i'm sending a message of feathers and bone | (december catch-all for fitz & nighteyes)

[listenyouidiot]

Who: FitzChivalry Farseer & Nighteyes + Nie Huaisang, open! (December catch-all)
What: Fitz and Nighteyes get settled in Trench; some Winter Mourning memory sharing prompts; assorted others
When: throughout December, timelines are fake
Where: On the edge of the Trenchwood in Feed, assorted other locations as necessary
Notes: bits of the third prompt adapted from chapter 3 of Robin Hobb's Assassin's Apprentice. hmu @ ragweed if you'd like an additional starter!

Content Warnings: the gif for the second prompt includes a spooky-ish moment near the end before the frames repeat! no other warnings yet, will update as needed.



i. new to the neighbourhood
open to all!

Just on the outskirts of Feed to the northeast and within a (generous) stone's throw of Farmer's Crossing, an abandon woodsman's cottage in the Trenchwood has been reclaimed from the elements.

Well. Maybe 'reclaimed' is a bit premature. Fitz and Nighteyes have managed to oust a pack of middling beasts from roosting within the dilapidated property, which means it must belong to them now. This isn't so different from how they came by their old hut in Buck Duchy in the aftermath of the Red Ship War, though the harsh terrain and unforgiving surroundings are a far cry from the bucolic life they'd lived in the countryside.

Fewer chickens, too, Nighteyes remarks to Fitz glumly across their Wit bond, that shared connection between them that links their minds, as well as their hearts and their senses. The large grey wolf is sitting on his haunches with his tail neatly curled around his paws, watching with shrewd, judgmental yellow eyes as Fitz struggles to figure out how to turn on the mechanical... thing... that supposedly provides power to the lamps inside the cottage. Given the amount of snow that has collected on the wolf's dense coat, as well as on Fitz's bent back, they've both been out here for quite some time. Nighteyes yawns once, maw of sharp white teeth on full display, before he lowers himself down into the snow bank and drops his chin onto his paws. We are losing daylight, little brother.

"Yes, I'm aware," comes Fitz's terse, verbal response--which, to anyone else, likely sounds like he's arguing with the air. With a groan that can only come from spending far too long bent over when one is clearly not a spry young twenty-something anymore, he straightens up and rolls his neck and shoulders, grimacing. "Would that this cottage's previous tenant kept a stash of candles on hand, I wouldn't need to waste my time with this."

ii. it comes
open to all! (shamelessly repurposing this prompt from the TDM)

There are only a few benefits that accompany a life spent constantly on edge to the threat of danger--to himself, to his loved ones, or to the Farseer throne--and being able to function efficiently while in a crisis is perhaps the most valuable one.

Fitz isn't a scholar, and so while other Sleepers may take evidence of their encounters with the strange footprints in the wilds to the archives or confer with others over how best to solve the mystery, he reaches instead for what he can do best: offer the strength of his body, and that of the wolf at his side, to anyone who needs to cross the wilds to reach the other districts, and fears making the journey alone. To that end, he can often be found lingering near the edges of the Trenchwood, people-watching and sharing some rudimentary meal with the wolf, largely unbothered by the cold now that he has a decent winter coat and new boots to keep his feet dry and warm.

iii. winter mourning: kin to the king
closed to Nie Huaisang

Buckkeep Castle is an impressive stone fortress built onto the cliffs overlooking the sea. In later years, Fitz would come to know its halls and all the hidden passageways concealed within its masonry as intimately as he knows his own skin. In its gardens as a youth he would learn the mastery of his Skill magic, and in its dungeons as a young man he would meet his first death. But in this particular sepia-tinted memory from his past he is just a little boy of not quite ten, dark-haired, dirty and skinny and sitting beneath one of the many banquet tables within the Great Hall in the aftermath of some feast or another, sharing the leftover pickings with three or four puppies who bark and gambol around him with fawning excitement.

And walking through the aftermath with stately poise is the elegant--and indisputably old--King Shrewd, flanked on one side by his youngest son, Prince Regal (bleary-eyed and a bit rumpled, probably hungover after the night's festivities), while the Fool in his black and white motley capers along in their wake. They have, the three of them, paused by the table so that Shrewd can make his incisive observations to Regal (either oblivious to or patiently choosing to ignore the Fool's playful pantomiming of his every gesture).

"Look at him," King Shrewd says to Regal.

Obedient, but not particularly happy about it, Regal glares balefully down at Fitz, who stares back up at him from beneath the safety of the banquet table amid the whelping puppies.

King Shrewd goes on. "What will you make of him?"

"Him?" Bewildered, Regal looks once to his father, then back to Fitz again with disdain writ plainly into his coldly handsome features. "It's the Fitz. Chivalry's bastard. Sneaking and thieving as always."

"Fool," says Shrewd, flinty eyed. The little jester at his side, thinking that he is being addressed, smiles sweetly up at the king, but the King's words are for his son alone. "Are your ears stopped with wax? Do you hear nothing I say? I asked you, not 'what do you make of him?' but 'what will you make of him?' There he stands, young, strong, and resourceful. His lines are every bit as royal as yours, for all that he was born on the wrong side of the sheets. So what will you make of him? A tool? A weapon? A comrade? An enemy? Or will you leave him lying about, for someone else to take up and use against you?"

Regal only stares back down at Fitz in quizzical silence, though he does briefly steal a quick look around the Great Hall to ensure that they are utterly alone, before looking back again. There follows a short spell of silence, interrupted only by the petulant whine of a puppy pawing at Fitz's hand, reminding him that they had been sharing their meal, has he forgotten? The boy darts his eyes downward like a spooked hare, then back up again, dark eyes moving with keen intelligence between the King and his uncle.

"The bastard?" Regal speaks again. "He's only a child."

Shrewd exhales. "Today. This morning and now he is a child. When you next turn around he will be a youth, or worse, a man, and then it will be too late for you to make anything of him. But take him now, Regal, and shape him, and a decade hence you will command his loyalty. Instead of a discontented bastard who may be persuaded to become a pretender to the throne, he will be a henchman, united to the family by spirit as well as blood. A bastard, regal, is a unique thing. Put a signet ring on his hand and send him forth, and you have created a diplomat a no foreign ruler will dare to turn away. He may safely be sent where a prince of the blood may not be risked. Imagine the uses for one who is and yet is not of the royal bloodline. Hostage exchanges. Marital alliances. Quiet work. The diplomacy of the knife."

What things to be said in front of a child, about the child where he sits at your feet. Even Regal looks stunned, his voice dry. "You speak of these things in front of the boy. Of using him, as a tool, a weapon. You think he will not remember your words when he is grown?"

But the King only laughs. "Remember them? Of course he will. I count on it. Look at his eyes, Regal. There is intelligence there, and possibly potential Skill. I'd be a fool to lie to him. Stupider still to simply begin his training and education with no explanation. For that would leave his mind fallow for whatever seeds others might plant there. Isn't it so, boy?"

Fitz doesn't answer, but he does nod, slowly. The King looks down at him, approving. "Come here," he instructs, and Fitz obeys. Then the King goes down on one knee before him (mimicked by the Fool, who looks between both of them with surprising solemnity and earnestness), while Regal's countenance darkens. King Shrewd takes the half-eaten tart from Fitz's hands and tosses it gently to the puppies, then drew a little pin of silver with a red gemstone embedded in it. He neatly pushes it through the rough wool of Fitz's shirt.

"Now you are mine," the King says, claiming him with the surety that only a King can command. "You need not eat any man's leavings. I will keep you, and I will keep you well. If any man or woman ever seeks to turn you against me by offering you more than I do, then come to me, and tell me of the offer, and I shall meet it. You will never find me a stingy man, nor be able to cite ill use as a reason for treason against me. Do you believe me, boy?"

At first, Fitz only nods mutely, but the King's steady brown gaze demands more from him. His jaw works for a moment as he summons up the courage to speak; with all his time spent in the company of dogs, it's no wonder words don't come to him easily. "Yes, sir," he says, voice small and very young.

"Good." The King has other words for the boy before him, who even now looks down at the pin in his clothes that has claimed him for a cause he does not yet understand, but perhaps the words themselves are more for the benefit of the outraged prince who stands behind him. Prince Regal Farseer, who even now is staring down at Fitz with renewed distaste on his face, the beginnings of something cruel and hateful festering in his eyes.

This moment, this memory, is the beginning of something, and the end of something. One life is abandoned underneath that banquet table where the puppies continue making short work of their prize; every step forward from this moment is a step taken in new shoes, for a new purpose. If his life had ever truly been his own before this exchange, it wasn't anymore.

iv. winter mourning: pack
closed to Nie Huaisang

Soft. Warm. Safe.

A newly born wolf cub is a vulnerable, sightless creature, but even when their eyes have opened and their ears unfurled to take in the sights and sounds of the world around them, their principle experiences are rooted in smell and taste and touch. The scent of their mother--a wild wolf's musk, overpowering and unpleasant to a human nose, but rife with information and certainty and security to a helpless pup--the scent of their littermates, their warm little bodies nestled together within the darkness of the den. The taste of milk and meat, and the wash of nurturing, dangerous canine love that only a wolf can demonstrate for her cubs.

This is a memory that lives in the senses, and so that is how Nighteyes relives it now, his pup's recollection of himself curled like a tiny, vulnerable bundle of yearning, trusting love into the dense fur of his mother's underbelly. His mind, somehow both a pup's and his adult self at once, leans into the mind of the visitor to this memory without hesitation; he accepts these things unreservedly as they are.

Hello, Hummingbird.

His mother licks his face tenderly, trying to coax his still-closed eyes to open. She called me Nighteyes because my eyes were late to open.

The thought is dozy, warm, and content. As though at any moment, he could drift back to sleep in this dream, and forget that in a few months' time, all the warm, loved bodies around him would be dead.

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The sensations of the memory don't overtake Huaisang in a rush, like so many have already; no sudden lurch, like missing a step or falling into water. No, this one is gentler, like a warm embrace coming to envelop him and nestle him down into the comforting dark. So unlike what he'd been through with Lan Xichen, oppressively dark hours in the Nie Ancestral Hall; no, this is nicer. Cozier. Huaisang finds himself both apart of and within the memory at once, as well, and leaning with relief into the welcome familiarity of Nighteyes' mind.

"There are so many of you," he says, taken in fully by the mass of warm and comforting bodies, the unconditional safety of mother. His own mother passed before he was old enough to know her, and so he has imagined her in the lifetime since— she wouldn't lick his eyes open, naturally, but he likes to imagine this sense of trust and safety he feels from Nighteyes is the same.

He relishes it for a moment, heedless of how long it is - maybe a minute, maybe thirty, in this sleepy haze it hardly matters. The simple pleasure of being cared for by a mother melds into the contentment Huaisang feels at being able to speak to Nighteyes again, and he is... enjoying himself, for once. In one of these strange, strange memories.

"My mother called me Bào," he offers in return, eventually. "For 'precious jewel.' Ah, and 'embrace'... Hmm, I might have been spoiled, for a time." Mother-spoiled, specifically. Not the other kinds of spoiled he also enjoyed.

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[listenyouidiot]

Even grown, Nighteyes' concept of the passage of time is a thing connected to sense experiences; of needs met, of learned lessons, pain to avoid. As a pup, it's utterly meaningless. He's warm nestled amid his siblings and the mind of a new and trusted friend; his mother's fierce love blankets and surrounds him; and his yearling brothers and sisters who survived from the previous season can barely be heard gambolling about outside the den under the watchful eye of the rest of the pack.

None of it can last. But mourning it while it still brings him joy is, in his opinion, a stupid human thing to do.

It is only right to spoil a cub. Warm affection and humour encircles Huaisang like the ambient heat from a hearthfire, but it's tinged with melancholy that would be more at home in a human mind, rather than a wolf's. His time sharing his mind and senses with Fitz has changed him. Life is hard and uncertain, especially for the young. They should know the comfort of a full belly and trust that they will be provided for while they can.

Nighteyes' memory of himself, small and vulnerable and filled with puppyish devotion, nestles himself against Huiansang's side and sighs, on the cusp of being drawn into sweet and dreamless sleep. Still, he presses the thought into drowsily into Huaisang's mind: It is good to hear your thoughts again, Hummingbird.

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There's good sense in Nighteyes' opinions, particularly about which things are stupid and human. Huaisang has had enough of despair and melancholy nostalgia, after the past couple weeks. Better now to live in this memory of Nighteyes', warm and loved and special, wrapping himself around the little cub with almost-unfettered delight. He is regrettably a stupid human still, himself, and so the tiny hooks of his myriad stupid human problems will not leave him entirely even for this - but he's close.

"I missed you," he mumbles into soft comfort and drowsiness. "Is this how it works now? Should I carry around one of those hideous wreaths? If I must." He gripes, but there's good humor in it; for Nighteyes, he will tote around a weird little bone circle if he absolutely has to. Better that than being unable to speak with a friend at all, except through Fitz's translation-plus-commentary.

Like, how can he get Nighteyes' unrestrained teasing of Fitz like that. It's just not the same.

Ah, and something occurs to him, in this cub-memory, on the tail (ha) of Nighteyes' oddly profound advice for rearing children- "Do you have any cubs?"

[listenyouidiot]

I do not know. About the antler wreaths, that is. That raises a question that seems far more pressing to Nighteyes, however. With this many deer around to shed their antlers, I do not understand why I am not allowed to take even a single ailing fawn. Grump. Grumpy wolf thoughts about Trench rules about not eating the deer. He's a wolf, eating deer is his job. It doesn't make sense.

(A wreath is lying on the swept wooden floorboards of Fitz's wilderness cabin, either dropped or set aside after Nighteyes' memory swept over Huaisang. Nighteyes is, dimly and distantly, aware of Fitz's presence just outside the cabin now, where he is at work chopping up additional firewood and setting it aside to keep the cabin warm when the real cold arrives.)

Huaisang's question brings a ripple of warm humour across the connection between their thoughts. I have a little brother to keep out of trouble. He will always be cub enough. Then, because he has learned to anticipate that one answer alone will rarely satisfy human curiosity, he adds, No, little jewel. I ran only for a brief time with other wolves before I returned to my brother's side. I was...

What follows isn't a pause, because they aren't speaking with words, or even really sharing something as straightforward as their thoughts; a muddle of ideas and feelings and images follows as Nighteyes tries to adequately communicate the bittersweet cost of acquiring his shade of human intellingence through his Wit bond with Fitz: the loss of some fundamental understanding of what it means to be a wolf, and only a wolf. The pack he'd sought to run with had sensed the the difference in him, even if they could not understand its origins, and after so much time spent in the company of a man since his own puppyhood, sharing a man's thoughts and living as a man did, life with this pack had chafed Nighteyes in ways he still can't describe. He had returned to Fitz, and they had resumed their life together, and while Nighteyes knows that Fitz continues to worry at this particular bone years and years after the fact, Nighteyes himself has accepted it for what it is.

...I was too changed to remain with them. That is what he settles on, ultimately, without bitterness or regret or any real melancholy. The memory around them is fading now though it does so very gently, a soft transition from a wolf's warm den to a clean blanket and some pillows on the floor before the hearthfire in Fitz's cabin. That is where Nighteyes drowses now, and while there is a small couch nearby clearly designed for a human to relax upon, there is no wolf to cuddle on that couch.

Chop. Clatter. The idle crunch of boots on snow. Fitz is still outside living his woodsman's dream life, apparently. When Nighteyes fully comes back to the present moment, he touches his mind gently to Huaisang's again, just to solve that mystery once and for all. There you are. (Affectionate.)

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Huaisang can only give him the mental equivalent of a shrug, for the deer. He doesn't know; he hasn't bothered to ask, frankly, because oops- he's not really interested in the local culture. Maybe he wouldn't have touched so many of these winter mournings if he'd been asking about this kind of thing, but here they are.

There's a strange sort of ache as he listens - absorbs? listens to Nighteyes' commentary of Fitz as a little brother, a cub, unbidden; he can't help but think of Nie Mingjue, of the time he'd been a beloved little brother himself. Faraway days, and he has plenty more brothers now, but if a muddle of a smear of a memory, of a Huaisang truly small enough to be called little jewel slips through, well; there he is, pudgy tiny hands grasping at the robes of an older brother too young to have a temper yet, too young to call him names besides Pork Bun and squish the baby fat of his cheeks.

He doesn't push it away from their shared connection, but neither does he acknowledge it. He imagines he doesn't have to, given the mutual sense of understanding they've reacquired. Instead he settles in the indescribable changedness Nighteyes conveys, and something in him sticks on the phrasing: too changed to remain with them.

When he blinks a few times and finds himself out of the memory, all he can think is that he knows that one, too. Sometimes it feels like the person he was before Mingjue died is just as dead, and the cultivation world feels even more tacky and pointless to engage with these days. It gives him a sense of relief to sit upright where he's slumped down on Fitz's couch now, here, in another place, and wordlessly he slides off of it completely to join Nighteyes on the floor.

"Here I am," he says, and winds an arm over the wolf's great neck. Now he will get his proper wolf cuddle, thank you. And if Fitz hasn't yet noticed Huaisang's fresh new connection to Nighteyes, it will be a pleasingly simple thing to surprise him with later.