It doesn’t matter what she settled on. Let the imagination wander on the topic, because it all disintegrated, along with most of her agitation, when she arrived amidst a drizzling rain and found that Gouvernail - almost immediately, without a word - extended his ghostly hand to hers. It took her an instant to recover the memory of letting him pantomime the act of kissing her fingers. She resented the immediate sting of pity that had her lifting her own hand once again, letting him have the dignity of that feigned gesture, knowing even as she did it that it was only some maneuver to try and erase some of his lingering embarrassment from the last time he’d forgotten what he was now. She resented it, but she allowed it: he had told her that he did not have so many good things that he could hand them out thoughtlessly, and she felt that perhaps he had enough troubles that it would have been cruel for her to contribute this small one.
“I came back,” she said, with a touch of sullenness, moving briskly to duck under what remained of a ceiling, crossing vaguely towards the unglazed window to watch the rain fall on the lifeless river below.
“As we both knew you would,” he said, turning to face the empty door and folding his arms behind himself in the same posture of watchfulness as last time, which he had no need to assume. It did, at least, keep him from looking at her.
“I found a cat - a Mauvian,” she corrected herself. “Kind of by accident, if I’m being honest. But she did her thing - whatever it is that they do - and I guess I can - can network, or whatever.” She paused. “I also got into a fight,” she added, subdued.
He glanced over his shoulder at her at this, but returned his eyes to the doorway that no one was going to walk through.
“Gosh, I sure hope you’re OK, Elaine!” she spat mockingly. “Sure glad to hear you got out in one piece! Would certainly be a–”
“I can see you,” he said flatly. “And thus I can see that you are in one piece, Joy.” He laid the barest emphasis on the name.
She knew with a sudden feeling of defeat that she would submit to this - that in some way she had to. But she bridled against this pointed rejection of herself and at his once again reducing her to a role that she had not asked for, and she looked out over the rain with a dreary feeling that the day would be very long.
-*-
She had had some vague idea that he was going to Mr. Miyagi her - make her run laps, or something. But her relief in his only wanting to talk - in her being able to sit down on the broad sill of the window at her leisure, after being followed around in her desultory efforts at clearing stairwells - had quickly dissipated into an annoying sense that she’d rather be doing push-ups. He alternated relentless grilling and giving her more information than she could comfortably hold at once, interspersing all of it through a tone of constant lecture that he delivered like he might at any moment be snatched away from her, and therefore had to relieve himself of as much so-called wisdom as he could. He paced back and forth during it, with some sort of restless energy that had chased him to the afterlife like all his thoughtless gestures, in keeping with the way that he kept reaching to rest his hand on a sword that hadn’t been there for a long time even in life. He did, at least, appear to remember that he had promised to try and remember the difference in their situations - he no longer heaped scorn on her for what he termed her cowardice, and when she balked, he attempted to master his impatience - to a point.
There had initially been some pleasure in vividly describing to him the details of her profession and watching his expression grow increasingly grim. But that had lost its savor when she realized that he had asked about her work only to determine how she might manage to spend more time away from it - and from her own life - and more time dedicated to the cause. She had protested this vociferously.
“This is what you would rather do with your time?” he asked, contempt thick in his voice.
She stared at him, waiting for him to reveal that it was a trick question. “Yes?” she hazarded at last.
“You would rather cater to degeneracy than find time to pursue the destiny that God gave to you?” She had already determined that God was to Gouvernail a sort of cosmic figure of speech - less a paternal omnipotence than the shapeless hand of Fate itself. It was hard to argue with the terminology in a pre-Reformation Catholic, she reasoned, but she was finding it irritating in the way it contributed to the grandiosity of his lectures.
“Yes,” she said immediately. “The degeneracy-catering is fun and lucrative. God’s not paying me s**t and He sure as hell isn’t giving me foot rubs and telling me how beautiful I am.”
He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, and she felt a sick sort of pleasure in having driven him to another outward display of irritation despite his barely-kept promises. “This is madness.”
“Common ground at last!” she cried sarcastically. “I couldn’t agree more.”
“They come for you already. Already you find yourself stalked by monsters and your flippant–”
A thought had occurred to her some minutes ago. She put it into practice, reaching by instinct towards the part of herself that was Elaine and pulling it to the front. This always seemed to necessitate closing her eyes.
She was inordinately disappointed, when she opened them, to find that Gouvernail was still standing there, giving her a look of incredible flatness. He lifted his hands in a wordless motion as if to say: “Are you proud of yourself?”
“I thought that would work,” she said, mustering all her dignity, which wasn’t much at the moment, and somehow felt like even less now that she was in sweatpants.
“You are a child, putting her fingers in her ears.”
“I’d do that too if I thought it would ******** work.”
“If you truly wished, you could leave. You waste your own time by play-acting in this way.”
She pretended that he did not have an undeniable point. “I was trying to waste yours.”
“What have I in the world, if not time?” he said, with a withering touch of exhaustion.
“I don’t know!” she snapped. “You act like you’re running out of that too, the way you keep piling s**t on me. My head is swimming.”
“Doubtless it is unaccustomed to having thoughts in it,” he said, and Elaine shot to her feet. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t actually stick a finger in his chest. She tried it anyway.
“I’m going to put up with a lot of bullshit,” she hissed. “Or I wouldn’t have come back. And you can think of me as a coward, even if you’re wrong, because to be honest I’m not giving you much reason to think otherwise. But I will not put up with you insulting my intelligence.”
He looked down at her, startled, and said nothing.
“Apologize,” she demanded, feeling that her face was red even as she said it. His unreadable expression returned as he continued looking at her, until she felt her own anger cooling to embarrassment. But still she held her ground, waiting, and resisted the urge to look away from him.
“Forgive me,” he said at last, simply. And then, with a strange quiet: “I spoke in anger what I do not believe.”
She paused. It felt ungracious to say nothing, and yet she had not actually expected an apology, let alone one offered as bluntly as this. She had imagined some sort of explosive argument, instead, which might give her the satisfaction of sulking. She wondered fleetingly whether this was some sort of knightly courtesy - of the normal human variety - or if this was an apology that was uniquely Gouvernail’s.
“Thank you,” she said finally. And then: “I’m not stupid. But you’re asking too much again. I came back,” she repeated. “I’m going to keep coming back.”
“I do not think that you will shirk returning,” he said quietly. “I fear what will become of you before you do.”
She was, again, forced to pause, having not considered this as a motive for his impatience and feeling wretched for it. “Well,” she said. “Don’t. It’s not like it was when - like it was at the end for you. And I’ve already found allies. I’m not alone out there,” she reiterated. “And it’s not going to - to collapse tomorrow all of a sudden - and if it does then you talking my ear off isn’t going to change anything. You made a promise to try and put yourself in my shoes and you might think you’re keeping it, but you aren’t. Maybe I need to give you more information for you to do that, I don’t know. You could ask, instead of assuming.”
He did not answer her immediately, instead turning to walk towards the window, putting some space between them even though he couldn’t, really, occupy any space at all, hand reaching futilely towards his unarmed hip. “You are right,” he said at last. Another time, Elaine might have snorted at a man needing to turn his back on her to admit that she was right. But she knew, somehow, that the action was not motivated by shame or even anger. And then, again: “Forgive me. I do not know what your life is.”
“I already have,” she said, trying not to sound sullen and failing catastrophically. She looked at the shape of the dripping trees through the shape of his back. “I’m not going to stop being Elaine,” she said stubbornly. “Even if you think I ought to.”
“I can see this.”
“Weren’t you ever just - just Gouvernail? Not the Joyous Guard, just…” she trailed off.
There was a long silence. “No,” he said at last.
She hated him, for a moment, for this constant pity that she could not stop, and wished she was as heartless as she pretended to be for exorbitant rates on weekends. “Well, the title isn’t yours anymore. You’re Gouvernail now,” she said. “So you’ll have to deal with Elaine if I decide you do.”
She felt a pang of regret as she said it - for reminding him, as he undoubtedly did not need reminding, that even if he had neglected to live while he was alive, he certainly had no option to start living now - a pang even for the necessary reminder that she herself did not neglect to live. It felt a little like pulling up her sleeve to show a starving man a Rolex.
Then again, he needed to know the time. And how else was she supposed to give it? Especially to a man who might be starving only from his own willful asceticism.
“If you would end this conversation,” he said after another long pause, “I would consider it a kindness, as you are weary of it. I will remember what you have said, as I trust you will remember what I have told you.”
“Yeah,” she said, deflating. “I will. I’ll come back,” she said, hating that the words sounded like the childish propitiation that they were.
“I know,” he said. “And I trust that you will return with new things to tell me. I will listen, and thank you for your forgiveness that I did not listen sooner.” Before she could reply he turned to her, extending his hand towards her once again. And what was there to do, but to cross the space between them and pretend to give him hers, and let him lift it?
“I want you to tell me about who you were, too,” she said, with an impulsive need for understanding. “When I come back.”
“There is little to say,” he said, releasing his imaginary hold on her hand.
“I’m going to ask anyway,” she said. “If I keep thinking of you as a lecture on two legs I’m going to hate you. I’m already starting to hate you. Seems like it’s not very productive for us to hate each other based on a bunch of assumptions. We could be hating each other for good, solid reasons, you know?”
He searched her face for a moment, and then made a little bow of his head that seemed at once to dismiss her and to express some ineffable deference to her. “As you wish,” he said, and she saw him bite back some other word: perhaps the desire to, once again, call her by the name she was still struggling to accept as her own. She left before he could say it anyway.
word count: 2200 (christ)
