road had been dangerous, and despite his best efforts, she had been beaten and burned, stabbed and poisoned, frozen and sick, manipulated and plotted against, and he had never seen pain in her like this. Never.
As she spoke, her hand clenched on the blankets around her, a nervous habit that she had. It was her left hand. The hand on which she should have worn her Great Serpent ring. She had already removed it. That, more than anything else, was what finally snapped the last chain around his self-control.
“I don’t care,” he growled, a sudden anger rising up in him at the sight.
Shifting closer to her, he took her hand in his, and laced their fingers together, filling in the gaps where her ring should have sat with his own strength.
“Do you truly believe that I think so little of you as that?“ he said, a muscle jumping in his jaw as he clenched his teeth around his anger, "Do you think that my word is so lightly given, and so easily broken, that I will turn my back on you simply because you cannot channel at the moment?” he asked, unable to keep the taut pain from his voice. “Do you think all that has bound me to you these last twenty years, that has made me risk my life, and dedicate myself to you, and love you more than I have ever loved another soul, has been a simple weave of Spirit and nothing more?”
She shook her head, her eyes closing with a sense of despair and exhaustion. Such exhaustion that he felt it, even without their bond. Suddenly he wanted nothing more than to lie down beside her, and close his own eyes, and not open them until the Mother claimed his soul and took him away from all of this. He clamped down on that feeling and rammed a blade into its heart, mastering himself. She did not have the strength to fight it, so he had to fight it for both of them.
“I cannot give you what is necessary to make you my Warder,” she said, forcing the cold logic from her mouth like bile, but forcing it all the same, “You no longer have the gifts that come with such a connection that have you allowed you to do all of those things,” she said, “We are not Warder and Aes Sedai now, Lan. We are just two broken people who cannot fit together anymore.”
Her mouth trembled, but her voice was steady. Like a machine. A thing that simply repeated what it was bidden to, lacking any heart, or conviction, or feeling at all. From anyone it would have been unsettling, but from her? This woman who had always been so sure, who could cause entire armies to cower from her with but a single glare? It was more horrifying than anything he had seen from the Shadow after decades at war with it.
“You deserve a true bond, and a true Aes Sedai. I can give you neither,” she told him, voice restrained and matter-of-fact.
She spoke as though it was as simple as that, as though all this was for her was a matter of Tower traditions and technicalities. As though he meant nothing to her at all except in his use as her Warder. He knew, in his heart, that she was not herself at the moment. Their quest had been paid with a heavy toll of blood, and tears, and ashes, and had cost them dearly. It had cost her everything.
Everything but the life that still clung to her, making more mockery of the word with each day. Lacking the bond, missing the comfort of her soul gently brushing against his as he would miss his sword hand, he knew she was experiencing that a hundredfold. This was not her. He knew that, yet he could not stop the flare of anger that burned through him, hot as a fresh slice into his skin, at these cold, empty words she offered him as he fought with everything he had to hold on to her.
“What of the last twenty years, Moiraine?” he breathed, clenching his hand into a fist as he fought to keep that fury from spilling over into his voice. “What of the life we have shared that binds us to one another?” he demanded, teeth clenched, and this time he was not as successful at keeping his own emotions tamped down. “The history The respect. The trust. The love that we have for one another. Does that mean nothing to you? Do I mean nothing to you?”
She looked stricken, the first flicker of true emotion he had seen on her face since he had entered the room. It was masked a moment later as something reasserted control. With a flare of terror inside him, he realised that he did not know, could not tell without their bond, if that thing was her iron self-discipline, or the dark hopelessness he saw drowning the heart of her each time he met her eyes.
“I am saying these things because of what you still mean to me,” she breathed, looking exasperated that she had to explain, that he didn’t just understand. “I cannot give you anything anymore, Lan. If you are injured I cannot Heal you. If you grow sick I cannot help you. I cannot fight beside you anymore. I cannot channel. I cannot sense Shadowspawn. I cannot do anything for you now.”
“Do you love me?” he asked softly, reaching out and taking her hand in his once more.
“Of course,” she said, sounding strangely aggravated beneath the thick undertow of apathy that threatened to drag her away from him at any moment, “That is why I am-”
“That is enough,” he interrupted quietly, “That is enough for me.”
“No it is not,” Moiraine said, pulling her hand from his and shaking her head, anger flashing in her eyes, as though she thought that he was patronising her and lying to them both, “I cannot give you any reason to love me anymore, I-”
“You are mine,” he said, words rippling with barely controlled fierceness and pride, cutting her off before she spiralled any more into the toxic logic she had been raised with in Cairhien, and lost sight of who she was, and what they were to one another, “I did not swear my oath to the White Tower, or to your Ajah, nor even to an Aes Sedai. Not in my heart,” he added, when he noted the slight crease between her brows that indicated a frown.
Smiling for her, he squeezed her hand firmly, then, with deliberate gentleness, laced their fingers together. She allowed it, though she looked down at where they were now joined with an oddly blank look, as though she was watching him speak to another person, as though she was barely here with him at all now. He only held on all the more tightly for that.
“None of those things mattered to me when I accepted your offer to become your Warder,” he told her softly, “I swore to you. Not Lady Moiraine Damodred of Cairhien, and not Moiraine Sedai of the White Tower. To you. To Moiraine,” he said, praying that the brief spark he had seen in her eyes at those words had been real and not a fabrication of his desperate mind. “I would have given it to that woman had she been a beggar on the streets who had never so much as heard of the One Power before. I would have given it to you if you’d had nothing to offer me but the speech you made about finding the Dragon to protect this world.”
He still remembered it. Every word of what she had said to him on that day when he’d been determined to die forgotten in a war he fought alone remained branded into him. If they ever cut into his body, they would find those things she had told him that had changed his life so profoundly he could not be the man he was without them carved into the very bones of him.
“I bound myself to you not because you could do it with a weave of Spirit, but because of your heart, and your courage, and your grit,” he smiled, even as tears started to blur his view of her as he added, the words choked with emotion, “And because of your foolish, reckless, stubborn refusal to believe that you could not make the world what you thought it could and should be.”
His tears fell at that, silent, and controlled. But a part of him wanted her to see, wanted her to know how deeply he felt all of this. Reaching out, he cupped her face in his hand. She turned away a little, as though overwhelmed by what she saw in him, but also pressed unconsciously into his gentle warmth.
Softening his hand against her, he said, “You have endured something unbearable,” he murmured, “Something it is incredible you have simply survived. Something that has changed everything for you, and I know that. I do,” he said, for even though he could not begin to understand what she was experiencing, he could empathise with all he knew of her, and all they had shared before. “But I need you to know that it changes nothing for me in how I feel about you. I still love you,” he said, as simply as she had spoken, but with such a depth of feeling that he felt a tremble run through her body. Taking a deep breath he continued, saying what he felt he had to say to her now, “I still trust you. I still wish to protect you, and be at your side until the end,” Leaning in, he touched his forehead gently to hers, and said quietly, fiercely, “I am still so proud to be your friend, and your partner, and your Warder.”
“Lan-” she started, sounding tired and wan, but he shook his head, not yet done with what he had to say to her.
"My oath to you will bind us together as long as the Wheel wills us both to live,” he said firmly, a hand cradling the back of her head, keeping her with him, “Whether or not you can channel. Whether or not you can stand. Whether or not you can speak, or think, or feel,” he swore, fingers tangling through her hair with a tremble that gave some relief to the fraught intensity of his emotions. “As long as you live, I will be with you,” he promised her. Breathing shaky, he went on, a little more feeling slipping through his restraint with each word as he breathed, “If you lose everything that you are, and everything that you were, you will never lose this. You will never lose me,” he swore, needing her to know that, needing to know that she would have more success in trying to push aside the mountains than him, “If there comes a time when you cannot even remember my name, you will still know that I am yours. As you are mine.”
She swallowed tightly, throat working as she slowly pulled away from his touch. Shaking her head faintly, she stared past him, past the room, out into something that he could not see, and could no longer feel from her. An unconscious tremor ran through her and her lips twitched. For a moment she wavered, the walls she had placed around herself, between them, with him on the side of the rest of the world, not hers began to crumble. For a moment he thought that he had finally broken through the draining void that was consuming her day by day. Then all at once she shut down on him completely.
“I do not want to be yours,” she said numbly.
The words might have stung more sharply than if she had slapped him, had her voice not been so dead and cold as she spoke them. She went on, words painfully empty, as if she were reciting lines for a play she didn’t believe or even understand, but had to simply get out.
“I do not want to be anyone’s,” she mumbled, in the same mechanical tone, “I do not want to be needed, or wanted, or asked for. I do not want to be strong. I do not want to pretend that I care, or that I can help, or that I can do anything,” her voice was still clear, the words sharply defined, but it made stones seem soft and warm as a thick blanket. “I do not want to be-” she stumbled slightly, then shook her head and said, eyes closed, “I do not want to be.”
“Moiraine-” he croaked, reaching out, but she drew her hand away, the motion casual as though it had been accidental, but he knew better.
“Please just leave me alone, Lan,” she said coldly, sounding so tired as she sank back down onto the bed, pulling the covers up almost over her head, as though she could drown herself in them, “Please,” she added, the word near swallowed by her exhaustion, “Please go.”
She almost broke him. As no wound and no war ever had, or ever could. This woman came closer to destroying him in that moment than anything he had ever known. Without ever trying to, she dug her fingers into the cracks that lined his soul, nails biting in deep, as she almost rent him apart. She almost broke him. But she did not. Because she still needed him, as he still needed her, and he knew that if he left her now, he would lose her, with no hope of ever bringing her back to him.
“I cannot do that, Moiraine,” he said, straightening himself, his voice formal and direct, which seemed to come close to unsettling her as she shifted slightly in place. “I will not do it,” he added, bowing his head slightly in a gesture of respect, but holding her eyes, refusing to back down. “Please do not ask it of me again,” he murmured, his expression a mask of calm resolve, one he might wear before stepping onto a doomed battlefield.
Her whole body seemed to sag against the pillows as she sighed heavily, diminishing her already fragile frame even further. Lowering her head, hers a gesture of defeat, not resolve, she closed her eyes again and hunched away from him, withdrawing even further into her tangle of fabrics.
“What do you want from me, Lan?” she asked in a hoarse, hollow whisper that begged him to tell her so she could give it to him and finally be rid of him.
He wanted to reach for her, but knew in his heart that she would not accept it, and would only pull away. Yet his need to touch her, to connect with her, was suddenly so strong that, for a moment, he thought that he might have a sense of what it was to be her. To have this thing she should have held closest and dearest be out of her reach, rejecting her at every turn.
So he controlled himself, though his voice still held a faint quiver to it as he said quietly,“I want you to let me back in.”
“I have told you that I can’t,” she snapped, her eyes squeezing more tightly shut, her mouth clenched around a snarl, a burst of anger escaping for just a moment. Then she leashed it once more, pulled it back in and buried it deep within the graveyard she had become, haunted by a woman she could no longer be. Taking a deep breath, she continued, her voice that awful, flat recitation once more, “There is nothing that I can do about our bond-”
“I am not talking about the bond,” he interrupted softly, “I’m just talking about you. You’re pulling away from everyone, from me. You’re putting up your walls, and hiding yourself behind them,” he said, she huddled in more deeply to her blankets, as though expecting chastisement or harsh words, “That’s alright,” he said gently, waiting until she hesitantly met his eyes again before he continued, “If that is what you feel you must do in order to survive this then you should do it. But do not shut me out,” he begged her, emotion constricting his throat again as he reached for her, the movement dying halfway through, unable to bear her pulling away again. His hand hovered between them, reaching for her, but halted by those walls she shielded herself with, “Let me come with you this time,” he said, mouth tightening as he worked to control himself.
There was silence for a long time. Yet in this one he sensed consideration from her, rather than utter hopelessness. He gave her time, sitting as patiently as he could, touching the void within himself for comfort.
Finally she spoke, her voice hoarse and unsteady, "I do not know how to do that,” she said shakily, sounding uncertain, which was not a thing he was used to hearing from her. Even when she had felt uncertain within their bond, she had always projected a resolute, unwavering confidence to the world beyond. “I do not know how to share this with you when you do not feel as I feel,” she croaked, “Without the bond, I-”
Lan placed a hand on her side, quieting her, and encouraging her to look at him. When she did, he nodded, softening his expression, the flames of his previous flare of anger utterly extinguished now. He rubbed his hand gently back and forth, savouring the feel of her beneath it, trying to soothe her, to coax her back to him.
“You think that because we do not have the bond at the moment that I do not feel what you feel?“ he asked her gently, meeting her eyes and giving her a soft, sad smile, "You think that I don’t feel this pain with you?” he breathed, shaking his head, “This grief? This awful, screaming emptiness that is taking over you day by day?”
She floundered like a woman drowning, and he reached out, finding her hand where it was buried in her blankets and anchoring her to him. She held him back, thumb brushing absently over the spot between his thumb and forefinger, as she often did. The familiarity of it made his heart convulse within his chest. She was still in there. His Moiraine. Still fighting. Still trying. She was just so, so tired.
"Your losses are mine, remember?” he breathed, nodding encouragingly for her to continue.
A soft little sigh escaped her, and she closed her eyes, looking so exhausted and almost resigned. But she managed to look up at him again, and finished the thought, murmuring faintly, “And mine yours.”
“So let this be ours,“ he said, pulsing his fingers around hers like a heartbeat, reminding her that he was there, and so was she, "Our burden. To carry together as we always have.”
Moiraine hesitated, a slight frown making that line appear between her brows as it always did. She grappled with something it killed him not to feel through their bond. Yet he sensed that she was not trying to push him away again, so he gave her his silence and let her work through it herself.
“I- I don’t know how,” she said at last, a slight shake in her head as she continued, “It sounds ridiculous,” she muttered, frown deepening, “But I’ve gotten so used to you being inside my head, almost knowing what I think before I think it that I- I’m not sure how to find a way to share this with you without the bond,” she murmured, a faint look of desperate fear in her eyes, as though afraid that without the bond she had lost the relationship they had shared.
Lan had struggled with that himself. They had spent so long bonded together, their souls perfect mirrors for the other, their bodies sometimes acting more like limbs of a whole than two separate beings. They had often gone days without needing to utter a word to each other while they travelled, the bond giving them all the companionship and connectedness that they needed. Without that, having to interact with her as he did anyone else, had made him feel clumsy and unsure, like trying to fight after losing far too much blood.
He coaxed her to sit up, which she did, then he held her hand again, stroking her knuckles with his thumb, the way he often did.
“Just talk to me,“ he said gently, "Whatever you are thinking, whatever you are feeling, whatever words are spinning around inside that head of yours, just say them out loud for me to hear.”
“None of my thoughts make any sense at the moment,” she muttered, shaking her head and adding absently, “Not even to me.”
“That’s alright,” he told her, “Honestly I would be worried if they did,” he smiled and added, “Besides, half the time your grand thoughts made no sense to me even with our bond,” she caught his eye, and her mouth twitched in an attempt at a reciprocal smile. His softened, the humour melting away and leaving behind warm reassurance as he said quietly, “Give them to me anyway.”
She considered for a long moment, clearly struggling with herself. It had been a long time since she’d had to try and articulate her feelings; he had always been able to feel them, and generally interpret them. With others she had never even tried. The only other person she trusted enough was Siuan, and Siuan could read her almost as well as Lan could.
“I think- I think that this must be what madness is like,” she whispered finally. Her tone was still horribly flat and distant, but she was talking, and he did his best to listen to her words, and not focus on the awful way she said then, “I can still feel it, you know. I can still feel it. It’s there,” she murmured, her eyes glassy, a hand raising instinctively, “It’s right there. But I cannot touch it. It calls to me…But now it calls in a language that I no longer understand. And my tongue has been torn out so that I cannot answer,” she rasped, staring past him at that endless void even he could not know. It was her mouth that was moving, forming around the words, but it felt so horrifyingly as though she was merely a puppet, something else speaking with her voice, emotionless and empty, as though this was happening to someone else, “It reaches for me, begging, and pleading for me to take it but I can’t. It is so close. And I should be able to touch it. I know that I should. Yet I can’t. So it is both real, and not real, all at once. There and not there. Mine and not mine at all,” she blinked and turned to him, but her eyes were devoid of anything familiar for him to connect to, and she did not seem to see him at all as she murmured, “I do not know how to live like this. It is awful. It is horrifying. It is-” she broke off, and a part of him was glad, because the way she said those things was so unsettling it made his skin crawl. There was no emotion, still, her voice was hollow and faint, almost matter-of-fact, and it terrified him.
She hunched away from him, and he instinctively shifted closer to her in response. Reaching out, he rubbed her back in big, broad strokes, pressing against her and trying to bring her what little comfort he could.
"I know,” he whispered, forcing himself to speak, to break the horrible lingering silence even as his heart and throat both tightened around a new knot of grief for her, “I know it is. I am so sorry.”
“Everything has been taken from me, Lan,” she said, swaying in place, voice so hollow he almost believed that to be true, “The Dragon. This mission of ours. Siuan. The Source. You.”
“Hey,” he breathed, cupping her cheek in his hand, she turned away, not seeming to deliberately pull from his grasp, not even seeming to notice he had been there at all. Face working, emotion choking the words, he took her chin between two fingers and gently turned her back to him, unable to say this without looking in her eyes as he did, “You still have me,” he breathed, “I am not going anywhere. And Siuan is still yours, waiting for you, as she always has, and always will. We still have work to do, hm?”
Those words did not seem to register with her either. Her eyes stared blankly out of the window as she sat, drawing deeper and deeper within herself.
"How could he do this to me?” she murmured, and she did not sound outraged.
Her voice did not burn with justifiable fury, and loathing. It sounded almost confused. As though she was musing idly on how they had managed to take a wrong turn from one village to the next. Horror twisted in his gut as she went on, blinking a little, mildly confused, no more.
“How could he take it from me?” she asked, her face flickering with uncertainty as she looked a little lost now, “How could he take me from myself?” she mumbled slowly, eyelids fluttering rapidly, voice fading away to almost nothing, disconnected and unreal, as though sourceless, echoing from a distant void.
Head cocked slightly to one side, her eyes darkening more and more with each moment that passed, he watched as she silently crumbled like a novice shield wall before a cavalry charge. She did not scream, or weep, or beat her fists against the world in rage. That was not her. Even when she broke down, she did it quietly, and subtly, so that no-one could tell. But he had seen this from her before in their time together. Not often, she had always forced herself to be too strong, but on occasion, and he blessed those times now, for he knew what to do for her to help.
Gathering her in close, Lan cradled her against his chest, feeling as though he was clutching her broken corpse, for all the response she gave him. That had been a frequent nightmare of late for him, sleeping and waking. Finding her at the Eye, lifeless and dead, lost without him to protect her. More and more, he was coming to wonder if that had not been what had happened.
Taking a deep, steadying breath, he pressed her in against him as tightly as he could, as though trying to fuse their bodies together. When she had first asked him to do this for her, he had been afraid that he would hurt her. Instead, he had felt an unprecedented sense of peace through their bond, something he had never experienced from her before. In moments like this, when she fell within herself to a deep abyss of panic and pain, he could help her find her way back, give her something to anchor herself to, a thing to brace against as she hauled herself from the darkness.
"You are here,” he said, holding her to him with all of his strength, “I am here. I am here with you now,” he promised her, raising a hand to rest it gently against the back of her head, pressing her in closer, desperate for her to come back to him, “I have you. You are safe. You are alright. You are safe, Moiraine. I am here.”
A departure from expected content! 1x08 angsting will resume presently, fear not. For now: have this. Shoutout to both @ladyofrosefireand@bloodofthelioness for giving me betas/thoughts on this/actually make it A Thing for y’all.
Title:Ceremony
Warning:Explicit. This be spicy. Also mentions of past blood/show-typical violence.
Summary: Post 1x04, angst, hurt/comfort, spice. Sometimes your platonic soulmate nearly dies, and then you nearly die, in the space of like three days, and that’s just A Lot, and you need some good old-fashioned ‘you nearly died, and I need to reassure myself you’re alive’ sex. Still platonic/on a qpr level for them, the sex is but a vessel for Emotions. Alternating POV.
Teaser:‘With the synchronicity of battle, they inhale, a tension pulling their bodies apart, just so. In that brief space of suspended time and distance, they take the chance to bare each other. Then as they exhale, their bodies meet again, skin to skin. The sudden bright feeling of it is almost scalding, after the indifferent barrier of their clothing, but she wraps her arms around him at once, gathering him to her, drawing him as close as she can while they remain within their own bodies.
Hair rises along his arms in response to the sudden chill of the empty air around them. She does not flinch from it. She closes her eyes, and embraces saidar, and lets him feel it, too. One hand drags its way up and down his spine. A smooth and steady glide downwards, a swift, sparking pull up. With that motion she weaves her power, and channels the fire to blaze with heat for him. His body melts into her in answer.‘
Moiraine rarely, if ever, gives him commands. It is not how their partnership works. But when she looks at him in the cavern, as he shakily gets to his feet, the other sisters having safely contained Logain, he knows that she is not asking. Nor does she wait for a response before she turns and strides back out into the camp like she’s marching into battle.
Outwardly, she is as composed as ever. Within him, however, their bond burns.
Lan follows, equally wordless, and falls into step beside her.
The tension in him, the rising pull of desire he feels, the swelling, building need inside meets hers with the force of two tidal waves crashing together. And all that keeps them apart is twenty years of cultivated discipline and strength of will.
That falls away the second they gain the privacy of their own tent. For the world she must be Moiraine Sedai. And Moiraine Sedai is a cool, calculating near-deity in the eyes of so many. She needs someone in whose eyes she will always be a woman. A creature of flesh, and blood, and feeling, who sometimes needs to be held close, fingers running gently through her hair, and held together as the cracks begin to show.
Like a pair of arrows drawn back by the taut string of a bow, stressing, straining, they finally loosed themselves, with the world held back behind thin strips of green canvas. Shielded from the burden of their duty, and the pressure of the expectation of everyone else, they are allowed to briefly be human with one another. Lan barely has a second to set down his sword, still bloodied, before Moiraine is there. Her body is hard and solid against him; as carefully sculpted for war as his own. Her embrace is a fierce thing, as she pulls him into her arms, and holds him there. He closes his eyes, his body instinctively shifting to accommodate hers, knowing what she will seek from him. Their bodies flush. Her arms around his chest. Hands clasped at the back of his neck. Fingers grazing his hair. Head tucked gently against his neck.
Trembling, she presses her body to his. Her breath comes in short bursts against his throat, as though she’d just run for miles, tearing the world aside as she went to reach him. Part of it is from the effort she expended to Gentle Logain. He still feels that in her. The lingering effects of it. And the lingering effects of the anger that had partially driven her to it. Anger for him. For what she might have lost. For what she could not save. Most of it is the overwhelming emotion within her. Emotions that she’s struggling, and failing, to contain, as she clings to him in the stifling darkness.
With all the burdens placed upon her, all the burdens she has placed upon herself, she handles the weight of them well. But it is such a fragile, precarious balance, he knows. To have so much contained within a single person. Sometimes it becomes too much, even for her. Madness tugs at the edges of her fraying sanity, ever begging her to succumb to the pressure of it all. He feels it now, hears it whisper to her, and knows what he must do. As she breaks like a wave against him, seeming small for all her strength, he puts his arms around her, and holds her firmly to him. Her body melts into him, as the embrace gives her permission for that strength to fail. In his arms she is simultaneously less than perfect, and divine. Given the ability to be scared, and weak, and insecure before him. While in his eyes she will never be anything less than everything.
Her body shakes more violently now, for him, than it ever did with the fever that tried to kill her. His fingers find that knot of tension between her shoulders that always causes her problems, and starts to rub, and soothe. Grounding her with the motions, he does not stop until he coaxes a faint hum of peace from her, and feels her trembling ease slightly.
Slowly, carefully, noting through their bond how sensitive she feels, as though her skin has been electrified by a recent storm, he brings his hand down to her waist. He has his own fears to face, after what happened in the cavern. A deft finger brushes the hole torn in her shirt. The skin beneath is smooth and unmarked but he can still feel the pain of the wound that was there. His heart clenches, in time with the thud of the axe haft punching through her gut in his mind. A scene he does not think he will cease replaying until death takes him.
As he lay thrashing in the sand in an ever-growing pool of his own blood. Choking. Drowning. Dying. He felt her. He felt her agony. And tried to reach her, still. Even as she tried to reach him.
Had they died, their corpses would have lain together, their hands outstretched, fingers so near to touching.
***
The bond darkens, as she feels Lan’s fingers clench against her hip, and pain and fear swell within him, as though he has siphoned them from her, only to suffer from them himself. Moiraine reaches down and takes his hand, twining their fingers together like a weave. Her grip is so strong she fears it might bruise, and starts to slacken. But he seizes that instinct, and halts it, gripping back with the same fierce defiance she had met him with.
He doesn’t speak. Nor does she.
They share everything. The bond swells between them like a sea in storm. There is too much in them both to be contained in a single thread. So they weave more with the strength of their emotion. Joining, like tiny rivers that come together at an ocean, bringing the flood of all that he is, and all that he feels for her.
She gasps, and he goes still for a moment as they adjust. It’s like the feeling she has when she first takes him inside her, the welcome stretch, treading close to pain, but overwhelmed by pleasure. Yet this is more. So much more. Not just his body, but his heart, his very soul, shared with her, entrusted to her. Only to her.
Simultaneously, their hands move beneath clothes, pulling them free, pushing them away. Their eyes remain closed, but it doesn’t matter. They’ve done this so many times, so many ways, they could do it blind, and deaf, and senseless. The shaking of their hands adds only a second to this ancient ritual they both know in their bones as well as their hearts.
With the synchronicity of battle, they inhale, a tension pulling their bodies apart, just so. In that brief space of suspended time and distance, they take the chance to bare each other. Then as they exhale, their bodies meet again, skin to skin. The sudden bright feeling of it is almost scalding, after the indifferent barrier of their clothing, but she wraps her arms around him at once, gathering him to her, drawing him as close as she can while they remain within their own bodies.
Hair rises along his arms in response to the sudden chill of the empty air around them. She does not flinch from it. She closes her eyes, and embraces saidar, and lets him feel it, too. One hand drags its way up and down his spine. A smooth and steady glide downwards, a swift, sparking pull up. With that motion she weaves her power, and channels the fire to blaze with heat for him. His body melts into her in answer.
Trousers and undergarments follow all at once. Pushed down by fumbling hands, and even graceless feet, anything to stop them being drawn apart from each other. She can feel, in bond and in her body, as his breathing grows heavier, faster. Her heart pounds anticipation’s pulsing beat against her ribs so hard she knows it beats against him, too. Her skin, flushed and sensitive, seems to ripple like a disturbed pond with each brush of him against her.
Entirely naked before him, she at last feels safe. Only with him could she be so vulnerable, and her instinct responds to that knowledge, curling up quiet inside her, like a hound before a hearth. All of her knows that to be so exposed, he is there, and she sinks into the comfort of that like a warm bath, lets it rise up over her head, lets it drown her so gently in him.
It tastes like agony, to part from him, even a little, just enough to let a whisper of air pass between them. But her reward is the sight of him before her. Whole and unharmed. There is no scar to mark where the wound that nearly took his life had torn his skin. Not even a spatter of blood like casually tossed paint across the canvas of his skin. The sole proof it didn’t exist only in her imagination is the pain that she remembers in their bond. The pain, and the terror she had known as he began to slip away.
Shaking, unable to control it, she reaches out with both hands and presses them to his throat. The skin is smooth and unmarred. His pulse beats strong beneath her gentle touch. The eyes that find hers in the dim light are soft, and understanding. His hand rests gently on her side, where she had been stabbed in the explosion, and finds it similarly, miraculously, unharmed.
Bidden by something deeper than conscious awareness, her hands begin seeking him. For what she does not know. For anything, anything that might try to take him from her again. She needs to touch him, to feel him, to run her hands over every inch of his body and assure herself that he is still here, still with her. With her movements, she channels, pulling weaves from the ether to guide her fears, Delving into him, assuring her that he is safe, and whole, and unharmed.
***
Moiraine’s fear is palpable. Like a summer storm, darkening the skies, and whipping through the unsuspecting trees without warning.
His instinct on feeling it is to lift her into his arms, to walk with her to the bed, to lay her down onto it, and make love to her until she can no longer even remember what her fear felt like. Until she is shaking only from the pleasure that he has given her. Until all she knows is his warmth, and his light, and his love for her. But as his body starts to shift to do just that, the bond seems to envelope him, wrapping him up and stilling him, begging him with silence to stay in place. Just for a moment. Just for now.
He complies without question, and she pulls him in tighter. Closer than before. He is so aware of her body that it almost physically hurts. The heat of her skin, bare against his, makes the flames she channeled for them feel like Winter snow in the mountains. Every curve and line of her body fits so well with his, as though a sculptor moulded the two of them from a single piece of clay. Her breasts press into him. Nipples hardening for him, despite the heat. Lust begins to rise within him, firing through his blood like battle fever. And as she raises her head to meet his eyes, he knows that she feels it too, and knows that what she’s doing to him with the shift of her body against his is entirely deliberate.
***
Her need for Lan feels like embracing the One Power. It thrums inside her, a riotous rush of energy and feeling, begging to be used. And she takes it, she takes it all, and closes her eyes as she sinks into it and feels. Her body has been thrown back into a fever that is boiling over within her. It is going to tear through her, to burn her up. Her baser instincts clash within, as fear gives way to hunger, and hunger blazes up into need, as she turns to him, and meets his eyes, and finds the same fire kindling in him.
He strokes his fingers through her hair, and does not flinch as her nails bite into his skin while she clings to him. She needs him closer. She needs him in her. She needs more. As she raises her head at last, he lifts a hand, and meets her, cradling her cheek. His thumb strokes gently, up and down, the calluses there scraping her soft skin. It feels exquisite. Like he’s scraping away a layer of ash and restraint and revealing her true self beneath.
They move together, like a pair in a dance with music only they can hear, their bodies flowing with perfect symmetry, so they do not part for even a moment. She steps back, and he follows, as he always does, as he always will. Her eyes do not leave his as they turn in place, so that he can sit on the bed and draw her down into his lap. Her body flows like water over and around him, molding against him the moment she’s able, her face pressed against his neck once more, but this time it is with hunger, not fear. She nips lightly against the skin with her teeth until he gasps. Then sucks it between her lips to soothe in turn. Her kisses form a ring around his neck, pleasured bruises tracing the path of the blade that had sliced through him, replacing it with her marks instead.
Her hips rock against him in slow, pulsing rolls, like a wave claiming a shore, so gently it doesn’t realise what’s happened until they’re one. It’s been some time since they’ve done this, but her body knows what she needs. It responds to him, the heat of him, the slow drag of her centre against his thigh, which he shifts deftly to alter her angle. She feels him harden against her as she moves, and it sends a light thrill of pleasure sparking through her core. She feels his need through the bond, of course, but this visceral, physical reminder of how much he wants her makes her tremble.
The growing wetness between her legs heightens her awareness of where his hands are. One at the base of her spine, tilting her hips towards him, the other at her back, steadying her. Neither where she needs them. She does not say a word to him, still. He is already moving when she catches one of his wrists between two fingers. He meets her eyes as she guides him, and let’s her slip his hand between her thighs, legs shifting open for him. He gives a soft hiss at the first stroke of his deft fingers between her folds. His pupils widen at the same time she feels a deep thrum of lust from him through their bond. Her physical responses having a similar effect on him as his had upon her.
***
Lan shifts, still holding Moiraine against him, but nudging her to raise her head slightly, giving him access to her throat, so his lips can trail across her neck and kiss against the point where her pulse thumps against the press of his tongue. The sensation brings him as much security as it brings her satisfaction. Her breath catches, so quietly he might not have heard, had her lips not been pressed to his ear. She exhales slowly, almost a groan, and presses down into the hand he has between her thighs, seeking more from him. He smiles a little at her need. Such a patient woman in all things, all things but this. Both of her hands find their way into his hair, pulling, just slightly, not enough to cause pain, just enough to introduce a little tension to him, for this is a game she plays as well as him.
Through it all, while one hand brings her pleasure, the other lingers on the echo of her pain. There’s no scar to guide his path. No torn skin to seek for. Not even a blemish to indicate the spot. But he knows it. He knows that this is where she was stabbed straight through and pinned to the ground, the time since it happened still measured in minutes. Her hand covers his and holds it, squeezing tight, trying to reassure him.
The steady rocking of her hips pauses, and the fingers in his hair gentle, no longer pulling, simply resting. He feels her eyes upon him, and meets them, as his mind tries to drag him away from her again. Back to the cave. Back to that moment where he had felt her. He had felt her as she strained for him. She had torn the haft of the axe from herself with fury and desperation, so that she might reach him. But the pain of it had overwhelmed her.
He feels her respond to the darkening of his mood. He knows that she is aware of what caused the stutter in his feelings. And he feels a new emotion rise to claim her as she looks at him. Guilt. Guilt and shame. As she remembers his pain. She remembers her efforts to get to him, and thinks not of what she put herself through for him, of how she would have torn the world asunder to reach him, but only that she failed to do so. All of the strength, all of the poise she held herself with as she had claimed him with her body starts to falter and fail. Her head bows and he hears a sob, quickly stifled, but already felt by him.
Lan raises both of his hands at once, startling her, as he breaks from their reverie and ritual of this moment. He places them tenderly on either side of her face, and catches the tears that would fall before they can. Closing his eyes, he draws her in, gentle but inevitable, and touches their foreheads together. Then he holds her there. While his soul answers hers and makes her understand.
He will stand for no guilt from her. Nor will he allow shame. Not in this moment, with nothing between them but sweat, and skin, and darkness. Not when he does not think it possible to love another as keenly as he loves her. And he will not have her feel anything less of herself than the adoration he experiences. Raw and real as a morning sunrise.
Her lips are slightly parted, overwhelmed by him, and her breath comes in short, hot bursts that mingle with his own. His head tilts, just slightly, his nose pressing against hers. He feels her respond, nuzzling against him in silent answer. His lips brush against hers, only just, as gentle as a summer breeze, a question. She answers by leaning in and giving him what he needs, covering his mouth with hers in a deep kiss that he cannot help but gasp into.
Drawing back, panting slightly, he meets her eyes and waits for her nod, and responds with his own. Then he lets his hands fall from her cheeks, though their foreheads remain gently pressed together. He moves them slowly down her body, never missing a fraction of her, flowing perfectly with every curve and shift of her. He leaves one hand grounded on her hip, moving with her as she starts to rock against him once more, seeking that friction between them. The other slides deftly between her thighs, feeling them open for him. With intimate ease, he drags his thumb between her folds again, as slick and wet for him as he is hard and hot for her.
Her body shifts minutely against him, and he allows that to guide him, as he finds her clit, and deliberately makes sure it gently scrapes the callus on the pad of his thumb. She responds at once. Arching against him, her hips press down against his hand, seeking more. Her nails bite deeply into his shoulder as she grips onto him, begs him with that pressure not to stop. The slight hitch in her breath is all the sound she’s likely to give him, but he doesn’t need more. He feels it in their bond. The sensation is not as keen for him as it is for her. It is but an echo of the pleasure he’s coaxed to life within her. But it is enough. In that moment it is everything. To know, to know what he makes her feel, the pleasure that he brings her. He has to bite his lip, and leash himself with all his self control, because he does not want to come tonight before he’s inside her.
Closing his eyes, he repeats the motion of his thumb between her thighs, letting repeated movements become a steady rhythm. Her pleasure builds, but her need is almost unbearable now. Her body strains against him, her hips rocking urgently, altering their pace with every panting breath, pushing him faster, begging for more.
He does not ask her what she needs from him. He does not have to. He knows. From their bond, and from all the times he’s taken care of her in the past. He gives it to her without restraint or hesitation. Thumb working to the beat of her heart against her clit, he slides two fingers into her, curling them, dragging them against that spot inside her. That almost coaxes a whimper from her, as her mouth falls open in pleasure, and he has to grit his teeth against the ache that’s building in him to hold himself back for her.
Her breathing becomes heavier, and she buries her face against his neck once more, in that space where it fits so perfectly, as though his body has evolved through time with her to shape itself precisely to what she needs. His cock twitches as her lips mouth soundlessly against his skin in her pleasure because he knows that it’s his name she presses into him now.
He brings her to the edge, while she clings to him, nails leaving more marks against his skin, and lets herself go where he leads. She’s so close, quivering around him, but he can feel her holding herself back. She doesn’t want it like this tonight. She wants it to be with him. So he slides a hand under her, feeling her move to help him, and lifts her up, bracing her against his chest. One of her hands, shaking, lets go of his shoulders, and wraps around him, guiding him to her. Slowly, so slowly, he lowers her, and she sinks down onto him with a trembling exhalation, while he bites his lip and presses his face down into her thick dark hair as he fights to control himself at the feel of her around him.
***
Moiraine senses the shift as control moves again to her, Lan allowing her to take over. He’s taken care of her so well, and she’s so close for him. Now it is her turn to take care of him. And she does, as she eases down onto him, inch by inch, letting him feel every exquisite second of it. She pushes everything he does to her through the bond, wanting him to know, absolutely, the effect that he has on her. The slick stretch of him filling her, the completeness, as though she was lacking something without him, the rightness of taking him inside her. Lan rewards her with a soft moan into her hair as she settles fully on him, their hips now flush.
She gives him time to adjust, though her body urges her to move. There is something she wants first, and she will have it before she gives in to him completely. Dragging her fingers through his hair, she coaxes him to raise his head so she can look into his eyes as they do this. When he does, she smiles, hands moving to rest on either side of his face, as he had done for her.
***
Lan whispers her name, and she surrenders to him at last. They move together, with a completeness it would be impossible to find with any other partner. She rides him with perfect rhythm. Each pulse of her hips takes him just as deep as he needs her. The agony as he slides out only enhances the intensity when he thrusts back in, a harsh pant of breath pressed into her shoulder with each one. The slick heat of them as she slides down onto him is everything. He lifts up into her, meeting each stroke, angling himself so that he finds that spot within her that makes her tighten around him just. Like. That. His mouth falls open, too far gone to moan for her, he just gasps as they bring each other closer and closer. She tucks her head in against his neck once more, lips pressing against his skin, as they chase each other’s pleasure.
It happens both too soon, and not nearly soon enough. All at once, she shudders around him. She makes that sound, the only one he hears from her when they do this, the faintest quiver of a whine in the back of her throat. Her hands clutch onto him as though she never means to let go. Her body trembles, as her back arches, her mouth fallen open, lips quivering. And she comes around him at last.
***
Moiraine feels her eyes pull shut as her body tightens with pleasure. Lan goes still within her, eyes closed, lips parted, expression exalted. She feels his need through the bond. So close. So close for her. Just needing a little more from her. Just a little more. Shaking, she clutches his face between her hands and opens her eyes, even as the aftershocks burst through her like shooting stars in a blank night sky. Meeting his gaze she nods urgently to him, making herself move on him again, oversensitive and trembling as she is, giving him what he needs.
“Come,” she whispers to him, “Come.”
As before, he obeys. Crying out her name and muffling the sound of it in her skin, he fills her in a rush, thrusting up into her one last time. She lets out a little sigh as he does, feeling his relief crash through the bond.
Breathing hard, chests rising and falling in unison, hearts pounding out a singular beat, they take a moment to recover. The bond, usually a gentle trickle between them, has swelled to a flood as they had embraced it, and each other. As they pant, and shake, and hold each other, it begins to return to something more normal. Though it’s still overly sensitive, like their sparking skin, and she feels acutely aware of the minute details of his emotions, even as they withdraw from one another.
***
Collapsing back down against him, Moiraine nuzzles gently into his neck. He can feel a dampness there that he knows comes not from sweat, but silent tears. He brushes them away, as he might a stray strand of hair, with careful casualness, not drawing attention to the state of their emotions. They will have a conversation about this, he’ll make sure of it, but it can wait a while yet until she’s ready. His fingers find that spot between her shoulder blades that he knows will knot with her anxiety, and work gently at it, feeling her relax again, where tension had begun to creep in.
“We should rest now,” he murmurs softly into her hair, feeling it stir with the heat of his breath.
Gratitude stirs within her for that, and for the blanket he drapes around her shoulders, when he senses her starting to feel cold.
As they adjust, he slips out of her, and she shifts, a note of displeasure in her, which makes him smile. She does not let him rise to fetch wet cloths to clean them, though. Her composure has not quite returned, and in its absence, she needs him there. So he stays, resting his chin on top of her head, tucking her in close.
Finally, she gives him a gentle nudge, allowing him to leave. Lifting her with ease, he sets her down on the bed, then moves off. He returns with a small bowl of water, which she channels a little warmer for them. He attends to her, and she to him, the closing stages of their ceremony.
Then they dress one another. He would have preferred to remain naked, holding her to him, skin to skin, for that last moment of comfort before they rest. But he knows she would never relax that way. So they dress again, then he draws her into bed, and lets her hold him as they succumb to sleep.
Thinking about Moiraine absently reaching for the power to do totally ordinary things because it’s just so unconscious and instinctive and she honestly just forgets that she can’t.
Trying to light a candle, or clear up some spilled wine, or ease the pain from a bruise Lan got while training. Not even thinking about it. Making the appropriate channeling gesture and then immediately turning away to move onto the next thing.
Each time it takes about a second before she realises that the candle is still dark, the wine is still spilled, and Lan has just closed his eyes with a wince at what she’s tried, and failed, to do.
So over and over again she keeps getting hit with the awful reminder that….she can’t.
Summary: Moiraine is having a rough time, so Lan steps up as a good Warder should to provide her some comfort, unorthodox though it may appear. Desperate times call for desperate measures…
Teaser: ‘The cat nestled in Moiraine’s lap was still as content to stay snuggled on her knee as it had when it had first jumped onto her several hours ago. It was a surprisingly large thing, given that she suspected it was stray, mostly orange, with some spots of black she was unsure were fur or dirt, it was difficult to determine. Its large size seemed necessary to contain its heart, given the intensity of its purring, which it had not stopped since it had trotted into the room as if it had owned it.’
The cat nestled in Moiraine’s lap was still as content to stay snuggled on her knee as it had when it had first jumped onto her several hours ago. It was a surprisingly large thing, given that she suspected it was stray, mostly orange, with some spots of black she was unsure were fur or dirt, it was difficult to determine. Its large size seemed necessary to contain its heart, given the intensity of its purring, which it had not stopped since it had trotted into the room as if it had owned it.
Today had been a bad day. She’d barely slept, relentless nightmares, one after the other, no matter how often she woke, or what she tried to keep them at bay. When her breakfast had been delivered by her servant, she’d left it outside her door, too nauseous and unsettled to contemplate eating it. Though she had tried to get work done, she’d mostly found herself staring blankly at the stone wall opposite, thoughts swirling like the last dregs of dirty bathwater circling the drain.
Having the comforting, warm pressure of a living body nestled against hers was more of a relief than she ever thought it could be. One hand tickled the cat absently behind an ear, and it enthusiastically butted its head into the touch, as though it had been as desperate for this contact as she had.
It was such a simple thing, to make her feel so much better. Foolish, too, she thought to herself, that this should help her when all else had failed. Yet it had reminded her that the world was both bigger and smaller than the pain she was experiencing. Everything was going on, as she sat here in her suffering, and there were still small, innocent, helpless creatures who needed her to stop this world falling into darkness.
She looked up with a slight start as the door opened and Lan entered the room with a tray of food and tea. He seemed to think that if he did not bring her something to eat, and then sit to eat with her, that she would simply waste away. Perhaps he had a point, she allowed, as she reached for the tea he had brought her and sipped delicately at it while he laid out the plates on the small table beside her. She gave him a small, grateful smile. He deserved better than this, being reduced to a manservant for a broken former noble, fetching her tea and snacks like a butler. Yet he did it with the same adoration and dedication with which he guarded her in battle facing down a trolloc army. She loved him for that, and for so much more besides that she could never properly convey to him.
As they began to eat, she noted that his eyes were watering, and he sneezed a few times, though with a valiant effort at hiding it.
Smiling thinly, suspicion solidifying into near certainty, she took a sip of her tea then said mildly, “You should really speak to Nynaeve about those allergies of yours, Lan, she will probably be able to give you something for them.”
He grunted noncommittally, as was his usual response to any suggestion he see to his own needs instead of her own. But she saw him smile into his soup as he took another spoonful of it.
The two of them sat in quiet companionship, feeling connected in spite of their silent bond, the only sound in the room the continued purring of the ginger cat on Moiraine’s knee.
***
Cats liked Moiraine. Lan had learned that early in to their partnership. Whenever they stopped at an inn, or took shelter in a barn, any cats that lurked within the shadows would emerge and seek her out, as though she had bidden them with the Power to do so. He’d watched feral tom cats roll on their backs like sleepy hounds at their master’s feet, and terrified alleycats become like playful kittens before her. She confessed she had always had this gift, even before she knew that she could channel, it had simply intensified as she’d gotten older.
Around the same time he’d discovered that cats were drawn to Moiraine as bees were to flowers, he’d found something out about himself, too. He was deathly allergic to the things. Being around one for more than a few minutes had him sneezing as though he was ill with fever, and coughing fit to hack up a lung or two. His eyes would stream, his throat would itch, and his body would do just about anything to encourage him to get away from them with great haste.
Early on in their bond, Moiraine had found this intensely amusing. Their first night at the inn, she had charmed the chef’s fat black and white cat with a weave and had it sleep on his head. He’d barely been able to see out of his eyes when he woke up, and had wheezed so badly for breath he’d woken his Aes Sedai in the early hours of the morning. At that point, he had also found the situation far more amusing, as it transpired that an allergic response was something that transferred across the bond.
Moiraine had given him a look through wide, streaming eyes, that said quite plainly she was seriously considering stabbing him through the heart with his own sword just to rid herself of his affliction. In mild fear for his own life, he had delicately suggested that perhaps she could try a weave or two to spare them this problem.
Thus had begun a small project for her, as they had travelled. If there had been anything resembling a library, she had visited her Brown sisters and attempted to discover knowledge of something that could help them. In the end, frustrated and in apparently dire need of some affection from the flea-infested felines that kept seeking her out, in spite of how they made her sneeze, she had simply created her own. He still teased her about this, from time to time, that when they wrote the history and accomplishments of the great Moiraine Sedai, the first note in the recordings of weaves she had created would be one to deal with sniffles brought on by cat fur.
Still, it had served them well in many cases, and he’d heard that their Yellow Sisters had even managed to adapt and improve it to cleanse not only the air a person breathed, but the air in their lungs and body, allowing them to cleanse it of any toxins. Lan suspected that, though Moiraine would die before she willingly admitted it to another soul, the fact it allowed her to befriend cats in every town once more was still the best thing about it, as far as she was concerned.
Lan didn’t have Moiraine’s odd gift to attract the world’s most standoffish and aloof animals, but he did have a coin purse, and the ability to communicate with Fal Dara’s street kids, which proved almost as effective. The wide-eyed child had looked at him as though afraid he was trying to deceive her then, when his hard face and stern eyes had convinced her he was serious, as though he was simply mad. Mad or not, he had given her good coin, and a hot bun from a street vendor, and this was apparently enough for her to point him in the direction of the local street cats and give some opinions on the ones least likely to claw his face from his skull for looking at them.
What he did not have, unfortunately, was Moiraine’s weave to help deal with his allergies.
So it was that as he walked through Fal Dara’s streets, his eyes streamed, his chest convulsed with his coughing, and his mouth and throat tickled as though he was trying to eat a fistful of feathers. In spite of all of that, he carried his prize as proudly as he would have carried the head of a slain trolloc warchief. The large, confused ginger cat had apparently given up the notion that it could escape him now, and simply sat limp and deeply befuddled in his iron grip.
Lan carried it back to the royal chambers, where he and Moiraine had been given quarters. As they drew nearer he paused a moment, just out of earshot of her door, and gave the cat a stern look. As much as he could with red-rimmed, watering eyes.
“She’s having a hard time at the moment,” he informed the cat, as though it could understand and, even more unlikely, as though it actually cared. It blinked at him, which was enough encouragement to continue, “You’ll make her feel better,” he ordered it, trying to keep the instinctive ‘or else’ threat out of his tone, but not entirely succeeding.
Light, I need to sleep, he thought vaguely as he realised what he was doing, and hoped no-one had noticed him. Fortunately the corridor seemed empty. Moiraine had developed a new power, since the Eye, the ability to keep others away. No-one wanted to go near the unfortunate Aes Sedai who could no longer channel, and the halls were eerily silent and haunted. Like a graveyard.
Walking on silent feet to her door, slightly ajar, he placed the cat down carefully then gave it a slight shoo towards her. He needn’t have bothered. It shook itself free of the indignity of being carried by him, then became aware that it was within Moiraine’s aura. It chirped eagerly, tail going up with interest, then it trotted straight into her room, making an obvious beeline for her.
Lan paused outside, fighting down another sneezing fit so as not to alert Moiraine of his part in this. Listening, he heard her voice for the first time that day give a quiet, “Hello there,” as the cat meowed for her attention.
Smiling to himself, he heard the purring start, and the smile in Moiraine’s voice was obvious as she murmured, “What a beautiful young man.”
Satisfied, he slipped off towards the kitchens to fetch Moiraine something to eat, hopeful that she would take it now, and might even manage a few words for him.
Warnings:Moiraine is having a bit of a bad time post EoTW.
Summary: Siuanraine, post 1x08, based on the prompt ‘run to another character’ and/or 'stop at the sight of another character’. Lan arranges things to smuggle Siuan into Fal Dara so that she can meet with Moiraine and try to bring her some comfort following the harrowing events at the Eye of the World.
Teaser:’“Take me to her,” she commanded, with the voice of the Amyrlin Seat, so forcefully that Lan’s family paused, staring at her with something close to shock.
No doubt they were wondering, likely for the first time since she’d entered their home, dressed in casual clothes only a bit better than she might have worn on the boats as a youth, who exactly they had taken in and given soup to. Taking a breath, she drew on the calm she’d been forced to find when the Wheel had rewarded her ambition with the power and responsibility to reshape this world. Softening her voice, she reached out and gripped Lan’s hand, squeezing urgently.
With the voice of a woman who loved her she said, “Please take me to her now.”’
Siuan Sanche had never, in all her life, been as happy to see a man as she was to see Lan Mandragoran ducking through the doorway and shrugging down his hood. His eyes swept around the small home where he had instructed her to go, where she had been fussed over by the people there who had taken one look at her haggard face and decided she needed soup immediately.
There had been something comforting in that, as she knew it was exactly what her father would have done in their position. The only difference would have been instead of chunks of unidentifiable meat in the bowl, there would have been chunks of unidentifiable fish. It had also amused her to think of the reaction some of the Sitters might have had at the idea of the Amyrlin Seat being presented with peasant broth. It had amused her more to imagine eating it in front of them while making deliberate and uncomfortable eye contact, daring them to make so much as a peep about the ‘propriety’ of it all.
In spite of the down-to-earth food and pleasant atmosphere, she had still worn through both the neat rugs and her thinly stretched patience in the hours since arriving. Jumping every time there was movement outside, unable to hold a conversation for fear she would miss the sound of Lan’s arrival. Now that he was finally here, she felt her heart lurch with gratitude at the sight of the man now forcing a smile for the sake of his family.
Standing up, she unceremoniously brushed Zahir out of the way as he tried to greet his adopted son, and yanked Lan down into a powerful hug. He pulled her in close, and they took a long moment just holding each other. Siuan felt Lan sag against her with a mix of relief and exhaustion she was as familiar with as the ocean was familiar with salt and water.
Bracing herself, she drew away first and held him at arm’s length, whereupon she studied him with a critical eye. She’d known this man for twenty years now, and though their encounters had generally been in snatched moments through the years, she felt that she knew him well. The initial mutual respect between them, an acknowledgement that they shared a love for Moiraine, and a desire to keep her safe, had evolved and blossomed into a genuine trust and fondness for one another. They’d found they had more in common than being united in the near impossible task of keeping Moiraine safe. Now, she trusted him with her secrets, things that could utterly ruin her. More than that, though, she trusted him to keep Moiraine safe when she could not, and to take care of her.
The first thing she noted in him was that he looked tired. That was a bad sign. Siuan had been sure that the mountains and shores would display fatigue before Lan would. Yet she could feel it in him now, a tide that was still doing its duty and meeting the shore, but slowly, and painfully, as though the light waters had been replaced with thick corrupted blood.
“Thank you for coming,” Lan murmured quietly, as though Siuan could have done any differently when she’d received his letter.
After cursing and ranting at thin air for half an hour about Moiraine’s stupid stubborn refusal to ever ask for help, no matter how dire the situation, she had packed a bag, arranged her excuses, and left for Fal Dara. She had spared a moment amidst all of that furious chaos to bless Lan for thinking of her and doing whatever it took to see that his foolish little snapper of an Aes Sedai was taken care of.
Her nerves felt as frayed as old rope, right on the edge of snapping and sending her drifting out to sea without a tether left to sanity. Siuan Sanche was not an impatient woman, if she was any judge. In her youth she had been. She’d been as tempestuous and impulsive as a summer storm at times, and hadn’t wanted to stop for longer than it took to glance at the horizon she was forever chasing. The Wheel had taught her to wait. Perhaps too well. She felt like she spent her whole damned life waiting these days. Waiting for change. Waiting for calamity. Waiting for the tension she felt in the world to finally snap. Waiting for Moiraine to bring news of their quest. Waiting for the woman she loved to return to her arms where she belonged. Right now, she was certain that if Lan made her wait for even a moment longer than was absolutely fucking necessary, she’d skin and gut him for sport.
“How is she?” she demanded, just cutting right to the meat of the matter, nevermind batting back pleasantries for the several unbearable minutes that would have consumed.
A flash of pain marred Lan’s usually controlled expression and he turned away, teeth gritted against words he couldn’t say.
Oh Light blind and burn me, she thought, feeling her heart twist in her chest.
It had been a stupid fucking question to ask, anyway, no wonder he couldn’t bloody answer it. Moiraine had confronted the fucking Dark One at the fucking Eye of the World and he’d- She couldn’t even think it. Her mind split around the word like a river around a rock, unable to ignore it, but equally unable to directly confront it. Still, what had she expected when she asked Lan that question? What else could Moiraine be except a fucking mess? Twenty years. Twenty years of danger, and trauma, and near-death experiences every other day, just for fun, and Lan had never needed to send for her. Not once. Not until now.
“Take me to her,” she commanded, with the voice of the Amyrlin Seat, so forcefully that Lan’s family paused, staring at her with something close to shock.
No doubt they were wondering, likely for the first time since she’d entered their home, dressed in casual clothes only a bit better than she might have worn on the boats as a youth, who exactly they had taken in and given soup to. Taking a breath, she drew on the calm she’d been forced to find when the Wheel had rewarded her ambition with the power and responsibility to reshape this world. Softening her voice, she reached out and gripped Lan’s hand, squeezing urgently.
With the voice of a woman who loved her she said, “Please take me to her now.”
***
Siuan braced herself as Lan opened the door to Moiraine’s chambers for her and stepped back to allow her to step inside first. Heart constricting her throat, lungs feeling made of iron in her chest, she immediately swept the room for her. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but somehow the room being perfectly neat and ordinary felt wrong. Something terrible had happened, and a part of her felt that the world should show that. There should be some sign that it recognised what it had done to this woman that she loved. It should be darker, and colder, chaos and destruction reflecting what had been done to its occupant. But no. The only thing wrong with the room was that Moiraine was nowhere to be found within it.
Ascertaining this with a soft growl, Siuan rounded on Lan, fear bursting up in her like a flaring pufferfish, “Where is she?” she demanded, the words sharp as shark’s teeth, even if she knew it was undeserved.
The flash of worry she saw in Lan’s eyes did nothing to help her own. It was replaced immediately by a look of pain. Belatedly she realised that, if the bond had still been present, he would have been able to feel her, would have known exactly where she was without even trying. He’d likely forgotten that in a panicked moment, the absence of her registering on his instincts as a sign that she was in some sort of danger, causing his initial concern. Remembering that she was gone because their bond had been taken along with Moiraine’s power was responsible for the pain she still saw in his eyes.
“I left her on the balcony,” Lan replied quietly, recovering himself enough to answer, though his jaw remained locked in a tight grimace.
Nodding, Siuan paused just long enough to give his shoulder a soft, apologetic squeeze for her part in aggravating the still fresh wound that was the hole where his bond should have been. Then she marched towards the doors at the far end of the chamber which led to the balcony beyond. Lan trailed behind her, keeping close, but giving her as much space as he could. Any at all was near miraculous, at the moment, and she spared a thought to be thankful in his direction at the effort. After what Moiraine had done, Siuan was impressed he hadn’t sewn himself to her side the second he’d found her again to stop anything else from happening to her. Lan could be described as ‘somewhat overprotective’, in the way that the ocean could be described as ‘somewhat wet’. Siuan had always blessed him for it, because the Light knew Moiraine needed it. In fact, for her, he was probably entirely too lenient, he-
Siuan froze at the sight of her, her mind going utterly blank, all of her thoughts snuffed out like a candle in the face of a tsunami.
The balcony before her was a narrow thing, but it spanned the entire length of the chambers that had been given to the visiting Aes Sedai at Fal Dara. It stretched from her bedroom to the sitting quarters, and even on to the accompanying rooms that Lan kept, a second connection point between the two rooms.
Moiraine was huddled on the opposite end, furthest from her chambers. Her feet were tucked up under her, and she was somehow being drowned by the open, skeletal rocking chair she had curled herself onto.
The figure in the chair that was supposed to be the woman Siuan loved did not stir when she stepped outside. Though there was a good distance between them, old instincts should still have alerted her to the presence of someone near her, someone who might have been a threat. It seemed that she no longer cared. The near paranoid guard she always kept around herself which had caused her to draw a blade on Siuan on a memorable stormy night when she’d managed to steal away from her duties to join her in a smoky tavern room in Tar Valon was now gone.
Her name choked from Siuan’s lips in a hoarse whisper before she could stop it. She needed Moiraine to look at her. She needed her to know that she was there, that she had come for her, that she was not alone. And she needed her to know that she was so achingly, endlessly, unforgivably sorry for doing this to her, for hollowing her out into this fragile husk of what she’d once been.
“Moiraine,” she breathed, her voice reduced to a strangled rasp of mingled love and longing.
Moiraine’s whole body went rigid at the sound. Her back straightened unnaturally, every muscle of her drawn taut, like a line snaring a catch. One of her hands began to twist in familiar patterns, trying to draw the Power to her, weaves of Air designed to capture and hold whatever had intruded upon her. Both hands clenched on the arms of her chair as she found herself unable to draw saidar to herself. She sat for an agonising heartbeat, shaking with the stress of the tension now held in her body. Slowly, every pounding heartbeat it took for her to do so grinding down more and more of Siuan’s patience, she turned her head.
"Siuan?” she whispered hoarsely, as though this was the first word that she had managed to speak in days.
Hearing her name in this woman’s mouth had frequently taught her what love was meant to sound like. So it was that the contrast struck her like a smack to the face in how wrong it sounded now. This was no gentle wrapping of her tongue around the syllables with the care and power a master bard might sing his greatest epic. It trembled from her. It quaked with uncertainty, and rippled with what was unmistakably fear. She was not stunned and pleased, but shocked and somehow horrified. Even as Siuan watched her face creased into lines of worry and suspicion, and she drew back in her chair as a frightened animal might if confronted by a stalking nightmare.
It broke her fucking heart to do it, but she forced herself to remain in place. She would have given up her title, her power, her life, and the bloody Wheel itself to be allowed to hold this woman in her arms for a single moment. But Moiraine did not want it, not right now, not with such unguarded terror in her eyes. Siuan knew that she would not be able to stand it if she flinched away from her touch. It would break her like a wave against a cliff, spraying the fragments of her out into the world, never to be made whole again.
Unable to speak past the tight lump in her throat, she just desperately held her ground, and held her gaze, trying to tell her without words that it was her, just her, her Siuan. Eyes locked with hers, she nodded to her, trying to smile reassuringly, but knowing her emotions twisted it into a grimace of pain and awful frustration.
Moiraine’s gaze suddenly shifted, and she looked past her, to the doorway at her back. Siuan sensed movement behind her, though she could not bear to take her eyes away from Moiraine, she knew that Lan must have stepped out onto the balcony behind her. He seemed to understand what was happening at once, and put a hand on Siuan’s shoulder, squeezing gently in comfort. She turned over her shoulder in time to watch him steadily incline his head towards his Aes Sedai, giving her the confirmation that she needed. This was not a figment of her imagination, not a hallucination born of stress or trauma, nor was it some foul trick of the Dark One. It was okay. She was real, and she was her, and she was here.
Moiraine’s mouth wobbled as she turned more in her chair to face her, eyes going wide, body suddenly slack with shock.
“Siuan?” she whispered, voice still hoarse, but with a little more life and strength to it now.
Her lips remained slightly parted around the word, frozen with surprise, her features soft and open, none of her energy spent trying to control the reveal of her emotions. There still lingered a note of disbelief and question in the way she said her name, but there was no fear this time. Instead there was a desperate, broken need for her in every aching, trembling inch of her body.
Siuan didn’t think. At the sound of her name, spoken like that, from this woman’s lips, she ran. Ran like she had as a child on the long, rickety piers her feet had flown across before she launched herself from the edge, shrieking with laughter, and plunged into the deep, welcoming sea that had been a second home to her. This time she launched herself towards the woman she loved more than anything else in this world.
As Siuan approached her, Moiraine slid from her chair, staring and weak with shock, not even seeming to notice that she was falling for her. Siuan darted in and caught her before her knees hit the hard stone. Then she pulled her into her arms, engulfing her like that first all-consuming embrace of the water swallowing her form and pulling her home. Choking off a sob as it threatened to burst free of her chest, she cradled Moiraine against her with a fierce strength, keeping her close, keeping her safe. If sheer will could have given back what had been taken she would have had it returned to her, and more, from the force of this embrace.
In the comfort of her arms, Moiraine trembled. She ctually trembled, in a way she had barely even done after Elaida had ‘helped’ her with her channeling. Siuan had not thought she’d been capable of feeling any more rage than she’d felt at that vile fucking woman on that day without erupting. What she felt now, as Moiraine’s nails dug into her back with how desperately she clung to her, as though still unable to believe she was real, would have made that child’s anger look like a gentle summer rain shower before a pair of clashing hurricanes.
Coaxing her back, just a little, just enough, Siuan stroked her hair back behind her ears so she could her face. Siuan looked into her eyes, those beautiful deep, dark eyes that had always seemed too old, and too haunted, for her face. Even when they’d been youths in the Tower, Siuan had always found such sorrow and wisdom in those eyes; of a kind that only came from being forced to endure too much, too young. The years had only darkened them, with all that she had seen, but even now, the hollowness in them shook her. The glint of defiance and stubborn light of life that had lived within them in the days before the Eye, when Siuan had last held her, had since died. Siuan herself had killed it.
Yet she was here. Still here, in spite of it all, Siuan reminded herself firmly. The foolish, stubborn, reckless pincushion disguised as a woman had strode into the Blight to confront the Dark One without Lan, without anything, except a boy greener than fresh picked seaweed she thought might be the Dragon. Somehow she had walked out again. As Siuan held her in her arms she felt as miraculous and precious to her as the tiny pearl she had found when her family was on the brink of starvation.
“Moiraine,” she whispered, just needing to say her name while looking into her eyes.
Taking a deep breath, Siuan tried to ground herself on the familiar comfort of having her close. The scent of her, that soap she used when travelling, faintly perfumed with pine and mint. The softness of her skin beneath her fingers. The way her face softened and relaxed, becoming as open and free with her expression as she ever was when they were together.
Brushing the straggling strands of hair back from her face so she could see her better, she felt her lips trembling, tears in her eyes again, “My Moiraine,” she said quietly, unnecessarily smoothing her hair down over and over, just needing to keep touching her, keep holding on to her, keep reminding herself that she was still here.
"Siuan,” Moiraine murmured, still looking a little in shock at the sight of her, hands trembling as they cautiously touched her, clearly expecting her fingers to pass through at the first brush against her skin, “You’re here,” she breathed, blinking as though she had seawater in her eyes she was trying to flush out, “You’re here,” she repeated, somehow with even more disbelief than the first.
"Of course I am,” Siuan growled, cradling her face in both hands, thumbs caressing her cheeks.
Pressing her mouth tight to try and stop the torrent of suddenly overwhelming grief and guilt that was roiling within her like a dinghy in a storm, wrecked and ruined by the lashing waves and winds. Light what had she done? What had she done in sending her to that awful place alone? Oh Light forgive her, for she would never forgive herself.
Emotions overcoming her at last, Siuan pulled Moiraine’s face down to hers and kissed her forehead, holding her against her mouth and shaking, forcing back her sobs. She had no right to cry in front of her. She had no fucking right to put her own struggles with this onto her. By rights Moiraine should have thrown her over the other side of that balcony and banished her from her sight, with no promise to ever call her home. Mastering herself, she swallowed down her own feelings with a deep, tight breath, reasserting control with difficulty.
“I am,” Siuan murmured softly, “I’m with you now, love,” she breathed, soothingly stroking her face.
“You came here?” Moiraine whispered, and her brows creased into a tight frown, eyebrows almost meeting like two tiny stormclouds of confusion, “Why?” she said, shaking her head a little. Eyes suddenly widening with a flash of horror, she gripped Siuan’s shoulders and said urgently, “What else has happened?”
“I came here for you, you idiot,” Siuan choked, with a kind of exasperated fondness only she ever brought out of her.
Finally feeling hot tears spill from her eyes and slip down her cheeks because of course, of course, the damned woman would assume she was here for any other reason. Of course she couldn’t even comprehend the idea of someone doing something just for her. Even after all these years, the damage bloody fucking Daes Dae’mar had done to her had never healed. There always had to be some deeper reason, some secret, hidden motive. It could never be simple. It could never just be love, not even with her and Lan.
“I came here because I love you,” Siuan whispered, forcing herself to remain patient. Gently kissing her mouth, needing that point of contact, pressing as much into that kiss as she could, she drew back, fingers still stroking through her hair she murmured, “Something awful happened to you, and I want to support you through it. I don’t need any other bloody reason,” she hissed, unable to keep a ripple of anger and frustration from those last words.
"How did you know?” Moiraine whispered softly, a slight frown darkening her face, “Your eyes and ears network?”
“Lan wrote to me,” Siuan said gently, anticipating, correctly, that Moiraine would not approve of that. Indeed, she managed a little scowl that made Siuan smile before she could help herself. Pressing a gentle finger to her lips, she said quietly, “Don’t go all pufferfish on me,” she chided lightly, stroking her finger down her lips. Gentling her touch against her cheek she murmured, “He did it because he loves you.”
Moiraine shook her head, still looking concerned, somehow more so than she had been before that reassurance. She opened her mouth to say something, but Siuan kissed her, then kissed her again, and kept kissing her until the thought of whatever she’d been about to say was gone, and there was something that might once have been a smile on her lips instead.
“So stubborn,” Moiraine murmured with fondness, shaking her head and absently touching Siuan’s lips with her thumb while she held her face.
“Me?” Siuan choked incredulously, taking Moiraine by the shoulders and fighting the urge to shake her by them, “What about you?” she demanded, caught between anger, and love, and grief, and guilt, and endless frustration as she looked at her.
Then something broke in her, and all that was left was fear, and the enormity of what she might have lost.
“What did you do?” she whispered, shaking her head, breath huffing out of her, brows drawn tightly together as she fought to control herself, “What did you go and get yourself into this time, hm?” she demanded, one hand rising up and stroking her cheek again, “I can’t even leave you alone for five minutes, can I?“ she said, her voice cracking at the vain attempt of humour.
“I did what I had to do, Siuan,” Moiraine said, though the well-worn phrase sounded distinctly tired in her mouth this time, “As I always do.”
“You shouldn’t have,” Siuan hissed fervently, all of her emotions boiling over like an unwatched kettle, “You should have found another way,” she said, shaking her head, knowing damn well that Moiriane had probably considered alternative options for all of three minutes, if at all, before she tossed herself right into the heart of the fire. “And you should never have left Lan here,” she found herself saying, words tumbling over each other like fish in a barrel, “He’s supposed to protect, damn you all to bloody ashes,” she ground out, her temper getting the better of her as her tongue completely ran away with her, not a semblance of restraint left, “Knowing that man exists and is keeping both eyes on you as often as he can spare them is the only reason I get any sleep at night for worrying about you.”
“I know,” Moiraine mumbled, glancing back towards the door, to where Lan no doubt waited for her inside. A flash of guilt actually marred her features, which was a first in Siuan’s memory, and she hung her head, her voice small and obviously ashamed as she repeated softly, “I know.”
She sounded so damn tired that Siuan found she couldn’t be angry with her. Not right this second, anyway. That could come later, in a few months, when she was feeling more like herself and did something utterly idiotic again. For now she just wanted to hold her, and kiss her, and bring her what comfort she could. It was the least that she could give her, after all she had been responsible for taking away.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, gently kissing her cheek to punctuate the apology, “I shouldn’t have said that to you now,” she told her, kissing her again to take the sting out of her earlier reprimands.
“You were right,” Moiraine admitted in a low voice, though she still sounded as weary as Siuan had ever seen her.
“Oh I know I was right,” Siuan said with a slight smile, trying to lighten her darkness even a little. Forcing levity she continued with a wry smile, “I just said I shouldn’t have said it to you now,” she clarified with a falsely lofty voice, “I should have waited for a more appropriate time, when you wouldn’t just have lain down at my feet like a sad old dog and taken it from me. Making me feel like right shit for it,” she chided, clucking her tongue.
Moiraine huffed a little at that, but there was a tug at her lips that said it was out of amusement rather than frustration. She shook her head with fondness, and though she lowered her head, she raised her eyes and met Siuan’s, peering up at her in a way she’d done a thousand times before after being caught red-handed doing something else she shouldn’t have. Light but she loved this woman.
As she let this quiet moment of love and tenderness linger between them, Siuan carded her fingers gently through Moiraine’s hair. A bird’s nest would have been more orderly.
“This is a disaster,” she tutted, shaking her head in apparent disapproval, “What in the name of the Light has Lan been doing to let it get into this state?” she demanded, “I’ll have to have words with that man.”
She could have sworn she heard a slight cough come from the chambers behind them at that comment. That, perhaps more than her terrible attempt at a joke, was what coaxed another little smile from Moiraine, each one feeling like a minor miracle in and of itself.
Then she suddenly sobered, brows contracting and forming that line between them, which had gotten deeper and deeper over the years, and always meant she was concerned about something.
"You can’t be here, Siuan,” she murmured, actually trying to ease her away, though she swayed on the spot without support. Light, when had she last slept? Last eaten anything? Shaking her head, Moiraine drew her back to the current moment as she said, “If anyone sees you here-” she began, then broke off, worry obviously deepening, “If they find out that you’ve seen me without cause, they-”
“Burn them,” Siuan snarled, with no hint of levity or humour in her, all of it reduced to ash at the mere implication that she should leave her alone right now, “Burn them all,” she breathed, like the Amyrlin Seat giving a command to destroy those who had harmed her daughters. There was no gentleness in her, no restraint, and no mercy. Not for this. “Every last one,” she said flatly.” Moiraine opened her mouth to say something, but froze at the look on Siuan’s face. “I don’t care,” she growled, seeing the hesitation and worry in Moiraine’s eyes. She cupped her cheek, still defiantly shaking her head, “I don’t care, Moiraine,” she repeated coldly, from words that could not lie, and never would to this woman.
"Siuan-” she began, with a long-suffering tone it was frankly impressive she could adopt with sincerity, after some of the shit she’d pulled over the years.
“Ask me to give a fuck,” Siuan hissed, in a voice as likely to burn ad roar as an angrily spitting fire, raging against the darkness and the cold that threatened to consume them. “Ask me to give a single bloody fuck about anything else right now, Moiraine. I dare you,” she said, in a way that told her she meant it, meant every damned word.
The world could burn tomorrow, and as long as it left her behind, she wouldn’t lift a single fucking finger to stop it. Not after what it had done to her.
“Siuan-” Moiraine murmured, but placatingly this time, finally reading the guilt in her eyes and in the slump of her shoulders.
Siuan shook her head, lips pressed together against the sudden lump that tightened in her throat, threatening to burst free in a sob. Eyes squeezed shut to hold in her tears, it was a long moment before she was able to control herself enough to speak. Moiraine gave her that time, though she took her hands in both of her own and held tightly, somehow trying to give her comfort, after all that she’d been through and lost.
Bloody woman. Siuan loved her. She loved her so much it should have burned her up years ago. Like the feeling she had from trying to hold too much saidar at once, the threat was always there that this thing was so powerful, so beyond human hands that it could consume her. Yet she held to it anyway, for without it, what was the point of living at all?
“I should never have let you come here alone,” she managed to get out, throat constricted and words choked off, forcing her to take a breath and a moment to gather herself.
Tears escaping from her at last, but she wiped them away angrily, because she didn’t deserve to cry over what she’d done, shouldn’t have had the fucking audaciy to attempt to grieve for a thing she hadn’t lost, but had taken away.
“I should never have told you about those damned dreams,” she whispered, smacking her clenched fist against her thigh in anger, “I should never have been so stupid to believe them myself. I should have known it was a trap, should have known, after all we’d been through all those years, that it was too bloody good to be true. It couldn’t be that easy,” she murmured harshly.
Meeting Moiraine’s eyes, she shared a look with her that only they could. For only they knew exactly what they each had given. All of the sweat, and blood, and tears, and time that they had to sacrificed to see this done.
“I shouldn’t have sent you away from me,” she said, and her voice cracked, tears spilling from her eyes before she could hold them back, “I should have kept you in that Tower at my side where you would have been safe, where you belong. I should never-”
“Shh,” Moiraine interrupted softly, taking Siuan’s face between her hands, such a gentle expression on her face that it would break the heart of the Dark One himself to see it.
Placing a gentle finger on her lips to silence her, Moiraine smiled for her. She replaced the finger with her mouth a moment later, kissing her over and over again, as she had done for her before, kissing away her sadness and her sins.
“This is not your fault,” she assured her, kissing away her tears.
Pressing their foreheads together, Moiraine placed her hands on the side of her head to hold her in place, knowing that she wanted to draw away, disgusted with herself and what she’d allowed to happen.
Somehow those words hurt more than the condemnation she deserved. It would have been better if she’d screamed. It would have been better if she had ranted and raved at her. It would have been better if she had been pacing up and down right now, beside herself with rage. She’d rather have heard that she despised her, that she never wanted to see her face again, that exile was the best thing that had ever fucking happened to her, because it meant she wouldn’t have to be within a hundred miles of her again as long as they both lived.
That was what she deserved. Anger, and blame, and judgment. Not forgiveness. Not gentleness. Not from this woman. This woman who had lost everything, and now wanted to give up the last remaining shreds of her tattered heart so that she might repair the scars on her own.
“Moiraine-” she began, but Moiraine, looking for a moment like her old self, suddenly shook her head, glaring in a way that could silence kings on their thrones and generals on their own battlefields, a look that neither expected nor tolerated interruption or dissent.
“Enough, Siuan,” she said, her voice sounding more brittle than it would usually have done, but still with a core of iron in it that had stiffened her spine and kept her standing all these years. “It is done,” she continued harshly, “You trying to convince me that you are to blame, and that I should hate you, or scream at you, or demand that you put it right when you can do no such thing will not help me. It will not help anything.”
All at once her shoulders slumped, that iron will seeming to bleed from her, a momentary spark that could not catch to burn as she might usually have done. Siuan instinctively pulled her in close, giving her that support, keeping her upright when she could not manage it on her own any longer.
“I do not have the strength to argue with you about this right now,” she confessed tiredly, so tiredly, “So please, please,” she repeated, a thread of desperation binding that word to her, “Do not make me,” she breathed, her body all but caving in on itself with exhaustion.
“Alright,” Siuan murmured to her, unable to stand being responsible for her carrying any more of burden than she had already been asked to bear, “Alright, love, alright.”
“Besides,” Moiraine said, in that tone that meant she was shifting into her role as Moiraine Sedai, business-like and more formal, “There are other things that happened at the Eye we must discuss.”
"That doesn’t matter now,” Siuan hissed with a kind of furious disbelief that she would try and do this now. Cradling Moiraine’s face in her hands again, tilting it up so that she met her eyes. Chin held high, Siuan nodded firmly and said, “You are what matters.”
They were words that Moiraine had likely never believed in her life, no matter how many times they had been spoken to her over the years. But she would know them in her very blood and bones before the night was out, Siuan would see to that. Light help her she would.
“You are all that matters,” she added fiercely, in a tone that meant no arguments, a voice she had perfected as the Amyrlin, which had been known to send centuries old Aes Sedai scurrying for cover at the sound of it.
Moiraine, being Moiraine, tried to push her luck anyway.
"The Dark One-” she started, sounding insistent, a slight stubborn jut to her jaw, which was good to see, even as it threatened to frustrate the tits off of her. It meant there was still a spark of life in her yet, hiding behind those dark, fathomless eyes.
“Hush,” Siuan growled at her, “I don’t want to hear this from you,” she said firmly. "Lan can tell me,” she snapped tersely, before Moiraine could try and protest further, “Anyone can tell me. Or no one,” she added flatly, an edge of desperation to have this done so she could focus on her properly, “It’s not important to me at the moment.”
“I am the thing here that is not important,” Moiraine said with a bitter little laugh.
She shuddered in her embrace, drawing away, arms wrapping around herself. When she next spoke, her voice was so terrifyingly small and faint, as though she was a girl again, speaking to her from so far away, out of reach, beyond her ability to help even though she was right here with her.
“I failed, Siuan,” she whispered, sounding so cold, and so fragile when confronted with this thing, this awful thing she feared and hated more than even losing her connection to the Source. “I failed you. I failed Lan. I failed this world,” she muttered, despair in every quivering, anguished line of her face, “The Dragon is gone. I fear that we released something at the Eye, something that should not have been let loose. And I- I can no longer channel,” she choked on that truth, her next words strangled and taut, “I am not worth-”
“You finish that sentence, Moiraine, and I will never forgive you,” Siuan cut in sharply, her voice shuddering with rage and emotion, “Never,” she added in a violent hiss of warning.
Moiraine froze, swallowing hard. Siuan gently caressed her face, taking the sting out of her words and trying to soothe her.
“You are everything to me,” Siuan murmured quietly, leaning in and holding her close. This time she kept Moiraine in place, stopping her from pulling away in her despair. “All this time we’ve been apart, hunting for the Dragon, preparing this world for what we know is coming,” she whispered, “All this time we’ve been fighting this war together. What the fuck do you think I have been fighting it for if not you?” she breathed, gripping her face between her hands and pulling her in, touching their foreheads together and gently stroking her fingers through her hair as she leaned in and kissed her through the tears that now fell from both of them.
“I don’t think that I can fight anymore, Siuan,” Moiraine rasped, looking up at her and shaking, silent tears streaming down her cheeks.
A moment later her body slumped against hers, forehead against her shoulder, her eyes closed, all of the strength suddenly bleeding from her body, leaving her trembling in her arms.
"Don’t you say that,” Siuan whispered, feeling tears choking up her throat, “Don’t you dare look me in the eye and say those words to me,” she said, unable to stand hearing that.
She could not stand the thought that she had done this to her. She had done with the Sun Palace, and the White Tower, and the Black Ajah, and countless darkfriends, and shadowspawn, and the bloody Dark One himself had never managed. She had broken Moiraine. If she said this, if she felt it, if she truly believed it, in her heart, then Siuan would have broken her, and that was utterly unbearable to her.
“Don’t tell me that. Not when I know that you wouldn’t let a single fucking thing stop you from doing what you thought was right if it was for anyone or anything else,” she said, forcing herself to be strong, and firm, when all she wanted to do was crumple beside her, and weep, and beg for her forgiveness, “You never have. You never will,” she said quietly, “I know you, I know you,” she said again.
Taking her chin between her hands, she gently tilted her face up so she looked up at her again.
“I still need you to fight for the world, Moiraine. My world,” she breathed emphatically, “Because that is you,” she choked quietly, voice breaking on that last word. Swallowing, she ducked in and pressed a soft kiss to her lips, needing her, needing to show her, to make her believe in that more than she believed in her own destruction. “You are all I have, and all that I care about, and all that is worth protecting in this world to me,” she breathed quietly. “So you are not doing this to me, Moiraine. Not now. Not like this. Not after everything we’ve been through together,” she told her fiercely, drawing herself up and shaking her head in stubborn defiance of the very idea of it.
Moiraine’s mouth trembled, head resting against her neck, shaking with emotion she was struggling to hold in.
“You can fight,” Siuan growled, “You will. Not for yourself, damn you, because you never do,” she sucked in a shuddering gasp of breath, forcing down her own feelings as she said that. Impatiently, she brushed away her tears, and made herself go on, “I know better than to ask you now, when you’re like this. But for me,” she whispered, and hated herself to ask for this now, when she so scarcely deserved it, “For Lan. You will keep fighting for us, won’t you?” she begged, in a way she did not think she’d begged for anything at all since she’d been a child.
“Yes,” Moiraine said hoarsely, doing her best to straighten herself again, though it seemed to cost her more than it ever should have to say that for her.
"You promise me that, Moiraine,” Siuan murmured quietly, tucking her hair back behind her ears, stroking her cheeks with the pad of her thumb, loathe to push her, but needing to hear it, needing her to be safe, “You promise me.”
“I promise,” Moiraine whispered softly, nodding to her, “I promise.”
"Thank you,” Siuan murmured, leaning in and gently kissing her forehead, "Thank you, my love.”
Moiraine shuddered, and trembled, and pressed in against her, clinging to her, “It was awful, Siuan,” she gasped suddenly, shaking and finally letting that emotion spill out now, utterly incapable of holding it back any longer, she knew. “It was awful,” she choked, nails biting into Siuan’s arms as she pressed her face against her neck, tears hot against her skin, “I see it every time I close my eyes. I feel it over and over again. His power ripping out of me and leaving me with nothing. I have never felt anything like it before, I-”
"Shh, shh,” Siuan whispered, tucking her head against her with a gentle hand, “You’re alright,” she swore to her, “You’re alright, Moiraine. You’re alright now,” she whispered, and knew that she would do anything she had to do, and give anything she had to give, in order to make that true for her.
"I am not, Siuan,” she choked, voice strangled, breath heaving in and out of her as she tried to control herself, “I am not at all,” she gasped, tears flowing from her once more, “And I do not know how to be,” she said, words tumbling over each other in their haste to escape the tormented prison she had become, “I do not even know how to try.”
“I know,” Siuan breathed hoarsely, tears stinging her own eyes again, “Oh boil and char me, I know,” she whispered, feeling her own emotions sweeping over her with the force of a tsunami, at such odds with the tender way she still stroked her fingers through her hair. “If I could give you mine I would,” she told her, and meant it, because it was all her fucking fault that it was gone in the first place. And she couldn’t stand seeing her this way, couldn’t stand knowing that she was responsible for it, couldn’t stand being with her now when she was in such pain, “I would give you all of it. Every last bit, to stop you feeling this way.”
“But I don’t feel, Siuan,” Moiraine whispered, with a twisted little irony in her words, “I don’t feel anything at all.”
“You will,” Siuan breathed, rubbing her back and kissing her forehead, “You will, I promise you, I promise you,” she said, kissing her forehead and struggling to hold herself together, “I’m here. I’m here and I am not leaving you this time.”
“I don’t- Siuan- I- I-” Moiraine stammered, fully breaking down at last, sobbing against her chest and clutching onto her as though she was the only real thing in the world.
“Come here,” she breathed, tilting her face up and pressing a soft kiss to her mouth. “Come home,” she told her, cradling her face between her hands again as she ducked down and kissed her once more, trying to bring her back to her. “Come home to me,” she pled quietly, tears streaming silently down her face as she leaned in and pressed their mouths together, “Please come home to me,” she whispered, sinking down and kissing her deeply again, letting it linger this time, begging her with everything she had to just come back to her.
****
Please feed me the comments.
I have a possible follow-up to this, but it’ll be a WHILE before we get to it, writing has been hard atm.
another reason Lan and Moiraine are Like That is that Lan never really got to take Gaidin 101. his training has essentially been whatever Moiraine gleaned from observations of Warders and Aes Sedai in the Tower
Moiraine: the primary task of every Gaidin I’ve ever met has been to help their Aes Sedai make Dramatic Entrances
