Work Text:
And should I live a century more,
Its meaning would be thus:
A hundred years of remembrance
For you, the light I lost
-Fragment from ‘Lament of the lover of Tellius’ Vanguard’ (contemporarily untitled), composed ~60 TNE
The applause buzzed around Soren’s ears as he finally let his eyes drift up from his notes. It was polite applause; not the most enthusiastic he’d ever received, but plenty. Respectable, for a crowd and setting like this.
He allowed himself a small smile, and a second to relish in the moment. A good paper, well delivered. Eyes on his work—important work, he thought, challenging everything they’d once assumed of such a formative period in their history—and interest in his research. His paper proved it: the long-celebrated writer and lover of Tellius’ Vanguard was a man. It was no longer in doubt.
All he had to do now was survive the final gauntlet.
The first hand went up, and he nodded to the questioner; an acquaintance in his faculty, probably asking something nice to set the tone. He was kind like that, even if Soren had never asked for the kindness.
“Could you say a little more about how you think the poet’s identity as Branded crops up in the Goldoan papers?” Ah, a classic from Stefan. It was always about Branded with him, something they didn’t always agree on. Still, an easy question to answer.
“I actually don’t think he identified with being Branded,” Soren answered. Stefan’s brow furrowed slightly; he worked too much with Begnion's history. Their unnamed poet was decidedly not from Begnion. “His journals make frequent references to the suffering his status caused from his childhood to adult life, and the connections he made to his blood family in Goldoa were tentative at best. I would dare say he found no home at all in Tellius, and tied no part of himself to it.”
Stefan nodded, and the cut of his jaw belied future conversations over whatever hot drink Soren could extort from him in return for entertaining the ‘Branded pride’ tirades that would never apply to the Vanguard’s lover. It was no more or less than what Soren expected when he answered the question.
Two more hands went up. Soren nodded to the one on the left of the room, a figure he didn’t recognise. “In light of these papers, what do you think of the female remains found at the Vanguard’s grave?”
And there it was. The question Soren had desperately hoped he wouldn’t be asked. The question that had an answer, but not one that most wanted to hear. An answer that turned so many assumptions on their head that it would send all of them up to the hills to sing his praises or shout him down.
Soren didn’t know which it would be, and it was why he hadn’t said anything yet. But he’d prepared an answer, held close to his heart, and maybe it was the right time.
The truth deserved to be known. He just hoped the still-nameless, long-dead writer wouldn’t hold it against him.
“The final notes left enclosed in the papers describe what the Vanguard’s lover wished to happen to his remains on death,” Soren said. The room around him was silent. “They match, down to the letter, the arrangement of the grave - but only after the second set of remains were added. There is no woman buried alongside the Vanguard, only a man, and that man and the poet are one and the same.”
The room exploded in a low murmur, and six hands shot up at once. Soren looked up at the clock and didn’t bother to conceal his sigh. So much for surviving the gauntlet.
The day was warm in your hands,
A light unrivalled by stars,
You caught me in those young eyes,
And changed me, loved me, for good.
-Fragment from ‘On Meetings’ (The Vanguard’s Lover), composed ~66 TNE
‘Hello!
I attended your paper ‘The authenticity of and conclusions arising from the Goldoan papers’ at last week’s Crimean Humanities Conference and I wanted to contact you with a few thoughts.
I want to say that I really liked your paper, and I’m looking forward to your future publications on this material and topic. I read ‘‘The endless sea’: articulating grief in 1st century Tellius’ and I admire your style a lot - seeing all the revelations of the Goldoan papers laid out plainly is something I’m much anticipating.
Though I don’t want to assume your particular plans, I would be particularly keen to see you talk more openly about the incorrect identification of the poet as female based on scientific analysis of his remains and the lack of gendering in his published work. I’d wanted to catch you elsewhere at the conference to talk about it, but I didn’t manage to find you!
I hope it isn’t too blunt of me to say this, but it felt like you weren’t particularly comfortable discussing the issue under scrutiny. I work in late TAE and early TNE gender theory and trans studies - I would be more than happy to discuss some of your ideas with you at any point.
Once again, thank you for all your work on this topic so far. It’s important work, and I’m eagerly anticipating everything that comes next.
Kind regards,
Dr Ike Tyrust
Lecturer in Tellius New Era Gender Studies
Pronouns: he/him’
‘Dear Dr Tyrust,
Thank you for your email. I appreciate your kind words about my work.
Your offer to discuss gender theory and trans studies is noted. I do not have a particularly strong grounding in these areas, and I would be happy to converse with you. I will note at this stage, however, that I have no intention to explore these topics with regards to the Vanguard’s lover in any great depth in my writing, despite my interest.
Regards,
Dr Soren Daer
Lecturer in Tellius New Era History
Pronouns: he/him’
Sugar on your lips,
Sunlight on my tongue.
The bitterness of parting
so far away,
It seemed it would never come.
-Fragment from ‘The brightest days’ (The Vanguard’s Lover), composed ~62 TNE
Dr Tyrust (who had implied, multiple times, that he would be happy for Soren to refer to him by name) worked at the university across the city. They hadn’t encountered each other before now, which wasn’t as much of a surprise to Soren as he wanted to admit; there was some kind of petty rivalry between the University of Melior and Melior City University that rendered exchange between their faculties limited at best.
Soren had always considered himself above things like that, but apparently not enough that he hadn’t missed a possible useful contact. Still, Dr Tyrust had reached out now, and Soren would use the knowledge now he had access to it. No point in regrets.
That didn’t mean he didn’t regret it, though. Just a bit. His career might have looked a little different with someone like Dr Tyrust to talk to.
They’d worked out where the gap in their schedules lay (a gap that was, unsurprisingly, rather difficult to find between two full teaching schedules) and arranged a meeting - Soren would have been glad to continue their exchange by email, but it was Dr Tyrust’s request.
‘I find that writing emails takes so much longer,’ he’d written, in a characteristically unnecessarily long email. Soren would have told him that he could just say less, but it was probably rude when they barely knew each other. ‘I always have to restrain the urge to use citations.’
So, there Soren was. A coffee shop in neutral territory, with minimal chance of a student spotting either of them - Soren didn’t mind seeing his students out of hours, but that didn’t mean he wanted interruptions either. Besides, the location had been Dr Tyrust’s idea; Soren gathered he was rather popular with his students.
Soren could understand. Like any self-respecting nosy academic, he’d taken a peek at Dr Tyrust’s Twitter, and he was exactly the kind of teacher who got nominated for awards and ended up swamped with emails from students who actually did have questions about their content.
Looking at Dr Tyrust’s Twitter also made spotting him in the cafe immensely easy, when he finally managed to show up (only two minutes after Soren sat down with his drink, which was perfectly respectable because Soren had been a good ten minutes early). That was to say: the man was built like a house. It was impossible to miss him.
As he looked around, his eyes slid right over Soren. Yeah, that made sense; Soren wasn’t quite as tall when he wasn’t standing at a lectern. Soren sat up a little straighter and waved his hand - once, sharply, just so Ike would see him.
Dr Tyrust’s eyes lit up. And then he smiled, making some gesture towards the counter that probably meant ‘I’m going to get something,’ but Soren didn’t see anything that actually communicated that. He just nodded and waited, swallowing down what absolutely wasn’t nervousness. Because he wasn’t nervous. He had no reason to be nervous.
“Hi, Soren,” Dr Tyrust said, sliding into the seat opposite him. Soren watched him wince as his knees hit the bottom of the table, but he recovered quickly. “It’s good to finally meet you.”
In one hand, Dr Tyrust held a plate with a cookie on it. In the other, another plate, also with a cookie, but one balanced precariously next to a mug. Dr Tyrust slid the lone plate over to him. Ah.
“You needn’t have,” Soren said. No, that was too rude. “But thank you, Dr Tyrust.” He pulled the plate a little closer, and the man looked caught between a smile and a grimace.
“Please just call me Ike,” he said. “We’re not doing anything formal-”
“This is technically a work meeting.”
“It’s a meeting between people with a mutual interest,” Dr Tyrust fired back. “Please. Take it as payment for the food?”
If Soren were petty, he’d point out that he hadn’t asked Ike to get him anything. If he were pettier, he’d say that he didn’t even like the cookie. Unfortunately, he did, and he was more honest than he was petty.
It was a close run thing. But it was still true. “Alright, Ike,” he said, and the man smiled properly this time.
“Great,” he said, sitting back in his chair and taking a sip from his drink. From the face he made, it was still too hot. “So, gender.”
Soren nearly groaned. “That’s a little broad as a conversation starter.”
“Perhaps,” Ike answered with a laugh. “I don’t want to lecture to you like you’re encountering the concept of gender for the first time, though. I don’t know what you already know.”
“Very little,” Soren conceded. Perhaps he’d normally be wary of admitting a lack of knowledge, but he wouldn’t exactly be able to feign it with Ike; especially not when it was the whole pretext for their meeting. “Enough that I never buy into some of the rubbish published about the men of the early New Era.”
Ike laughed again. He had a nice laugh, one that didn’t sound at all mocking. “Have you ever read anything about gender and literature in the period?”
“A little.” It was even more necessary, back when people tended towards the interpretation that the Vanguard’s lover had been a woman. People wrote a lot about feminine gendered dynamics that weren’t there anymore. “I’m not versed in the theory.”
“Okay, uhh.” Ike took another sip; still too hot. “Know anything about gendering grave goods?”
“Oh, do I,” Soren answered. “But not from a theoretical perspective, again. Just a practical one.”
“No, that’s good,” Ike said. “That’s what I was asking. Tell me what you know, and I’ll tell you about the theory.”
That easy? That was fine. “The Vanguard’s lover was buried with a small collection of items,” he said. “A hair tie, made from leather. A handful of wooden animals, worn but carved by hand. Books, including a wind tome. They were identified as domestic items, the kind of thing a woman would keep as trinkets from a lover or items that would be kept in the home.”
“Right,” Ike said. “The items were interpreted to mean femininity, because the bones were identified as such. And before the identification, they were labelled as feminine because of his status as a lover of a man.”
“An incorrect labelling,” Soren said. “A tome isn’t a household item, it’s a weapon.”
“It’s also a household item,” Ike corrected. “People used tomes to light fires, or dry their clothes. But its practicality doesn’t make it a woman’s object, and its status as a weapon doesn’t mean it belongs to a man.”
“And men could have long hair, or trinkets made by hand with some kind of sentimental value,” Soren said. “The grave goods don’t have a gender at all.”
“Exactly,” Ike said. He shot Soren a grin and bit into his cookie. “And that’s the theory. Historians, archaeologists, whatever - everyone looks at something and assigns it a gender that aligns with its modern meaning. When it’s repeated often enough, it seems to become a fact, but it’s no more historical than it was when the historian first made their guess.”
It made sense. It was easy to grapple with, and laid out before Soren in a way that made sense. Just like that, the overly-friendly Dr Tyrust who was keen to lord over Soren with his knowledge of gender from the emails disappeared, replaced with Ike: nice, kind, and just as interested in the presentation of the past as Soren was.
This meeting wasn’t about superiority, just… understanding. “So with those items in the grave, what would you say about gender?”
Ike’s face lit up. He had crumbs caught at the side of his mouth. “Mostly that it doesn’t say anything at all,” he said. “But with the knowledge that the person in the grave was a man, I’d say something about the lack of gender in long hair, or the use of magic.”
“But nothing about the animals?”
Ike chuckled. “I don’t know what to make of the animals,” he said. “Do you have any ideas?”
“I wouldn’t have asked if I knew,” Soren admitted. There were the beginnings of a smile just starting to form on his lips. It felt strange. “But the poet wasn’t one for handicrafts. He said he could never get the hang of it, in one of his diaries, so I think they were a gift from someone else.”
“They’re well made?” Ike asked.
Soren nodded. “Not the kind of thing a rich child would have played with at the time, nor something that would be displayed in wealthy households. But not shoddy, either.”
“I wonder who made them,” Ike said. “The Vanguard? Another friend? A relative?”
“Well, if I were to make an educated guess…” Soren said, and then he was off, and Ike spoke, and listened, and didn’t once stop him. Soren drained his mug, finished his cookie, and they kept going.
They didn’t stop until Soren looked up, abruptly, and realised that the light outside had been replaced by artificial light, the skies now dark. He hadn’t even realised so much time was passing.
When he faltered, Ike’s eyes went to the window too. “Oh,” he said, and burst into laughter. Soren couldn’t help but follow him, small sounds escaping his mouth.
“I’m sorry for keeping you,” Soren said, moving to fish his bag out from under the table.
“Please, don’t be,” Ike said. “It was interesting! I didn’t even realise how off topic we managed to get.”
They’d ended up on the practice of having pets in Ancient Era Tellius. It had certainly drifted a little; Soren hadn’t minded. “It’s fine,” he replied. “Like you said, it was a good conversation. I do need to get back, though.”
Ike nodded, and Soren pushed down against the… regret, he supposed, that they had to part for now. It was odd - normally, he would have tried to escape such a long conversation hours ago. But here he still was, and he’d enjoyed himself.
“Maybe we can meet to talk again,” Ike said. If Soren didn’t know better, he would have thought that Ike looked hopeful.
“I’d like that,” he answered, and for once he actually meant it.
Ike was always my dearest friend, from the moment I knew him until the moment I scattered his ashes into the sea. He may still be my dearest friend, even now - he is not my only friend anymore, but it’s still his face I see in my dreams, his smile my mind runs to when I imagine explaining my everyday successes.
-An extract from Diary #7, contained within the Goldoan papers. Entry estimated to have been written 75-78 TNE
“Hi, Soren!” Ike stood at his door with a bag held in each hand, one fabric and full of books, the other a mystery. Soren found a smile tugging at his lips immediately.
“How did you ring the doorbell?” he asked. Ike smiled wider and awkwardly stuck his elbow out from his body. “Fair. What’s that?”
“Dinner,” Ike answered. He followed Soren into the flat without hesitation, kicking his shoes off at the door. “We talked so long last time, I thought it might be easier if we don’t get hungry part way through.”
Last time - and the time before, and the time before that. Honestly, at this point Soren would be more surprised if they didn’t spend the rest of the afternoon and evening talking about whatever next came to mind. “I didn’t know you could cook.”
“I can’t,” Ike answered cheerfully. “My roommate did it. It was in exchange for me doing the groceries this week, you don’t need to look at me like that.”
“I’m not looking at you in a way,” Soren said, though he knew he was. Ike’s roommate didn’t know him; Soren didn’t even know their name, but here he was, eating their food in the near future.
“Sure,” Ike answered, “and the Vanguard was heterosexual.”
“Take that back.” Soren laughed, taking Ike’s food bag from him and carrying it to the fridge. “And take a seat. Anywhere you like on the sofa is fine.”
“Not going to rise to the challenge?” Ike called over, followed by a thwump sound as Ike sank slightly too far into his sofa; Soren hadn’t warned him about it. That was what he deserved for a remark like that.
“Somehow, I don’t think I need to,” Soren said.
“But hypothetically,” Ike said. “If someone said that, how would you respond?” When Soren poked his head around the door, Ike was lying on his back and staring at the ceiling. No one ever accused him of being uncomfortable in unfamiliar places, clearly.
Normally, Soren would mind if someone he’d barely known for a month was making themselves so comfortable in his home. Ike was different.
“With the facts, obviously,” Soren said. A tiny part of him was tempted to just sit on Ike’s legs, but he took the desk chair instead. They were probably friends, but not like that.
Friends. It was an odd concept, one Soren was still unsure of how to broach. Ike was friendly, and he obviously had more friends. Soren was… not. Was it strange for Ike, to be friends with someone who had no one else, and for good reason? Did it make him uncomfortable?
“Which fact?” Ike asked. He seemed just as at ease as always; he probably wasn’t thinking about it at all.
“Probably that a concept of heterosexuality didn’t really exist at the time,” Soren said. “Succession looked very different in the period the Vanguard grew up in. Or that the poet referred to being the man at his side in the past tense, so the Vanguard knew him as a man - no heterosexuality there.”
Ike smiled, turning his face directly to Soren. “Succession, huh?”
Soren nodded. “Have you ever read the Daein court records for that kind of period?”
“I don’t read the language that well,” Ike admitted, scratching the back of his head and shooting Soren a sheepish grin. “I know, I know. Crimean and Gallian are more my thing.”
“After the dawn of the new era,” Soren explained, “the new ruler completely split up the way that Begnion had divided the land. Inheritance was almost entirely taken out of the family.”
“But is that relevant? The Vanguard had a family inheritance,” Ike argued. “A company and a fort. There’s a record of it in the Crimean royal archives, though it’s retrospective.”
“He also had a noble title that was passed onto a boy from Begnion,” Soren shot back. “No familial relation; all we know is that they probably fought together at some point.”
“Not anymore,” Ike said. Soren shot him a questioning look. “Lord Tormod. He fought in the army against Daein and Begnion, and before that he was a resistance fighter of some kind in Begnion. I have a grad student working on him.”
“Oh, excuse me for not knowing about unpublished work,” Soren said. Ike looked at him, then burst into laughter. Effortlessly, Soren joined him.
He still didn’t understand this. How he could laugh when he was wrong, or how Ike could laugh when Soren said something that always verged on too sharp, too defensive. He continued like normal, and Soren followed suit, and it didn’t make sense.
He couldn’t be the kind of person Ike was usually friends with. He was standoffish, rude, and he didn’t care about what other people thought about him - including if they wanted to spend time with him. With Ike, he didn’t even have to worry about it.
Ike always wanted to meet up with him again, always organised it before they split off for the night (and it was almost always the night, because they’d learned their lesson from trying to meet before they each had to teach afternoon classes). A meeting once a week had turned into every few days, and now it was almost every time Soren was free.
Each time, their conversation never really stopped. It flowed effortlessly from gender to emotions to literature to history, and everything in between. They talked so little about their lives, but Soren still felt like Ike knew him quite well. Maybe he’d even hesitantly say that he knew Ike well. Knowing him was easy.
Perhaps that was what was so strange: the ease. It wasn’t that Soren found socialising with Ike easy; he never had, and never would, find conversation easier than silence. But as conversations went, his time with Ike was painless. It was enjoyable, in a way no one else’s company ever had been.
Ike didn’t judge him for his patchy knowledge on his subject area. He didn’t lord it over Soren whenever he didn’t quite grasp something. In return, Soren never judged Ike for his threadbare knowledge of literature, and they both listened when the other had something to say.
He’d expected their interactions to be one-sided: Ike told Soren about things Soren didn’t really want to learn about, in a way that made Soren want to know them even less. After a few meetings, they’d lose interest in the knowledge exchange and Ike would dismiss him as the kind of person who wasn’t really worth spending time on.
It hadn’t been like that. Soren didn’t know how he was meant to feel about it.
It didn’t help that Ike was easy on the eyes. Or that he was endlessly kind, and had big arms, and handed out smiles like they’d never end, and listened to everything Soren said, and almost always had something to say in reply, and…
Ike had a lot of features that made him a good person to spend time with. Soren was still adjusting to what that actually meant.
There was a gap in his teeth,
from when he lost them sparring with Boyd as a child.
They grew back all wonky, all perfect.
He used to say he liked my smile. Everyone loved his smile,
I loved his smile.
Please don’t let me forget. There was a gap in his teeth and they weren’t perfectly white. One of them was chipped on the left. He had a scar next to his mouth, when he took an arrow to the face because he said he was too busy staring at
I’ll try again another day.
-An early draft of ‘Memories Eternal’ (The Vanguard’s Lover), composed ~58 TNE
“No, not quite like that,” Ike said. It was the third time in an hour that he’d corrected Soren, but he hadn’t gotten any less patient. Soren couldn’t quite say the same about himself. “This conceptualisation is about repeated acts constituting and reinforcing the meaning of gender. No one really ‘makes’ it.”
“Ugh.” Soren let his eyes fall to his notes again. “So how does change happen, then?”
Ike shrugged. “It’s a theory, not practise,” he said. “You can apply it to things, but it doesn’t always fit.”
“I know that,” Soren said. That much was easy; it was like any historical theory. But the words of this one tangled up in a different way - he recognised some of it, but other elements meant nothing, and the author treated them all the same. “I don’t get on with philosophy.”
“Does anyone?” Ike asked. “I don’t think philosophers even get on with philosophy.”
“You seem to get on just fine,” Soren grumbled, and he meant it. Ike didn’t seem to have any problems with this kind of thing.
“I’ve had a lot of practice,” Ike said. “This is a foundational text, so it’s been on every reading list I’ve ever been handed, probably.”
“It might help if the foundational text was a bit more accessible.” If Soren had to see the word constructivism ever again, he’d probably just give up. Unfortunately, the moment his eyes returned to the page in front of him, he spotted it at least three times.
“If I had a penny for every time someone had said that to me, I wouldn’t need to apply for funding for the rest of my life,” Ike said, laughing. “You’ll get the hang of it.”
“I might have managed it sooner if I ever took the chance to study it sooner.” He hadn’t even known he’d need it. Until Ike, he hadn’t known he’d want to.
“You talk about it like there’s a reason you never went this route,” Ike said, and Soren internally cursed himself for ever thinking that he wasn’t particularly perceptive. He hit home exactly when Soren least expected it.
“There’s no particular reason.”
“No?” Ike tilted his head slightly. “You have more of a brain for the theory than I do.” If it was anyone else, Soren would be tempted to point out that he just had more of a brain than Ike. With Ike, the appeal wasn’t really there. “You know your subject, and it’s all about emotions and intimacies. It’s sort of hard not to go this way, with your credentials.”
And there it was. Credentials. One step away from Ike saying ‘lived experience’ and then that was only one step away from ‘what people expect from you.’ And Ike couldn’t mean any harm in it, because he was Ike and he never did, but it still stung a little.
Ike pulled a strange face. “There is a reason, isn’t there?”
Soren didn’t understand. He was so used to being hard to read. No one ever knew what was going through his head, and he relished in it. And then here came Ike, and he understood. Somehow. He saw what no one else did and left Soren unmoored, drifting in a space he’d always stayed out of because the waters were too rough.
He gritted his teeth. “Why does there have to be a reason I haven’t studied a relatively niche subject area?”
Ike laughed. “I thought it was you who said that gender was everywhere, and people would be fools not to pay some attention to it sometimes?”
“That was me,” Soren agreed. He didn’t regret saying it, but he was regretting this conversation heavily. It was only so much time before he said something he couldn’t take back.
“You don’t have to answer me,” Ike said, “but at the same time, you can say. Trust me, I’ve heard every reason in the book as to why people don’t know anything about what I do.”
“But they’re all old men who wouldn’t know gender if it bashed them over the head,” Soren said. “I think it’s relatively expected these days.”
“You’d be surprised,” Ike said. “But I won’t be. If there’s a reason you’ve never done trans studies, that is.”
Maybe Ike’s life wasn’t as planned out as Soren’s. Maybe, for Ike, there wasn’t a gaping hole of mystery that defied explanation or verbalisation, and the question of reasons didn’t mean so much to him.
He didn’t know all that much about Ike, not really. Soren knew nothing of his life, or the experiences that brought him to his work. For all he knew, Ike had just as good a reason to study something that Soren had to avoid it.
Or maybe he had exactly the same reasons to avoid it, and chose to embrace it all anyway. Soren didn’t know what scared him more: the idea of Ike knowing why, or the possibility that Ike already knew why, and he was just strong enough to overcome it where Soren couldn’t.
A large part of Soren’s mind screamed at him to take Ike’s offer to just drop the subject if he didn’t want to provide an answer. But a small, very insistent part had another idea entirely. If anyone would understand, Soren felt like it could be Ike.
“There is a reason,” he admitted. Ike nodded, his face the picture of patience. “I can tell you, but could you tell me why you do study it?”
Ike nodded again, and Soren felt something uncoil in his chest. Of course it wasn’t a bad question; it was probably a question Ike got all the time, but this time it was slightly more welcome than usual, asked in good faith.
“I knew trans people growing up,” Ike said, and Soren wished he could say the same. He wished there’d been anyone who understood. “My father had a trans student before I was even born, and he had another family friend who was trans. But neither of them had ever known anyone like them.”
Ike hadn’t been alone, but the people who came before him had. It made sense. “I saw and heard the way they’d fought for themselves, and thought that if I could do anything worthwhile, it was to show others that they weren’t alone.”
Soren knew the feeling; there were always students who looked at him like he’d put the stars in the sky himself when he introduced himself with his pronouns. He’d never aimed for it, but it was nice. “I wanted to be there to remind people that we’ve always been around, in some form,” Ike continued.
“So, Ancient Era gender studies?”
Ike nodded. “We’ve always been here, and we always will be. It’s a comfort to myself just as much as it is to my students.”
“And just as much as it’s a threat to the people who never saw it.”
Ike chuckled. “That too. I like being a threat, though.”
Soren had very clear memories of a fist in his stomach as a father of three told him he wasn’t welcome anywhere near their home. “Sometimes being a threat is more exhausting than anything.”
“Oh, definitely.” Ike’s gaze was understanding, a far cry from what Soren had always imagined someone so different to him would be like.
He’d always been sure it would go like this: someone telling him that he had a duty. Someone saying that if he wouldn’t, no one else would. That he was ignoring what was in the past. That he was betraying his students, his people, whatever that might mean.
Ike was the opposite. Ike defied every expectation, and somehow Soren didn’t resent him for it.
“I’d never really interacted with another trans person before university,” Soren explained. Even afterwards, he’d barely spoken to the people he knew of, too wrapped up in his studies. “And there was no one else in my subject area. The moment anyone even said the word gender, everyone tried their hardest not to look at me.”
Ike nodded. Soren had no idea if he’d ever experienced the same thing, but it seemed that way. “I had my interests, and I stuck to them. I didn’t want my life to get wrapped up in my studies. I didn’t want to be that one trans person who studied trans history, so they could put me in the corner as just…”
He gestured into the air, and Ike nodded again. “The one who does exactly what people expect them to, so their work isn’t surprising or worthwhile. Sounds familiar.”
Soren was used to being pushed into a corner, and he didn’t want it to happen again. He hadn’t been able to risk it. But Ike had taken the risk, and he’d got everything he needed. Had he been wrong?
Then again, his choices had still led him here, a leading expert on one of the most important—and almost certainly trans—literary figures in Tellius’ history. It was funny how things turned out.
“So I never wanted to study that kind of history,” Soren said. Ike smiled, and the final bit of tension eased in his chest. He’d never said it to anyone before; it wasn’t nearly as hard as he’d expected it to be. “But now I’m here, and I don’t think I mind it one bit.”
Ike smiled wider, and Soren fell just a little more.
Our star was just east of the brightest,
A better place, you used to say,
Than in the full light of day.
-Fragment from ‘The nature of remembrance’ (The Vanguard’s Lover), composed ~61 TNE
“You’re named after the Vanguard, aren’t you?”
Ike looked up from his book, a smile spreading over his face. “How did you guess?”
Soren just shot him a look. Ike’s smile turned sheepish. “Oh, just a wild stab in the dark.”
“Alright, alright.” Ike laughed. Soren was still getting used to the way that reverberated in his chest, filling him with warmth. He loved hearing Ike laugh. “Yes, I named myself after the Vanguard.”
“When did you name yourself?” It was a two-pronged question. The other ones, unspoken: how long have you known? How long has his past been on your mind?
Ike scratched the back of his head. “I think I was… eleven? We read some of the poetry in our literature class, and had to do a poster project on a section each. I got carried away.”
“Oh, I’d pay to see that.” Soren could imagine it; half-clumsy drawings, the words of the poem pasted in the middle with annotations. On the back, in the corner, a name that would soon be overwritten by the one on the front. Ike probably had something intelligent to say about contemporary gender identity formation and that poster.
“I don’t think I have it anymore,” Ike admitted. “Titania helped me burn all my stuff with my deadname on it.”
Soren smiled. All his things with his deadname on had been ‘unfortunately misplaced’ over the course of various moves. “Do you remember which piece of poetry it was?”
When Ike met his eyes, it was to greet him with an even wider smile. Soren echoed it. “I do,” he said. “It went ‘in the night sky I trace your name, the stars we held tight in our eyes. They gave you a star, and it bears the name Ike; yet they know not the one you named ours.’”
“The poems on the nature of remembrance,” Soren said. Those were his favourites; they were miserable, but they said so much. About the strength of emotion, about the way people grieved. It was a poem composed by a participant in and observer of grief.
“Do you have a favourite from the set?” Ike asked.
With others, Soren might have denied it. There was a line of professionalism, some people said; having a favourite for any reason other than how interesting it was from an academic standpoint could be used to call him too emotional, too attached.
But Ike knew. The poems were emotional. They were about attachment. How could Soren not have a favourite part?
“That’s easy,” Soren said. Ike watched him with something like rapture in his eyes, and he felt pinned to the spot. Somehow, that didn’t make him nervous. Not when it was Ike. “‘Your light shines ever into eternity, and I know: we shall never meet again. But I know myself to have seen your brightest light, and it is our star I watch to guide me onwards.’”
Ike let out a breathless laugh. “You speak his poetry so beautifully,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m surprised that you had a quote ready, just like that.”
Ike didn’t know about the book Soren read until it fell apart. He didn’t know about how he used to keep it under his pillow, stopping short of holding it in his arms at night only when he accidentally creased some of the pages. Soren had whispered those words to himself hundreds of times before, when the world around him was too much and his mind felt like it was collapsing in on him.
But if he said it, Soren felt like Ike might actually understand. “You really shouldn’t have been surprised,” he said instead, because that was shorter. Funnier.
“No one knows that poet better than you,” Ike said. “But each time you tell me about some of his work, it blows me away every time. Just how much he loved Ike, that is.”
“I’ve called some of his works the kind of love that exceeds understanding,” Soren said. Sometimes, he looked at Ike and wondered if it was true. If, one day, he could love in the way the poet loved. It was hard to imagine, scarred and cold as he was.
But wasn’t the poet the same? Hadn’t he, in helpless loneliness, found someone who looked at him with care in their heart and fallen deeper than he could ever get up?
“He had a lot of time to love in,” Ike said. “And a lot of space. He saw a lot of the world, didn’t he?”
Soren nodded; Ike knew that as well as he did, of course. Almost everyone working on the period had read about travel in Tellius’ New Era. “As much as anyone in that age could.”
Ike’s eyes lit up in the way they always did when something occurred to him. “There’s something in- oh, I think it’s a Hatari text? About laguz, gender, and horizons. I can’t remember the wording now, but maybe…”
And just like that, they were off again - Ike to his laptop to find what he was talking about, Soren to his notes to see what, exactly, their poet had to say about the Hatari and everything that lay beyond Tellius.
Still, his heart thudded in his chest. The way Ike looked when he spoke of love, the spark in his eyes and leap in his voice when he was drawn to something… Soren was learning it all, piece by piece. It was starting to feel more precious than anything else Ike had to teach.
And when my strength fails one final time, I would be set at the site of his eternal rest. Do not bury me with my work; just a simple traveller’s cloak. Do not erect me a monument, nor name me to posterity. I join him, not history, and though I would like nothing more than to be remembered at his side, I dare not hope for it.
-From the will of the lover of Tellius’ Vanguard, contained within the Goldoan papers. Estimated to have been written ~154 TNE
“I think you should pitch a book,” Ike said, and for a moment Soren thought he must have misheard him.
He looked up, and Ike was watching him, waiting for a reply. He looked more comfortable on Soren’s shitty little sofa than Soren had ever felt. “Pardon?”
“You should pitch a book,” Ike repeated, and there was no denying it now. “About the poet. I’m pretty sure you know more about him than anyone else alive.”
“Not necessarily,” Soren said. And a book was… well, he’d written a book before. It was about the emotional landscapes in the literature of the early New Era, and it was fine. It was the kind of thing that someone would use half a chapter of once every five years if they had a question they needed answering and nothing more.
“I think you do. And you were the one who got your foot in the door with him being a man! You’re the perfect person to get everything else down on the page.”
Soren pursed his lips, put his pen down, and twisted on his chair to look at Ike properly. “I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about it.”
Ike grinned, and Soren felt a little of his reserve crumble. Damn Ike for springing this on him without warning; he couldn’t even remember all his excuses yet. “You should do it! You’d do him justice.”
Soren shook his head. “I couldn’t.” Every time he read those poems, those journals, he learned something new about a man who continually refused simple interpretation. “I’d be writing it for years, probably.”
“Like everyone who writes a book,” Ike pointed out. He was right. “He deserves years. You’d be studying him anyway, why not write it all down?”
“Because everyone’s written about him a hundred times before.”
“Not like you would.” Ike beckoned him over, and Soren knew he wasn’t going to resist him. He shut his laptop and stood, moving to perch on the sofa’s arm. “And not with the discoveries you’ve made.”
“And that’s why I can’t do it.” Everyone who wrote about the Vanguard’s lover before wrote about someone else: a woman. A Branded woman, guessed as being from Gallia, because it made sense.
Now he had a shape, if not a name. He had a past, an identity. He had a body that left its mark on the historical record in a completely different way. If Soren was to do it justice, he’d have to address it all. He’d have to get it down on the page: the Vanguard’s lover, trans. A man who loved another man so much that the world still shed tears over the words of his grief.
“Soren.” Ike shifted on the sofa, leaving more space for Soren. When he sat down properly, the fabric was still very slightly warm. “I’m not going to tell you that you have some kind of duty in this, or that you’re the only person who can do it correctly.”
Soren nodded. He’d already heard that from plenty of people; some who said it was for the good of the world, others because they demanded he defend his ‘lies.’ Neither position made him want to write about it more. “Good, because you’d be wrong.”
“But you’re wrong that you don’t have the capacity to do him justice.” And then Ike reached across the gap, his open hand offered towards him.
Soren looked at him. His blue eyes stared back, just as understanding as they’d been when they first met. Now, they just held a hundred other things Soren was still hesitant to name.
He took Ike’s hand, and those eyes crinkled slightly as Ike smiled. His hand was warm.
“I’m not lying for a second when I tell you how talented you are,” Ike said. “You understand this man. And when I talk about what I think it meant to be trans back then, you understand that too. When you talk about those two things together, I can believe everything you say.”
Soren nodded. His mouth felt dry. Every very real reason he had to tell Ike he was talking nonsense had faded away.
“If you want to do it, you shouldn’t let this hold you back,” Ike said. “Because I won’t let it do that. I’ll help you carry it forward instead.”
“Why are you so kind?”
Ike blinked, and Soren tore his eyes away. This couldn’t be- there had to be something else. There was always something else. No one could be so effortlessly kind without a reason.
“Because you deserve it.” Ike’s thumb brushed over Soren’s knuckles. “Because I want to be kind.”
Soren didn’t think anyone had ever even been this close to him before. No one had seen him like this, or said words like these. Ike was- and he was-
Soren squeezed Ike’s hand, approximated a smile, and hoped it would be enough to tell him what he meant. At Ike’s returning smile, he thought that maybe it was.
And Ike, oh Ike, my Ike
I will say your name until I fade into the night, my love on my lips
Just as it always was when you lived, and I will know
You may not watch me. There may be no more between us
But there will always be me, whispering to you:
I miss you, Ike
I miss you, like the ocean misses the shore
(the land has receded)
I miss you as the trees miss the sun at night
(the dawn shall never come)
I miss hands slotted together in the darkest places
(your grip never faltered, not until the end)
You are the kindness this world never offered
The warmth when fire only burned
You are. You were
I am not used to a world without you, I will never be
I. You. In all our years, we have so rarely separated
Still I am unused to thinking beyond ‘we’
But now you rest in the silence of forever, and I
But now I wake in the silence of forever, and I
I miss you, Ike.
-Unpublished fragment from ‘Lament of the lover of Tellius’ Vanguard’ (contemporarily untitled), composed ~60 TNE
“They loved each other a lot, didn’t they?” Ike said. His voice was quiet. He’d finished reading the poem.
It was rough. It had never been published. It didn’t rhyme. There was no real rhythm. Its words were scrawled on a page that Soren knew must have been stained by tears, once. Those marks were no longer distinguishable from the other marks time left on the papers, but he knew.
“Some would argue that it was one-sided,” Soren said. Ike frowned, his fingers tracing the paper.
“I never got that impression, reading the ones he published. I don’t remember seeing anyone argue that before, either.”
Soren didn’t laugh, but it was a close thing. “That was before they were forced to accept that he was a man,” he said. “Now, they’re grasping at straws to argue that it’s all pining, that there’s no evidence that the feelings were held by the Vanguard.”
“I guess he wasn’t writing the poems,” Ike said.
“And the poems were almost all written after he died.” Yet they were full of the kind of love Soren was sure could only come from someone who was loved in return. And what was love, if not a lifetime spent together? Those historians hadn’t needed proof of a marriage bed before the truth came out.
“I still think he loved the poet,” Ike said. “Some of the things he writes…”
“‘I still remember the way we touched, when no one dared to watch, each moment a shared breath, each heartbeat shouting love.’ That’s a favourite of mine.”
“Yeah, that isn’t the writing of someone whose affections were never returned.” Ike’s eyes were still fixed on the unpublished poem. “Did he write a lot of these?”
“Countless numbers,” Soren answered. He’d read them all, but hadn’t transcribed each one yet. There was so much in them, and sometimes…
A lot of the unpublished works were unpublished for a reason. Lengthy musings on gravestones and celebrations of life and condolences in death. Hopelessness emanated through every line, sometimes.
“Would you show me some others?”
Soren nodded. “You don’t have to ask me for permission.” For some reason, he appreciated it anyway. Ike knew how much this meant to him, in a way he couldn’t quite explain.
The Vanguard’s lover was a nameless, anonymous poet. Once, someone must have known what he was called, but it was lost to time; he was the shadow at the Vanguard’s side, and his name had faded out of the legends before they were ever written down as such. He had no connection to Soren, and by all rights Soren should have no real image of him.
But when he read those words, he felt that pain, that love, that joy. He’d never been loved, but through the Vanguard’s lover he could imagine it clearer than day.
“I want to see him how you see him,” Ike said. “He feels closer that way; it wouldn’t be the same on my own.”
Soren looked up, and Ike wasn’t looking at the poem he’d picked out anymore. He was looking directly at him, and Soren had to revise just one thing: he’d never been loved until he met Ike.