word count: 1600

The door in her heart that unlocked itself on some schedule that she could not control was hanging open, inviting her to return to the Garde, and she did not.

The resistance, now, created a sort of pang of longing, and she remembered that pastel senshi who had told her that she could tell when she had been away, as she put it, “too long.” She, too, had had glowing lines scored into her skin. She should, she supposed, ask Ekstrom, or Encke. She did not. She did not even reach out to tell them or anyone else what had happened, and remembered the first time she had seen Ekstrom in a similar situation, and the exhaustion that had been painted on her face as clearly as the new marks.

The thought of the place made her sick. She huddled up on the bench on the tiny square of concrete that called itself her porch, absently looking out over the parking lot - or at nothing - and wishing for a cold snap that hadn’t come while she held in the palm of one hand that little stone that Lyndin had given her.

He had told her that it might not work, but furthermore exhorted her not to waste it. At the time she hadn’t known how to reconcile those two instructions. But for all the attendant grief she had not been unaware of the power that had rushed into her like a fresh breath, and she could envision it, now, coursing through the stone and unlocking whatever magic lived within it.

What that magic might be she could only guess. Before, she might have turned away from the rosiest of her ideas on the matter as being too much to hope for without a guarantee of disappointment; the same ideas, now, were drowning in dread.

Her musing was interrupted by the arrival of the packages she’d ordered Before, which had been subjected to a series of delays and now arrived at a time when she did not want to think about it.

But she hauled herself reluctantly to her feet, moving as if moving hurt, even though it didn’t, and scooping up Petitcru to usher her inside. She then, mechanically, sat on the floor of her living room and pored over the instructions, mentally moving through the steps and checking for what other tools she would need to take with her when she at last succumbed to the inevitable and returned to the Garde.

The Garde, where, undoubtedly, he waited for her with that ageless patience, doing whatever it was that passed for existing when she was not there. He had taken care to tell her once that time did not pass in that agony of waiting when she was not there, but she had not asked him to clarify, and so she did not know if it had only passed that way because she had not existed for him to wait for, or because he had not felt the need to let it. Perhaps, now - and the thought was a sick little pain at her heart - he did wait, after all. Perhaps there was some pleasure in anticipating, after centuries of unchanging days with nothing to look forward to in them. And she, in her selfish pain, sat on the floor of her apartment and avoided both him and the place that had become a part of her, turning away from them as the Code had once suggested she could, if she wanted.

—

Dreams tasted different, now, but it was good to know and internalize the difference between that dream of mundane sleep and that dream of arcane magic.

When she was in high school she’d tried to teach herself to lucid dream in pursuit of that bookish-kid dream of escaping to the places she read about. One of the recurrent pieces of advice on the topic was that you should develop a regular habit with a regular trigger - turning off a light when you entered a room; flicking a rubber band against your wrist whenever you looked at a clock - until it became so ingrained in you that you would perform it automatically in dreaming, and discover by the lack of a light coming on or an answering pain that you were no longer awake.

She lifted her hand to him, again and again, and felt nothing.

But that was the same as it was waking. Only the dream had ever brought her something different, and then only long enough to be regretted.

—-

She mentally rehearsed the conversations. But she no longer thought she could know with some confidence how he might reply to her, and those internal scripts petered out into a sea of question marks on which she grew motion sick.

He was a stranger to her. In some ways this was her own fault. She had always been a little too comfortable avoiding knowing him more fully - at first to avoid any feeling and later in an attempt to kill what feeling had already arrived; later still, if she was forced to think with honesty of her own motives, because she had been protecting that feeling with the ferocity of a starving animal crouched over a scrap that might or might not have something edible clinging to it.

Unhappy, to think of herself in that way. But wasn’t she? All that vaunted independence and treasured aloofness, and she discovered herself as disgustingly drunk on a shred of affection as she’d always imagined herself immune to, desperate to preserve it against the inevitable wrack of time and knowledge.

Horrible, then, to think that there had been some version of herself -

No.

- some version of some other person, then, who had been a part of her but had not been her, who had not seen him as a stranger at all, despite knowing him even less than she did now.

Turns out she wasn’t as above all that bullshit as she’d always proudly thought. The only comfort was the thought that it would pass. Every time she’d ever, in her smug security, told a grieving friend - among her inward rolling of her eyes - that it would pass, she’d been right in the end.

And what now, of all her oaths that she had made to a Code that was not even real? If it wasn’t real she could turn her back on them, but that would render the rest of that dream in some way false, and it had within it the only scrap of familiarity he had ever had to her, and she - no matter how much she hated herself for it - could not relinquish that crumb of knowing him.

Besides, what was an oath made to a thing that you knew was not real, if it wasn’t in a way an oath to yourself? And she had always been a woman who kept her promises, and never more so than when the promise had been made to herself.

Of late, she had often been finding loopholes. It was time to remember her own duty to herself, and do what she’d said she’d do.

Even the impossible things. Especially the impossible things.

But she could be Joy away from the place that had given her its name. She could do her patrols and her reaching out, dispatching a youma there or harassing an agent away from a civilian there. No one but herself had been responsible for entangling the idea of the Joyous Guard with the dead man haunting it, and so she herself would have to be responsible for separating the two. They did not have to clamor for the same spot in her heart in order for her to keep all her promises, even those that she was now regretting making.

She would adopt some of that philosophy of his which had repelled her at first, and tear her feelings out from the root where the Garde was concerned. She would not repeat his mistakes in abandoning her life for its sake, but nor would she create new ones by attempting to make it what it could never be.

Research could continue, in the placidity that was to be had when she was not rushing to throw herself back towards his company.

—-

(It was funny, the way high-flown ideas and romance could have effects so mundane that it felt silly to connect them. But she had bought hair gel and now stood with it in her hand, watching a YouTube tutorial with a scrutinizing eye in order to get the slickest slick-back possible, because every time she reached up to push her hair behind her ear she felt a soaring flutter that careened immediately into nausea.)

—-

The Garde beckoned from somewhere, until she imagined that if she rolled over and looked at her bedroom door, she would see the silver reflection of the moon on the river beyond it. But she did not roll over, and she did not look.

She continued braiding her hair and unbraiding it, experimenting with various ways to weave in the two ribbons: the one homely and dye-stained, the one ornate and shot with gold. And as she did so she considered which one she hated more, and could not determine an answer. The gold ring that was normally bound to them reposed within her subspace, untouched - and unfelt, as she was Elaine for the moment, and not the hateful Joy - and somewhere near it that grey stone that Lyndin gave her would be illuminating it, in whatever pocket of space and time they rested in, with its sickly shimmering.

(It made sense. If she was ever going to be petty enough to be jealous of another woman, if she was ever going to hate her, it would have to be some version of herself that she had never known.)

Lyndin had said that the Code was not a living thing, and that it was self-defeating to think of it that way. But she had often felt that it mocked her, and she imagined it, now, taunting her in its ineffable silence for having finally taken on the name of the Joyous Guard, only to emerge from the other side of that trial and realize that while she might know who she was, she no longer believed that Gouvernail did.