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The Lies Our Broken Selves Tell Our Better Halves - A Siuaraine Fic

Title: The Lies Our Broken Selves Tell Our Better Halves

Warnings: Spoilers up to episode 3 of season 2. Safe for non-book readers. Trigger warnings: Mo's general mental state atm which is, as we know: Not Ideal. Mentions of rape/threatened rape in the context of forcing a bond.

Summary: Set/written after the first trio of episodes of season 2 to deal with Lan and Moiraine's dramatic bond-divorce via the power of Siuan Sanche, currently in possession of the only known braincell in Randland. AKA: Moiraine is making bad decisions, spiralling out of control, and smashing every 'self-destruct' button she comes across and she very badly needs Siuan to slam on the brakes before she yeets herself off a cliff. AKA: Moiraine needs a 'come to Jesus' talk so badly and who better to give it to her than the wizard pope/her wife?

Teaser:

'“Then Moiraine crumpled before her eyes. Her shoulders slumped, her mask fell away, revealing the agony and the empty exhaustion that lingered beneath. She covered her face with a shaking hand and moved blindly towards the bed, sinking down onto it as though she no longer had the strength left in her body to remain standing.

Siuan’s heart clenched painfully and the love in it for this woman caused a pang of regret to pulse through her. But she steeled herself and refused to give Moiraine an easy way out of this. It would be painful, but she needed it. Light but she needed it.'

Link: AO3 or Read Below:

“Where’s Lan?”

This simple, casual question instantly changed the atmosphere in the room the way a storm changed the feeling of the wind on the sea and instinctively made Siuan shiver.

Moiraine turned away, putting her back to Siuan, making a casual show of looking out of the window, the gesture effortlessly woven into the absent circles she was walking around the room anyway. But Siuan knew her too well for her to get away with that shit, and a flicker of anxiety immediately tightened in her stomach. She was far too calm for him to be ill or grievously injured, and if he was dead Siuan doubted she would even be upright, let alone coherent, but–

“At the Tower, I expect,” Moiraine replied lightly, absently tracing the delicate petals of a rose in the vase on the window ledge.

“At the Tower?” Siuan repeated, bewildered, “Why in the name of the Light is he there?”

“I sent him there,” Moiraine said, moving away from the window to continue her lazy, seemingly mindless circle around the room. "He should have arrived by now. No doubt he's enjoying reuniting with Nynaeve. Likely as we speak,” with the suggestion of a little smirk on her lips and a faint laugh. It was as flat and empty as her eyes, which remained cold and distant and sad throughout her little performance.

Enjoying reuniting with– Siuan opened her mouth to demand an answer to just such a question, but no. That was deliberate misdirection. Moiraine’s too casual air, that forced smile. She wanted her to focus on something, anything, other than what she should be focusing on. And that was an answer to the question of: what in the name of all that was bright had happened at Verin’s quaint little cottage? Clearly it’d grown more interesting since Siuan had last visited.

“What do you mean you ‘sent’ him?” Siuan asked, very quietly, and very intently, so Moiraine could not avoid the question unless she very obviously side-stepped it, thereby revealing it as a sore point.

Instead of further attempts at deflection, Moiraine returned with that false little smile that Siuan loathed. The one that held no humour at all and that she only used when she was trying to make light of a situation that could not have been darker if it was taking place within the Dark One’s own arsehole.

“I’m not really sure what’s causing you confusion,” Moiraine said with that mildly patronising inflection in her voice. “I sent him, that is to say I arranged for him to go from one place and to arrive in another of my choosing.”

Siuan might have throttled her, but she needed her hands to massage her temples to try and stave off the headache she felt coming on. Light and she’d thought this would be a simple question. She had forgotten that, when talking to Moiraine bloody Sedai, there was no such thing as ‘simple’.

Moiriane, the Light blind her, had the gall to add blithely, “couriers do that sort of thing, you know. I was sure you’d be familiar with the concept.”

Siuan snapped her eyes up to meet Moiraine’s as she cut in sharply, with no trace of amusement or indulgence of the little farce she’d just been forced to witness, “your Warder is not a package.”

The coldness in her voice brought Moiraine up short. Her false little smile faded as her expression hardened. Then she set her jaw in that way she’d picked up from Lan years ago, without either of them realising it and stared icily down at Siuan. As if that was going to put her off.

“That man cannot just be ‘sent’ anywhere,” Siuan continued, utterly unphased by Moiraine’s glare, “anymore than you can send a hurricane to ‘a place of your choosing’,” she repeated sardonically, each word snapping out harsher and faster than the last, until she was practically spitting the last ones. “He has been more devoted to you than a sailor who hasn’t seen a tavern in a year is devoted to his first mug of ale." Her eyes bored into Moiraine’s, and she met the stare defiant and unflinching as ever, so Siuan pressed harder, "I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d died and his corpse just got right back up and refused to stop following your fool self around," she said bluntly.

Then she paused for a moment, letting the implications of that sink in properly, watching the subtle nuances of Moiraine’s expression shift. It was like reading the currents of an ocean, something anyone unfamiliar would miss entirely, but were as obvious as words on parchment to those that knew. Siuan caught the slight twitch at the corner of her mouth, the flickering blink, there for half a heartbeat then gone, the slight tightening of the skin around her eyes, and felt as wary as she would spotting a cleverly hidden riptide beneath the waves.

“What happened, Moiraine?” she asked quietly, in the same stone voice, unbroken and unweathered by time or tide, every inch the one she used when she made a demand as the Amyrlin Seat. One that would be obeyed.

With a swirl of deep blue Cairhien skirts, Moiraine turned on her like a summer storm. Siuan held her ground, unmoved, even at the sight of the flare of anger that flashed in her partner's eyes. For a long, charged beat of tension they stared at each other, gazes locked, jaws clenched, heels dug in, both ready to go ‘til the last breath if needed.

Then Moiraine crumpled before her eyes. Her shoulders slumped, her mask fell away, revealing the agony and the empty exhaustion that lingered beneath. She covered her face with a shaking hand and moved blindly towards the bed, sinking down onto it as though she no longer had the strength left in her body to remain standing.

Instead, Siuan crossed the room and knelt down on the floor at her side, staying close, while still giving her the space she needed. Reaching out and gently twining their fingers, stopping Moiraine from agitating the already red and ragged skin around her nails that she’d been worrying at in her agitation. Siuan waited, patient, thumb stroking over the back of her hand, giving Moiraine time to gather her thoughts.

Finally, without warning, like a horse suddenly bolting for no flaming reason at all, as they did, Moiraine launched abruptly into speech.

“I tried for months to make him leave me,” she began, with an obvious frustration in her voice, punctuated by her little huff, “to make him see reason.” She sighed heavily, shaking her head and looking exasperated and hopeless at once. “Nothing I did worked,” she muttered impatiently, “no matter what I said, or what I did, aloof, or indifferent, or even cruel I was to him: it never made any difference. He can be damned stubborn when he wants to be,” she grimaced.

Siuan decided it was not wise to interrupt Moiraine now she’d finally started talking, and clearly had a lot to get off her chest, to point out the frankly hysterical level of irony and lack of self-awareness in her calling any other person in any turning of the Wheel ‘damned stubborn’, but she had to bite her tongue to manage it.

“The more I tried to push him away the more insistent he seemed to become on staying,” she frowned, as though unable to even fathom a suggestion of why he’d acted that way.

Siuan bit her tongue harder still to save bursting out a deeply sarcastic suggestion of why it might be that the man who had been the other half of her bloody soul for decades, and who loved her more than all the stars loved their sky, became more reluctant to abandon her the more clearly unwell and irrational she acted.

Something shifted in Moiraine and Siuan snapped her focus sharply back to her. The atmosphere around her became suddenly very cold and still. As though a funeral shroud had slipped down behind her eyes, they darkened, and she had to swallow to clear her throat before she could continue. Siuan reached up and placed her other hand gently on Moiraine’s side, feeling a need to anchor her against whatever memory threatened to pull her away in its current.

“What?” Siuan prompted as gently as she could, but she still felt the bite to the word that snapped out before she could stop it as concern flared in the pit of her stomach.

“That night, after I found out about the breaking of Lanfear's seal," she clarified quickly, clearly struggling to wrangle her thoughts into some semblance of order, "I left to set out for Cairhien and I–" she paused, mouth tightening and Siuan frowned, sensing her change her mind about what she'd been about to say. Before she could comment, Moiraine blurted out abruptly, "we were attacked by three Fades.”

Siuan swore she felt her soul attempt to leave her body for a moment at the horror of those words, but she wrestled it back down like a troublesome line. Though she knew that, clearly, they had both survived the ordeal, she couldn’t help herself gripping Moiraine’s hand with the fear that had gripped her.

“It was my fault.” Moiraine whispered unsteadily, that familiar shadow of self-loathing turning her sea blue eyes to chips of black ice, “entirely my fault.”

The hand Siuan was not holding curled into a too-tight fist she knew would make the nails bite painfully into her palm.

Mouth trembling, Moiraine went on with difficulty, “ “Lan was fighting, protecting me, but there were too many. It was too much,” she wiped away the tears that threatened in her eyes with a careless, impatient hand. “I was injured, just lying there on the ground like a discarded doll–” she choked on the word as disgust and frustration mingled and silenced her momentarily. “Pointless,” she spat out, words returning, along with her anger at herself. “I was useless, Siuan,” she breathed, shaking her head, “I was so useless. Like a frightened child in the middle of a warzone,” she shook her head again. Her voice was shaking so badly now that Siuan had to concentrate to make out her words. “They were going to kill him and I did nothing to save him, to help him, I– I couldn’t–”

She was crying now, tears streaming from her eyes, her anguish ignoring the hand she used to try and brush them away. Siuan squeezed her hand as her heart tightened in sympathy with her. Moiraine tried to speak several times, her efforts largely incoherent, though Siuan thought she heard the words ‘I tried to channel’, but in the end Moiraine gave up. Swallowing hard she finally just shook her head to indicate that the power had not come when she had needed it.

“I failed him,” she choked out bluntly, “utterly,” she added, ignoring Siuan shaking her head and opening her mouth to chastise her for that. She was still speaking, firm and matter-of-fact now, “I knew then that I had to get him away from me,” she whispered firmly, a new resolve giving her the strength to continue, though it shattered something within Siuan to hear her phrase it like that, as if she were a blight, infectious, corrupting, “whatever it took, I could no longer stand to keep him at my side, shackled to my danger, and my weakness.”

Siuan was quiet for a long moment, letting those words fade from ringing declarations of pain, to fading echoes, until they were mere memories of the agony they once held. Abruptly, Moiraine got to her feet, and moved away. Siuan made no move to stop her. She stayed quiet, watching Moiraine tremble herself to stillness again, the agitation slowly working its way out of her body as she hugged herself, pacing, before finally coming to a halt at the window again. One hand resting on the sil, she stared out of it with a posture and smoothness to her face that said she’d done this many times before, and took several slow, deep breaths, gradually regaining control. Her shoulders hunched slightly and her eyes seemed distant and exhausted again, as though this brief flicker of true emotion had drained her of what little strength she’d managed to cling to.

Finally, when she felt Moiraine was ready to hear it, Siuan broke the silence.

“Do you remember all those years ago,” she intoned softly, “when we agreed that you would search the world for the Dragon, and I would remain at the Tower to maintain our informant networks, and try and politic the bickering Ajahs into something that vaguely resembled a useful faction against the Dark One for when the time came?”

Moiraine nodded, looking too exhausted to speak, but she turned her head over a shoulder, watching, waiting for more.

“I told you that you needed a Warder,” Siuan went on calmly.

Moiraine nodded tiredly again, but with a slightly more impatient air, as though she felt an ‘I told you so’ twenty years after the fact was a little pointless. Siuan agreed, which was why that wasn’t at all what she was headed towards.

Unruffled, Siuan reminded, “you didn’t want one,” and heard a barely perceptible little sigh in response. “You told me that you didn’t want a Warder, didn’t want someone in your head, able to feel all of your fears, and your flaws, and your insecurities,” she went on doggedly, apparently oblivious to the disparaging little frown pinching Moiraine’s face. “You thought it would be invasive and unbearable, and that it wasn’t worth all that. But I insisted.”

‘Insisted’ was actually a very polite way of describing what she’d done. If memory served the conversation had been a lot closer to beating her over the head with a broom and demanding it than anything as polite or civilised as ‘insistence’. Moiraine looked too worn out to point this out, however. Siuan pushed through the worry she felt coiling in her stomach, determined to see this point through.

“So we observed, and we gathered information, and we made notes, and conducted thorough investigations into all of the Warders currently in training at the Tower to find someone who was suitable and competent,” she said, remembering their girlish excitement, their first spy mission undertaken together as budding Blues, “and, more to the point, someone that you might actually manage to stand without driving one or both of you to murder or suicide within a week,” she added wryly, a fondness now tugging at her heartstrings at the memory.

The corners of Moiraine’s mouth even dared to lift into something like a true smile, warm and real, her eyes softening, meeting Siuan’s gaze with such love at the recollection. Without seeming to consciously make a choice to do so, she crossed the room back towards Siuan and reached down twining their fingers together.

Siuan burst the romantic bubble blossoming between with customary brutality before Moiraine became concerned that such uncharacteristic behaviour meant her wife had been replaced by a Forsaken.

“Then you thoughtlessly toppled weeks of our hard work into a fire pit on your way out on that hairbrained scheme you had in mind when you left without so much as a ‘by your leave’,” Siuan grumbled, not missing the way Moiraine rolled her eyes. Undeterred, Siuan forged resolutely ahead. “One week later you waltzed back to the Tower with a man neither of us had ever met before in our lives and announced that you’d bloody gone and taken him as your Warder!” she concluded.

Siuan made sure that her words appropriately conveyed how distinctly incredulous, not to mean miffed, she’d felt at little Lady ‘no Warder is good enough for me’ Damodred pulling a stunt like that after rejecting every one of her carefully selected candidates.

Siuan shook her head in mock-disbelief, but couldn’t stop the smile that was starting to blossom on her lips, “I thought you were insane,” she said bluntly. “Couldn’t even have told me his favourite colour if I’d held a knife to your neck,” she snorted with derision, “but you’d gone and bonded the great stoic stone lump, eyes colder than a dead shark’s and all,” she muttered, fully smirking now.

In spite of the lightness of her tone, and the fact that Moiraine was well aware Siuan loved Lan in his own right after all these years, she did not miss the slight tension that flared for a moment at the insult to him, affectionate or otherwise.

Stroking her thumb soothingly over the back of Moiraine’s hand to stop her spikes making an appearance, Siuan continued, “I was wrong,” she said softly, “and I’ve never been as happy to be so, either,” she added for good measure. Moiraine looked down, as she looked up, their eyes meeting. A faint glint of tears reflected in Moiraine’s again as Siuan murmured, “that man is the best thing that’s happened to you since, well, since I did,” she teased, and was rewarded by a feeble, wobbly little attempt at a smile from Moiraine for her efforts. “And he is, without a doubt, the only reason you didn’t starve to death two months in because you forgot to eat for three weeks straight,” she added mildly.

Moiraine’s weak little smile had the audacity to shift at once into a much stronger little scowl, as though Siuan had claimed something utterly unreasonable or false when they both knew it was true.

“The day I met him, he didn’t know you from the next haughty little Aes Sedai,” Siuan continued, remembering this more clearly than what she’d eaten for breakfast that very morning, “but I knew that he would follow you wherever you led. I knew,” she insisted firmly, “that every step you took, he would be right there at your side, taking each one as you did.” A single tear slid down Moiraine’s cheek at those words, and she gave a tiny nod of affirmation. “I was right,” Siuan agreed, nodding herself, “that’s what he’s done every day for the last twenty years, Moiraine,” she reminded her pointedly, as though she had forgotten that she had lived them, or, perhaps, as though she had simply forgotten that she’d ever lived at all.

“Exactly,” Moiraine murmured and for a brief moment, if she hadn’t known her better, Siuan might have entertained the idea that the stubborn pain in her arse might have seen reason. Unfortunately, she knew her very well, and sensed this was too easy long before Moiraine proved it to her by insisting in a hollow, self-loathing little voice that didn’t suit her, “he has wasted enough of his life on me already.”

“I don’t think he sees it that way,” Siuan argued back, preparing herself for a long, agonising night of attempting to beat some sense into this woman.

Carefully worded logic rarely worked on her when she was like this. Typically she needed a good solid reality check with the approximate subtlety of a brick to the face. This sort of clobbering generally fell to Siuan since her Warder, for all his admirable qualities, was far too gentle with Moiraine for her own good sometimes.

“You can’t just ask someone like Lan, someone who lives and breathes for one single thing, one single goal, one single purpose,” she said, laying a steady emphasis on that final word, not missing the tightening around Moiraine’s eyes that said she knew very well what she was getting at, "to give all of that up and abandon you. He needs you, Moiraine,” she murmured quietly, “as surely as the stars need the sky.”

"He does not,” Moiraine half-growled and half- groaned back. She drew her hands from Siuan’s and took a few steps away from her, gazing unseeingly out of her window again at the night sky and the stars it held beyond. “He has never needed me,” she muttered, arms wrapping around herself, “except perhaps in needing me to stay away from him,” she added darkly.

"He would be dead without you,” Siuan countered bluntly. “If he'd never met you, and you'd never convinced him to trust you and become your Warder he would have died twenty years ago.”

She saw the flash of pain in Moiraine’s eyes at whatever memory of Lan, broken and hopeless as he’d been, and knew she felt the truth of her words. So she kept going, the moment before a catch broke the surface of the water at last was no point to slacken your grip on the line.

“Without you there would be no Lan,” she stated, clear and precise, with all the conviction of a simple truth. “Even if, by some miracle, he survived that suicide mission he set out on, he wouldn’t be the man he is today without you.” She gave that a moment, a brief handful of heartbeats, for Moiraine to come to terms with, then pressed on relentlessly. “And I know you love and trust and respect the man that he’s become at your side more than almost anyone in this world,” she all but growled, “And you know that he has more earned the right to choose to stay with you until the end."

"Enough, Siuan,” Moiraine snapped finally, rubbing the spot between her eyes that marked where the sharpest pain of the migraines that had plagued her since they were novices tended to gather when she was stressed. “I have listened to him argue with me about this every day for the last five months,” she muttered wearily, “I am not going to endure the same from you,” she said with an irritated little jerk of her head, obvious frustration in her.

Well if she was finally frustrating her that meant at least they were starting to get somewhere.

"You listened, did you?” Siuan retorted sceptically, eyebrows raised. “Did you actually listen to him and what he said to you?" she demanded knowingly, “or did you just pretend to hear him the way you do when you know someone is making a reasonable point that you don’t want to acknowledge?” she pressed relentlessly.

Moiraine turned and managed a scowl that looked positively like her old self as she said coldly, "I know what you're doing and it won't work. My mind is made up,” she bit out firmly, seeing Siuan open her mouth to reply.

Then she turned away, her eyes again on the window, and the world beyond, as though she could see through the buildings, and the trees, and the hills as if they too were glass, to the man that she had not been parted from this way in twenty years.

Lowering her head she added in an undertone, “even if you did it's too late now. It is done. It is broken. That is the end,” she concluded very softly, swallowing hard and looking down at her fingers, away from the window, cutting off the invisible thread Siuan had imagined joining her and Lan for a moment.

Siuan paused, pretending to actually deliberate and consider this idea, then she said evenly, “it could still be undone.” Moiraine took a very deep, very slow breath, lifting her chin very slightly towards the ceiling, as though silently begging the Light for patience. “It could be fixed, if you tried,” Siuan said, completely ignoring Moiraine’s reaction.

"Not everything that is broken can be fixed, Siuan," Moiraine replied, a new darkness gathering at the edges of her words, like night steadily swallowing the evening sun and all its warmth.

"No,” Siuan agreed, and she could not maintain her previous toneless, matter-of-fact even cadence now, not when she knew that Moiraine did not only mean to imply her fractured relationship with Lan, but also her fractured self. “Not perfectly or completely,” Siuan went on, made herself go on, made herself say those words, with the full force of the belief that lived behind them. “Maybe it can never be exactly as it once was. But it can always be better than it is now,” she said, and she felt her father’s voice echo in an unheard harmony alongside her own, his lessons, his wisdom, still a core of who she was and, more importantly, who she strived each day to be.

There's no such thing as perfection, so there's no excuse to ever stop trying to improve.

Her head and her heart were still full of his sayings. If they’d been rich, she’d often thought, he could have become one of the greatest philosophers of their age, quoted from Tear to the Two Rivers.

Usually Moiraine knew the feel and form of Berden’s little pearls of wisdom. Usually she would tease her and tell her that her accent became stronger, more Tairen, when she said them, as though her father truly was sharing his words with his daughter’s voice. Usually they coaxed a smile from her, and a pause to the ceaseless spinning of her mind. Usually they connected to her in the same place that she connected to Siuan, a tether to a welcome shore that promised a safe harbour.

This time nothing. No response. No acknowledgement at all. To the point that Siuan was sure she had barely even heard her speak, let alone what she’d said. She opened her mouth to say something more but Moiraine beat her to the catch,

“Not this,” she whispered, and she was staring at the window again, but this time she clearly didn’t see it, or anything at all for that matter, save whatever memory had gotten its hands about her throat and started to crush the breath from her. “Not after what I–” she began in a tremulous whisper.

Abruptly she broke off, as though remembering herself. Siuan watched as she reflexively corrected her posture, straightening her spine, standing tall and confident, the very image of a perfect Cairhien noblewoman. But though her face, as she turned back in Siuan’s direction, was perfectly calm and smooth, she would not meet her eyes.

Something went very cold and dark inside Siuan as she realised that she had made a damned rookie blunder and allowed Moiraine to distract her from the one key detail she clearly hadn’t wanted to discuss.

“How did you get him to agree to go to the Tower without you?” Siuan asked slowly, fear rising in her throat and choking the word near to silence. “You never answered me.”

She’d thought Moiraine had given Lan some false instruction asking him to fetch something for her that she could not, due to her exile. But no, Lan knew her far too well to fall for something like that. Especially after what Moiraine had done to him the night before she’d gone to the Eye of the World. And from the look in her eyes,, the hunch in her shoulders that all to clearly gave away her bone-deep guilt–

“Moiraine–” she began, unable to keep the warning from her voice.

Quiet engulfed them for a long, heavy moment, that seemed to press down with a greater weight than the world they’d carried between them all these years.

“I wrote to Alanna and asked her to meet me at the crossroads so that she might escort Lan to the Tower while I carried on alone to Cairhien” Moiraine answered at last, trying to speak stoutly and confidently, but Siuan could hear the tremors of the fracture lines she was close to breaking along, no matter how well she tried to hide them.

Narrowing her eyes, Siuan bit out, the words sharpened by the tension that was winding ever tighter in her, “it’s a good thing she has Ivhon and Maksim. I imagine that would make it much easier to bind and gag Lan and throw him over the back of his horse, which is the only bloody way I see him going to the Tower with Alanna while you ended up here.”

It could not have been clearer that Moiraine could not meet her eyes. She stared down at her clenched fingers, the skin of which was red raw from how she had agitated it during their conversation. All at once, it was as though she could not even stand to be in her own body, to be herself at all. So great was the guilt and pain and shame that seemed to physically press upon her as Siuan watched, that Siuan thought she might collapse between it. Their eyes met for the briefest moment, as they darted wildly about the room seeking another anchor point, and for that single beat of time, Siuan felt as though she glimpsed Moiraine’s true self, trapped and smothered within the cage of her bones, huddled and broken, given up on trying to break free.

“What the fuck did you do, Moiraine?” Siuan whispered, terrified, genuinely terrified, for the first time in years.

“I told him–” Moiraine began, then broke off, as if gagged by her oath, though Siuan knew there was a far simpler, far more human barrier between her and the words she struggled to speak this time. “I told him that if he refused to go willingly–”

Again she stopped, this time needing to take down a gasp of air as her whole body shook. Even then she seemed to be struggling to breathe, as though something constricted her throat, each word needing to be forced out past an ever-tightening noose, and Siuan suddenly felt dread grip the very heart of her. All at once she did not want to cross this line. She did not want to know into what darkness this woman she loved had fallen.

“I told him that I would have Alanna take his bond by force if I had to,” she whispered in a strangled little voice.

Siuan recoiled. The movement was instinctive, and she couldn’t have stopped it if she’d wanted to. Nor was she sure that she did. Light– That was– Light. Forcing a bond with someone against their will was one of the most invasive and horrific things it was possible to do with their power. It was not only a violation of the body, but of the mind, the very soul itself. For Moiraine to have even threatened that– Threatened Lan with it–

“I thought that you loved him,” Siuan said, horror and disgust rising in her words as well as the back of her throat. “I thought that he was family to you,” she breathed, revulsion forcing her, for the first time that she could remember, to step away from this woman that she had spent most of her life waiting to run to. “How could you do that to him?”

“I didn’t!” Moiraine cried, stricken, a burst of emotion rising in her, stronger than anything else she’d been able to muster as she stared at Siuan with desperate urgency. “Of course I would never have allowed it to get that far, but–”

“You threatened him with it!” Siuan interrupted, a snap in her voice, words rising to a shout in her disbelief and her anger and her horror.

That she had done this in what Siuan assumed, what she begged the very Wheel itself, was in a wild moment of utter desperation was one thing. But to stand here now in the cold aftermath and defend the choice?

Siuan felt as though she were looking into the eyes of a stranger, a nameless, unknown creature wearing her face. Because this could not be her Moiraine. The Eye of the World had taken that woman she had loved for decades, that woman she would have ripped the world apart seam by seam to protect, and spat out something else, something that looked like Moiraine, sounded like her, but could not be her in truth.

Still in disbelief, bile burning the back of her throat she went on, hoarse with shock and ever mounting rage, making her voice waver, “the fact that you actually managed to get those words out past the First Oath to spit in his face?” Her lip curled and she spared no effort at all to hide her disgust as she growled, “I think that’s far enough.”

“Why don’t you understand?” Moiraine whispered, staring at Siuan as though she barely recognised her either. As though they were two strangers seeing each other for the first time. "I was so sure that you would,” she murmured, her eyes going unfocused as she looked inward, seeing something that Siuan could neither see nor even fathom. “I was so sure that you–”

Flinching back with a sudden twist of contempt at that very suggestion, anger rose in her. “How could you ever think I would understand something like this?” she demanded, furious, “let alone accept it!”

“Because you know me!” Moiraine shouted a little wildly, her voice rising and wavering out of her control, like a loose sail stolen by a strong gust rippling and writhing as the rage of the ocean claimed it. “You know me, Siuan,” Moiraine whispered, thumping her palm flat against her chest, just over her heart in a broken display of utter desperation, “you know me better than anyone.”

“I thought I did,” Siuan breathed, her face still hard and cold as her heart had become, petrified and crumbling in the face of this unprecedented darkness in the woman she adored. “Before tonight I never would have believed you capable of this. Not for all the light in this world.”

Moiraine looked utterly broken for a moment, her face falling into lines of clear agony, her eyes closing against it. For a moment Siuan was sure that reason and sanity had returned, and it had hit her just how awful what she’d been suggesting was.

“I swear to you,” she breathed softly, “I swear to you on my father’s name that I did this for the right reasons,” she all but begged, her eyes wide and shining with tears, “I didn’t do it to hurt him, Siuan–” she began.

But Siuan’s anger flared once more and she cut in, “then I’m sure it wouldn’t have,” she snapped with a furious spite twisting each word, “I’m sure he wouldn’t have felt any pain, or violation, or betrayal at all,” she spat, the words firing from her mouth like crashing hailstones, “not as long as you made sure you had him raped with good intentions–”

Moiraine flinched violently at that word as though it was a physical lash Siuan had branded her with. But Siuan couldn’t find any pity for her. She had blinded herself with willful ignorance and justified this to herself somehow, but Siuan would be burned to ashes before she let her ignore the harsh reality of what she had held over the head of a man who had trusted her enough to dedicate his life to hers for two decades.

“I would never allow Alanna, or anyone else, to hurt him like that,” Moiraine snarled, anger deepening her voice so that it almost seemed to echo up to her from the depths of the ocean itself. “If I could not channel I would put a blade through their heart before they even tried to do such a thing to him,” she went on, emotion burning so palpably from her now that for a moment Siuan felt as though she stood beside a raging sun, “And if I had no blade then I would tear them apart with my bare hands before they even thought of harming him.”

There she was. Yes. That was Moiraine, her Moiraine. Without question. There was no mistaking the blazing intensity in her eyes, the strength of will that seemed to rise from every taut muscle and sinew of her body like a heat haze as she set out her goal and swore every fibre of her soul to see it done, as no one Siuan had ever met could do.

But again, Siuan saw her in the slight tremble of her mouth, the brightness of her eyes, the frightened woman who lived beneath that raging force that at times felt as if she could halt the Wheel itself by virtue of the strength and stubbornness of her command alone. The woman you could almost forget was there, fragile and afraid as any other mortal creature made of flesh and blood and foolish, foolish love.

“But I will not apologise for trying to save a good man from an unjust fate,” Moiraine whispered, the near overwhelming fire of her earlier words suddenly ash, and though there was a crack to her voice there was no less conviction or intent because of that, as she now met and held Siuan’s gaze.

Even now, after she had been emotionally beaten and branded for her choice, she maintained that, if it could not be called good, it could also never be called wrong.

Siuan wanted to shake her. She wanted to shake her and ask how she could have endured what she had at the Eye, how she could have felt someone use their Power to strip away her own. How she could know as keenly as it was possible to know what it was to be left behind, vulnerable, and violated, and helpless– how she could feel that pain, and then threaten someone she loved with the same in the name of protecting them.

But she had spoken one truth, amidst the rest of this shadowspawned blight: Siuan did know her. She had known her, and loved her, since they’d been little more than children in the Tower together. So she had to believe, if she believed that there was any light left at all in this forsaken world, that Moiraine had meant well, and could still be made to see some bloody reason.

“Explain,” she murmured tautly, with every flaming bit of restraint that she was still just clinging to.

“There is no chance that either of us will live to see the world we hope to save,” Moiraine said with an honesty that was as casually brutal as it was familiar; and it was as familiar to both of them as cold beds and lonely hearts. “Not until the Wheel turns us out together again in another life. You know that,” she said very quietly, her eyes never leaving Siuan’s, never dropping, never even blinking as they confronted this truth, and this tragedy, of their life, and their love again. “We both made our peace with that years ago when we started all of this. We knew what the price would be if we were to take this path. And we both agreed to pay it."

Siuan nodded, but her brow creased in a slight frown as she said slowly, "Lan would give his life for this, for you, just as willingly, without even thinking about it."

"Of course he would!” Moiraine snapped, sounding almost insulted on her Warder’s behalf, as though Siuan had implied the opposite.

Slamming her palm down against her thigh, frustration rankling through her, she lifted the same hand to press against her head, as though trying to help it resist some unendurable pain. Then she looked up at Siuan, her expression softening, the lines of tension and stress smoothed away, so she appeared half a child again, innocent, and naive, still able to find the hope they had begun this all with years ago.

“But he doesn't have to,” she whispered, the words near a plea, to her, or the Wheel itself, Siuan didn’t know. But it was as honest and as raw a prayer as she had ever heard pass this woman’s lips. “He is not bound to that fate as we are. He would give his life for it, without hesitation, I know he would, I do not question that. But he does not have to die for this unless I drag him into the grave that has already been dug for me.”

Light but there was still good in her, Siuan thought with gentle despair, her heart aching with it. Perhaps too much.

“He can still have this life, a good life,” Moiraine insisted, the words apparently sounding reasonable and fair to her, when to Siuan they just sounded like the nonsensical plea of a loved one to save a fallen friend who’s heart had long since stopped beating, “a life that he deserves at last. That is all I wanted for him, and everything I have done has been for that. For him,” she implored.

Siuan believed her. Light but she believed her.

“You hurt him,” Siuan said quietly, still adamant that she would get an acknowledgement on this point, before they went any further. “No matter why you did it, or what you hoped to achieve, you still hurt him, Moiraine. More than anyone else ever could, and more than you ever should,” she added firmly, because she understood now, but that did not mean she accepted.

“I know,” Moiraine said, something darkening in her eyes. Shame, Siuan realised, shame for what she had done.

All at once she seemed to fade before her, the ghost of the woman that had once stood in her place. She moved as though in a daze and sank down onto the edge of her bed again, head in her hands. Cautiously, Siuan moved to her side once more and sat down next to her.

Her presence seemed to give Moiraine the strength she needed to speak. Raising her head, she said softly, “I knew I was hurting him every day that I spoke to him so callously. Or looked at him as though he were a stranger I did not trust. I could see that pain in him, as clearly as I see you standing here before me. And it destroyed me, Siuan. You have to know that. But– He is no longer caught up within the threads of my Pattern, so he need not be hanged by them as I will be,” she said, her eyes wide, the words caught somewhere between a statement and a question; wanting it to be true, but needing Siuan to make it so.

“Moiraine,” Siuan said, achingly tender, the way she would have wrapped her last breath around her name before she rammed the dagger of mercy between her ribs to spare her a fate worse than death.

Moiraine trembled to hear that, and all the gentle agony it promised.

“Nothing in our Oaths keeps us safe from lying to ourselves,” Siuan murmured, combing her fingers through Moiraine’s hair, smoothing it back from her face. “It’s time,” she said softly, “you can’t hide from yourself anymore, love. You know, you’ve always known, in your heart, that you can’t do this alone.”

Moiraine’s face crumpled at those words, and she buried it against Siuan’s chest as she turned her face against her shoulder. Siuan cradled her, comforting her from the pain that she herself was inflicting with each word she spoke. Yet she spoke them still, feeling the weight of irony in each one, but knowing they were needed.

“You and Lan are bound together with something far more powerful and lasting than any Warder bond,” Siuan told her, sharing a truth she had seen the moment she had met Lan, standing at Moiraine’s side, and feeling, for the first time since they’d heard the prophecy, and chosen their paths, that Moiraine might be safe on hers, with him beside her. “Your Patterns are intertwined, absolutely and inextricably, and always have been,” she murmured, achingly gentle. “Your fate is his; and his yours.”

Moiraine’s whole body shook with the weight of the breaths that heaved through her chest as she struggled to bear yet another burden Siuan laid upon her back.

“I told you that there would be no Lan without you,” Siuan said, still cradling Moiraine in close to her body, “but equally there is no you without Lan,” she murmured.

As she spoke she rubbed Moiraine’s back in broad, soothing circles, trying to convey without words that it was nearly over. A few more words, and Moiraine would have survived the harshest torture that any person could know. That of having the deepest fears that gave your soul its shadow to contrast its light laid bare before you with simple, merciless truth.

“You need him, Moiraine,” she said, then again, one last time, to be sure, “you need him.”

Moiraine’s shoulders slumped, and she laid her head completely in Siuan’s lap, then shocked her by actually saying, very quietly, “I know.”

A pause while she trembled, and wiped furiously at her eyes and mouth with the back of her hand, obviously trying to regain a grip on herself. For a moment, it seemed that she might succeed. Then she wavered, taking several breaths that palpably shuddered through her whole body as she tried to contain the heavy sobs that Siuan could almost feel weighing her down before she managed to get out, “I miss him. I miss him so much.”

The shock of that hit Siuan like a brick to the face. She had expected her to talk about the Pattern, about the future, about the impossibility of the task that had been demanded of them, of the cruelty of the world, and the indifference of the Wheel. She realised now that this had been the last bit of strain needed to snap the entire line, and that everything Moiraine had been holding in since Lan had left, likely since she’d started pushing him away at all, had finally become too much for even her to bear.

“Oh Moiraine–” Siuan breathed sadly.

“I look to my left to catch his eye and seek out his approval before I remember that he’s not there,” she said, the words flowing from her as thick and fast and uncontrollable as her tears. “I hear his voice each morning telling me that I need to eat something before I start my day,” she said, as Siuan stroked her hair and let her weep, “I find it strange when my plate doesn’t have a little more potato or an extra bit of bacon on it than it did a moment before, because he’s slipped me some of his without my noticing.” Siuan smiled at that, at how simple, and ridiculous, and utterly Lan such a gesture was, how it was always the smallest, stupidest things that said ‘I love you’ without ever needing to use the words. “I pour out two cups of tea without even thinking about it. When it all feels too much, and the weight of the world is crushing me, and I do not know what is right or if I can even trust myself to tie my own shoes, I wait for his reassurance, for his hand on my shoulder, or his steadfastness through the bond but– but I–”

Siuan sensed that there was more, so much more, a lifetime’s worth of tiny moments and instinctive acts that had become as thoughtless as breathing, not noticed until they were gone, and then their absence was an agony worse than dying. But there were no more words left to her to speak them. The mask she’d clutched to her face and hidden behind all these months was little more than ash snatched at by the wind. She was bare, and barren, with no more shields to crouch behind, and no more barriers to break her fall. All she could do now was feel, feel every ounce of grief and pain she’d been pushing aside and struggling to ignore for months.

Moiraine broke, utterly and completely, and Siuan held her as she did. She rocked her gently in her arms as she sobbed and screamed until her throat was raw. She stroked her hair as she gasped and heaved and struggled for each breath she sucked in past her grief. She rubbed her back as she convulsed and trembled until at last her exhausted body could give no more, and it lay still and silent in Siuan’s arms.

Afterwards, Siuan remained quiet. Like the first breath the world took after the passing of a great storm, this was not for her to do, this was not her silence to break, only to keep watch over, until the time came. She knew that it would. Some things were inevitable that way, and she had learned patience as a babe strapped to her father’s back on his little fishing boat, waiting for the tides to carry them home. She had kept that patience for twenty long years, spending each day waiting for Moiraine’s return. She had patience now for this.

Wiping her eyes with that frustrated little gesture, sniffing repeatedly, Moiraine pushed herself tiredly into a sitting position, still leaning against Siuan’s shoulder to help keep her upright.

“I must sound so foolish,” she muttered, voice dulled by fatigue and exertion. Catching Siuan’s expression out of the corner of her eye, she seemed to realise that had not been entirely clear, for she clarified, “crying over cups of tea and potatoes when the Forsaken are stirring and the Dark One’s shadow spreads further each day across the entire world which may be lost if we cannot save it,” she said, with a truly admirable amount of dignity maintained between her hiccups.

Siuan smiled fondly, smoothing out Moiraine’s hair, “a bit,” she admitted, though she made it clear from her tone that it was meant to tease. Kissing the top of Moiraine’s head she sighed out a long resigned breath and said, “I think you need your cups of tea and potatoes and… whatever else,” she said, struggling to remember the precise details of Moiraine’s long, only mostly coherent list. Fortunately this lapse made Moiraine snort with suppressed laughter, knowing her far too well to feel aggrieved, so Siuan continued, “and that’s okay,” she murmured, giving Moiraine a bracing little squeeze. “It’s the same reason I still practise my nets and lures by hand every day,” she said, seeing the soft, fond smile and distant bob of Moiraine’s head in acknowledgement of this, “we need something to keep us sane while everything else goes mad around us.”

Moiraine considered that and then she said very quietly, “So many times, Lan has been the only thing protecting me from death, ever snapping at my heels. But he has also been my net,” she said with a watery smile, catching Siuan’s eyes, “keeping me from the insanity always clawing at the edges of my mind.”

Siuan nodded as Moiraine’s mouth trembled with the burden of the realisation Siuan had just watched settle heavy upon her soul. She stroked her cheek, anchoring her, but did not interrupt or say the words for her. She needed this, needed to purge herself of this truth as surely as if it were trolloc poison.

“I was selfish,” Moiraine managed to whisper at last. Siuan closed her eyes, a tension she had carried since she had asked Moiraine where Lan was at last allowed to leave her. “I convinced myself that the pain I caused him was worth it, if it kept him safe but… nothing in our Oaths keeps us safe from lying to ourselves, does it?” she murmured, repeating the wisdom Siuan had given her earlier. She closed her eyes, her face a mask of pain, and Siuan felt such pride, and such love, swell within her as she found the strength to confront the person she had been, and hold her accountable for what she had done. “I sought to break him, to break the love, and the loyalty I did not feel I deserved because I knew that it would break me to lose him as well.” Silent tears escaped her, sliding down her cheeks as she whispered, “I was so selfish.”

“I know,” Siuan said, the harsh simplicity of that truth balanced by the soothing tone in which it was spoken.

“He must hate me,” she said, unable to entirely smother the small sob that choked from her as she spoke those words.

“Maybe he should, for what you did to him,” Siuan said, as softly and gently as she had spoken her last truth.

She saw the reflexive flash of shock and betrayal in Moiraine’s eyes, before she blinked it away, along with the tears that had shone there, and nodded heavily.

"But I’d still stake my life on the bet that he doesn’t,” Siuan continued very quietly. Whether that made him a fool or a hero, she didn’t know, and perhaps it wasn’t her place to decide either way. “You know that’s not him. He will forgive you. Even for this. As long as you give him a reason to."

Moiraine looked up at her for a long moment then, finally, blessedly, she nodded. She looked utterly exhausted as she did so, but she did so, and that was enough for now. Siuan kissed her head. There was still more to say, on this, as well as the other events of the last six months, but Moiraine clearly wasn’t up to hearing so much as the day’s catch right now, let alone anything like that. So Siuan scooped her up and drew her down onto the bed beside her, stroking her hair and wiping away her latest tears.

“Rest now,” she told her softly. Moiraine started to open her mouth to protest, but Siuan just pressed a finger to her lips, “I will stay and shield your dreams,” she said quietly. It was a risk, she knew, not to return to the Palace, but Leane would make her excuses if that became necessary. Siuan judged that the hour-long grilling she would get from her Keeper about where she’d been and why was worth it to allow Moiraine to get a chance to actually recover some of her strength. “You need to sleep,” she insisted, in a tone that warned there would be no arguing of that point.

“You know so well what I need,” Moiraine growled huffily, the words barely distinguishable through the blanket Siuan was already pulling around her.

“I do,” Siuan agreed, as though Moiraine had spoken the words as a mere statement of fact, and not an obviously petulant complaint.

More grumpy sounds issued at this, though none were coherent enough to be made sense of, and were thus very easy to ignore, as Siuan bundled Moiraine up in the densest, heaviest blankets she could find, then wrapped her arms around her and held her close. She was asleep almost before Siuan had finished weaving the shield around her mind to protect her from Lanfear’s influence, at last safe enough to allow the sleep she so desperately needed to claim her.

There was still a ways to go, she knew, the shore was only just visible as a faint line upon the distant horizon, and their little boat still had a vast ocean to cross to reach it. But if things had not yet been fixed, they had been improved. Tomorrow they would improve again, and the day after, and the day after, and the day after. One step at a time. One foot in front of the other. Until the sand of the shore turned to earth, then to stone, and they reached a place where the turbulent sea was little more than myth, and the oar they carried was mistaken for a staff.

****

I'm friendly! In spite of the endless angsty content I produce! Please come talk to me!

#moiraine damodred #moiraine sedai #siuan sanche #siuanraine #molan #lan mandragoran #wheel of time #wot fic #siuaraine fic #molan fic #my fic #fic #long post #text post tag

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moiraineswife · 7 months

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Moiraine + That Pesky First Oath

1x06 vs 2x05

#moiraine damodred #moiraine sedai #rosamund pike #wotedit #rand al'thor #wot on prime #wheel of time prime #wot show spoilers #wheel of time spoilers #wot gifset #moiraine gifset #LOOK SHE'S REALLY TIRED OKAY LET HER /LIVE/.#moiraine really out here like:#'and i would have gotten away with it too! if it hadn't been for my meddling oaths!!!!!'#rosamund pike really just fully committed to the face journeys in both of these scenes #truly a delight #this woman dumped charisma as a stat like 'eh when will i ever need that?????'#and then was forced to deal with 5 of the world's prickliest young adults #also appreciation again for how WRECKED she is in ep 5 #remember when we were all watching ep 7 like 'LOL LOOK HOW EXHAUSTED AND UNHINGED SHE IS'#and now look at her #2x05 Mo would literally kill to have 1x07 Mo's sleeping pattern/eating habits #also brief F in chat for randal in that second gif #really was all excited/hopeful like 'oh what's she gonna say about me!?'#and then #.............rand #ty to the discord squad that i polled to determine if i had enough '....'s or not #my gifset #my gifs #mine

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moiraineswife · 7 months

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"You should have stayed away."

"I know."

#wotedit #moiraine damodred #rosamund pike #anvaere damodred #lindsay duncan #wheel of time #wot on prime #wot spoilers #wot show spoilers #moiraine gifset #my gifset #my gifs #anvaere x moiraine #SHE'S SO BROKEN :'(#we are not going to talk abt the number of years trying to colour this shit took off my life #we're just going to look at moiraine barely keeping her shit together #and then we're all going to cry like the good sapphics we are #but also wow #that 'you should have stayed away' 'I know'#when Moiraine has spent all season pushing away people who care about her and isolating herself #and then she goes back 'home' and sees her sister and her nephew #and a day later she's got the dragon reborn with her and is being pursued by one of the forsaken #proof that she was right to push Lan away - and to leave Verin and Adeleas and Tomas too #because look what happens. everywhere she goes: death and ruin follow #and now the entire city of Cairhien is in danger; as well as her family; and it's all her fault #AND she had to kill a horsie as well #this is really just moiraine's no good very bad existence tbh #SOMEONE HUG HER #and someone also force her into bed and make her eat food #lan where r u. look at her. she's a disaster. MAKE HER NAP. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. MAKE HER NAP!!!

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moiraineswife · 7 months

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Cairhien Costs

2x03 - 2x04

#wotedit #wotcentral #moiraine damodred #anvaere damodred #rosamund pike #lindsay duncan #wheel of time #wheel of time on prime #anvaere/moiraine #anvaere x moiraine #moiraine gifset #wot gifset #wot #mine #my gifset #GENUINELY think every word anvaere spoke to moiraine was emotional manipulation of some sort #and wow what a perfect demonstration of how cairhien is simply: THE WORST #everyone is emotionally manipulative/abusive at all times #no wonder Moiraine looks utterly EXHAUSTED when she gets back #and then she can't even switch off and relax #because that is not an option in this household - and never has been #there is always another twist in the tail. another game to be endured.#her face as she realises just how Anvaere has played her and manipulated her is just so :(#reminding her exactly why she hates it here. exactly why she left. exactly why it's been decades since she visited #because visiting means subjecting herself to THIS. to these constant games #to having your sister spy on you and check up on you and spend her entire day finding out what you're trying to do #just so she can use that information as a weapon against you #to force you to do what she wants #this is not about tea. this is not even about rejection. this is about CONTROL.#the writers really just went 'u wanna know why moiraine is Like That. WELL WE'RE GONNA SHOW YOU'

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moiraineswife · 8 months

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Taken and Paid - A Moiraine & Anvaere Fic

Title: Taken and Paid

Warnings: SPOILERS for episode 4 of season 2! And canon-typical continuation of the themes of abuse, manipulation, suicidal ideation, coping very badly with trauma, depression - the usual Moiraine stuff for this season, in a nutshell.

Summary:

A continuation of the scene between Anvaere and Moiraine where her sister reveals that she knows the information Moiraine seeks, and that if Moiraine wants it, she must subject herself to the invitation she refused that morning, and sit and have tea.

Teaser: So Moiraine took what she wanted, and paid the price that was owed.

She got down on her knees and lowered herself into the chair opposite her sister. She raised her hands in supplication and reached out to accept the extended cup. She tied a noose around the last remaining shreds of her dignity and pride and took a small sip. She let herself go as a tribute to the Dragon, who could never claim she was unfaithful, as she smiled in apparent enjoyment of sharing a warm drink on a cold night with a beloved family member.

Link: AO3 or Read Below:

“If you want to know about that redheaded boy from the inn you’re going to have to ask me very nicely… over tea.”

Looking into Anvaere’s quietly triumphant face as she delivered her final line, this little play that she had planned and set the stage for having just been performed to perfection in her eyes, given the ever-so subtle satisfaction that placed that perfect emphasis on the word ‘tea’; Moiraine felt for a moment as though she was at the Eye of the world once more. Trembling as Ishamael stared down upon her in exaltation of his power and his control as she lay stripped and vulnerable at his feet.

The stench of the Blight, fetid and inescapable as the twisted heart within her own chest, was thick in her mouth again. For a fleeting moment the room shifted, and the dark furniture became dark stone, the twisting patterns of the carved window frames the twisting patterns of Ishamael’s seal, the flickering fire-light the glow of her power before it was snuffed thoughtlessly like an insignificant candle.

She was powerless again. She was on her knees again. She was backed into a corner, walls all around. She was convulsing with pain and violation as Ishamael lorded over her powerless form again.

Blinking, the memory cleared. It was something Moiriane had become rather well-practised at in the last few months. Everything, no matter how small, no matter how innocent, no matter how obviously well-intentioned, sent her back to that place. At times she had even wondered if the Forsaken was capable of haunting and shaping waking nightmares, as he had haunted the sleeping dreams of Rand and the others. But no. It was not the Forsaken. Moiraine did not matter enough to him for him to waste his time with her. It had only ever been her own weakness. A weakness she would overcome. Every day for the rest of her life, if that was what it took. The stubborn defiance faded to a shiver at the prospect, but she had control again.

Moiraine looked at Anvaere, looked at her, and truly saw her. So pleased with the success of her little scheme, so jubilant in her exaltant victory. The deliverance of her just punishment to the sister who had done the most unthinkable and unforgivable thing a Cairhien noble could ever do to rest of their pit of vipers: escaped.

It struck her then, the reality of the situation, that while she had struggled, and fought, and desperately sought to find, and train, and save the Dragon Reborn so that he might save all of them in turn; Anvaere had sat and schemed and sought to forced Moiraine to accept her invitation to tea after scorning it that morning.

She wanted to laugh. To laugh, without humour, until she could not breathe, because of the absurdity, of the near hysterical way the Wheel seemed to be forcing her to confront what she might have become had she stayed here.

She wanted to scream. Scream until her throat was raw and the pretty little porcelain of Anvaere’s neat little tea-set, and the vile glass in the judgemental mirror shattered and revealed how empty and pointless they all truly were. The Forsaken were being released, released because of her, because of the choices she had made, the plans that she had set in motion. Now this. This game she had always despised and now, more than ever, had no desire, and no damn time to play.

She wanted to fall to her knees and weep. Weep for the cruelty of the Wheel. For, time and again, when she was quite sure that she had lost everything a single person could lose, when she had nothing left to sacrifice, and nothing left to pledge to prove her loyalty, and her devotion: it asked for yet more. It took every last fragment of strength she had not to sink down the ground and sob because nothing was ever easy. Nothing was ever given. Everything had to be taken. Everything had to be paid for.

What she took was always the same: something to advance her mission. A scrap of knowledge, a prophecy, a scrap of lore, an artefact that may hold answers, a secret that may prove vital. The price changed with whom she needed to purchase from. Some wanted coin, some wanted information, some wanted secrets, or favours, or power. Today Anvaere wanted her pride. Served up to her on a silver platter, raw and bloody, as the prime cut of a kill should be.

Pride was all Moiraine had clung to after the Eye. It was all that had kept her from taking the dagger she had tempted Logain with and using it to cut free the last tether she had keeping her in place. Like snipping free the final tendon holding a severed and useless limb in place, too stubborn to let go, too stupid to realise that such stubbornness was utterly pointless.

Pride was what had driven her, day by day, to wake up, to force herself to rise from bed with nothing to do and no purpose to strive towards, to put one foot in front of the other, even when the result was more a shamble or a stagger than a walk, to carry her water and try to clean off the feeling of being dirty and contaminated that she knew could not be scrubbed from her skin when it had sunk in and settled like scum on her bones and on her very soul, but that she did anyway.

Pride was what had stopped her from ever being able to let another person see her weakness, never willingly handing a vulnerability to a potential enemy, never being able to admit that it was sometimes agony just to breathe.

Pride was Anvaere’s price. And she knew there would be no negotiation, no haggling, no bargaining, no escape. For they both knew that Moiraine needed what her sister held, and that she had no other way of getting it, as her futile, exhausting efforts in the city that day had only served to underline.

So Moiraine took what she wanted, and paid the price that was owed.

She got down on her knees and lowered herself into the chair opposite her sister. She raised her hands in supplication and reached out to accept the extended cup. She tied a noose around the last remaining shreds of her dignity and pride and took a small sip. She let herself go, hanged as a tribute to the Dragon, who could never claim she was unfaithful, as she smiled in apparent enjoyment of sharing a warm drink on a cold night with a beloved family member.

“You really shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble,” Moiraine said, with the expected courtly perfection of a refined polite, slightly self-depreciating tone, as was appropriate when falsely humbling oneself to thank their host for providing the poison they now sipped on together, “just to have a cup of tea with your sister,” she said, with a smile she was sure was uncannily like the one she had practised in the mirror that morning, revolted and slightly chilled to realise that, after all this time, the mask they’d held her down and sewn onto her face still slipped seamlessly and easily back over her features.

“Well,” Anvaere began, responding with the appropriate level of graciousness and deference to their honoured guest whom they hosted in their home with around the same level of reluctance they would hand over their jewels to an uncouth man with a dirty dagger at their neck, “I wouldn’t have been forced to do so had you not made me,” she crooned condescendingly, smiling as though Moiriane was a child she’d just had to slap for putting her hand too close to a fire.

And there it was. The dark undercurrent of drive that had shadowed her entire life and shaped her entire person: she had been made to be hurt. If she had not been foolish and cried at court when the maid she’d loved had been sentenced to death for stealing kitchen scraps from the noble’s meals, her Uncle would not have needed to punish her for it.

If she had simply done as was expected of her, had perfected her steps at the first instance, as she should have done so, her dance instructor would not have been forced to snap at her bare feet with a cane until they were raw and bloody, for if she had done it right, she would have missed the blows, and would have pristine, perfect feet - as a Damodred should have.

If she had not been blocked in her channeling, she would not have needed her mentor to assault and beat her with the One Power until she finally broke through the pain to embrace the Source herself and fight back.

If she had not been so foolish, and so stupid, and so wrong she would not have let herself be Cut off from the Source at the Eye of the World.

Every failure was her fault, and was a reason for pain; every triumph was a result of that pain, and therefore ultimately attributable to those who had caused it, not to her.

Swallowing down the unseemly surge of bitterness that had threatened to mar her courtly poise, so like the expected Aes Sedai serenity, simply with its own purposes and quirks to suit the Cairhien society, rather than the Tower one, Moiraine took another drink of tea to force down the sour thoughts and smiled blandly over the rim at Anvaere.

“Are you enjoying your tea?” her sister asked, in a tone so sweet it had to be poisonous, and told Moiraine quite clearly that she had not been as swift in hiding her distasteful thoughts as she wished she had.

“It is a very pleasant blend,” Moiraine returned a little stiffly, forcing herself to take another grudging drink.

Anvaere’s eyes glinted at that, and she opened her mouth to say something else–

“So, sister,” Moiraine cut-in, breaking the formal flow of their conversation in a misstep that would have been considered near scandalous, had she actually cared, the pretence slipping, as did her patience. Sitting up a little straighter, she barreled forth before Anvaere could say something else and draw out this agony any further, “you clearly wished to take tea with me very much,” Moiraine noted, as though Anvaere’s obsessive dedication and aggressive reassertion of control over Moiraine’s slightest perceived flouting of that was an admirable trait, “was there something you wished to discuss with me in particular?”

“Well typically,” Anvaere replied, with a very mildly wounded inflection in her voice, almost playful in its insincerity, “when a beloved family member, especially one as close as a sister, is away for an extended period of time, as you have been,” she said, each little addition a perfectly shaped and sharpened knife designed to slide efficiently and ruthlessly between Moiraine’s ribs to stab directly into her heart, “it’s customary for them catch up as it were,” she said with a smile that would have been genuinely warm and full of sisterly affection had both of them not known very plainly that Moiraine despised doing this in all of its forms, “you’ve been gone so long,” she said with a mournful cast to her eyes, though the sharpness and shrewdness never left them for a moment, “I would so like to hear how you’re doing.”

“Of course you would,” Moiraine said, and her tone and expression, too, mirrored that expected sisterly warmth, as though they were at a table full of dinner guests they could not embarrass with the explosive fight they’d been having moments before walking through the doors to the banquet hall and now had to keep up appearances, and not sitting alone together in Moiraine’s old bedroom. “It’s only natural, after all,” she smiled, even though she now knew, having learned from Siuan and Lan, that the relationship and dynamic she had grown up with in her family was about as natural as a shark scenting the fresh blood of a wounded seal and choosing to to nurse the poor creature back to health rather than simply ripping it apart to feast as was its nature.

“I do still know you, sweet Moiraine,” Anvaere simpered, leaning forward to pat Moiraine’s hand. It took more self-control than she would ever admit not to instinctively pull back from the unwanted touch. “I know that doing things like this can make you feel a little awkward and uncomfortable,” she gave an entirely humourless little laugh, with a subtle undercurrent of mockery, audible only to her as she added, with false fondness, “our Moiraine, so humble, with such humility, never wanting to flaunt her accomplishments or her talents,” she side with a smile.

Moiraine reflected, with a twist of something that might have been true regret for the state of this relationship and what their world had forced them to become to one another, that if Anvaere were to ever learn about what had happened to Moiraine at the Eye, about how she could no more channel than her teapot could, while outwardly she might be able to put on a decent show of sorrow and pity, deep down she would feel nothing but satisfaction and vindication that the prized apple at the very peak of House Damodred’s family tree had toppled from her great heights and proved rotten and weak to the core.

“So to make it a little easier for you,” Anvaere was saying now, and Moiraine forced her focus back to her, even as her exhausted and already strained and stretched mind longed for nothing more than to swipe the cup from Anvaere’s hand against the wall and order her to get out and leave her be. “I thought we might make a little game out of it,” she said with a nostalgic little smile, glancing very pointedly at the large portrait that loomed above them, in pride of place above the mantle.

It had been a gift, a request of Moiraine’s, actually, for a nameday when she had been twelve, or perhaps thirteen. They had been close, once. There had been a true fondness and love between them at one time. When they had been children, and had still been sweet and blind enough to believe that they could be different, that they could be the siblings in Cairhien who never worried about backstabbing, or betrayal, or even assassination from the other. As they had grown, and their Uncle, more and more, had Moiraine groomed as heir, while Anvaere was groomed as little more than a broodmare had started to strain that relationship. Moiraine revealing she could channel had utterly broken it beyond repair. Yet she had kept the portrait, as a memory of things that, while they were not, and would never be again, had still been a small source of comfort, and joy; a reminder of better, happier times, short lived though they had been.

Now Moiraine would have happily torn the portrait from its place on the wall and cast it, and the judgemental eyes of its naive, foolish occupants into the fire until it was nothing but smoke and memory.

“You remember how we used to love games when we were girls?” Anvaere said, as though following Moiraine’s own path of thoughts, likely thinking very similarly to her, ironically.

“How could I forget?” Moiraine replied with a false little laugh that made the self-loathing lurking within her rise up and hiss its own cruel, malicious laughter in the back of her mind, knowing it would replay over and over again when sleep refused to claim her because the monsters in her mind had not yet had their say.

“Indeed,” Anvaere returned, not missing a beat in this little dance they did together now. “Well I thought that it could something like this,” she began, meaning, it will work exactly like this, or you won’t see so much as a scrap of information from me, “but I will ask you a question, likely about what you’ve been up to while you’ve been away from us,” she smiled, as though this was an exciting adventure she longed to hear about, and not the bitterest truth that had stirred hate in her heart for Moiraine as nothing else could have: the fact that she had escaped this world, while Anvaere had been chained to it so long she’d been forced to truly become it, not merely to live in it, “and then, if I’m happy with your answer,” she added, a slightly harder note entering as if to remind Moiraine that, in spite of all these niceties and politeness and pleasantries, Anvaere was still firmly in control of this interaction, “you can ask me a question in turn,” she smiled, “about anything at all that you wish to know.”

“That sounds like a very fair arrangement,” Moiraine said, hesitating just a fraction too long, long enough that they both knew Anvaere had seen her briefly falter and slip on a step, “and I believe that you should go first, as you were the one to propose it,” Moiraine said, graciously inclining her head and saluting her with a slight raise of her teacup, before bringing it to her mouth and swigging down too much of the still scalding liquid at once, feeling a strange satisfaction as it burned her throat and left it raw as it went down.

“How sweet of you,” Anvaere returned. Then she shifted in her chair, sitting up a little straighter, and Moiraine mentally braced herself for what was to come. “Truly, I have to confess, that what I have been simply dying to hear about more than anything at all simply has to be your husband,” she beamed, sitting with her chin propped on the hand that wore her wedding ring, which caught the firelight and gleamed almost threateningly between them.

Moiraine’s heart went tight. Well, at least she could say for Anvaere that, once she decided to finally get right down for it, she wasted no time in simply going straight for the killing blow. They both knew that this was a particularly sore point. As they both knew that, more than politics, or betrayals, poisoning or parties, assassinations or assaults, what Moiraine most feared and dreaded as a fact of her life was the idea of having to marry a man, to be forced to his bed, to bear his children, to become chained and beholden to him. They both knew that was a fate that she had escaped, fleeing from an arranged marriage to instead go to the White Tower and train. Anvaere had not been so lucky. Her husband had passed only a few years ago, with no love between them, and enough children that the mere thought made Moiraine feel slightly sick.

Moiraine took another sip of tea, to give herself time to regain her poise, but most of the liquid dribbled down her chin instead because of how her hand was shaking, and she had to duck to wipe it away, utterly ruining the intended effect.

“My husband?” she repeated with feigned confusion, frowning politely at her sister, quite sure that this little farce would not be believed, but that wasn’t really the point.

The point was she needed a moment to gather her wits and curse her sister. Why in the Light did it have to be about Lan? Why wouldn’t she have asked about almost anything else? But of course that was not the Cairhien way, was it? When one identified what was undoubtedly the best weapon to use for a current fight, one did not choose a less effective tool simply because it would have shown a hint of mercy. That might result in a loss, and a loss was unacceptable. It did not matter if something was gained by the purest and most noble methods, or the dirtiest and vilest of tricks that many a cutpurse would have flinched at. All that mattered was that you came out better than your opponent. By whatever means necessary.

“Oh, are you not married to him?” Anvaere said, continuing this painful little charade of pretence, just to draw it out, twist the knife and force it a little deeper before she withdrew it and allowed it to bleed freely for her own amusement, “I apologise for making the assumption,” she replied, very clearly slighting Moiraine by implying that it would have been wrong to assume she would be a decent, upstanding woman and marry the man she was bedding, as she would be expected to.

Waving her fingers idly, Anvaere added carelessly, “but I’m sure you know well the one I mean,” and though this comment was only a stepping stone in passing for her, unseen and unknown, the damage it caused was deeper and more lasting than Anvaere could ever know.

Yes. She had known him well, had known him better than anyone, in fact. Moiraine swallowed down tightly past the tight knot of emotion forming in her throat. She had not thought of Lan, had deliberately kept her thoughts on anything else, since leaving him, for every time she remembered his face, or heard his voice chide her for not eating or sleeping as much as she should be, it almost made her wish that she was back at the Eye with Ishamael, as that would have been far less painful to endure. She could not lose her composure now, could not reveal to Anvaere just how much of a weakness Lan was for her. Anvaere had told her that she saw Moiraine as a threat. And Moiraine well knew how threats were to be dealt with in Cairhien. Any weapon that could be used against an enemy would be, and any potential weapon would be found so that it could be held in reserve and used to threaten as needed. She would not allow Lan to suffer the consequences of her weakness and failures yet again.

Returning her full attention to her sister, she heard, with a clarity as sharp and cutting as freshly broken glass, as Anvaere said casually, “that brooding man who is always at your side,” she raised an eyebrow very slightly as she added pointedly, “well, usually at your side, in any case.” When Moiraine, jaw clenched, remaining silent and missing yet another beat of the dance, unable to trust herself with speaking when she was not sure she could open her mouth without screaming, Anvaere continued mercilessly, “he had eyes so hard and cold I would have bet they would chill the very fires of Dragonomount,” she said with a contemptuous twist to her mouth, “let alone a woman,” she added with an affected little shudder.

Moiraine’s hand, the one not currently strangling her teacup, clenched tightly on the arm of her chair, and she was quite sure, given Anvaere’s slight flicker as her own mask slipped, that she had not concealed the anger at this insult well at all.

“Regardless,” Anvaere said, licking her lips as though almost thinking better of this, side-stepping her rudeness as if it was as insignificant and beneath her notice as a dirty puddle in her way on the street, “do tell me all,” she pressed with a seemingly warm and inviting smile.

Her mouth did not say ‘or I will tell you nothing of what you want to know’ but her eyes could not have made it plainer where they peered expectantly at Moiraine over the rim of her own cup.

“Lan is not, and has never been,” Moiraine clarified swiftly, before Anvaere decided to twist the knife any further and force her to go over this again, “my husband. Nor were we ever involved that way,” she added, unable to stop a little of the exhaustion she felt bleed into her words.

It was not the tiredness of her body that was unbearable to her, though it was certainly beginning to weigh on her, but how simply exhausted she was by this entire culture and way of life in Cairhien. Where every phrase in a conversation with her sister had to be examined for loopholes to swiftly close lest they be taken advantage, as though she was eternally stuck making endless bargains with the Sea Folk. Every word out of her mouth was weighed, and judged, and measured, every breath was critiqued, every step taken drawing raised eyebrows and whispers behind hands. It had been less than a day and she felt strung up, skinned and gutted. How had she survived here for so long as a child?

“Yet you spent such time together,” Anvaere pressed, her eyes wide, as though Moiraine was sharing a juicy piece of scandalous gossip, “travelling alone together with only a man, sharing rooms at inns, if the rumours are to be believed.”

“He– He was my Warder,"Moiraine broke in, speaking too swiftly, wishing to simply shut Anvaere’s perfectly painted mouth.

Only Anvaere could do this to her, get under her skin this way, provoke a temper she’d not had in years. And in doing so she had also forced Moiraine to stumble once more. She’d felt the slip herself as her Oath caught and gagged her when she'd briefly tried to say 'he is my Warder', for that was no longer true. Not after what she'd done.

“Was?” Anvaere said, pouncing immediately upon the word like a rabid street dog upon an injured mouse attempting to scurry past it, “Did something happen?” she asked, with a very appropriate level of expected concern. ‘Did something happen?’ Light. What a question. With so many answers, and so much pain attached to it. Moiraine blinked and forced herself to take another too large gulp of tea, letting the blistering in her throat distract her, letting her draw herself back to the room, away from the Eye, so that she could hear Anvaere conclude with saccharine sweetness, “nothing too terrible, I hope?”

"No,” Moiraine answered mechanically, “not at all.” Quite the opposite, in fact. Terrible would have been bringing him here, subjecting him to this vile place, wasting more of his life with her, until it was ultimately, pointlessly, cut short attempting to prolong the miserable excuse for existence hers had become. “I suppose you could say that he has…moved on to greener pastures,” she said with a forced smile, betraying nothing of the raging tempest of emotions within her.

"Ah," Anvaere sighed, with a look that would almost have been pitying, had Moiraine not caught the glint of satisfaction as she watched her sister come to her own conclusions about what exactly that meant. "A lesson for you, then," she said, "always marry them when they're still addled with lust for you and pliant. Uncle, for all his faults, was right about the fact that, when presented with the opportunity to make a killing blow, you should never hesitate."

Moiraine noted Anvaere’s assumption, in spite of her attempting to kill any possibility of thoughts in that direction, that Lan had only agreed to follow her initially because he’d wished to bed her, and decided it was not worth trying to scrape together more energy she frankly didn’t have to argue the point. Naturally she assumed that. It was how they were taught, and how the game was played. A woman’s sexuality is one of her only weapons, and hse must wield it accordingly to gain whatever power she can while she still has it at her disposal. She knew it would be almost impossible to explain the relationship she and Lan had to Anvaere, who simply came from such a different world that she could not even begin to imagine it, let alone accept it.

More impossible for her, still, was the sentiment behind why Moiraine had pushed Lan away. There was no greater sin in Cairhien than to not use every advantage you had. The idea of actively pushing away someone that you loved, worse, someone who was useful to you, simply for their sake? Unthinkable. Moiraine would likely not have been able to conceive of it, either, not before Lan. For this had been his influence upon her, she knew. Ironic, given how hard he’d fought against accepting it. Sacrifice had been a language she spoke fluently and well, but letting someone go, letting them be free of the burden of duty or love so that they might be happier for it? That was a lesson that Lan had helped her to learn. Along with so many others on their journey together. And now–

“You seem to miss him,” Anvaere observed, giving voice to the very thoughts Moiraine had been working so hard to push down and ignore, lest they break her.

Her sister also betrayed a flicker of surprise in her expression for the first time, as she apparently uncovered something she had not already known was there, and was as such not expecting it. Learning things about Moiraine had never been the purpose of this little interrogation. Hurting her with things already known had been. Punishing her, in the most Cairhien of ways, showing her the consequences that came with refusing a polite invitation. Had she taken tea that morning perhaps they might have had a pleasant chat with one another. Since Moiraine had forced her to go to all of this trouble, well, now she had to pay the price.

Moiraine swallowed hard, drank her tea to give herself thinking time, for the simple truth was that she did. She had not expected it to be so much sharper and keener for the loss of his physical presence in her space. She had been missing the bond, and the emotional connection she had delivered held off, for months now, why should this have made it so much worse. Yet it had.

In the end she could come up with no way to talk around her First Oath and was forced to say, very quietly, throat painfully tight, “I do.”

Anvaere, at last, looked satisfied, and Moiraine decided not to let the opportunity presented to strike go to waste.

“Now,” she said firmly, leaning forward with clear intent, “about that redheaded boy at the inn,” she prompted and Anvaere raised an eyebrow slightly to indicate that, as hoped, she would permit Moiraine her first question, “how long has he been staying here in Cairhien?”

An hour later, Moiraine had what she needed, though she felt as though she’d been forced to let Anvaere flay her very soul until it was raw and bloody and exposed before her. Nothing she had asked had been dreadfully invasive, really, but that had not been the point. The act itself had been the price, and the punishment, of her earlier transgressions. As she moved from the room, she did so feeling hollow and empty. Like the old dollhouse, or the books untouched for years, or the dust that had lain thick upon the space, Moiraine was now but another old, unloved ghost, cold and despairing, and never able to find peace.

***

I'm friendly please feel free to yell thoughts/comments at me!! They fuel my angst and pain!!!!

#moiraine damodred #moiraine sedai #anvaere damodred #wheel of time #wheel of time spoilers #wheel of time on prime #wot spoilers #wot show spoilers #moiraine/anvaere #mine #my fic #LOOK AT THIS. I WROTE SOMETHING FOR THE NEW SEASON AND THEN I PUBLISHED IT #BEFORE THE NEXT EPISODE AIRS #wow. so talent. much wonderful. go me.#cairhien really said: we're going to show you exactly why moiraine is Like That #and make you wonder why she's not: so much worse #moiraine really is just doing her utmost to punish herself huh?#not enough she goes back to cairhien: the abusive pit of all the worst things ever #no no #that's not enough for little lady dramadred #gotta go stay in her old childhood bedroom #bc she's just THAT fuckin extra #goddammit Mo why do i love u so much #IM SO BEHIND AT POSTING FIC TO TUMBLR BTW PLS FORGIVE ME #and also pls comment - that too #and reblogs. share the pain. spread the suffering. my ideal form in life is as a virus

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moiraineswife · 8 months

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Moiraine Reflecting

Season 2, Episode 4

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moiraineswife · 8 months

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Moiraine And Lan - The Inability To Communicate Trauma

Hello friends. It has been quite some time. Quite some time since I have: absolutely lost all my fucking shit over my blorbos at great length via a long and quotation filled tumblr meta. Fear not: the status quo of the universe returns, and I am once again: back on my bullshit (literally hours before the next episode airs and this gets drowned/replaced with New Content. Because I’m smart like that). ANYWAY.

Today we’re going to discuss: Mo and Lan and the singular moron-flavoured braincell they share, bond or no bond. More seriously, however: I’ve noticed a few bits of commentary/takes/analysis of the current state of their…well state, let’s be frank here, and realised that my contrary ass has: Different Opinions. So I figured I’d share them. Bc that’s what I do.

(Obligatory disclaimer that there is no right or wrong way to interpret something - that’s why it’s an interpretation, and this is not a call out or a “oh wow you’re wrong and here’s why!!!!” post directed at anyone or anything. Just my observation that I am going against the grain of what I’ve seen and thus throwing out: a new chew toy for us to gnaw on).

Also: please do note that this post will cover, rather extensively/in-depth, the trauma arc that Lan and Moiraine are going through at the moment and will contain trigger warnings for: depression, PTSD, trauma response, rape (in the context of the analogy that Verin presented), suicide, suicidal ideation, suicidal attempt (again: all in the context of the show/previous events), and everything related to the topics that have been raised in the first two episodes for these characters. Be safe and tap out if you need to!

So. Obligatory wiffle aside: what shall we discuss? In a nutshell (bc I’m real good at that) I’m covering how, as I see it/am fascinated by it: the responses that they’re having to each other at the moment are mirrors/insights into the responses that they’re each having to the recent traumas that they’ve both suffered. In more depth/the points where I think I differ from the norm we’re going to cover:

1)-why Lan is: not an idiot, actually. I see it as him being still perfectly capable of READING/understanding Moiraine without the bond; what he’s having difficulty with is COMMUNICATING with her without the bond

2)- that Moiraine is actually: ALSO failing dismally at communicating with Lan, and that she’s doing: a real fucking bad job of manipulating him. (is she HURTING him? Yes. 100%. Is she MANIPULATING him into doing what she wants? Given that she clearly wants nothing more than for him to: leave her, and that after 5 solid months he has: not left, I’m just going to put out the idea that maybe she’s not quite meeting her all of her targets in this area.

3)- wow they’re both doing incredibly stupid things, and they’re doing them for the same incredibly stupid reasons, and they are, in fact: INCREDIBLY THE SAME. See: singular moron-flavoured brain cell. This manifests slightly differently, due to their own individual traumas influencing the specifics of their actions/thought processes - but the general underlying thesis is the same for both.

The TL;DR here is that: these weirdos still know each other, and love each other, and understand each other without their bond. Can they communicate any of what they want to communicate in any kind of effective way? No. No they cannot. They BOTH suck. (I say that with legitimately all the love in the world).

So. Let’s start with Lan. Purely because I think my takes on him are the most Spicy/differ the most from everyone else’s and, let’s be honest, everything here feeds into everything else and this is going to get complicated where I start SO. Drama first. (I think it’s what they would want).

Okay so first and foremost I want to try and establish/explain what I mentioned at the outset of this thing which is: Lan is not blind, he’s not stupid, and he is not suddenly completely and utterly incapable of understanding a single feel that Moiraine feels if he can’t feel it with her via bond.

The largest and most obvious piece of evidence for this feels like the best one to start with and, for me, this is the fact that: HE DIRECTLY AND COMPLETELY CALLS HER OUT ON HER BULLSHIT, TO HER FACE, TWICE!!!

“Don’t smile at me. You can shut me out, try to drive me away, but don’t you dare smile at me. As though everything is fine. As though you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.”

This is from episode 1, where he finally snaps at her after she gives him that fake ass little smile and is like ‘is an aes sedai not allowed her secrets’ when he tries to talk to her/get her to explain: literally anything to him. And THAT is what pushes him over the edge.

She has been cold. She has been dismissive. She has flat out ignored him like he’s not even present. He has taken it all. Not happily, and with obvious frustration, but he hasn’t said a peep. Not when she gives him one brusque, dismissive one-word orders (“door”) like a dog. Or when she deliberately turns away from him and refuses to so much as look at them - he endures all of that and just takes it and let’s her do it. Because he understands that this is her current expression of: not being fine.

If she WAS fine, she would not be doing these things, and he knows that, and I think sees it as something like a storm to weather? It is something that will pass (he hopes) if he has the patience and the strength to wait it out. When she smiles at him? When she tries to make a JOKE out of what she’s doing? Out of the secrets that she’s been keeping from him - secrets like the fact that she was planning on going to the Eye of the World to die without him - THAT is not acceptable. She’s smiling at him and trying to joke with him as though they’re still capable of that - as though they can still tease each other the way they did, as though things are fine, both in herself, and between them, and they are NOT. When she’s treating him like a slave, or a stranger, or an annoyance - that is strangely better - because it’s this unspoken acknowledgement/agreement (the only one they’ve been able to achieve) that this is because things are not fine. She treats him badly because she’s not fine, he KNOWS she’s treating him badly because she’s not fine - is a strange kind of shared truth. Like sarcasm - something said/done where both parties know that the meaning/intent is completely different. Smiling, joking, pretending she’s fine? That is an insult, because he knows damn well she is NOT in that place.

Okay, so let’s look at the second instance of this, which occurs in episode 2 (oh how quaint) and is as follows:

L: “Then tell me! You and I have walked this path together. Every step, every choice, every sacrifice.”

M: “We have never walked this path together. You have never seen the forest for the trees because I have never shown it to you.”

L: “I know what you’re trying to do. You can’t push me away.”

Again, as with the previous scene, he tries to get her to talk to him, to stop keeping secrets from him, to share this with her and let him help her carry her burdens the way they always have. She puts him walls, she, again, tries to force distance - she tells him that they have never been together as he says. And he calls her out. AGAIN. He knows what she’s trying to do. It hasn’t changed. She’s still just doing the same thing she’s been doing from the start of episode 1 - trying to force him away, because she’s desperate, and she’s suffering, and she doesn’t have anything else but this - even if he knows what she’s doing, even if it hasn’t worked so far.

Both of them are guilty of this - both of them get one idea stuck in their minds of how to handle this situation/how to fix everything, and they both refuse to change. They both dig their heels in, plant their stakes, pick their hills to die on, and are refuse to budge for love, money, or common sense. For Lan it’s in trying to get her to talk, to open up, to push back on the destructive coping mechanisms she’s got - trying to force her to include him, tying to force her to include herself and come to dinner with them etc. For Mo it’s this: it’s pushing him away, because she is no longer worthy of him (and believes she never was) and protecting him.

(to continue this: unhinged adventure, pls continue under the cut!)

So she commits to this, even if she honestly knows it probably won’t work now, either. (she empties her entire quiver on him in this scene, and the atomic bomb she had in her back pocket too for good measure. These things she’s been holding back in reserve, the last cards to play - that she misled him about Rand’s death, that she has discovered they (and notice that she still says “we” when she talks about this - even though she went to the Eye alone, even though she made that choice alone, even though she rejects the idea that they have been together on this quest, as he says - when she is not actively choosing every word to hurt him, she thinks of them and what they’ve done as an unconscious “we” and a unit) have freed Ishamael/possibly other Forsaken - one after the other, meant to just overwhelm him and be the final coup de grace. And it STILL doesn’t work. She unleashes everything she has on him and he STILL insists that he’s not leaving her. And it’s because he knows - as he just said - what she’s doing, and why. And he will not let her. And he says that to her “I’m not letting you walk away from me again” - because the last time he did: she went to the Eye to get herself killed. And it’s only by some miracle and twist of cruelty that she was left alive to suffer instead.

Also I’m going to take a brief sidebar here, before we move on to Further Evidence/thoughts on this. But I think that it’s really important to consider LAN’S trauma in what he’s doing and why? Like, I think people are doing this for Mo already? They recognise that she wouldn’t be behaving this way if she 1)- wasn’t trying to protect Lan (her intention) and 2)- wasn’t suffering the effects of her trauma/being cut off from the Power at the Eye. Lan is a little less obvious (both in that his trauma is not a single fixed point/event that’s very obvious and easy to refer back to; and that he’s a bit less blunt Lan Mo’s “brick to the face” techniques and motivations) but, as I said at the start: his reactions to Mo are a direct reflection/window into his own trauma responses.

So, as I just mentioned - Lan is SO adamant about not leaving Moiraine, not giving her the opportunity to distance them/push him away - because the last time she did that, in just nudging him, like, an inch to the left, she used that to mask their bond and skip off into the Blight to go get herself killed with Rand. And there is: no doubt, and no question, and no room for wiggling or negotiation on this. They BOTH were FULLY aware that that was a suicide mission. The first thing he says to her when he finds her is “you’re alive” - because he was sure that history was repeating on him.

Because I think that it’s very important to not just consider Mo’s actions here, I think it’s important to remember Lan’s experience with Stepin as well. The two played out very similarly for him/parallel each other almost exactly. They both talked to him about Nynaeve, encouraging him to seek a love and a life with her. They both manipulated him/the circumstances to make it impossible for him to try and protect them - Stepin by drugging him, and Moiraine by masking the bond so he was unable to sense her, so that they could leave him. They both had clear plans and intentions - and both of their ultimate goals was for it to end in their death (obviously the REASONS behind this are very different - Mo was trying to save the world; while Stepin’s had already ended). But in both cases, Lan wakes up alone, realising that they’ve left him, realising, instantly, what they intend to do and in both cases: he was too late and he feels that he failed. Stepin he finds dead - and the only reason that he DOESN’T find that has happened to Mo is not because of something he did, it’s not because he got to her in time, it’s not because he protected her, it’s not because HE did anything at all - it’s just because some whim of cruelty decided to spare her. And these two events happen within, like, a week of each other I want to say? Like that’s…That’s an incredibly damaging and traumatising thing to go through ONCE - but back to back? How guilty must he have felt? How ANGRY with himself? Because how could he not have learned? How could he have let this happen AGAIN?

Of course he’s terrified now. Of course he’s terrified that if he leaves she’s going to die. Of course he refuses - past the point of any sense or reason - to just back down and leave. He is certain that if he does it will mean the death of the person that he loves the most in this world. And it will be HIS fault. She’s being cruel to him, she’s pushing him away, she’s ignoring him, she’s ordering him around, she’s deliberately pushing every button he’s got, and stabbing her knife in every sensitive spot she’s discovered over the last twenty years. And what kind of weak, selfish, useless person would he be to let that be all it takes for him to just say ‘well fine, I’ll just abandon you and let you kill yourself without me’. He cannot fail again. He WILL NOT fail again. He has been here, history is repeating on him again and he will not let it. Whatever she says to him. However she hurts him. Whatever he has to endure to weather this storm with her he will. Because none of this pain even comes CLOSE to what it will be like if he leaves her and she hurts herself and that is entirely his fault.

(Note: I do not actually think that Moiraine is actively suicidal at this point. As Verin notes - she chooses to fight every day. She wakes up, she fills her buckets, she puts one foot in front of the other and she clearly keeps going. It’s wobbly, and it’s messy, and she’s clearly grieving and depressed and traumatised - but she is not suicidal. Does LAN know that? Can Lan, without the bond, and with Stepin, and the Eye, haunting him even begin to scrape together the required rationality to see that? No. Lan sees Moiraine as being in just as much danger as she sees him being in and all he can do, all he has left to do in this world is protect her. And so he will).

To conclude the wrap of: the most painful breakup scene in the history of the world (for me and my present blorbos at this present moment in time, anyway) I want to just talk about the infamous “we were never equals”. And a lot of it has been covered, and I agree with the takes that Moiraine does not believe herself equal to Lan (and never did (SELF ESTEEM ISSUES!? IN MY CODEPENDENT PLATONIC SOULMATE RELATIONSHIP!? NOOOOO!!!!!!! NEVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)) and that is how she’s able to say this oath wise. I just want to touch on the fact that some people seem to be like ‘bro how can u not see what she’s saying DIRECTLY TO UR FACE, BRO!? COME ON LAN. LISTEN!!!!’ and like. So, to bring up a controversial and possible shocking observation: Lan is, in fact: still a human being! Emotions are messy, and logic is a fine and wonderful thing from a couch, yelling at your tv screen, and with the delightful ability to rewind and replay conversations/moments in time to be able to link them together nicely.

But Moiraine has been cruel to him for months at this point in an effort to drive him away. And, as discussed - he knows what she’s doing. He knows WHY she’s doing it. He is enduring it and putting up with it and stomaching it without throwing things at her because he knows it’s an expression of pain and is a reaction to what she’s been through. But he’s also hurt by it. Not least because: even if she’s only SAYING these things to hurt him/drive him away - she still believes them enough that they’re true for her to be able to actually get them out of her mouth. That HURTS. That’s going to break you down, that’s going to GET to you, that’s going to be thing that keeps him up at night and just echoes in his head over and over again and like - my man’s self-esteem and self-worth wasn’t actually sitting up at the peak of Dragonmount BEFORE 5 months of this, like dear Light people.

To have the person you love the most in this world tell you that “I don’t want my saddle to slip” (I don’t trust you to do this for me), to have her admit that she deliberately misled him, that she has actively kept important, possibly world-changing events from you, that she says, to your face - the thing that you are MOST afraid of, the thing that tormented him via Machin Shin, the thing that torments him still about Stepin - that he FAILED her? For her to believe that so firmly that it’s truth to her? Of course he doesn’t think he’s worthy of her? Of course he’s willing to take what she says at face value. SHE CAN’T FUCKING LIE!!!! And the set-up to this is so important, because she goes right for the jugular in this scene, and she does so repeatedly, in quick succession.

So she hits him with: ‘actually I lied when I said before that WE were going to the Tower - I’m going on my own without you. We yote a forsaken out into the world OOPS. -I refuse to explain anything to you. -We have never been walking this path together. -I have never showed you everything, I have always hidden things from you. -OH also ur lil sheepherder dude is actually: not dead and never was, I #lied to ur face abt that. -I am loyal to the Dragon - and ONLY him. -You can’t protect me anymore without the bond. -No, you’re not my Warder, you failed me, and I would be dead in spite of you if not for the help of people more competent than you. -ALSO here’s our good buddy Alanna and I am going to THREATEN TO HAVE HER TAKE YOUR BOND BY FORCE IF YOU KEEP REFUSING ME and I arranged this ahead of time to make this right. ALL of this gets dumped on his head in the space of LITERALLY AROUND TWO MINUTES. Like damn Mo the bloody Fades were less efficient than that.

He has just had all of that thrown in his face - the things she’s been holding back, keeping in case she needed them - her lying to him, her isolating him, her NEVER walking this path with him or ever showing him all that she saw, telling him that he is not her Warder anymore, that he has FAILED to protect her, that she will have him bonded against his will just to get rid of him. And he stands there on the ground, while she gazes down at him from on top of her horse (which she mounted - for the first time we’ve seen on screen - without his aid (which is a GUTTING little touch, because we see him smoothly and seamlessly help her mount a couple of times in season 1)) and she just says, to his face, the TRUTH, as he asked for: they were never equals.

And she can say that because she believes that he is better than her, and we know that, but can you blame him for not quite catching that in the moment????? She’s just told him that he’s a failure, that she’d be dead and he didn’t do a damn thing to protect her, that she will have someone bond him forcibly - and in this moment she just says what he’s been thinking for months, for YEARS honestly, given what machin shin torments him with “you can’t protect her. You’ll watch her die.” Of course he believes it. He is ALREADY taking an irrational level of responsibility over all of this, over what he perceives as his failures.

Adeleas calls him out for this and tells him he’s taking it too personally (and he IS) - he is assuming responsibility for not preventing something as though that means that he caused it. And again: this is a trauma response. This is an overreaction to a perceived series of circumstances that led to the death of a friend he’s had for possibly decades, to the one person he is supposed to protect, who he let go on a suicide mission alone so that he could get fucking laid, who he let slip away from him AGAIN to get attacked by Fades - where he failed her FOR A THIRD TIME. But like…He starts this little conversation off with her by apologising because he didn’t sense the Fades. He has: absolutely no way, reasonable or other ways, to sense INVISIBLE CREATURES THAT MOVE THROUGH SHADOW without the bond giving him the ability to do so. It’s a ridiculous thing to say. It has no logic to it at all and that’s the POINT. He is not capable of logic about this situation. He is blaming himself for everything - every single thing he can think of, whether it’s reasonable or not, is his fault, and his responsibility - he should have sensed the fades, he should have sensed her leaving, he should have stopped her going to the Eye, he should have stopped her from being cut off. He is trying to assert control, he is trying to assign blame and reason to the things that have happened to him - to the losses he has suffered - so that he can stop suffering them. And he can’t. He can’t. It happens over. And over. And over. AND OVER again. The trolloc blade that hit Moiraine in the Two Rivers and nearly killing her. Logain’s shield exploding and the axe handle piercing her side and nearly killing her. Being drugged by Stepin who killed himself while Lan was absent. Letting himself be distracted by Nynaeve while Mo went to the Eye. Missing Mo leaving AGAIN and her being attacked by the Fades. Actually getting there while the attack was in progress finally at LAST being able to DO something, to STOP something - and he can’t even fucking manage that. Over and over and over he fails people and he loses them and it’s his fault and he can’t stop it. He’s been retraumatised by circumstance, and is now retraumatising HIMSELF by adding even more perceived failings to the existing tally. Of course he believes her. He’s just been waiting for her to say that to him from the day they bonded. NO ONE IN THIS DYNAMIC HAS ANY SELF-ESTEEM. LIKE THEY STARTED WITH ZERO TOTAL AND SOMEHOW IT’S GOTTEN WORSE.

Okay so shifting focus slightly for the last thing I want to say about Lan, but still related, because: the problem (for me) is not that they cannot read/understand each other, it’s that they cannot COMMUNICATE with each other. And there is a distinction here. Lan’s issue is not lack of understanding where Mo is at - he sees her suffering, knows she’s not fine, understands she is reacting to the loss she endured at the Eye, he gets that. He’s known her for twenty years - bond or no bond - he knows what pain looks like when he sees it in her eyes. That’s not it. What he’s struggling with, and what he’s frustrated by is that they are not TALKING. He knows how she’s feeling - he doesn’t know what to do about that. He doesn’t know how to TALK about that with her. He doesn’t know how to fix it because she refuses to engage with it at all - and they’re SO bad at this that they don’t even get to the part where she can ignore him trying to talk abt the actual problem, bc she just nips it in the bud and ignores him/deflects him from the opening bland ‘small-talk’ set-up questions to start making forrays into that.

Because before all of that would have happened instinctively via the bond - she feels the bad feels, he knows why, he sends the required good feels back/makes her tea/gives her an extra blanket/just responds without having to think about and, and this is the key point: without having to talk. Because, let’s be real here: these idiots BOTH suck at talking about their emotions/needs. Genuinely think they would both just lie on the ground and fucking die rather than say ‘I need a bandage because I’m BLEEDING PROFUSELY FROM EVERY ORIFICE.’ Because they’re deeply repressed, traumatised people who were never given the tools/language/space they needed to be able to safely and healthily learn to express their feels (but that…is a different piece of meta for another day).

THE POINT IS: we’re now going to turn to my beloved, my man, my favourite, the myth, the legend, the ICON: Tomas and his tomatoes. And by this I do of course mean that we’re doing a deep dive of the scene where Tomas gives Lan some advice after they go out to the (absolutely THRIVING - good job my man) garden to pick some tomatoes for dinner (or at least….Tomas goes out to pick tomatoes for dinner; and Lan goes out to brood in his proximity while he does so. ) But eh. Tomayto, tomahto….) ANYWAY:

So this scene gives Lan a chance to talk about losing the bond - and I think that is important as well? Likely obviously Moiraine is Going Through It here, and Lan hasn’t been cut off from the Power/isn’t dealing with that experience but WE DON’T PLAY TRAUMA OLYMPICS IN THIS HOUSE!!! PAIN IS PAIN AND IT SHOULD ALL BE VALIDATED AND DEALT WITH IN A CONSTRUCTIVE AND POSITIVE WAY. Ahem. Anyway. It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for: QUOTE TIME AGAIN;

“The bond made things easier. It was like a friend walking along with us chatting away so we never had to.”

I think this is a really interesting (and honestly fascinating) way to describe the bond - to personify it and see it as another individual existing between them and making things easier by doing the things that they both struggle to do - use their goddamn words.

“She’s tired, she’s hungry, she’s angry, she’s afraid. Now silence.”

This part, too, I think is really telling. Because if I had to put money on it and pick out the Top 4 Feelings Moiraine Is Having I think I could do a lot worse than ‘tired, hungry, angry, and afraid’. He KNOWS how she’s feeling. He can read that in her still. He doesn’t need the bond to tell him that. That’s not what he’s missing. He doesn’t need the bond to point out what she’s feeling to him, and he doesn’t miss that aspect, he misses the ‘chatting away’, he misses the noise, he misses the COMMUNICATION, and he is struggling with the silence.

THAT is what the bond used to do for them - it used to ‘chat away so they never had to’. A friend, a helper, who facilitated between them and allowed them to communicate when they couldn’t speak/didn’t have the words. We see this over and over and OVER again in season 1. They have whole ass conversations without making a single peep. Most notably in extremely tense or emotional moments - Kerene’s funeral and the look they share, Lan struggling with Stepin’s grief, coming to Moiraine, kneeling beside her, holding her hand - so much happens in that scene in particular. Without saying a word he communicates an exhaustion, a fatigue, a grief and a sorrow - a need for comfort and support - and she gives it. At Stepin’s funeral - the lookk that he gives her, the way he seeks her in the crowd, again needing her strength, which she gives to him through their bond and across a room. THAT’S what’s gone. That’s what he keeps trying to get back.

Because he gives her that same look - that same obvious cry for help and look of desperation at the end of ep 1 with the Fade battle. He is WRECKED he is DONE, he’s disarmed, he cannot stand, he can barely crawl - he NEEDS her, he needs her strength, he needs her help. She tries to channel - she reaches for the power, as she would once have reached for him through their bond - and it does not come. It is not there. It cannot help them. And the words that he speaks to her then echo a repeated sentiment he’s had for her throughout: “what aren’t you telling me?”

The bond isn’t there to talk for her anymore. And she refuses. Consistently. Verin and Adeleas comment on Bayle visiting - and Lan notes that she doesn’t tell him any more than she tells them. After Bayle is gone, Lan tries to small talk, he slaps on a casual little smile and he asks a mundane ‘let’s start the ball rolling on that conversation thing’ question, easy to answer, nothing tense, nothing painful, a very common “how did it go?” she ignores him. He presses further - asks who that person was? She gives him the bare minimum (and doesn’t answer the question he’s ACTUALLY asking) and then he tries to push again - what did she want. At which point she hits him with that fake smile and the ‘can an aes sedai not have her secrets?’ - and he’s not even really asking for much. He’s not asking what he actually wants to ask which is: how are you? Are you okay? What can I do? What do you need? What are you thinking? And this idea repeats - in ep 2, when he tries to point out it takes 8 aes sedai to cut someone off, she snaps that he has no conception of the power the forsaken have - so he snaps at her to tell him then. And she refuses.

They are both FEELING - and their feelings are seen. Lan sees how Mo struggles he sees how she shuts herself away, he sees that she’s not eating, and not sleeping, that she’s frustrated, and she’s frightened. Mo sees that she’s hurting him, she sees that he’s frustrated as well. They know this. But they’re not TALKING. They’re not COMMUNICATING. And at the dinner sequence - this is what Verin, Adeleas and Tomas try to give them advice about - their history is the “common language” that they are; maybe he needs to listen to what she IS saying and not try and demand her to say other things. They don’t know how to talk about things like this - they’re not good at that ANYWAY - but with each other? When they’ve never had to before? When for once, for the first time for both of them, it was effortless to share these things and communicate these deep insecurities and emotions that they struggle to give to others? THAT’S what they’re lacking and that’s what the biggest problem is.

Alright let’s leave poor Lan be for now, I have tormented him enough. On to Momo. This will (hopefully, dear god) be shorter, because people have covered Mo before. We know that she’s traumatised, we know she’s trying to push Lan away to protect him, we know she’s trying to regain control, she feels powerless, she feels helpless, she is trying to deal with something life-altering, something that made her vulnerable and helpless, she’s being reckless with her safety, she’s taking foolish risks etc etc.

The point I want to touch on here is the idea around her ‘manipulating’ Lan, because I usually see this go hand-in-hand with the Lan stuff I talked about already. Largely: how ironic that without the bond Lan doesn’t understand her/cannot read her, but Moiraine is doing it so well with him and i must: respectfully decline to go along with that perspective. And this is (I imagine u know what im going to say now) *inhales deeply* because they SUCK AT COMMUNICATING!!!!

It doesn’t really MATTER that he is trying to open her up/communicate that he loves her, and he’s there for her, and he wants to support her; while she is trying to communicate the same - she loves him, she cares about him, she wants to protect him. They are both: failing dismally. Lan’s incessant pestering of Mo to talk to him is just making her clam up more and more because she can’t and what’s more: she doesn’t bloody want to. She wants to shove her trauma under a rug in the corner of Verin’s study, and then she wants to drag a bookshelf over the top of it, and then she wants to fill the bookcase with books, and then she wants to put a whole bunch of extra things on top of the bookcase, and then she wants to flee the country and forget that any of that ever exists because she does not want to deal with it. And Lan keeps pushing. He keeps trying to make her talk, because he’s desperate, and he misses the chattering of their friend the bond, and he wants to help, her wants her to let him back in, and it’s just pissing her off. Which is what the cottage squad calls him out for (when will Mo get her ‘come to jesus’ talk?? For Fairness? Like i need this too).

So Lan is coming at this: far too softly, and far too indirectly in a lot of ways. He never asks about what he actually wants to ask about. He talks about the weather, or how shiny Aldieb’s coat is this morning, or how nice and red and juicy Tomas’s tomatoes are. He never actually just says what he wants to say which is: “I love you, and I’m worried about you, and I’m failing you more and more every day and I’m sorry and I need you” he pussyfoots around it and avoids it and lets her shut him down because that hurts and, well, he deserves that hurt so alright then.

And then there’s Mo. Who has managed to somehow twist the logic of the universe so that she can say “I love you” by, uh *checks notes*: Not saying anything at all/ignoring him. Or by saying things like “you failed me” instead. Because she is just THAT powerful. Okay I’m being a bit sarcastic here, clearly, but she has convinced herself (based on how her trauma is affecting her) that she: 1)- does not deserve Lan/is not worthy of him and so he should leave her so he can be happy and 2)- she needs to protect him and so he should leave her and go and be safe.

Maybe she tried to articulate this at some point? Sit him and down and be like ‘okay Allan so I know u have a lot of trauma abt, like, being abandoned/being left behind so ppl u love can go do themselves great harm but…it would REALLY be just swell for me if u left me all by myself while i go through possibly the worst things that’s ever happened to me: alone. Okay? Okay.” However I doubt this. Bc, as previously and repeatedly discussed: these two can’t communicate for SHIT right now.

I think she probably made some sort of roundabout suggestion? Like she didn’t directly say ‘you need to leave me because reasons’ but she probably…asked him to go the White Tower and watch over Nyn and Eggy, or maybe go with Perrin and the Shienarans to help, or even ‘hey remember Mat? The little scrungly one?? I wonder where he is’ and he just told her ‘absolutely fucking not’ (or words to that effect) so she had to try something else instead. Which is: being mean af.

So far so good and I think we’re all (relatively) in agreement to this point. But then people think…She’s being successful here? And she’s reading him well - largely because she knows EXACTLY what to say to hurt him? And yes, she absolutely does, I will 100% give you that. Blade directly to the heart each and every time, she never misses. HOWEVER. This is not the actual point. Causing Lan pain is not her endgame - it’s actually just the painful middle step that’s hurting her too to try and get her to her endgame.

Manipulation essentially involves doing ‘y’ (in this case being deliberately cruel/causing Lan pain) to make the person do ‘x’ (in this case: push Lan away and make him leave her), in theory/if it’s super successful: without the person realising that you’ve orchestrated this/making it seem like it was all their idea/decision. This is, uh, not working too great. It’s been 5 months and Lan is probably less likely to leave her now than he was when she started (because he now has 5 months worth of knowing that she is actively trying to get him to leave so she can do the Light only knows what and if that’s what she wants him to do while she’s in this state then it’s absolutely the last thing that he feels he should do - so in that sense this has actually backfired kinda spectacularly on Mo. Because: SHE’S COMMUNICATING JUST AS BADLY AS HE IS!!!!!!!!!! Just. On the COMPLETE opposite end of the spectrum to him. Because they’re drama and aesthetic that way.

And the added bonus content of this is: she CAN do this. She can (and does) manipulate people spectacularly well. Take Bayle for example (god she needed that little win SO badly, bless her and her buckets). She wanted: to see/examine the broken heartstone - but what is she actually going to DO with it? She doesn’t want to put it in a fancy display case or collect it, she wants to know WHY it broke. So what she ACTUALLY wants from him is information. Information such as: the poem. So she haggles with him on the thing she actually wants - makes him feel like he’s getting a win when he agrees to budge on that, far cheaper, item - but then he counters and says that he won’t move on the heartstone chunk itself - which she has no interest in. So she gets her essential infodump poem for a bargain price, and takes Bayle down like six pegs in the process. 10/10, excellently managed misdirection, making him do all the work and lowering the price of the poem so she didn’t even have to ask for it, and making himself look like a plonker into the bargain. Delicious. She CAN manipulate people - she just cannot manipulate Lan (not in this instance/about this anyway) because she’s as wrongfooted as he is, and is scrambling as much as he is without the bond, to try and find a language she never thought she’d need to try and speak with him.

And so if we now consider BOTH of them: they’re in this very weird space here, where the traumas that they have suffered, and the reactions they’re having are placing them in this fundamental position of opposition. Because their needs/the things they believe/have convinced themselves they have to do put them in direct conflict with one another. They’re like an immovable object meets an unstoppable force, right? And this idea reveals itself in several smaller ways - eg: Lan thinking that Mo needs company and to not isolate herself to get better; while for Mo that just feels completely intolerable and she wants to be alone and in Her Space, her study, where she is in control and can pretend to her visitors/informants that all is well and nothing has changed. But I think the biggest point it revolves around/where it’s most obvious is that, ultimately, their absolute overall goal is to protect the other person?

The difference/tragedy of this is that: Moiraine believes fundamentally that Lan is in danger WITH her, and that she has to make him leave in order to protect him. Lan believes fundamentally that Moiraine will be in danger WITHOUT him and that he has to stay in order to protect her. And this is the hill they’ve both chosen as their last stand/thing to die for. So she is going to push him and push him and push him, and she is going to hurt HERSELF by being crueller and crueller and crueller to him to protect him. And all the while he is going to endure and endure and endure and let himself be hurt to protect her.

AND THEN IT GETS WORSE (or better if ur twisted and u enjoy these kinds of parallels the way i do) because: they are both stubbornly trying to protect the other; but they’re also both feeling like they’re martyring themselves/are hurting themselves more and more to do so. She feels like he is being stubborn and forcing her to hurt him more and more every day - which she does not want to do - when he could just go, just let this end, just leave her the way she clearly wants him to! But this will make her stronger. She will be stronger for this, for having let him go, and for knowing that at least she managed to protect him. So she will just keep going - tomorrow, that will do it, he has to break tomorrow, he has to finally break tomorrow. And this goes on. The next day. Maybe the next day. The next–

And then HE feels like he is enduring, and that the pain she is inflicting on him is his cross to bear, and he has to endure it because he will NOT leave her, no matter what she throws at him. And it’s almost a test of his will and his love and his devotion (even though I think he knows it’s not: but it’s kind of become his own little personal quest. Because yes. Yes he SHOULD suffer this way. She SHOULD hurt him like this. He deserves it after how he failed her. He has to take this pain. He has to prove what he’s willing to go through for her, prove how dedicated he is, how much he will suffer for her, how even she cannot break him). And he too is thinking that next day it will get better. If he can just endure, just survive this onslaught, it will end. It will get better. She will get better. This will pass. He just has to prove his strength and last as long as he needs to in order to see that through.

And, to bring us back to the start of this extremely long and rambling essay I present you my final, deeply insightful, deeply professional, deeply ~meta~ thought which is that: they are BOTH. SO. FUCKING. S T U P I D!!!! (in a genuinely really interesting and complex and fascinating way, as i have hopefully discussed/explained - the idea that their lost bond/connection makes them mirror/echo each other but now in a destructive way? That instead of seamlessly and instinctively meeting each others’ needs they are both unconsciously and unintentionally triggering the other person’s trauma and making things WORSE? What an absolutely fascinating take/an incredibly subtle but profound way to show the depth of exactly what they’ve lost/how much it has affected them while ALSO rooting the entire thing in their individual traumas, experiences, and characters - like who ever wrote/conceived of this NEEDS A GODDAMN RAISE I SWEAR) But also yes they are: morons. Absolutely. Without a doubt. One singular moron brain cell that ping pongs between the two of them but is, fundamentally: the same. Absolutely fucking delighted. Can’t wait to see where this goes from here. Join me again in the future for me: ‘wow Rowyn that’s a whole lotta thoughts u got there buddy’.

Also I swear I’m friendly and I like engaging/talking with ppl! Pls feel free to comment/reblog/message!!! And do note that if u reblog i WILL read and appreciate ur tags bc im: one of those Old People.

OKAY BYEEEEEE!!!

#moiraine damodred #moiraine sedai #lan mandragoran #molan #wheel of time #wheel of time prime #wot #wotprime #wotspoilers #wotshowspoilers #rosamund pike #daniel henney #wheel of time season 2 #wot s2 #wot meta #molan meta #my meta #look at all dat trauma #once again pls remember this was: stream of consciousness written with no forethought or afterthought #so no planning no editing no HINGES #yes i AM aware that this is about to get DEVOURED by content/posts abt the new ep but u know what?#i didnt claim to be smart #i just claimed to be unhinged #anyway i had a gr8 time with this im sure you'll all deeply appreciate my angsty insights making this all: Worse #pls enjoy #also pray for the readmore cut #i know this is long as shit #i TRIED #i TRIED REAL HARD TO PROTECT Y'ALL FROM THE ENDLESS SCROLL #but tumblr is: not a functional website

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