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The Best thing (Temperance thought the capital letter should be utterly emphasized) about being a student at Rider Waite was office hours. More specifically, office hours she could take advantage of. While she didn't have a class with him, or even in his department, most professors had a sort of open door policy. She'd chatted with a linguistics teacher in her first year quite a bit after wandering haphazardly into his office. Though now, she had a purpose.

But she couldn't just charge in questions blazing (he could probably zap her to outer space if he wanted), so Temperance settled on a short polite knock. And then a "Professor Noor - are you available?"

She entered in, somehow expecting to see the same mask, the same scarf. But he was normal, but his voice was the same, that stringed harmony. Temperance shivered and looked around, her eyes caught by they pictures. Hah, Steve Jobs, really? And a familiar figure, maybe, though she'd last seen her in lavender and decidedly more transparent.

Uninvited to sit, she still took a seat in front of his desk. "Looking for another type of information, maybe. If you'd be willing to put up with the, um, unskilled questions of a college student." And if he said he wasn't willing? Temperance would try anyway, probably.

His stare made her uncomfortable, but she looked back, trying to appear unfazed. Temperance nodded as he spoke, a thousand questions running through her mind. In retrospect, she should have structured out a flow chart, something to run in the thoughts that tripped over themselves and tangled in each other. She opened her mouth.

"Could you have saved her?"

Temperance sighed. "I guess there's a couple it could be, huh." She wondered which names had run through his head at the question, if any.

"Your old fiancee."

"She said you didn't do everything you could have for her." Temperance's eyes fell to her hands that lay still in her lap. The other things she'd said, too -'They won't choose you to help choose, but you're going to help the one who is chosen.' What a load of s**t; she hadn't helped anyone.

She looked back up. "She wants to know why." She sighed. "Is it cyclical, then? Again, and again, everyone dies and stands back up again and dies."

"I'm not here to comfort a murderer." She said it without much inflection, like commenting on the weather or how the Merriweathers might decorate their house for Christmas. She remembered the quick slice of knife against flesh, the blood that rolled forth red. Adoelle had asked, but he did not have to comply. The nobles were all murderers, in their own ways (likely literal, though she had no proof), and Liam was no exception.

Cycles - forward and back. She wondered how many times she might have sat in this same chair, asked a different question, got a better answer. From an alternate universe standpoint, there was one, there would always be least one spot where Vivien still lived.

She shifted on the seat and ignored the way his voice shook. "You left her. She wanted you to stay, wanted to ask why you did leave: an explanation. I don't know if the self that she is now was in that garden for some other purpose that night. She told me I was there to help the chosen." And that had gone well. "Was the tithe everything you'd hoped for?"

"Algernon was not my choice." Jack had been. There was no way to know what he could have chosen to do, if it would have been better. She looked down at her hands and they were white, shirt nails ragged but unstained. "Algernon was not my choice and neither was Adoelle. I regret... I regret not being faster."

Temperance looked up, her mouth set in a line that did not tremble only through sheer force of will. "There is always-" A breath. "-blood on my hands. There will always be blood on my hands. D-did you think I didn't know that?" Cut throat, savaged throat, arterial blood stiffening her clothes. Maybe it was her theme, she thought a little fatalistically.

"I claim the absolution of ignorance in Adoelle's selection. But I will always hold guilt closer than you think." She narrowed her eyes. "I do not want anyone to die." Temperance would have to note twenty-two years from now in her calendar. She'd be 43, still around, and maybe this time, she'd be quick enough, skilled enough. And, even if Liam could not harm Melany now, she certainly wasn't going to volunteer information about where she was.

"I am not a murderer. I am a nurse, no more." A nurse-in-training, but close enough. "How did you even become a part of that court?"

"No love, but no active ill-will." She wasn't out for his blood or anyone's. Temperance breathed deeply: in through her nose, out through her mouth. Then she smiled wanly at him. "You could answer because then I'll stop bothering you. Or you could answer to appease a student's curiosity. Or you could answer in the hopes that I'll find some kernel of knowledge somewhere to try and help Vivien. This list can continue." Her voice wavered a bit. She shouldn't have spoken before of blood and murder. Stop thinking about it.

"I do worry about her, you know," she said honestly. The unspoken thought being that she didn't really care about him.