Stupid, stupid, stupid. It all felt stupid.

She had just gone through something world-altering, in the sense that it had altered her particular world, even if the larger one kept spinning uninterrupted. She had witnessed something like a murder, and somehow with her own hand averted it. She had awakened to some new understanding of herself and the idea of life in general. She had felt what it was to have real and genuine power, and all the awful obligation that came with it.

And now she was Elaine again, in her faded cut-off hoodie and shorts, watching her shaky little rat dog trying to find the right spot to pee next to the sidewalk, one hand occupied with the leash and the other checking her schedule of appointments for the ensuing week.

Her own world, too, kept on spinning.

Her hands were still intermittently trembling in the wake of little shocks of adrenaline, but Petitcru seemed oblivious to it in a way that was ridiculous and bizarrely soothing. She flipped through the booking messages on her phone and could smell the desperation and money through the screen, as she always could, and the little play-pretend of power was somehow more ludicrous even than it normally was. With her head buzzing, she typed up her usual brand of responses to confirm or reschedule, her fingers moving on autopilot and unthinking. All of it felt unimaginably stupid. She was playing a kazoo on the slopes of Vesuvius.

To her unutterable shame, she felt, as she released Petitcru back into the dark apartment, like a child who had had a nightmare and was seeking out a grown-up’s comfort. To her even worse shame - to her outright disgust - she found that what she wanted, with a desperation that she had rarely ever felt and for reasons that she could not even begin to understand, was to speak to Gouvernail. She needed, somehow, to speak to someone who had once had this name. This groundless and superstitious belief in him, too, was almost childlike: the idea that he could somehow with his aloof coldness reconcile her to her feelings. The pure vulnerable desire for it almost buckled her knees. She felt that she could have thrown herself into his arms and endured all his disgust in that moment and felt it like a cool relief, and the realization that she couldn’t do that even if she could speak to him filled her with a hysterical sensation that was something like grief, and which she wrestled down in defiance.

In her desperation, she tried to return to the Garde. She had done it three times before, but it had been with an intuitive understanding that had already made it easy. She stood in silent darkness, feeling strange in the newness of her power, and she reached out in the internal way she knew by now. It felt like closing her hand around nothing. She tried again, and with desperation a third time, but the sudden wave of fatigued dizziness made her stumble. In that moment of isolation, she did not want to be Joy, and she did not want to speak to Gouvernail, perhaps ever again. She did not try again.

She warmed up leftovers, and could barely eat them. She moved restlessly from chair to bed and back again. She answered her texts, and by the time she was done she opened a White Claw and settled onto the sofa, Petitcru sleeping in the crook of her arm, and realized that the crisis had passed over her and was gone now, leaving her standing in a pool of temporary calmness. The desperate hysteria of her attempt to speak to Gouvernail was now something to be forgotten, or else remembered with shame as something to be studiously avoided in future.

She had saved a life. She ought to be celebrating. But all she felt was the cold, numb yawning of the chasm of her future, filled with innumerable other lives she would be obligated to save, and with a duty that she was finding herself increasingly incapable of running from. She already felt it nibbling at the edges of her life, threatening to consume it.

“My name is not Joy. My name is Elaine, and I picked it myself,” she whispered out loud, rebellious. Petitcru’s ear twitched, but there was no other answering cry from the universe to either challenge the assertion or submit to it. It was, like everything else, both stupid and petty. It was nothing but a reminder to herself. “I will not stop being Elaine,” she added, as she had once said to Gouvernail. Her stomach lurched at the memory of it, and she gave up on the pointless posturing that almost amounted to a prayer, and did herself the kindness of letting herself cry.

The sun was coming up when she was done, and she laid in the grey light of her apartment, looking with blurry eyes at the sword hanging over the unused fireplace, the empty can in one hand and the other stroking Petitcru’s ears.

The world always looked a little better after a good cry, she thought absently. And better still by the light of the sun coming up, as if to reassure her that everything that had happened, while it might be something to deal with tomorrow, was for the time being something that had happened yesterday. Today was its own, new animal, standing on its wobbly legs, and today, she thought, she would be Elaine, and no one else.

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