It was not without a certain impatient restlessness that Elaine found herself returning to her wonder. It was an unhappy thought - that there was a feeling almost like a homesickness in being away from a place that was a corpse of some once-living world long since dead.
There was even a certain pleasure in meeting Gouvernail, with his gesture that was already habitual, allowing him to pretend to raise her hand to his lips. Three weeks had shaped her significantly - she had had her skirmishes, met her allies, and learned things. She could bring him information that was both useful and flattering to herself.
But all that was for later. He had promised her a conversation about anything but duty, and so she could not help but smile at him, at his unfelt kiss of her hand, suffused with the pleasure she always felt at the prospect of meeting someone new and potentially interesting.
And there was besides, she realized, as she walked beside his spectral figure along the remnants of the curtain wall to look out towards the water, a new pleasure: a young but definite verdure, as if the rain of the previous visit had made way for moss and tender leaves. Beneath a sky streaked with grey clouds she looked out towards the river, and if she did not imagine things, felt that the trees looked somehow less sickly under this clearer weather.
“You promised we could talk,” she reminded him, and he bowed his head in a deferential gesture that was always going to be a quick route to her benevolence.
“I remember. I am prepared to do as you wish,” he said.
Things were looking up already.
—
The comparison of their childhoods was humbling. She should be grateful, she supposed, for the softness of her life, but her simple sketch of rural Kentucky, her struggling mother and her escape to the city, felt toothless and cowardly when he outlined his own youth: a blunt, unsentimental account of violence and warfare, first for men like himself (although still a boy), and then for the cosmic forces he still referred to as God.
She tried to find some wedge of joy in it. His matter-of-fact and unregretful narrative was somehow more upsetting than the most angry resentment could have been - as if he had no right to expect anything better, and never tried to - and she tried to wheedle some whimsy out of him by telling him of sliding down muddy hills on sheets of plywood, or smoking weed with high school friends in the wrecks of old cars discarded by the creek.
“Well?” she asked at last, prompting him impatiently.
“Tell me what you wish me to say, and I will,” he said, apparently uncomfortable at this open-endedness.
“What did you do when you weren’t working? Haven’t you ever - I don’t know - haven’t you ever sought out a good feeling that wasn’t in some way related to obligation or honor or whatever?”
“I believe everyone has,” he said at last, but with an air of mystification, as if, despite this, he could not recall an instance of it.
“Didn’t you - I don’t know -” she repeated the words, feeling stupid, “- go drinking with your friends, or anything?” She paused, searching his face with its furrowed brow. “Your colleagues,” she amended desperately.
“Yes,” he said at last.
“Tell me about that. Tell me anything.” And then, with a cheerful recollection: “Let me jog your memory.”
—
She finished the song with gusto. Tuneless gusto, to be sure, but that had never stopped her at any karaoke bar and certainly didn’t stop her now.
“Something like that, anyway,” she finished, beaming.
He was silent for a moment, his expression unchanged and unreadable. She was standing with her hands behind her back as if she were a reciting schoolgirl, framed by the arch of an old window that perhaps had never had glass, and certainly did not now. The dusty remnants of tapestries snapped in the light breeze, which brought with it the smell of the ground soaking up the recent rain, and he stood among them and listened to her, with his hand pressed to his side in his habitual attitude of watchfulness.
“I believe,” he said at last, voice mild and sober, “that it is over worlds and under stars.”
Astonished, she could do nothing but laugh. “I’ll tell Grieve you remember it,” she said. “Is it true?”
“I do not understand your meaning.”
“The song. Is it true?”
He paused. “For myself? No,” he said.
—
The chapel was half-buried, and dark as a crypt. Only what greyish sunshine streamed in through the narrow window by the ceiling brought any light, every other opening for illumination clogged by debris and dead ivy. She ran her fingers over the dusty surface of an altar as she spoke.
“Did you pray here?” she asked, for the first time nearly shying away from a question that felt too personal, too intrusive.
“At times,” he said.
She hesitated for a long moment, smoothing grime away from the engraved head of a pelican tearing at its own breast. “To what?”
His own pause was at least equally long. “I was never entirely certain,” he said at last. She coughed at a swirl of dust. “There are no Gods here any longer. You should seek the clean air, Lady.”
She choked. There were certain mannerisms that Elaine had a strong disdain for, and she had made it the work of her life to eradicate most of the worst from herself. But one of them bubbled up now, irrepressible and awful. To her horror and mortification, she giggled. “Did you call me Lady just now?”
He wrinkled his forehead, assuming the wounded dignity of a man knowing that he is being made fun of. “I see that in my thoughtlessness I have done something foolish,” he said stiffly.
“No. No, no. I’m not making fun of you,” she promised, taking his advice and climbing the steps back towards the ruined courtyard, feeling the sudden need for fresher air. “I swear. I just - oh, God. It would take way too long to explain.” She coughed again as she emerged into the cloudy sunlight. “It’s just - it’s funny, but you’re not funny.”
“I will not say it again,” he said, cold and haughty, “if you find it unpleasant. It was merely habit.”
“No,” she repeated, repenting and regretting her lack of self-possession. “Don’t. It was nice,” she added, although she wasn’t entirely sure if this was true. “I just didn’t expect it. I’ll explain one day,” she finished, hoping that the date of that explanation was very far away. “Say whatever you want, as long as it’s not an insult.”
He was silent for a long, aloof moment, pointedly turning his eyes towards the clouds moving across the sky. When he spoke again it was with a sort of defiance that she recognized intimately as an attempt to disarm mockery by embracing what was used against him - a tactic she herself had often adopted. “Very well, Lady.”
She paused and almost recanted to beg him to stop saying it, feeling the hysterical laugh rising again. But she managed to muster her own show of dignity. “I will not be calling you sir,” she said.
—
She sat on the edge of the curtain wall, her feet dangling, and looked out over the water. It wanted seagulls, she thought absently, more than anything else in the world.
“Anyway,” she said with a sigh, wrapping up her narration of the Order meeting. “I’m starting to think that - that there isn’t any point to fighting.”
Before she could continue, he made a convulsive movement where he stood next to her, one that she immediately recognized as one of quickly-suppressed anger. “You are quick to see defeat-”
“No, no. Not because I think we’ll lose,” she cut in impatiently. “Because I don’t think anyone can win. I think it’s like - like some game - and they played too big last time and someone flipped over the chess board in a huff and stormed off. And now they’re trying to rematch but they’re being all timid and they’re picking game pieces out of all the other boxes and putting them on the board and just - playing, and making it up as they go. Just this constant stalemate playing. So that no one flips the table this time.” She added with quick defensiveness: “And that’s what I mean. Not that I won’t - use whatever power I’ve been given to try and counter some of the s**t things the other side is doing. Just that I don’t - why strive towards a resolution that I don’t think exists? I just have to sit here and hope no one flips the ******** board again.”
He was silent for so long that she had to steal a glance up towards him, and was vaguely startled to find that he was not scowling or mastering his anger. He looked, instead, tired - exhausted, even. He closed his eyes.
“I have told you that I will not lie to you,” he said at last. “I think that everything you have just said is the basest, most despicable sin of thought. But I confess that I turn to it, and would have thought the same, if I had ever allowed myself the freedom to do so. But I closed my eyes to it.”
“I’ve eaten the ********’ apple and now I’m offering you a bite. We’ve got a good little Garden of Eden scenario here,” she said. And then, for the first time, he smiled - still weary, but without bitterness, turning his eyes towards the water as he did so.
“He smiles! A miracle!” she cried. “I didn’t think you were capable of it.”
“You are not the first to say as much,” he said.
“And we were all as wrong as Grieve’s drinking song,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “But parts of that are right, yeah? The whole chasing tragedies thing.” She paused, stealing another glance at his face, the smile already faded. “None of the rest of it’s true?” she asked, emboldened by this sudden crack in his armor.
“No.”
She hesitated. “Not - not like, never?”
It was his turn to hesitate. “It was not a habit,” he said at last.
She smiled, unable to suppress a surge of satisfaction at this confession of some humanity, but she found herself suddenly shy, feeling intrusive in her curiosity again. “Wasn’t there - anyone that you kept a space for?” she asked tentatively.
He had told her that he wouldn’t lie to her, and she had no choice but to believe him. But he was silent for a long, long time before he answered.
“No,” he said.
She almost apologized, but the subject suddenly felt too sharp to touch safely, and she dropped it, turning back to the safety of the meeting.
—
They stood beneath the dimming sky, both of them turned towards the shaggy remnants of the keep. She had not said that she was preparing to leave, but both of them seemed to know it anyway.
“I wish I could come more often,” she said, finally approaching a topic she had been too afraid to.
“It is not as you imagine, Lady,” he said quietly. “I do not sit and wait, and drive myself to madness. Do not imagine me made to while away the time. It passes. I cannot explain it,” he finished.
She felt a wretched sort of relief, and did not ask him to. It was enough to know that he was not merely trapped in endless motionless waiting for weeks at a time, or that if he was, it was somehow different for him than it would have been for a living thing. She selfishly did not want to know more.
“I wish I could anyway,” she said finally. “It’s weird - I feel like if I look at it long enough it’ll look like it did when you lived here - the way you described it.”
“I feel the same. It is a silence that wishes to be broken. I feel somehow that the gulls would return,” he said. And then: “Be safe, Lady. Do not fall into recklessness.”
“Last time you nagged me for not doing enough,” she reminded him, unable to avoid a little gloating, bad sport that she sometimes was.
“I did. But I will not have you dying to recklessness before you have even -” He stopped abruptly.
“Even what?”
“Felt what it is to wield the power of this place. It is small at first. But I would have you know it, if you would.”
“To make me a better soldier?” she asked drily.
“Yes. But also because you asked me once what the joy of the Joyeuse Garde was. Stay safe, Lady,” he repeated, turning to her to once again pantomime taking her hand. “At least long enough to know it.”
She was taken aback, and had no reply. Instead she did the only thing she could: mutely lifted her hand for him, so that he could pretend to press his lips to the ring on her finger that had once been on his.
word count: 2200 (christ)
