Our Brief Wage
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| Fanfiction | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Our Brief Wage |
| Author(s): | toujours_nigel |
| Date(s): | 25 September 2011 |
| Length: | 1000 words |
| Genre: | AU, prequel |
| Fandom: | Mary Renault |
| External Links: | (members-locked) |
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"Our Brief Wage" by toujours_nigel is a short story based on Mary Renault's 1953 novel The Charioteer. It is a prequel to her story, "Play the Roman Fool", and is set in the same AU, some time after the Nazis won World War II and occupied Britain. The story fills in the details of events described more briefly in "Play the Roman Fool".
Synopsis
At the side of a road where there are already too many other shallow graves, Ralph buries Alec's body.
Background
The title of the story, "Our Brief Wage", comes from the third stanza of the dedicatory poem at the beginning of T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom:
- Love, the way-weary, groped to your body,
Our brief wage
Ours for the moment
Before Earth's soft hand explored your shape
And the blind
Worms grew fat upon
Your substance
- Love, the way-weary, groped to your body,
Comments
The story was received such comments as the following:
- "Oh, dear. You really are a damnably good writer, you know."—comment by greerwatson
- "The deliberate nature of the events, the logic behind it all, the sense that this is merely something that needs to be done, and so he does it, without question, without worrying about it. It's what happens just after this, when he returns home, that it will come out."—comment by whitmans_kiss
- "This universe is haunting and horrible and totally believeable. You have written something very powerful. (More please)"—comment by fawatson