Chapter Text
The summer rugby programme form is filled in by their father on the same Sunday, submitted on Monday, and by Wednesday Aegon is going three mornings a week to a field on the outskirts of Marlborough that is presumably better equipped and less muddy, though Aerion has no way of verifying this because Aerion is not going, because there is no casual, rational explanation for why someone who has never before expressed the faintest interest in junior rugby, or indeed shown any signs of tender brotherly support, would suddenly want to attend training sessions before ten in the morning.
And so he finds himself with too much time and very little to fill it. The state house is virtually empty for most of the day, if you don't count a reclusive sixteen-year-old who only leaves his room to piss and forage in the fridge.
Their father Maekar ferries Aegon to training most mornings before going to the office, at least when he isn't billing hours, because there is no rest for the wicked, and he is a lawyer after all. Aerion cannot even claim to want to be helpful and drive Aegon there himself, because Aerion does not drive, a fact that has never previously troubled him and is now a specific and daily source of misery. He could learn. He is aware he could learn. Daeron is learning, has been for weeks now, and not just in the family Volkswagen with their father's watchful eyes following his every move behind the wheel, because he is now even allowed to drive with Valar as supervising driver. Because of course model son Valar drives, and has his own car and his own calendar and his own perfectly legitimate reasons to be elsewhere most mornings. He ferries Aegon to rugby training or play dates when it falls convenient, which it does not always do. Presumably he could also take Aerion to Marlborough, if Aerion asked him to which he is categorically not going to do, because Valar would have questions, and Aerion is not prepared or willing to produce any answers.
When a few weeks ago, at Daeron’s 19th birthday dinner, their father had claimed with a rare full smile he'd cover for Daeron’s driving lessons, Aerion had sat there chewing dry chocolate cake and thought: yes, it’s high time I do the same, but he hadn’t opened his mouth, and no one had asked.
There are people who simply prefer other modes of getting places. It is a legitimate preference. He is just more comfortable as a passenger in trains than in cars. He is aware that he can sit for a three-hour rail journey and arrive feeling easy, and sit for a forty-minute drive and arrive feeling like he has been holding his breath the whole way, though he cannot always identify the moment he began holding it. When there’s no other option but a car, he always takes the back seat and, once there, looks at his hands or his phone. Not the road. Not the windscreen.
Sometimes, though not as often as he used to, he wakes with the duvet twisted and damp with sweat, taking desperate, burning lungfuls of air, as if someone or something had tried to smother him in his sleep, but he only has some disconnected, sensorial memories about headlights in the darkness, the sound of rain on windscreens, the smell of gasoline and pine air freshener, and then a deafening crash, a sound he never heard, but only imagined in dreams and which haunts him still.
So Aerion doesn't go to Marlsborough and therefore he has no legitimate excuse to cross paths with Duncan Donegal again because the summer programme Aegon signed up is not a league, and there are no matches, not until the very end.
Instead, he wakes at an unholy hour, his mind too wired to sleep in, and does fasting yoga because he has read somewhere that autophagy is the road to long-term health. When he finishes, the house is quiet, Aegon already at training, his father and uncle at work, Daeron and Valar more often than not elsewhere, Aemon still sealed inside his room, presumably sleeping.
Aerion likes doing yoga in the stillness of early morning. Nobody needs to know what he’s doing, how much he enjoys his body starting to bend easier, new muscle groups hardening under his pale skin. After that first morning fiasco when Aegon had caught him, Aerion started putting on his old karate gi instead of the tight yoga pants he'd bought in Oxford —currently shoved to the back of his wardrobe behind his good shirts— and if he occasionally throws in a kata between the downward dog and the warrior pose, it’s just because it gives a plausible alibi for bending around in the garden pergola at nine in the morning, not because it makes him feel more of a badass, and he needs the occasional pick-me-up.
After breakfast, scrambled eggs with more white than yolk, fried vegetables and turkey bacon to the side when he’s feeling fancy, oatmeal with cottage cheese, PB2 and raspberries when he’s not, he sits the east wing's window seat overlooking the abandoned vegetable garden, and reads things he is supposed to read for next term, which is some distance away, and also things he is not supposed to read for anything, which is most of what he reads.
He makes notes. He has very neat handwriting, which people always find surprising, as though they expected his thoughts to be messy because when he opens his mouth he tends to put his foot there more often than not. His thoughts are fast and his handwriting is neat and there is no contradiction here, just discipline.
He is officially working on the framework for his research thesis, which he is supposed to have in rough shape by October. The topic came to him in a dream, the way good ideas do: the evolution of national identity as a felt thing, an emotional and cultural category, from the Romantics through to the present day. How the movement constructed the nation as an object of love, sublime, worth dying for, and how that construction filtered through different ideologies, and how, depending on where and when you looked, it produced verses or produced bombs or produced both simultaneously, which is perhaps the most human thing about it. And how populism is making all that cultural battle relevant again.
He keeps finding his eye drawn toward Ireland and then redirecting. Ireland can’t be one of his case studies. The inclusion would be methodologically defensible, the Irish revolutionary period is arguably the paradigm case for the whole thing, Romantic nationalism becoming actual nationalism becoming actual insurgency, the full arc compressed into a single generation, the poetry and the guns arriving in the same breath, sometimes by the same hand, but he has not included it, and this is a well-thought decision, and not connected to any other line of thought currently running in the background of his mind.
Neither is he mentioning Brexit, or has any plan to. He wants to study nationalism as a historical problem, not as something the people around him are currently feeling and talking about, nothing his uncle Baelor can get his sticky fingers on and twist beyond recognition over Sunday roast. Aerion likes to keep an emotional distance with his study fields, is all.
He finds the old bicycle in the back of the garage, a silver fixed-gear, old enough to predate Aerion and all his siblings, with tyres that have gone soft but are easy enough to check for punctures and handlebars that need adjusting and a chain that takes thirty minutes of patient attention and a tin of oil from the shelf to run smoothly again. He doesn't ask whose it was. He is fairly sure he knows. He doesn't need to ask for permission to ride it.
He pumps the tyres and adjusts the seat and takes it out the back gate, and it turns out the lanes of rural Wiltshire are a different country at bicycle pace, the dry stone walls close enough to touch on both sides of the road, the hedgerows so thick that the lane becomes a green tunnel. Sheep watch him pass from behind gates with their usual expression of profound philosophical detachment. He finds he does not resent their natural wisdom.
Everywhere you look in Wiltshire there’s a reminder of its ancient history. The barrows are everywhere once you start looking, the long grass covering burial mounds so old the people who built them have long ago been forgotten. He has lived here his entire life and seen them driving past from the back seat with his hands in his lap and his eyes at middle distance, and he has not, he realises, stopped to properly look at them.
He passes a stone circle one morning, a small one, not even signalised with the obnoxious blue plaque of tourist points of interest, just standing in a field off a single-track lane as if it had always been there and always would be, impervious to humankind’s whims. He stops the bicycle, lets it fall among the tall grass. The stones are shoulder-height and lichen-covered and absolutely hieratic. He stays longer than he means to, thinking, dreaming, remembering.
He had read, as a child, every book in the house that contained dragons or wizards or enchanted hills, and imagined himself as a hero, or perhaps a villain in those stories, never a background, forgettable character like he is in his own life. He had grown out of his dragon phase, or thought he had. He is not sure now. He finds his tattered Alan Garner’s books, all worn spines and dog-eared pages, and puts book after book in his bike side satchel, by a soggy sandwich and scratched water bottle, and rereads them all by the stone circle, lying on his back in the long grass with the sky enormous and indifferent above him, the crickets’ song reminding him when it’s time to go back home.
The Alan Garner books are as strange as he remembered and yet stranger. He had forgotten how unresolved they are, how willing to leave you standing at the edge of something vast and mythical without offering a way across. He finds this comforting in a way he couldn't have articulated at nine or ten or however old he was, reading them for the first time by torchlight under the covers because it was past his bedtime and the stories felt too urgent to put down. He is twenty-one now, his birthday come and gone without any fanfare, but the urgency to keep reading has not gone anywhere. Reading and dreaming have always been easier than talking to people.
He cycles every day, weather allowing, tries different roads. Sometimes in the morning, low mist still hanging at knee-height, sometimes in the afternoon, hills going gold and amber in the slanted light. He rides with his hands loose on the bars, the wind in his face, and his mind running slower than it usually permits itself to run, and once, cresting a small hill with his lungs working properly for the first time all summer, he sees a barn owl hunting and stops the bicycle and watches it until it drops into the grass.
There is another hill he has found, a long chalk one, and he gives up pedalling midway and walks the bicycle up it and freewheels down with his feet off the pedals and his eyes half-closed, which is probably reckless and certainly exhilarating. At the top there is a view across three counties on a clear day, or so someone has scratched into a wooden post that leans there at an angle, and he has no way to verify it and does not try. He is content to believe it. He is finding, lately, that he is more willing to believe things.
He is enjoying himself. This is alarming. He did not intend to spend his summer enjoying morning yoga and fantasy books and bicycle rides, and yet here he is, and his calves ache pleasantly, and the air smells like summer, and he is composing, against his will and without his permission, in the back of his head while he pedals. Lines. Sentences that have the weight and cadence of something that is not prose. Images. Feelings. Desires.
He puts them down in the Moleskine anyway, in barely pressed-in pencil scratches, under the shadow of an old elm tree, and makes an effort to forget about them.
He reels, privately and with genuine feeling, at the person he is becoming.
Once, on a Thursday morning, he takes the lane that curves around the north side of Marlborough and he is coming down a slight hill with some speed when someone tall and broad-shouldered, hair hidden under a helmet, rolls out of a side intersection ahead of him on what appears to be, improbably, a longboard and he follows the faniliar giant figure flying above the hedgerow line like some mythical creature of days long past with his gaze until it disappears around the bend, and then his hands go to the brakes too late and he ends up half in the hedge with one foot on the ground, his kneecap scratched and hawthorn in his hair. Aerion has no confirmation of this sighting of a broad-shouldered stranger on a longboard being anything other than an overactive imagination but finds himself, nonetheless, cycling down that same road on the next training day, hands loose on the bars, eyes at the intersection, to find only bitter disappointment.
And so that evening, after weeks of internal struggle, he finally relents and searches for Duncan Donegal in Google.
What he expects to find: very little. A private Facebook, perhaps. A social media ghost, the way athletes sometimes are when they are young enough not to care about profile-building and old enough not to post everything that crosses their mind.
What he finds is both considerably more, and considerably less, than expected.
First, he finds indeed very little. An open Instagram that is either dormant or forgotten, a single profile photo, face angled away from the camera, standing on what looks like some beach in winter, dark coat, the manbun. Some low-quality landscape pictures that remind him of all the futile wandering he’s been doing with his bike.
The next result is a school rugby team page with an old squad photo: Duncan in the back row, second from right, standing a head taller than the man beside him, squinting slightly against the sun, hair shorter than it is now. Aerion screenshots this and puts it in his private gallery on the phone and immediately questions every decision that led him to being so pathetic.
Next he finds a Facebook from several years ago, mostly locked, though he is pretty certain this is the same Duncan Donegal, even if the profile picture is of a golden retriever with a birthday hat. There are eight posts visible without following or befriending: two rugby match announcements, the same school team from the previous find, a landscape somewhere grey and windswept that Aerion cannot place but stares at anyway, and a lot of messages wishing him a good birthday. His birthday, Aerion notes with hawk-like attention, is in August, a few weeks from now. None are as charismatic, passionate and natural-born leaders as Leos, his mind unhelpfully supplies, and he hates himself for having retained that miniscule horoscope trivia as if the position of stars on one’s birthday had anything to say at all about their fate.
He’s a Gemini himself. The sign of the twins, one face turned toward you and one turned away. Contradictory. Fickle. Flaky. His own best enemy. He does not believe this. He believes it slightly.
He types, Gemini compatibility with —. He closes the browser. He opens it again and reads for half a minute. He closes it and goes to sleep.
He dreams he is a kitten dozing in a patch of warm, fragrant grass. He is perfectly content. He does not know there is anything beyond the warmth and the grass and the light. Then the shadow falls over him, and before he can turn to look there are teeth at the scruff of his neck —not cruel, not tender either, just enormous— and he is lifted clean off the ground, dangling, useless, his four small legs finding nothing, and he wakes in a cold sweat with his heart going and the room very dark and sleep does not find him again that night.