Title: Armistice
Author: Argyle -- loveonthehighseas @ hotmail.com
Fandom: A Separate Peace
Pairing: Finny/Gene
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: These characters were created by John Knowles & are used here out of a certain smitten admiration (strictly non-profit).
Summary: What deceived me was my own happiness.
Notes: For the Contrelamontre Garment challenge, finished in fifty minutes or thereabouts.

10/18/04

“Armistice”

Even in sleep, Finny seemed to glow with a mark of vitality.

From the vantage point of my desk, I watched his chest shift with the solidity of his breath, a motion that gave no indication of the violent events that had befallen him, the vulnerability that I had forced upon him.

His hair fell in a boyish tumble across his brow, appearing lightened by the gloom that shrouded his eyes. I was once more irresistibly drawn to him, though I suppressed the urge to cross the room and touch my fingers faintly across his cheek, breaking the flow of the night.

I suddenly felt that I was standing upon the cusp of some great peril. As I prepared to fight for my own success, I longed for Finny to remain by my side just as I had been compelled to utterly surpass and in turn become him with the passing months. My ambitions were so tightly twined with Finny’s own that I was no longer able to make out the faint borderlines that stood between us. Any semblance of happiness that sprung up was from the sacrifice of my own identity, parasitic flowers borne on blood.

I heard the hollow sound of footsteps in the hall, approaching and retreating softly.

Beyond my hooded reading lamp’s small focus, the room was touched with dusky red and gold, narrowly meeting silver and blue as the light of the late sky poured through the tall, frost-covered windows. Objects that were familiar by day took on a foreign, displaced appearance: school ties and tennis rackets, holiday souvenirs and Finny’s walking-stick as it stood soberly by his bed. They seemed to take up the bare weight of truth, offering no promise of reconciliation.

Moonlight splayed across the floorboards, catching particles of dust and memory, and finally came to rest upon a patch of cloth that peeked from beneath the dresser.

Of course, I recognized it at once.

It was Finny’s pink shirt, ruffled and halfway-buttoned, its soft collar standing at a haphazard angle. Through the track of dim light, it continued to radiate with the power of its own inanimate certainty as though it had long ago been sparked into being by Finny’s laughter.

Yes, in those long summer days that now seemed to be little more than vague fragments of my own imagination, it had been Finny’s emblem, equally showcasing his support of the war efforts and his own strident ease. Now discarded, it was merely a forgotten gesture of his innocence, dusty and defiled, and I imagined that its sprightly folds held some key to my failure.

The hour for emblems was over. With the peals of my own reckless abandonment, I had willed it to be so, and at that moment, I understood that it would never come again.

Dragging a hand roughly through my hair, I forced my gaze to drop.

The blocked text of my grammar book blurred, my muddled Latin translations fading with the breadth of two millennia. The words formed a wall, making strangers of companions and disconnecting lovers with veiled significance. My own thoughts lay behind me like a trail of breadcrumbs scattered by the wind; I was left without bearings or strategy.

Even strewn across brittle pages, wars began with the captured pulse of vanity and terrain; both past and present, they were fought for the same reasons just as they reached the same outcomes. Generals and footmen passed through my mind with the grainy distance of a newsreel, their dark, crackling voices forever doubting the possibility of reaching an armistice.

Such things were temporary.

“Gene?” Finny raised himself on his forearm, rubbing his temple with the tips of his fingers. I looked up quickly, my eyes meeting his by the pull of adverse stars, faintly visible as glinting surfaces in a mask of darkness. His smile rose and quickly faded.

“Yeah?” I searched his face for some sense of assurance. “What is it, Finny?”

“What’re you doing?”

“I have a Latin exam tomorrow,” I said, tapping my pen against my tablet listlessly. “Come to think of it, you have one, too.”

“To hell with Latin.”

“Infernus.”

“Give it a rest, Gene. You do realize that it’s past two, don’t you?” Tugging his blankets over his chest, he repositioned the burden of his cast with a controlled distaste. There was an anger to the movement, too, tentatively capped beneath the reddened glaze of his eyes and observed as with the regular ebb and surge of the tide. Although he now only rarely gave voice to airy proclamations, I sensed that he still felt himself to be a worthy recipient of the world’s charms, at once cautious of his own reality. Perhaps some corner of his mind had begun to realize my own inherent treachery, though by the knit of his brow, I knew that he was still reluctant to abandon his battles. He was not alone in that. “Switch off that damn lamp and go to sleep. Your books’ll still be waiting for you in the morning,” he said, his voice marked by exhaustion. “I will, too.”

And so he was.