Fandom: The Regeneration trilogy.
Author: Epigone.
Pairing: Rivers/Sassoon.
Rating: PG-13.
Warnings: Sexuality, general unpleasantness, borderline RPS, major spoilers for The Ghost Road.
Archivists: Ask first.
Summary: Rivers has just received the news about Prior, but he's thinking about someone else entirely.
Date Written: February 18, 2003.
Author's Notes: This is the fic that proves one and for all that I write for myself; no one knows what I'm talking about here, apparently. I'm simply enamored of the convoluted, almost Oedipal issues in the Rivers/Sassoon relationship. This piece is slash, although it is rather strictly canonical in its interpretation of the characters. It could also be considered Real-Person Slash, as both Dr. William Rivers and Siegfried Sassoon were actual people. If I'm cornered on this issue, I will gladly point the finger at Pat Barker. She did it first! None of these characters belong to me. Both Rivers and Sassoon -- along with the more peripheral Njiru, Nareti, Owen, Hocart, Charles Rivers, and the elder Rivers -- are real historical figures, although the characterizations are debatable. Prior and Hallet, who are mentioned in passing, are fictional, and they belong to Ms. Barker. Having through gotten those sticky issues, let me just extend a plea, once again, to anyone out there: don't leave me as a Fandom of One here. Write Regeneration fic! It doesn't even have to be Rivers/Sassoon, although that will get you bonus points.
Feedback: Can be sent to kmaru1701 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com, and is much appreciated.
That Dare Not Speak Its Name
I am the love that dare not speak its name.
---Lord Alfred Douglas, "Two Loves"
Rivers saw Prior's name on the list on the thirteenth of November. It was growing late, but when he entered his office, he found that someone had put the day's newspaper, open to the casualty report, on his desk. He never knew who it was.
The Sambre-Oise Canal meant nothing. In his mind's eye, Rivers saw it, wide as the sea, gray and sheer as steel, hardy grasses rioting up out of the drainage ditches fed with blood, but it meant nothing to anyone. Later, he would have a patient -- a Theosophist, actually; he saw several in those years, as though the need to put all of this in a cosmic context was pressing -- who would say it was God's hand moving upon the waters. He would have a pacifist Catholic liken it to Golgotha, the final fall of the human race. It took every bit of his self-restraint to remain seated behind the desk -- "a strip of empathetic wallpaper," that was what Prior had labeled him -- and not demand that they tell him where it was, that was all he needed to know, where had Prior fallen under the ragged gunfire, where did Hallet, Owen, anyone see it coming, where did they all go?
No one would have known the answer.
He left the paper in his office and went up the cold, echoing stairs to his room at the normal time, his hands leaving smudges of newsprint along the stone walls. He lit the lamp on his bedside table, ignoring the small, folded square of paper sitting beside it. After all, he knew what it said.
3 November 1918 Coldstream
Rivers,
You said you would like to hear from me when I got out. Well - I'm out. Certifiably sane, they tell me. I know you want me to think about the future, but I don't know. I may go to Sheffield, as we discussed. I don't particularly care about a dishonourable discharge at this point.
I would enclose a poem for you to struggle over, but I haven't written in some time.
Take care of yourself,
Siegfried.
For a moment, Rivers stood in the middle of the floor, listening to the breathless sound of the leaves turning against his shuttered window, the murmurous falling of the first few raindrops. Lamplight winked at him from the glass front of the bookshelf across the room, and he stepped over, opened it, and drew out a book.
It was a slim, leather-bound volume, its pages crackling with disuse. He hadn't looked at his Eddystone journals for a long while, although they had been much in his thoughts these past few months. The records of faraway tropics and reclusive headhunters caused in him a small shudder of recognition, but somehow, that wasn't what he was looking for now.
He let the book fall open to a page. The entry was marked "10 July 1908," and he recognized it immediately.
This afternoon, Njiru spoke of the sexual practices of his tribe. Everyone is quite free and unconcerned about these things, having relations with whomsoever he pleases. However, there is an important proviso: since marital fidelity is absolute, a male is not allowed to utter the names of past partners once he has a wife.
I asked Njiru about the implications of this, but, being mateless, he had little to offer. Then he asked me a question. At first, I thought he was trying to divert my attention from his painful inferiority on this count, but then I realized that, like the islanders on the steamer, he was purely and ingenuously curious about me.
He asked, "You have name no speak?" I explained that the British don't do things that way, but he insisted that he wasn't asking about my culture; he was asking about me. I told him I was not married, and that I had never felt strongly enough about anyone that the name taboo could have applied in the first place. He seemed surprised.
Rivers, slowly looking up at his wavering gray reflection in the bookshelf door, smiled at his younger self's staunchness. Journal in hand, he sat down on the edge of his narrow bed.
Njiru, he thought, what a long time it's been in between. Faintly, he could remember Njiru's sun-darkened face, the quick eyes, the acute curvature of the spine. He could see that bent form, moving lithe and swift before him through the brown tree-shadows, the branches parting lushly before them, until they broke into a clearing and saw Nareti, the mortuary priest, gaunt and angular where he sat in the sand. The skull houses behind him shone fiercely against the gray coastline, heavy with bleached bone and shell. The death site of ages: every tribe has one.
And there was Njiru, pausing at the edge of the shade to glance back surreptitiously, expecting a reaction. He was like Prior in that respect, forever pushing from a thousand different angles, even head-on if necessary. Rivers recalled one session where Prior, taking a new tack, had been as suggestive as he knew how -- and did he ever know how -- just to prompt an outburst. Rivers had been left cold, feeling rather indulgent.
He spared a glance at the letter on the table before looking pointedly back at the journal.
Why should one entry make a difference? He had been contemplating Eddystone a great deal recently; the way a people killed itself to survive, and the kidnapped children of a thousand nations, and the stark silhouettes of the skull houses as they were erected into the sunset of memory. In ten years, he and Hocart had never published their findings, but perhaps now was the time. There was a paper in this somewhere: the Great War as merely another checkpoint in the brutal march of civilization.
But, for a hollow moment, it didn't matter at all -- and then he reopened the journal and flipped blindly through it. What if he were to look at this from a different angle? Patriarchal societies?
He knew it was no use. There, again, was Njiru, looking over his shoulder, his teeth bared in an inscrutable grin, waiting; there was Prior, with that cold, receptive expression, lounging in sensuous anticipation; and always there was, there was, there was--
Silence. He had almost convinced himself, in the brooding isolation of hospital after hospital, that he was only a doctor. Only a doctor, and all that he felt was a doctor's abstract sorrow. Or, in moments of vulnerability, he had conceived of it in terms of paternity. After all, that undertone was always present in his interactions with the young men, and why shouldn't a father grieve discreetly when he was called upon to perpetrate the age-old sacrifice, when he had to send these boys back to the front? It was just Abraham and Isaac, even Christ and the Father, in their endless reiterations. They were only his children, and children, too, grow and leave, all the children of his country would go on growing and leaving, Hallet and Prior and Owen and.
That was not what it was. It was not a monolithic army of sons taking their leave of him. It was, and always had been -- like his own father, preferring Charles, who didn't stutter -- one among them, and damned if he knew why one man should matter so much.
The lamplight sputtered over the letter, just an arm's length away, and he heard, like an echo:
It's odd, isn't it, how one can feel fatherly towards somebody, I mean, genuinely fatherly, not exploiting the situation or even being tempted to, and yet there's this other current. And I don't think one invalidates the other. I think it's perfectly possible for them both to be genuine.
He opened his mouth to rebut it, mustering the quiet assurance he had affected with Prior and Njiru--
And found he couldn't say the name.
~Fin~
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