word count: 3000
It was getting hard to sleep.
She had a sense that she was approaching a place of precariousness: standing, as it were, on the edge of an imminent fall into what she was suspicious was a self-awareness that she had been defying.
This was an affront to everything she believed about herself. But what else was there to call it when she found herself frequently shutting down her own thoughts and turning away from them? She did not like being a stranger to herself - but then again, there were two of her now, right? Was it lying to yourself if you were two people? Did Joy, perhaps conceal things that Elaine ought not to think about? Did Elaine jealously guard what she considered a precious secret?
Did it matter, if doing it kept both names together from knowing the whole of the truth?
So it was getting hard to sleep. Audiobooks on a loop, a couple of glasses of wine and a suspicion that she was getting a bit reliant on that or some other chemical means to smooth the way. Longer walks with Petitcru; longer sprints as Joy; longer days at the pool as Elaine. Anything to make exhaustion a little easier to grab at. To sleep well, Gouvernail had said, was the reward of those who did the duty of the Garde well. She'd said she always slept well, and it was more or less true at the time.
Gouvernail noticed, of course. He was damnably observant when he wanted to be, for all he could pointedly ignore whatever he chose and make you aware he was doing it without saying a word. He watched her lackluster swing of her arm, and although he offered a word of what was almost praise for her improvement it was only to lead in to asking whether she was well.
“I’m fine,” she said stubbornly, but she began coiling up the whip. The wiser thing to do would probably be to leave it there, but she did not want to be wise. She wanted to be reckless and stupid. She wanted to make bad decisions. If she had not penciled in this entire day for the Garde - had not brought Petitcru along to enjoy her frolic around the bailey and nap in the chapel; had not brought food to eat - she would perhaps even tonight be in a club somewhere making enjoyably bad decisions.
Instead she opted to be productive, and without even bothering to tell him her plans she gathered up what tools were available to her and headed towards the boathouse. It was never any use telling him anyway. He would either argue with her or he wouldn’t; either way he would dog her heels in all his useless omnipresence.
It was still morning; a mist still hung around the river. She was grateful for it, as her strained temper perhaps could not have endured the hardship of the beating sun and the heat. When she threw herself mutely into the hard work of clearing the brush that kept her from launching the boat, she tried to ignore the constant ghostly figure lurking in her periphery - one that she knew, without looking at him, watched her with his hand pressed to his side, his back straight and his demeanor grave. She did not speak to him this time, forcing a conversation through her breathless work; she struggled, and succumbed to the physical ease provided by being in her powered skin rather than the comfort of being Elaine, and perhaps this, too, fueled her stubborn silence - or his own silent deference to it.
When at last she felt prepared to try and launch the boat - which she was now viewing as an explicit challenge to be conquered - she began dragging it with a stonily set jaw towards the pebbled shore.
“You cannot row it alone,” he said at last, and she bit back an urge to snap at him.
“I know,” she said. “I’m gonna tether it. I brought rope.”
“And how will you return?”
“I’ll tow myself in. Or I’ll swim, I don’t ******** know.”
He had no counter for this, and his silence propelled her into speaking again. “I worked hard for this. It’s gonna be nice,” she said obstinately, breathless as she swapped pulling for pushing momentarily, only to return to dragging. “I’m gonna lay in there and read a book and it’s gonna be pleasant.”
“If you insist,” he said at last, with a return of that infuriating mildness.
“I do ******** insist,” she said. “I could do with something nice right now. God knows I don’t have much else nice going on. Can’t have fireflies. Can’t have swimming in the reservoir.” He wouldn’t know what she was referring to; she didn’t care. “Can’t even have a good night’s sleep. Can’t even get laid. Work doesn’t count; that isn’t fun most of the time.” This was only partly true. “So I’m gonna lay in that boat and drink a little airplane bottle of vodka and read a shitty romance novel and it’s gonna be ********’ lovely, because that’s what it was designed for. To be ********’ lovely. Even if you ignored it just like you ignored everything else lovely about this ******** place. And now you’re gonna yell at me for getting attached to it.”
“No,” he said flatly, watching her struggle. “I am not.”
“Good. Because I’m still not setting up shop here. But right now, temporarily, this life is better than the other one. Which I know you’re gonna get all maudlin about.”
“No,” he said again, sounding more tired than angry. “My fears were misplaced.”
“Were they?” she asked, trying to sound less genuinely surprised than she was, and pausing near the water’s edge to catch her breath and procure the heavy bundle of rope from subspace, uncoiling it slowly as she dared a glance at him.
“Yes. I feared that you might repeat my mistakes.”
“By losing myself to it?”
“Yes. Yours is a life too good - and may it remain so - to throw away to a service you did not ask for. But you do not take from the Garde what I took from the Garde.”
She paused, hands suspended over her work, and found herself almost timid in asking: “Because you took it more seriously than I did.”
He was silent for a long moment. “No,” he said. “It is not right. I could not say how to make it right, but that is not right.”
She returned his silence in kind before resuming her slow unwinding of the rope. “You did take it more seriously, though.”
“Possibly, yes. But I do not think, as I once did, that we can compare our lots. Not to any use. We are not alike.” He made a helpless gesture, his eyes turned vacantly towards the water. “But you are troubled. Do not let my thoughts trouble you further, especially when I can make no sense of them.”
She hesitated, but acquiesced by her asking him to show her how to tether the boat.
This was something of a difficult task, as he could not simply reach out and show her how to tie the knots, having to direct her with gestures and words alone, but he was all quiet patience as she managed, finally, to secure it.
She climbed into it, finally, and before pushing off began pulling items from subspace: the little vodka bottles, the bag of cherries, the shitty romance novel from among the two or three books she had squirreled away for exactly this moment. He stood on the little spit of land where the boat was moored to an ancient metal post, watching her with his arms folded behind his back. When she glanced up to him, there it was: the twinge of pity and guilt, horrible and painful. Her eyes wandered from him to the beautifully painted scenes in enamel and wood and gilt on the inside of the hull: scenes of leisure and ease, of sunlight and finery, where men and women drank from golden cups under a sky of impossible blue. Maybe one day, she thought blankly, she could bring people here. Little outings on the water, to make the place ring out with laughter again.
No, not again. Maybe it had never been that place. Certainly it hadn’t been in his time. It was his own fault, of course - the boat would have been easier for him to get into then than it was for her now. But he’d let it be stashed away unused, along with all those things in the storeroom that had been designed for revelry. Forgotten, somehow, how to be a man when there wasn’t a weapon in his hand, whether it was the Garde’s whip or Gouvernail’s sword. Perhaps had forgotten what it was to be anything but a sort of weapon himself. She looked at a tiny painted man playing at some instrument to a lady under the scarlet canopy that even now filtered the cheerful sunlight above her, and she choked back a feeling of sudden rage against a man who, if he had regrets for how he had wasted his life, could do nothing with them now.
What was the ******** point? Every time she came back she wrung a little more beauty and life out of the place, and there was still a forlorn ghost haunting her heels every step she took. Dead at its very soul - because what else could the soul of this place be, if it wasn’t him? Wallowing in his self-inflicted misery and his anger and dead forever: a wayward spirit to follow her as a constant reminder, tethered to a rotting body entombed beneath the keep.
“Come with me,” she said, turning with a sudden imperiousness that seemed to startle him even as he instinctively moved to obey, only to stop before he had even taken two steps.
“I cannot,” he observed, hurt.
“How do you know? Come with me. I want you to come with me.”
“You and I both know that I cannot,” he said. And then he added, with an almost bewildered pain: “Why are you thus cruel to me, Lady?”
“I’ve told you I like being cruel to men,” she said, although she hated herself as she said it, and had to correct herself almost before the words were out. “But I’m not being cruel. I want you to see the place from somewhere else. I want you to get a change in perspective because I think you’d like it, if you’d ever ******** let yourself like anything. The weather is gorgeous and the boat is adorable and you should have enjoyed it when you were alive, but you can enjoy it now, if you’d just be willing to enjoy anything. I’ll read more Morris at you, if you want. You liked Morris, and I’ve never seen you like anything. Come with me,” she repeated, bringing up her chin in a haughty tip, dispensing the words like the order they were.
He paused, but he took another step towards the boat before grinding to a halt again. “I cannot,” he repeated, but it was almost inaudible; he looked at her with an expression so lost and boyish that she almost repented.
Which, of course, only made her double down.
“Come with me,” she said again. “Why won’t you even try?”
“Because failure would -” He could not finish, his eyes searching her face for some hint of mercy that was not there.
She was silent for a long, long moment, and wondered if he thought that it was because she was disgusted, or if he realized that she was choking back all the anger and grief she was capable of feeling. She dismissed the guise of the Garde and all its queenly dignity, returning to that of Elaine.
“Now who’s a coward?” she said at last, picking up the oar and pushing off the shore with more violence than strictly necessary, letting the boat drift out onto the water and unspooling the rope as the current took it out and downstream.
She turned her back to him where he stood on the shadowed shore, leaning over the edge to drag her fingers through the cool water. Some little fish beneath the surface nibbled at her fingers - a reminder of the Garde’s ever-returning life - and she withdrew her hand.
It was beautiful, after all. The mist had long cleared off under noonday sun; after the hard work of the last couple of hours she luxuriated on the velvet cushions beneath the scarlet canopy. The ceiling was hung with blue canvas gilded with little stars and a smiling and benevolent moon, and as she looked at it she listened to the cicadas and the thrushes, and she imagined the sound of seagulls long since silenced.
She would not let this stupid melancholy have this. She would take it back, since it was hers. And for several minutes she did take it back, rocked back and forth on the slow current of the river, the boat seeming to strain for the open water instead of being yanked along the shore, the rope going taut as she left Gouvernail and the Garde behind, finally heaving the anchor over the side and seeing, by the rope uncoiling, that the river at its center was deeper than she imagined. She only made it a few pages and three cherries into her aggressively-planned leisure, stretched out on the cushions. Sleep came effortless and dreamless, and with the sort of gradual approach that gives the pleasure of knowing that it arrives, rather than surprising you with a sudden jolting wakefulness before you can know that you’ve closed your eyes.
She woke just as gently, only dimly aware by the cast of the light that she must have been asleep for at least an hour. She indulged her heavy eyelids for a long few moments of luxurious indulgence before letting her glance once again roam over the painted canopy, lifting her head at last from the cushions to look out over the water.
She still floated far out on the gentle current in the middle of the river, closer than she had ever been to its further banks. But rather than towards them, she was turned towards those that flanked the Garde, and she watched as a doe stepped out from the shady trees, its ears fanning in caution before it stepped into the shallows to lower its head towards the water. Seconds later it was followed by another, and by a buck sporting yearling antlers and an expression of alert watchfulness: protecting his companions from threats that were not there.
The thrushes still sang; somewhere, a nightingale chose to mingle its song with theirs despite the hour, and the cicadas sang their shrill backing vocals. A cluster of dragonflies darted low over the water where the dark shadows of the trees gave way to the brilliant reflection of the sky, the surface breaking where a fish made an ineffectual grab for them here or there. Even the Garde itself, at this distance, seemed vibrant, like a promise of busy humanity that was not there: the banners waving from its keep, the lush forests concealing the disintegrated state of the curtain walls.
The words came from the bow as if they were her own thoughts: “The Garde seems very alive from here,” they said, and she startled violently, turning towards the familiar voice.
He looked exhausted, somehow - thinner in existence. But he was there, seated on the bow with his feet on the cushions below, an ephemeral phantom that had never felt more present. But he managed - and it seemed to cost him some effort - a pained smile. “Forgive me,” he said. “It was not right to stay here while you slept, but it would have been more wrong to wake you.”
She almost couldn’t comprehend it, but despite herself she laughed: not a mocking laugh or an angry one, but that sort of disbelieving laugh that comes of being blindsided by delight.The sound seemed to shake him, forcing him to turn his head aside.
“I’m dreaming,” she laughed, and he shook his head, and then shook it again when she asked: “How did you do it?”
“Do not ask me what I do not know how to answer,” he said. “If you were dreaming, I might have an explanation for you.”
She paused, and he paused. The same thought, perhaps, passed between them in that moment, and if that thought was you commanded me, and I obeyed, she, at least, did not have the courage - the coward now - to continue thinking it.
“I’m glad you tried,” she blurted finally, moved to an unwonted and unmitigated sincerity.
“As am I,” he said. “Perhaps you will gloat,” he added, with a gentle touch of what was almost playfulness.
“I wasn’t planning on it,” she said, “but I can, if you want me to. I’m great at gloating.”
And then he did what he so rarely did, and what seemed to come from a great distance only to be very close to her: he laughed.
She wrestled down a sudden surge of emotion that was as much painful as delicious, turning her eyes back to the deer gathered on the shore.
He seemed more faint than ever, for all his nearness; he was the dimmest silvered shadow on the air beneath the sun. A dead man at the soul of the place, seeming deader than he ever had.
“It does feel very alive,” she agreed, when she could sound like she said it with nothing but pleasure.
They were silent together for a long moment, and although she could not look at him, she kept him in the corner of her eye, afraid that if she looked away for too long he might simply vanish entirely, wisped away like a mote of dust.
She spoke, at last: “I think I promised you Morris,” she said, almost timid again, “if you still wanted it.”
“I do,” he said simply, very quietly, and she reached for the book.
The sincerity was too painful to sustain, and she lapsed back into the comfort of flippancy, although the shape it took sat strangely in her mouth.
“Since you earned it,” she said.
