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you-are-my-neverland · 4 years

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Positive Self Analysis Challenge

Rules: Post an excerpt you are proud of, and talk about why you’re proud of it! Choose a few sentences and talk about why you like them/what you were aiming for while you were writing.

Tagged by @commasinsidequotes ! I know it’s been like a month or whatever, but I kept getting distracted from writing.

I’ll tag @semblanche & @landfillmp3 & @acrimoneous if you guys haven’t done this already ;-;

This excerpt is from Fairbone and there are, like, kind of major spoilers mentioned, and I couldn’t edit them out without messing up the scene. It’s also long, because I couldn’t find a good place to cut it lol.

“For the dead.” Aurelius raised his glass into the air and clinked it against nothing. “No one asked me to go into the fire, Xanthe. No one asked me to let your brother burn alive either.” Xanthe flinched at how crudely he said it, let your brother burn alive. “No one asked me to leave Ashe behind. No one asked me to make any choice I made, but I made them, and now I’m paying the price and it’s fine, I’m fine with that. It’s just karma, right?” His eyes were red rimmed, from exhaustion, from pain, when he looked at her with his smile twisted in all the wrong ways.

“Aurelius.”

“Don’t say anything.” The words were a whispered plea. “Don’t say anything. I don’t—I don’t even want to be speaking to you right now. I just want—” He trailed off, voice wavering, and dug both his hands into his hair. The glass dropped to the floor and shattered apart, Xanthe watching it fall as if in slow motion and making no move to attempt to stop it.

“I want it to be quiet,” Aurelius whispered into his hands. “I want to die.”

Xanthe’s heart constricted, painfully. “Aurelius,” she started, but he turned away from her before she could even begin to reach out to him.

“I think…” He paused, looking up at her from between his spread fingers. “I think I want to go to where I belong.”

“Where is that?” Xanthe asked, but she thought she already knew.

Aurelius looked at his thin wrist and traced the empty space there languidly. “Someplace not where you are.”

Her heart squeezed even tighter. “I understand,” she whispered, but the words tasted like sawdust in her mouth. “I don’t know when you’ll be able to, though. Ruka’s been imprisoned.”

Aurelius raised his eyebrows, eyes darkening. “Bluespeer?” he guessed.

“How did you know?” Xanthe asked, tilting her head.

“The righteous are the most ruthless,” Aurelius responded. He looked up at her, and Xanthe could see the wheels turning. “Luckily for us, we’re neither.” Xanthe didn’t know if it was a compliment or an insult.

“I won’t see you for a while,” she said softly.

“You won’t,” Aurelius acknowledged. “Not unless you plan on leaving.”

Xanthe touched the place where the rose was tattooed over her skin, and felt it burn beneath her thumb. “I can’t,” she told him. “Not yet.”

Aurelius’ lips twitched, almost. “It’s probably for the best,” he said, more soberly than he had spoken before. “We probably shouldn’t see each other for a while.”

“What does that mean?” Xanthe asked, feeling a lump in her throat. She felt like she was being slowly torn to pieces this whole conversation, each word from his mouth another piece of her being thrown to the wolves.

“It means that you’re painful for me, right now,” Aurelius answered. “And I don’t think I can look at you without remembering Ashe. I don’t...I can’t heal if you’re here with me every step of the way.”

Xanthe swallowed, but it got stuck. She hadn’t been expecting him to say it so bluntly, like something had been stabbed between her ribs and stuck there.

“Am I the problem?” she asked, so softly that she thought, for a moment, it had gone unheard.

Aurelius looked away from her. “I think we’re both the problem,” he whispered. “Because whenever we’re around each other like this, people die.” Xerxes, Xanthe thought, back then, what had broken them apart. Ashe, breaking them apart now.

She couldn’t even argue with him and say that it wasn’t true, because that was a lie she would be unable to say. The girl that had seen the death and the man who had led them into it. They were both a pair, weren’t they? A type of dysfunctional that had worked when they were younger and didn’t have to suffer the consequences as much, but now the blood had found their hands and dried there.

“Okay,” she whispered, sliding off the counter, her bare feet touching the cold ground. “But if this is the last time we’ll talk, can I do something?”

“What?” Aurelius looked at her.

Xanthe swallowed. “This,” she whispered, and then she kissed him as hard as she could. He stumbled back, against the counter, and Xanthe pressed forward, trying to feel anything, but he was unyielding, shoving her off. She broke away from him, gasping, and wiped at her mouth sloppily.

“What the hell, Xanthe,” Aurelius said fiercely, his words biting.

She shrugged, feeling tears in her eyes. “I’m not sorry,” she whispered, and his eyes softened. He took a half step towards her and then he was kissing her instead, lips soft against her own. Xanthe felt heat in her body, tingling in her nerves, as if her blood was on fire. She felt the counter behind her, scrambling for balance against it, the edge digging into her back. She leaned forward, to deepen the kiss, only for him to gently pull away from her again.

“We shouldn’t,” he whispered, shaking his head. “It’s grief.”

Xanthe looked away. She felt guttural and raw. She felt like something had been ripped apart inside of her. “It’s fine,” she whispered, but the words stretched her tongue the wrong way, made her feel all wrong, because it wasn’t fine, it wasn’t fine.

“Why…” Aurelius broke off. “It was my mistake,” he said instead, pressing his lips together. “It was my mistake, I’m sorry. A lapse of judgement.”

“I don’t want to be your lapse of judgement,” Xanthe whispered. She couldn’t raise her voice. “I’m in love with you, Aurelius. I’ve been in love with you for a long time. I was going, I was going to tell you at the River of Forgetting, but I couldn’t, so I’m telling you now.”

“Go, Xanthe,” Aurelius said, rubbing at his temples. He sounded tired, looked exhausted, but Xanthe was unwilling to let the conversation simply filter off. Not when her words were in the air, not when they had finally been said.

“Is that all you have to say?” she asked bitterly. “No comment? You can’t even reject or accept me?”

“It’s your feelings towards me, I shouldn’t have anything to do with them,” Aurelius retorted, a snap in his voice. “What, you need me to validate your teenage love for me? Even if I feel the same, even if I don’t, that won’t erase your feelings. It’s not my responsibility, Xanthe.”

“Fuck you,” Xanthe whispered.

“Too late for that.” His eyes were ice cold chips. “You don’t get to fucking say you love me, Xanthe, not after we both nearly died and Ashe did die and she died because of us.”

“That’s not our fault!” Xanthe cried. “If you were me, Aurelius, you would understand that I can’t accept responsibility for every death that happens just because I had a vision about it!”

“And what about your brother?!” Aurelius shouted back. “You’re telling me you saw Xerxes was going to die and you did nothing to stop it? Because I was the one who dragged you out of there, Xanthe, and you were screaming to go die with him.”

She felt tears in her eyes. Everything was hot and bitter and burning. “Don’t bring him into this,” she said.

“Xerxes is as much of a part of us as the two of us are,” Aurelius responded. “He’ll always be there.”

“So what, that’s why this will never work?” Xanthe questioned, hands curling into fists where she held herself tight. “Because of my dead brother?”

“You tell me,” Aurelius said with his dark eyes and his golden hair and his ruination, all over him. She said nothing and he turned away from her, looking somewhere that was not her, somewhere that did not have her. “Go, Xanthe.”

She left.

Analysis

When I first wrote this scene, I wrote it all at once, and I didn’t exactly feel that good about it, but I liked it all the same, because I kind of just like Xanthe and Aurelius...anyways, it was a lot of raw emotion, and when it comes to raw emotion, I tend to write it, well, rawly (which can sometimes be re: messy). So I wasn’t really sure how much I actually liked this scene, but I kept coming back to it, and it still really jumps out at me, now.

Mostly, because this is, in a way, the ending to Xanthe and Aurelius’ story. The whole theme of them throughout the book is that they keep coming back to each other, even after everything that happened, but here is where they end, this is where they know they’re not coming back to each other.

“So what, that’s why this will never work?” Xanthe questioned, hands curling into fists where she held herself tight. “Because of my dead brother?”

Xanthe saying this kind of encapsulates their whole relationship - even if they have feelings for one another, they never acted on them. At first, when they were teenagers, because Xanthe was his best friend’s sister, and then because Xerxes died and neither of them could save him. Even when they reconnected, after three years, Xerxes is still there, in the empty space, even when they’re not thinking about him.

“What, you need me to validate your teenage love for me? Even if I feel the same, even if I don’t, that won’t erase your feelings. It’s not my responsibility, Xanthe.”

I’ve always liked the concept of someone...not being responsible for your feelings, if that makes sense, and not having to reciprocate feelings. Aurelius and Xanthe deal with their feelings and emotions for one another in slightly peculiar ways; they’ve never really confronted them, even if they’re definitely there. There’s always been a sort of understanding between the two of them that they are more than friends, but it’s never something they’ve acted on, due to external pressures and circumstances. This scene is basically Xanthe considering why not and going for it, but once again, circumstances hold them apart.

Xanthe and Aurelius are basically the definition of two people who might be destined for one another, but keep meeting at the wrong time, if you know what I mean? There’s a quote or something that could explain it better, but I can’t quite remember it...anyways.

This scene focuses a lot of emotions. I wouldn’t call any of the characters in Fairbone to be particularly emotional people, besides maybe Ashe and Thieu, and while Xanthe and Aurelius have practically clashed in all their scenes, here is where it all overflows. Aurelius, on one hand, finally lets it all out:

“I want it to be quiet,” Aurelius whispered into his hands. “I want to die.”

Aurelius, in a way, has been like this the whole book. He’s broken. He’s suffering. He’s lost. But we as the readers might not really understand this so explicitly until he finally admits this: that he’s tired. That he’s so tired. And he’s been tired. Now he’s just plain exhausted.

This turned out long and I kind of just talked in circles, but in conclusion, it’s an emotional scene, if not a good one, and I like that.

#wip: fairbone #lovely mutuals #writers on tumblr #wip excerpt #my writing #writing #commasinsidequotes #me: comes out of the woodwork to post fairbone and then disappears #you can maybe avoid the spoilers if you don't read close enough but they are mentioned #this is the beginning of part four so it's near the end...#all xanthe and aurelius do is hurt each other is that kind of toxic?#maybe but it's their own personal issues getting in the way..#xanthe's power #xerxes being dead #ashe dying now #star crossed lovers in the worst possible way #8.17.2020 #yeah it's been like a month or so i am so sorry

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