Asher Fic - James/Lydia(/Simon)

[icarus_chained]

For owleyes_arisen and her prompt in comment_fic. Er. Sort of. *grins sheepishly*

Title: Love's Weight In Knowing
Rating: R
Fandom: James Asher Series (Barbara Hambly)
Characters/Pairings: James Asher, Lydia Asher, discussion of Simon Ysidro. James/Lydia, James/Lydia(/Simon)
Summary: On the train home from Constantinople, James and Lydia deal with love and pain and death, and the vampire at the centre of all of them
Wordcount: 2352
Warnings/Notes: Coda to Traveling With The Dead (Book #2). Warnings for vampires, murder, love, responsibility and soul bonds
Disclaimer: Not mine

Love's Weight In Knowing

The long journey back from Constantinople was oddly comfortable. Just the two of them, he and Lydia, curled together in their train compartment. Shoulder to shoulder, wrapped loosely in each others arms. Their injuries, both physical and otherwise, had faded now, at least some little bit. They were tired, James thought. More than tired. But they were together, and that made so many things better.

"It's a shame," Lydia murmured absently, out of the blue. Her head lay propped against his good shoulder, her glasses tucked in a pocket as she gazed half-blind into some middle distance. James looked down at her, at the thoughtful frown marring her pale brow, and felt a nameless surge of affection. "It seems so wasteful, doesn't it?"

"I'm sure it does," he agreed, the corner of his mouth lifting faintly. "What is 'it', exactly?"

She blinked, startling a little at his voice, and James realised that she hadn't really been addressing him at all. Thinking aloud, rather, and confused now to realise it. She craned her head to look up at him, blinking vaguely at the interruption to her thoughts, and he leaned down to catch that frowning mouth, to press a kiss to her lips simply because he could. Because she was her, and she was there.

"... What was I saying?" Lydia asked him, a moment later when they had drawn back a little and she could breathe once more. Her eyes were crinkled, her mouth curving softly against her cheek as she looked up at him, and it took James rather longer than it ought to remember there was a question to be answered.

"Something about a shame," he recalled, shaking his head ruefully. "Wasteful. I'm afraid that was all you managed to tell me before I, ah. Lost control of myself."

She smiled, rich and startlingly bright. "I noticed that part," she murmured, with that dash of mischief that so enthralled him, and James found himself flushing, warm and comfortable in her arms. "Must you always distract me so, James?"

He didn't answer. He considered that a heroic effort. He was good and didn't attempt to distract her further. And after a moment, knocking him gently on his arm, she acquiesced and pulled herself back on topic in her turn.

"I was thinking about the Bey," she said, with a downwards turn of her mouth. He felt his heart follow the curve, sinking a little at the change of topic, but didn't move, letting only confusion and mild interest claim his features. "About ... what you were saying about fledglings. What he wanted, what he tried to do." She bit her lip, shaking her head. "It seems such a waste, I was thinking."

James felt his eyebrows lift of their own accord, felt them sink again into a frown of something between confusion and a rueful admiration for her. "That was ... not my first thought," he admitted, with a wry note to leaven it. His thoughts had been horrified, pitying, distantly fogged by pain. Hers, as always, were clearer, and slightly clinical. It was what made her Lydia.

"I know," she said softly, wry herself, but he knew she had decided many years ago in her father's study that she would no longer be ashamed of her clinician's mind. In that, they were in full agreement. "It wasn't mine either. But looking at it now ..." She paused, shook her head. "Do you ... Have you ever imagined it? After Sim- Ysidro described it. Did you ever imagine ... what it would be like?"

He noted her faltering at Ysidro's name. Didn't mention it. Instead, he turned his thoughts to her question. Which was, in its way, as difficult a topic. Because, in many ways, it was much the same topic.

"Have I ever imagined being turned, you mean?" he asked quietly. Remembering lying bound at Ysidro's feet in Blaydon's prison, remembering the vampire's sulfur eyes looking down at him with remote calculation. "Have I ever imagined being made a fledgling?"

"That," Lydia agreed, as she lowered her head back onto his shoulder, speaking to the hollow of his throat. "But more ... have you ever imagined doing that to someone else?" A long pause. "Making someone else. Holding them like that. Could you imagine it?"

For a moment, he couldn't answer. Staring out across the top of her head, the auburn tumble of her hair, remembering ... remembering many things. Remembering Zardalu, lying beneath the Bey's silver blade while his master flayed open his mind. Remembering Anthea, who had hated Grippen and the Bey and Golga Kurt with such a blind, pained passion. And remembering that dream-image of a frail hidalgo lying beneath a master's hand, of a vampire who later carried a horror of making fledglings of his own.

Remembering why - the burning weight of a foreign soul taken into yourself and held ever afterwards against the loyalty of the one who had entrusted it to you, the transfer of that soul into the body of a monster to subsist on murder for the rest of its existence - James understood that horror full well.

"I don't want to imagine it," he said, a hushed murmur, pained and quiet. "I don't think I could bear it."

She was quiet for a second. And then ...

"What if it was me?" She didn't look at him, not even when his muscles shot tense in shock beneath her. "What if it would save my life? Could you do it then, do you think?"

James shook his head, his lips numb and a cold, vice-like weight in his chest. He had imagined her death many times, feared it so often of late. He had thought, time after time, that one day he might find her, with blood on her throat or her breast, still and cold in some room. He had a horror of it, then and now. But he couldn't ... he couldn't ...

"No," he said at last. "Not even then. I would not ... I would not condemn you that way. Not to that life. It would be selfish, done for me and not for you. Even then, I don't think I could."

She turned her head into his chest. He couldn't see her face, couldn't see how she reacted to that, but she had not tensed in his arms. Her body still rested with calm trust against his, as if the answer, perhaps, did not displease her.

"Nor I," she said softly. "I thought about it. Wondered, when I thought I would arrive too late. When I thought I would find you dead. But I couldn't. In the end, I wouldn't do that to you." She paused, curled her fingers at the open neck of his shirt. "But James ... I would trust my soul to you. I could do that, I think. I could ... put my soul into your care, and count it safe."

His eyes shuttered closed without thought, his arm curling instinctively tighter around her shoulders. The thought of it rose in him, unbidden, unanswerable. The burning weight of her soul, all that she was, every memory that made up Lydia. Given to him, entrusted to him whole. Pressed into his keeping, that he might keep her alive. Or at least ...

"He was worth saving," she went on, quiet and careful, picking her way through the thought so very carefully. Ysidro, he realised distantly. Simon. "You could ... I don't know if you could see it. Those moments when he was the man and not the vampire. The Don. That soul ... could you see it? Did he ever let you see it?"

"... Yes," he managed, distantly. A strange tumble of shock and pain and distant, remote admiration. For her strength, in thinking this. For her pain, in knowing what it meant.

"That soul was worth saving," Lydia whispered, and he could hear the pain now. He could hear the dull throb of it in her, the wound inside her where the events in Constantinople had torn her open. "Yours. If I could hold your soul safe against all the world, I would. I would, James. But it doesn't ... it doesn't work like that. It doesn't save them. It makes monsters of them, locks them inside a monstrous form. Your Bey, thinking he loved that boy, only to condemn him to that ... to that ..."

"I know," James interrupted, hollow and pained. "Lydia, I ..."

"It's such a waste," she said, with that clipped clinician's tone, masking the throb of pain beneath it. "It's not right. To be able to save someone, to preserve something like that, to hold something like that, and have that be the price. To love someone enough to save them, or think you loved them, only to make a monster of them. It shouldn't ... it shouldn't be that way."

There was no answer to that, James thought. Could be none. She was right.

"They chose to live that way," he said, a thin offering at best, when she already knew. Had already faced it. "They wanted to live, and chose to even when it cost others their lives. Every time they kill, they make that choice. They are ... They chose it. In the end, they chose it."

They are monstrous, he finished silently. We love them, and they are monstrous. Perhaps they have no choice but to be, when to choose otherwise is death. Perhaps they even love us too, treat us with honour and with friendship, live and die by their word to us. Perhaps, in their own way (in his own way, some determined piece of James whispered, remembering crumpled sonnets and a cold hand touching his), perhaps they love us too. But they are monstrous, and have chosen to be monstrous, and there is nothing to change that.

"There should be a better way," Lydia whispered tiredly. "There should have been ... someone to hold his soul, and put it somewhere that did not ask him to murder to keep it. There should have been someone to hold him as I would trust you to hold me."

Yes, James thought. His hand rising to brush her hair, to cup the dome of her skull where it lay against him. Hadn't he thought it? That frail figure in his dreams, offering up his soul for a chance to live. That pained thought as he watched the Bey torture Zardalu: that someone had once held such power over Simon, that he had once been held within such a grasp. Even had it not been used like that, even if his master had been as gentle as Ysidro himself. Someone had taken his soul from him and planted it in the body of a monster, that man of honour who would die by his word to the woman he cared for and the man who served him. He had trusted his soul to someone in desperation, and so had they paid him.

"There's nothing we can do," he rasped, cradling her head against his shoulder. "It was done centuries ago. He doesn't ... he doesn't belong to us. Nor we to him."

Liar, said that voice in his heart. And after it, echoing it, Lydia.

"Don't we?" she asked, her voice flat with exhaustion and her hand curled against his chest. Her face hidden against his throat, taking shelter against the pulse of his life's blood. "I would trust you with my soul, James. I think ... I fear I would trust him too. Even knowing what he is." She curled close, as though cold, or afraid that he might push her away. "He put his honour inside mine. I think he would choose for me, and not for him. I'm afraid ... that I would trust him too."

A vampire who made no fledglings of his own, for fear of the power he would have over them. A man who had looked at him with those sulfurous eyes and known that he could not bear a monster's life. A pale warrior who had almost died by Lydia's word, and sold his honour to preserve her peace of mind.

"I know," James said, stumbling over the truth of it. "I fear ... that I would too."

She slumped, that tight coil of tension leaking out of her, that fear for what power and offense she'd offered with that trust. Her hand fell lax against his shirtfront, the warmth of her trembling where it lay by his side, and she raised her head again to look at him, and smile crookedly for the pain in both their eyes.

"... We are a pair, aren't we," she murmured at last, so strong and so frail against him. "As in thrall as any ... as any of his victims. In our way."

James smiled, a crooked curve of his lips. "For what it is worth," he offered wryly, "I think he is as enthralled by us." A pause, remembering the horror of held power. "Though whether that makes it better or worse ..."

"Yes," she agreed, that wound visible in her again, though covered now in her strength, in the stubborn, self-depreciating courage that had carried her across a continent. For a second, his love of her blinded him. "That's the question, isn't it?"

Because it would be easier, wouldn't it, to love him as Margaret Potton had loved him, blindly and without understanding of his nature, and theirs for allowing it. It would be easier to love him and not know, to love him and not hold him in their power at the same time, to be bespelled and only that. To not be responsible for him, to not hold the peril of his soul and his monstrous nature both. It would be easier.

And it would, in the end, not be love.

"To love not wisely but too well," he murmured, an odd fey shadow coming across him. Othello. Apt, perhaps. More apt than was wise. He couldn't help the chuckle that escaped him. Lydia blinked at him, long and slow, and then ...

Then she smiled, bright as dawn before him, and added her own wry note of acknowledgement.

"Lord," she agreed, "what fools these mortals be."