WRITING
Sometimes, Lennox remembers what he’d thought of Faust before they’d first met. It had been easy to write him off as just another person trying to use him and his family as pawns, just like so many others had back then.
But as they met and talked, he had started to understand just how untrue that was. Faust was the kind of person that he would willingly fight for— the kind of person who fully believed in a brighter future. The kind of person who gave him hope.
What he’d given them hadn’t been a promise— but to Lennox, and to all of the other people crushed under the weight of rulers who thought of them as nothing more than livestock, it had been as good as one.
It had been a cause that they were willing to die for.
So long after the fact, each battlefield has blended into the same memory— nothing distinct but the bodies left behind, time and time again.
They died for something they believed in, and Lennox, staring out over the dead with no one left to mourn them, would always think of the mines.
People would die like animals there, and yet those who were left would be there to bury them, to plant a flower for them, to remember them.
There, in the choking depths of the earth, they had nothing else, but they were together.
Lennox stands alone among them all, now, bodies of friends and family and people he loved left out in the sun to bleach like so many dead cattle. This was what they believed in, the price they paid for a better future in which they had no part. This is the price they were willing to pay.
This is the price he is willing to pay.
This is why there is no one left to accept their death, to stop and mourn them.
The midday sun shines down on the bodies, cracking the skin and parching the flesh. Very few people would be willing to touch them, those bodies of nobodies from a nothing town, covered in blood and dust, torn and starting to rot as they were.
The army could never stay in one place, not for very long, not enough to give them a proper burial.
Lennox picks up a shovel.
Perhaps it’s a mercy that, years later, these memories all blend together. Perhaps it’s a mercy that he can no longer remember how many times he’s done this.
The day Faust was burnt at the stake was no longer a memory. It had been burnt so clearly into Lennox’s mind, into his dreams, that it felt as if that day had never ended. It felt as if it would play over and over in him for the rest of eternity.
Sometimes, in those dreams, he thinks of something he could have done— something that would have solved this, the right thing to have said that would have made the whole thing end peacefully— an eloquence and hope that wasn’t his, more suited to someone like Alec or Faust.
Each time he has dreams like these, he wakes up right after he’s spoken, not able to remember just what it is he’d done, just what it is he should have done to make the past right, that answer that he’d found in a dream and lost countless times upon waking.
(an answer, perhaps, that could only exist in a dream.)
Sometimes, what he dreams about is much simpler.
Faust, dying of his wounds in some faraway town. A search that was fruitless to begin with.
A wizard, dying alone with no one by his side, would have no body to bury and no one to mourn him. He would have no traces that he had even existed in the first place besides a mana stone.
These dreams, Lennox understands how to deal with.
After all, he’s always been bad at giving up.
(and if his search is impossible, and his journey will never end, isn’t that better? after all, no ending is far better than an ending that requires that the unacceptable be accepted)
But from time to time, the dream takes a turn that Lennox tries his best to forget.
In it, he does everything right— he says everything right, and for once, he is finally enough to prevent this tragedy.
He should be.
Despite that, he is aware that none of that matters.
It would have ended up the same way anyway.
To accept that there is nothing he could do is to accept that the tragedy could not be changed.
To accept that there is nothing he can do is to accept that what the people he loved fought and died for was, in the end, a conflict that they were outsiders to.
To accept that there is nothing he should do is to understand that the war is over and that this, with everything that has been lost, is the world they fought to be able to live in.
He remembers this perfectly, on waking, and tries not to.
The two of them watch the wedding procession, as the sun sets— Rutile and Mitile look happy as they wish the pair well, and Figaro and Lennox idly watch the two, chatting as they do.
“So, she’s getting married to him.”
“I never would’ve thought, you know? She’d lost her whole village in the storm before she came here, but she was determined that he was still out there, because she didn’t find his body— “
“She spent half her life looking for him. Honestly, doesn’t it seem a little pointless to you, Leno? Human lives are so short, but she’s already used half of hers on someone she didn’t even know was alive until a year or so ago.”
“She found him in the end. If the two of them could be happy together, that’s all that matters in the end.”
“You think so?”
“I do. It has to, after all.”
“She couldn’t have stopped it, you know. And he’s not her responsibility— she might’ve been happier just accepting that, moving on, and finding someone else.”
“She wouldn’t have to feel so guilty if she did.”
“Is that the way you see it, Dr. Figaro?”
Figaro can’t meet his eyes— the side glimpse he catches of Lennox’s face doesn’t seem like anger. Doesn’t exactly seem like sadness. For a second he thinks it may be something like understanding— an emotion so unfamiliar he doesn’t want to look any closer.
A long moment passes, and he answers a question with a question.
“Hey, Leno. Do you think she’s happy now, after searching for so long?”
“Do you think that all of it was worth it, in the end?”
“Do you think that this was better?”
Lennox pauses, for a bit, and then turns towards the wedding procession, walking to catch up.
“I hope so. But I don’t think it was better. I just don’t think she had anything else she could’ve done, after all.”
“This is all we can do, now.”
As he casts his spell, it seems more like a prayer than a blessing.
Forsan Et Haec Olim Meminisse Iuvabit.