The spider had run across his fingertips.

No amount of internal argument would change it. And she had already silently argued a great deal against its nagging her to be dismissed, and its intruding its ugly head on her when she was busy walking the dog or making coffee or answering texts. Swimming in her skull with noisy thrashing when she curled her hair. Banging loud fists on her peace while she did the dishes.

It had run across his hand. And he had turned, startled, and he had looked at her with an expression that she could not understand but instinctively quailed in front of.

When she had crawled home in the wreck of herself after first encounter with a starseed yanked from its home, she had wept with the sheer desire to throw herself into the imagined comfort of his arms. The fact that she could not even speak to him in that moment had been irrelevant to the searing, childish grief that she could not have done so, even if he had been there. In the time since, her head less fevered and her heart cooled, the juvenile impulse was more clearly labeled as an irrational panic response, brought on by the shock and by the simple and governable desire to seek sympathy from someone who seemed better poised than anyone else to at least understand, even if he could not pity.

And yet it was still wrong - an injustice that made her set her teeth - that she could not even take the hand of the man who had once held her title, and who in his awful and angry and impotent way was bent on keeping her alive.

It was wrong, too, that he could not take hers, when almost his first kindness towards her had been to reach for it. Their separate silences almost certainly swelled with the same unspoken railing against the same injustices.

She arrived to the Garde under a clear and untroubled late afternoon sky, and her heart sank as it had never sunk before in the face of gauzy clouds, unending blue, and kindly sunshine. With numb habit she lifted her hand, mute, as he did. He lifted his eyes to hers in like silence as he bent over her ring, the words passing unspoken between them as the feigned gesture lingered: the spider had run across his fingers, and her own were cold and untouched. Maybe, that day, he had drawn a sudden breath into the machinery of real lungs, only to find it snatched from him again before he could exhale it. The world would not come to touch his senses today, and give him something like a life to live, however briefly measured.

“The storms haven’t passed entirely,” she said, stomach turning at the inflection of her own words, which had been intended as a brisk status update and sounded oddly pleading in her own ears. To shoulder past it quickly might, if she was lucky, keep him from hearing it too, although if he did, he was too dignified - or too stricken himself - to observe it. “There’s been a lot of - work. I’ll tell you about it,” she added, falling into habitual step.

He, as usual, fell into step next to her without complaint. He complained often: about what he called her cowardice, about her lack of ambition, about what amounted to her blasphemy against the Code. But he had never once complained at a request that she had given, whether spoken or unspoken. Her stomach turned again, her mouth a little dry: the sudden realization needed to be shelved, caged away, forgotten. He was, often and imperfectly, kind to her. It had been hidden from her by his snapping impatience, which he had already confessed to her was only his fear for her made manifest: this, too, a misguided and ugly attempt at kindness, which had only served to obscure the larger, quieter kindnesses which he had been more successful in giving her.

He said nothing when she did not immediately begin, as promised, telling him about it. Nor did he look at her, his eyes trained on the river, on the empty sky above it. He walked next to her and when he did not comment on her strange, halting tone this, too, was a kindness.

Ekstrom, standing in the dark keep, had had eyes filled with tears as she defended the cruelty of the Code against the unmoved Joy. And Joy, with more passion than ever before, hated the Code now - looking numbly at the sky through the shape of Gouvernail’s ghostly chest and imagining lungs filling with a cold ozone breath that could never be exhaled - and if the Code had come to her with lungs of its own she would have choked them of air with her bare hands.

This, maybe, was her future, as well: to stand in fleshless uselessness in a dead world, alone, and try to find in all the awful cruelty of that existence the space to be kind to the one that came after her. To keep finding it, even when some awful chance had given her, perhaps, a moment’s sensation, even one as subtle as the touch of a spider’s legs on her fingers - to keep finding kindness even as she was given this new and terrible thing to regret. And to perhaps look at this scared person who took up the mantle of the name, and see that they wished to throw themselves into her useless spectral arms.

She still recited with stilted clarity the news that she had to give. It was a surprise even to herself when the words broke up in her mouth, and when they tumbled out amid undignified tears. They still walked, side by side and a reality apart, under the beauty of a blue sky and the dappled shade of idyllic trees, while she forced her way through what she had to tell, stubbornly choking out the words as coherently as she could arrange them. She could not look at him, and he did not speak to her, until this, too, ceased to feel like a kindness and began to feel like a cruelty of its own. He would expect her to hold herself together. He would expect her to rise above this petty feeling. He would expect her to do her duty, even a duty as mundane as relating the efforts she had had little part in, and he would expect her to do so without succumbing to this unseemly and unexplained emotion. She could not turn, to see the disgust in him.

But it was too much, at last, and she could walk no longer. She stood facing the eerie and quiet water, and she sobbed silently with grief that she could not even give a name to: grief for him, for this dead world, for her own present and her own horrific future, for the one that would come after her, for boys with starseeds yanked from their chests in dark parks at night, for the endless meaningless churn of violence without peace.

And he stood in silence, until, at last, she could no longer bear that her own internal kindness, unspoken though it was, should be met with this horrible dignity. She had been strong. She would be strong again. There would be new days, happier days - even happier hours on this day - and she would laugh in them and make her plans, but in this hour there was only grief, and this brief and rare weakness had cruelly come when she had a witness. That the witness, in turn, should only wrap himself in the aloof silence she could not command displaced the grief with rage.

“Do something,” she said at last, fury surmounting her tears. “Do something.”

“What could I possibly do?” he asked, his voice flat and level.

“What does it matter? What would it change? What would you even do if you could?” she cried out, lashing out at last, wheeling on him with all the power of her accusation only to find that his face, calm and controlled, was immediately belied by a convulsive tightness in his throat, and by a brightness in his ghostly eyes.

“Anything,” he said, quietly. “Anything, if you asked it.”

The trees moved in a gentle wind that would bring no storms that day, unheard above the blood rushing in her ears. She turned in the last moment she could to avoid witnessing whether he, too, could shed tears.

“Forgive me,” she said finally, subsided into exhausted calm.

“There is nothing to forgive,” he said, and his own exhausted calm still sounded strained.

“You promised not to lie to me,” she pointed out. “Don’t lie to me and act like I wasn’t being an a*****e just now.”

He said nothing. The silence grew, but only to settle into stillness.

“I want to swim,” she said, her voice dull and quiet.

“Then let us go to the water,” he said.

There was a quiet between them, mutually recognized as fragile and therefore not to be handled ungently, by the time she finally - after months of expectation - stepped into the cool river. The sun was low, the edges of the sky going grey and streaked with pink, and where she moved the bright reflections of the clouds broke up into swirling chaos. She sank beneath the surface, letting the water fill her ears with nothing-noise and then with silence, and she held her breath, imagining for a moment the idea that she might never exhale it. When she surfaced, she turned, pushing back her hair, and saw that he was still standing as he had stationed himself: his back to the river, not looking at her, where he, his arms folded behind him, had waited in patient silence for her to change - in both the literal and metaphorical sense. The crumbled stone of the curtain wall was outlined through the translucent shape of him. The silence was unbearable, but to approach anything that had already happened was even more so. She sought, stupid, for something to fill up the quiet.

“Thought I was never going to get to. Always storms or cold. And now it’s gonna get dark and cold again before I can even have my fill.”

“The cold never stopped me,” he said mildly, and she snorted, but she spent a moment trying to imagine him in some shape that was not that of the Garde: a man, more or less like any other man, seeking the uncomplicated pleasure of being in the water, perhaps beneath a riot of seagulls: a welcome ruckus, compared to the eerie stillness.

As if in answer to some silent prayer, or perhaps as if the Garde itself would submit to her wishes as readily as he did, a noise broke the silence. His head turned towards it at the same moment hers did: the shrill chirping of a cricket, somewhere in the shade of the overgrown banks. They stood still, and if she held her breath, she did not for the moment remember to think about his own suspended lungs. Perhaps in some ghostly way, he held his own - or enacted in some way the memory of holding his breath - as they listened to the single voice be answered by a second, and a third, the unseen singers lifting little voices into the cool air.

He turned, then, looking for her in the same moment that she turned to him, and he smiled one of his rare smiles: a quiet little expression that deepened the lines around his eyes as if to betray the fact that he had, at some point, at least smiled often enough to carve those lines in the first place.

“What do you want next time?” she asked, burying her momentary thrill of confusion beneath playfulness as she returned to the water, throwing her head back and closing her eyes at the touch of its coolness against her temples. “Go ahead and put your orders in now, or I’m just gonna fill the place up with more spiders. Snails? Bunny rabbits? Some goats, to chew through all that ivy choking up the place?”

He was silent, and when she glanced up she saw that he was watching her. “I have already told you,” he said at last. “Seagulls.”

“Demanding already. Maybe, if you ask nicely,” she said, with a little lurch in her stomach as she adopted this loaded language, instinctively lapsing into it when the tone of playfulness was in her mouth.

“Pray bring me seagulls, lady,” he said, with a little bow of his head, “if it pleases you.”

She pretended to need to once again plunge herself beneath the surface, to buy herself the time - not to think of a reply, but to find the courage to say it calmly. She shook back her hair as she surfaced, running her hands through it. “I would,” she said at last, “if I knew how. And I will, as soon as I figure it out.”

“I believe you,” he said quietly.

“Good, because I also never lie.”

“I have never said that I do not lie,” he said mildly. “Only that I do not lie to you.”

She did not say that it did not matter - that he never had anyone else to lie to; might never again have anyone else to lie to; that if by some miracle the earth shook again and let him for a moment inhale a breath of air and touch a living thing, she would in all likelihood be the only person nearby enough to share that half a moment of reality with him. It would have been cruel, and it would have been untrue: it did, of course, matter. It would always matter. And so she, in her efforts to be kind that did not come any more easily than his, let go of the thought, and laughed instead.

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