Feeling a bit as though she was getting seasick from floating on an ocean of new information, Elaine - Joy - wasn’t sure how long she simply sat in numb silence, turning the new ring - appropriately heavy - around and around her finger.

It was long enough that Gouvernail had walked away from her, apparently in a tactful effort to give her space. He had gone out to the end of a long crumbled spit of stone that had perhaps once been the foundation of a curtain wall, turned himself towards the silver plain of the river below, and stood with his arms folded behind his back in a posture of patient watchfulness. But there was nothing to watch for here: not even a few white-backed birds wheeling over the water; not even gnats gathering in the slanting rays of the sun when they broke through the clouds. Gouvernail in his eerie silence and nearly-motionless patience was like the rest of this place: dead. It made Joy uncomfortably aware of the way her heartbeat could be felt in her throat, racing along in terror.

However long she waited, she still felt numb when she finally rose from where she sat in the crumbling frame of what had once been an arched window, and she felt her way half-blindly along the wall to follow him at last. When she joined him in looking out over the lifeless water he did not look at her. He had a habitual movement that she had already come to recognize: a motion of his hand as if to rest it on a sword that was not there.

“What if I don’t want it?” she said at last.

He gave a little shrug of resignation. She found she could not look at him to see the expression of contempt that she knew was on his face. “The Code cares nothing for your wishes,” he said.

“And what if I care nothing for the Code?” she demanded, and in the moment she said it felt a sick sort of disgust with herself that she couldn’t place. He still did not look at her, but she saw the sudden tension in his jaw as he stilled himself to a reasonable reply.

“I cannot force you to care for your duty or honor,” he said at last, with the unruffled calmness that can only come of someone forcing themselves to adhere to it. “But you will care at last, or you would not have been able to make your oath and come here.”

The thought of him - recruited young, welcomed into the arms of the Academy, brought up for years of service - the thought of all that privilege having the arrogance to be impatient with her reluctance when she had simply woken up to a new life on a Destiny City sidewalk shook her with a surge of resentment. “Maybe I won’t. Maybe it ******** up.”

“Perhaps it did,” he said at last, wheeling on her with a look of disgust. Generally a man’s expression of disgust was only the source of a sort of gleeful defiance, but she felt herself quailing before this one, her face cold as the blood ran from it. She had been aware of a simmering contempt in him nearly since she arrived - a haughty, aloof revulsion for her obvious cowardice and her undignified struggle against her fate. “Perhaps it made a mistake, in choosing as it did. Where is your courage?” he demanded. “You will run? You will–”

“From what you’ve told me your courage didn’t do you a damn bit of good. You lost, didn’t you? And I guess you, of all people,” she said, growing heated, “might know as a knight - I mean, as a soldier - a real soldier, a human soldier - that almost every war is just empty violence. It’s been a thousand years,” she added, as Gouvernail, taken aback by her sudden passion, looked away, once again mastering himself with effort. “And it’s been - what? Twenty, if I had to guess? That everyone’s been tearing things apart again, and from everything you’ve said it’s been a stalemate all these centuries except when your honor and your courage weren’t enough to let you win? Just one big noisy game of violence with conscripted soldiers–”

“This is not the war of men,” he cut her off, sharp and angry. “This is the war of God–”

“Is that what you call it, to make yourself feel better for the fact that you got drafted into a war that no one’s ever going to win? Because I’ve got thoughts about God’s wars, too–”

“Spare me from them, if they will be as empty and ignorant as–”

“Are they?” she demanded, and she had meant for it to be furious, but it burst out of her as a sort of desperate, wounded cry that sought for mercy. “Or are you actually the kind of idiot that stories are written about, who looks over a field full of dead men and dead horses and thinks that he’s done something worth doing? Because I don’t see how it’s any different to–” she stopped. Gouvernail had lifted the back of his hand to his mouth, turning in quiet dignity back toward the river.

For a moment they waited in a tense silence. It was Joy that broke it, with a gentleness she did not intend and immediately resented.

“I don’t know what you did or saw,” she said at last. “I didn’t mean to - to use it as a weapon. You know? But I think–”

“I know,” he said, his voice very quiet. Unexpectedly, the mercy came. “And if I speak truth to you - and I will always speak truth to you, who share my name - then I will tell you that I do not know that you are wrong. I have known many moments that ought to have been glory, and none of them have felt like glory to me.” He paused, eyes wandering sightlessly over the horizon. “But I cannot help that God put a weapon into my hands, that I could not put down even if I wished to - and I did, at one time, wish to. I can do nothing but wield it in a way that I think is right. And I do think that it is right,” he added, with gentle exhaustion. “For whatever else it may be.”

They stood in silence for a time, watching the wind ruffle the surface of the lifeless water.

“Perhaps even right things are cruel,” he said at last, and he did not sigh, but he sounded as though he would have. “I do not pretend that I did not often rail against the cruelty of it. As a man and a knight - a Knight - I railed against it. But,” he added, with a helpless little gesture of his hands, “very few of us are marked out for a lot that is not cruel, whether we are man or Knight or anything else. We may as well find the path in it that makes us hate ourselves the least.”

She swallowed, disgusted to be ashamed, ashamed to be disgusted. “I can never hate myself,” she said.

“So you believe, in a life that has been easy for you,” he said. “But every love is easy until it is tested.”

“You will not,” she said, with grim emphasis, “talk me out of loving myself by pretending like it’s wrong for me to hate this.”

“I do not say that it is wrong to hate it. I say that it is wrong to run from it.”

“You will also not convince me that the way to love yourself is to do something you hate,” she said, but she realized, before the words had even fully left her mouth, that she’d been cornered.

“And have you never,” he asked, turning back to her at last, words laid out slowly as if he had to haul them from some depth with great effort, “found you were a better person for having to do something that you did not want to do?”

“Not something I despised like this.” The reply was weak and she knew it, and she bit it back and bit back the petulant tone she could feel rising to her voice. He didn’t answer, and she felt a bit checkmated, for the time being.

“You know,” she said at last, in a listless voice simply for lack of anywhere else to put her thoughts but into the silent air where birds should have been, “I don’t know - how it all works, exactly. But it wasn’t the Joyeuse Garde, originally. That should have been after your time. I don’t understand,” she repeated, with a shadow of frustration. “But I know–”

“It was the Dolorous Guard,” he supplied quietly. “Yes.”

“Feels real ********’ apt.”

“At times, yes, it did.”

“You talked like you chose it.”

“It was offered to me, and I did not see a way to put it down without despising myself for the cowardice. Is that a choice?”

“You gotta give me anything to work with here,” she said, desperate, hating herself for that tearfully pleading edge in her voice that she had not allowed to exist in the presence of a man in years. “A pep talk. Some hope. Something. You’re that bit of the hero’s journey where that’s supposed to happen. Do your - your narrative function, or whatever. The word ‘Joyous' is literally in the name. Give me something to be ********’ joyful about.”

“I will not give you what you will refuse to use,” he said flatly. “I do not have so many good things for myself that I can hand them away to you whenever you wish for them.”

“You’re supposed to be - selfless, and self-denying, and all that.”

“You ask me for something past the point of charity. I cannot,” he repeated, “give you what you will not accept. As well give a sword to a monk as give you hope and fire, for all the good you will do with it as you think now.”

“Or you haven’t got any to give,” she retorted, with sudden bitterness. He said nothing for a long moment.

“I have said that I will always speak truth to you,” he said, listlessly reluctant. “And I cannot entirely deny it. But I could tell you anything you might hear - and perhaps in it somewhere is a grain of something good. Certainly I could tell you things that I wish had been told to me. But until you come to me clear-headed and prepared to give yourself courage and the world honor, I will not waste words telling you what you will not believe.”

She did not bother to again assert that she would simply leave and not return. She already knew that it wouldn’t be true, and she had apparently shared with him a hatred of lying, at least. He once again moved his hand to rest on a sword that was not there, a habitual gesture of life that had crept right through to the afterlife, inexorable as an echo. She watched it, with a strange pang of resented sympathy for a man who had been trapped for all these endless ages in a name that perhaps in some ways he no more wanted than she did, and whose empty hands sought out an earthly relief that had been denied to him even before death: a knight without a sword, who probably felt bereft without it. Taken out of one sort of battlefield and put into another.

“Just give me time to think,” she said at last, keeping the sulk out of her voice with a supreme effort of will, but not quite the pleading. “I’m not making any promises,” she added, with an aggressive little spark of defiance.

“Do not make promises you cannot keep.” He paused, and his voice grew flat and grim. “I would not say it sooner, for fear of extorting from you exactly such a promise. But you will be forced to fight, whatever your reluctance. They can scent you like hounds and your refusal to arm yourself will not make them treat you with mercy. It will only make you easier prey. Do not think that you can exempt yourself. They will drag you in by their very teeth.”

She felt, again, the cold touch of the air on her face as the blood left it, and she nervously twisted the new ring around her finger.

“I don’t like to ask and beg,” she said at last, mustering an effort at chilly pride. “Especially not to men. But I am begging you to - to try and remember what it was like for you, and remember that you had a whole - ******** system to receive you, and you picked it. You had a school, for God’s sake. You didn’t do this to me. I’ll try to remember that, if you’ll remember - if you’ll be as patient with me as it’s possible to be. I’m scared,” she said at last, with characteristic honesty, and the tremble crept around the edges of the word against her will.

He was silent for a long time, his expression withdrawn and unreadable. “It is not in me to refuse the request of a woman any more than it is in me to mistreat a Knight who shares my name,” he said at last. “I, also, will not make promises that I cannot keep. But I tell you that I will remember, if I can. An idiot would be unafraid,” he said. “Only do not be a coward.”

She turned to him, and with a stupid instinct forgot that even now she could see the shape of the sky past him. She put out her hand in some token of goodwill to shake his, and he with the same thoughtless instinct reached to take it, his fingers passing through hers as he moved, not to shake her hand, but to lift it to his lips. She saw in his stern features the momentary pang of what must have been frustrating futility - the same as reaching for a sword that was not there - and felt herself moved by an urge of grateful pity. She had not asked for this, but he had not asked for her, either. She followed the interrupted trajectory of his touchless hand and he, understanding immediately, allowed her to cover their mutual confusion. With this pantomime of courtesy he put his lips to the signet ring on her finger, unfelt and unfeeling.

Joy - Elaine - left him where he stood, his back to the ruins of the Joyous Guard, watchful over an empty river that required no watching, looking out towards an ocean where no ships would ever sail.

word count: 2400 (?!)