She had not determined what she would do. She had only determined what she would not do, which was make a fool of herself. Still stung by the shame of feeling desperate for Gouvernail’s approval for one hysterical moment, she was at least glad that no one had to know about it but her.

The intuitive sense that she could return to the Garde came to her earlier than she had expected, but it was easy enough to link this unexpected opportunity to relieve her feelings to her sudden increase in power. She considered disregarding it. But this felt more like cowardice than defiance. She only gave herself the dignity of not rehearsing her introductions this time, and she arrived under a turbulent sky, the creeping strangeness of the last couple of weeks apparently having manifested in some troubled way even here in this captive pocket of reality. But the clouds were, at least, the sort of color they ought to be, and so she pushed concerns about it to the side, and she looked at Gouvernail standing across from her on the remnants of the curtain wall and tried to feel smug at his palpable astonishment as he took in her new appearance and the whip in her hand.

They exchanged the usual silent ritual, the play-pretend of his lifting her hand to his lips, and there was, again, that hysterical bitterness that was something dangerously close to grief at her realization that even if she’d succumbed to the childish urge to throw herself into his arms and demand a comfort he had never even tried to offer her, she couldn’t have. So she smiled at him instead, a thin and forced expression.

“Got a lot to talk about this time,” she told him, as he made as if to drop her hand.

“I see that,” he said.

—

The trees looked startlingly green against the darkness of the sky, their branches tossed in waves of leaves turned silver side up in the turbulence, and she sat on the broad sill of a ruined window with her knees drawn up, watching them. As before, she wondered if this was a true verdure, or only one that she imagined under the contrast of the changing sky.

She had already explained. She had even managed to do it with that brisk detachment that he himself used to narrate troubling ideas, and when he responded with no praise she was not surprised, but she was resentful.

But she understood, now, by the angle of his ensuing questions, that he was resentful, too. There was a disbelief in him as she repeatedly asserted that it had been five or so weeks, give or take; that it had in fact been only two weeks since she’d last seen him and fallen into all this new power.

He was bitter. She found it difficult, knowing what she did of his life, to blame him for it. It was hard to see someone receive accolades that you’d had to fight for, and know that they’d done little to earn them.

“We already know it’s different now,” she said at last, trying to keep the snap out of her voice. She did not quite manage gentleness, irritated that she, who felt in need of soothing herself, found herself in the disgusting position of managing a man’s tender and irrational feelings instead. “I’m sure this is different too.” She hazarded a glance at his face, which was tense with the effort of not lashing out at her with a cruelty that even he knew she did not deserve any more than she’d deserved this cosmic promotion. If he was going to be enraged, she was at least dully grateful that his rage was presently aimed at something other than herself. “I think,” she said, very slowly, “that - that maybe what matters now, more than anything, is just the idea that you’re not going to defect. I don’t know how many we lose to corruption. It seems like it’s a ******** lot. Maybe all the Code cares about is that I wouldn’t. Never. It’s good enough, maybe.”

He was so silent that she was forced to look at him again, and he was looking back at her with a very strange expression, his hand as it generally was pressed to his side, his eyes searching her face as if looking for some hint of a deeper meaning.

“I wouldn’t,” she repeated, quailing against her will under this inspection, but defying him to challenge her on it.

“Certainty is an enemy in an ally’s clothes, Lady,” he said finally, very quietly. <******** you,” she said flatly. “Because I am certain.” She turned her eyes away from him, back to the troubled trees and the ruffled surface of the river, and then with absent wandering to a spiderweb tossed back and forth in the arch of the window. The spider in its center hung on with twitching limbs, restless in the constant movement. Something niggled at the corner of her mind, trying to get her attention, but it was dispelled by Gouvernail’s sudden motion.

To her vague surprise he crossed the room, and seated himself across from her, the massive arch broad enough to hold them both. She wondered absently how it was that he could not touch her nor anything around him, but could sit down on that broad stone as easily as she did - could even lean his head back against the arch, drawing up his knees and turning his eyes towards the river.

“And what makes you certain, Lady?” he asked finally.

“I couldn’t do it. It feels - I don’t know. You feel a little like God, standing there with someone’s whole life in your hand, you know? And there’s not a single part of me anywhere - I don’t care what the pay-off was - that could just - treat it like something disposable.”

“And what if to defect was not a matter of becoming a bad God? There must be some who went over for better reasons. This is foolish reasoning,” he said. “You might be induced by better arguments than these.”

“I can’t think what.”

“If those who asked you to serve them offered you likewise a better future for those you have sworn to protect,” he said, after a long pause, “you might find that your loyalty was stronger to that oath than it was to–”

“No,” she said flatly, interrupting him. “I don’t care what the trade-off is. I’m not going to follow orders from people who operate like that. Joining up with them isn’t the answer. I’d rather - go rogue - give myself my own orders and fail. ******** that.”

He was silent, and then he nodded, an almost imperceptible movement that seemed to be more in response to his own thoughts than anything she had said.

“I felt the same,” he said at last. “I have no love for being my own king, but I never found one I could have bent the knee to with a cleaner heart.”

She looked at him, aware with some turbulent emotion of some hint of weakness in him - the suggested history of some time when his loyalties had felt more flexible to him than he had wanted them to feel to her. She remembered his initial anger at her flippancy and her resistance, and with a lurch in her gut thought that maybe she had found some reason for some of it, at least. But she found herself unwilling to turn the stone over and see what scuttled out, and she fell back, as she often did, on a joke, lifting her eyes back to the spider in its struggling, unwilling to meet his own eyes if he turned them towards her. The dim sensation of an alarm ringing somewhere in her hindbrain returned - some task left undone. “That’s because kings always ******** it up. You ought to have queens.”

He laughed - she had never heard him laugh; the alarm was forgotten - and it was a bitter little sound. “I thought that once as well,” he said. “I was mistaken.”

“Picked the wrong queen,” she suggested gently, inexplicably afraid to touch the subject.

“Yes,” he said. “I did. Or very nearly.”

“I hope you found a better one at some point,” she said at last, still filled with the strange and childlike fear. “If you didn’t like having to rule yourself.” And then, with a little more boldness: “Couldn’t be me. I ******** love being my own master. And everyone else’s, if I can manage it.”

“That is your arrogance,” he said, but she could hear the smile in his voice when he said it, and if it was still bitter, it was at least still a smile. “And your certainty.”

“I don’t think you can wear a crown without being a little bit full of yourself,” she conceded, and let the conversation drop, turning back to the safety of asking him questions, now that she had some idea of which ones would be the right ones to ask.

—

She eventually showed him, at his request, the manifestation of her new power. He instinctively reached towards one of the white flowers blooming on the vine, his fingers passing through it.

“As I remember it,” he said. “But mine was not so beautiful.”

“Maybe it always looks like its wielder,” she said smugly, the discomfort of the earlier conversation far enough behind her that she was recovering a bit of cocky pride in her abilities.

“It seems it may be that way,” he said mildly, as the vines shrank away and vanished. This, almost a compliment, had her wondering briefly if the magic had the same effect on him that it had had on the corrupt senshi - and then with a sudden gleeful horror was about to ask him if it had had that effect when he’d used it too - but she was sidelined by his brisk direction that she show him the spell he’d helped her uncover on her very first hectic visit to the Garde.

She obliged, and he watched her with his arms folded behind his back, his back straight, all his usual cold aloofness returning under the pressures of doing his duty as her mentor. She could not resist directing the three bolts at him, a little disappointed when he, in ghostly security, did not flinch at their passing through him and into the wall behind him, where the resultant thud sent the spider tumbling down and then scuttling back up to her web. There was, again, the sensation that she was forgetting to do something important.

When he told her that she seemed to be accustomed to the weapon, he met her cheerful explanation with a grim expression that was of enormous service to buoying her spirits. “I remember,” he said flatly. The pleasure of having incurred this disgusted reaction was short-lived, as she found herself, at last, subjected to something like the Mr. Miyagi montage she’d initially imagined when he had outlined his obligations to her. She had once attempted to secure a personal trainer in a moment of vanity, and had given it up after one session. She did not enjoy this any more than she had enjoyed that.

“My arm’s tired,” she groused at last, and before he could make his grim answer she promptly abandoned her squire form, collapsing back onto the windowsill with an exaggerated posture of weakness in her civilian clothes, the whip wisping out of her hand to where she could not be compelled to keep using it.

“You found yourself very near death,” he reminded her coldly. “Your sloth will kill you.”

“Not immediately,” she said, with a languid and hyperbolic stretch. The wind having somewhat settled save for fitful bursts, the spider was resting, finally, its slender legs picking up threads to mend the damaged web. She watched it, out of lack of anywhere better to put her eyes, while he spoke.

“I understand that you mean to limit your time as the Garde,” he said impatiently. “I have already made my arguments and will not repeat them uselessly again. But if you will also limit your time–”

He was interrupted by her bolting suddenly to her feet, clambering gracelessly onto the windowsill. The little alarm bell had finally reached her consciousness, and she realized what it had been drawing her attention to for hours. She stood on her toes, extending her hand.

“Nail,” she said, forgetting herself enough to use the internal nickname. “Look.” The spider extended one graceful limb, and then another, transferring itself from the web to the palm of Elaine’s hand, and she turned to him, forgetting to exaggerate her aloofness or her caution; forgetting even to try and master the inexplicable tears rising to her eyes. “It’s alive,” she said.

He hesitated, stepping towards her, and as she brought the spider nearer to him, letting it walk across one hand and then another, he lifted a hand as if to let it scuttle from her palm to his, only to remember, too late, that it was an impossible thing.

Involuntarily, she met his eyes, her own filmed with tears that had been of excitement and were now suddenly of regret. The spider was alive - the first living creature that she had ever seen here besides herself, she remembered too late, because the only other eyes to see it belonged to a dead man.

She would, later, think that the kindest thing he had ever done for her was to force himself, with painful effort, to smile in that moment of meeting her eyes. “It is,” he said simply. “Thank God.”

She paused, blinking back her confused crying, and then she laughed, turning to let the spider go, lifting it back to its damaged web. “Or thank me,” she said, with an airy cockiness that she tried to feel.

“And that, as well,” he said.

—

The sky was the trouble black of an approaching storm. By some instinct, Elaine felt that she had to leave, or find herself stranded in some way.

“I worry about the spider,” she confessed, as they walked to the end of the curtain wall in the fitful wind. “I wish–” but she did not finish the thought, which would have felt too much like a reproach to him for being unable to act as the protector even of this tiny living thing.

“I am sure that it knows how to endure a storm,” he said quietly. “If such a thing exists, when you are not here to see it.”

This felt like an unkindness, but she knew that it wasn’t meant as one, and let it pass. She reached out to mime the act of giving him her hand, as usual.

“Maybe next time the gulls will come,” she offered, with an uncharacteristic shyness. He paused before reaching out to let her pretend that he lifted her fingers, his eyes wandering over her shoulder to the dead river and the lifeless, churning sky above it.

“Perhaps they will,” he said.

“We’ll find out,” she promised.

word count: 2500 looool