Borne back ceaselessly into the past

[hellonspectacles]

Palamedes has always thought of himself as a solitary person. The Sixth are, as a rule. If one isn’t born with the ability to enjoy long stretches of time with reading and writing as one’s main form of entertainment, one grows into it quickly enough. Palamedes Sextus has spent hours pouring over a single phrase and days by himself in the deep recesses of the Library. The quiet is perfectly normal.

What has never occurred to him, not until now, is that while he has often been solitary, he has never been alone. Camilla has officially been his cavalier for almost eight years, but they’d been living out of each others’ pockets for longer than that; she is his right arm, his sounding board, his other half.

And alone in his apartment, larger even than the quarters allowed to him as Warden, he has never been so distant from her.

He has avoided leaving for most of that time—the loneliness inside makes him feel hollowed out, but the hustle and bustle of Darrow overwhelms his senses and leaves him dazed. In the forty-eight hours since appearing here, he has barely eaten. He has begun talking to the furniture. He needs to get out. Eventually, he finds himself on the long stretch of Darrow shoreline, where the sky is frightfully open, but the people few and far between, and the sea tantalizingly mysterious.

As he approaches the water, he toes off his shoes and socks and leaves them in the sand. He sinks onto his haunches at the edge of the water, his grey scholars robes pooling around him in the wet sand, and lets his fingers trail in the foamy edge of the water as a wave comes up to greet him.

"Temperature: Ten degrees celsius. Salinity: 35 parts per thousand. At least fifty distinct species of microscopic organisms,” he murmurs. It doesn’t tell him anything he doesn’t already know, but its a comforting sort of exercise, for all its simplicity.

Comments

[hellonspectacles]

The question makes Palamedes' heart constrict, and he thinks carefully before replying. At hour forty-one after arriving, he had asked the same thing to the silence of his dark apartment after lying in bed awake for a miserable amount of time. No comforting answer had come.

Truth over solace in lies. Palamedes has gained a reputation as a Warden suspicious of tradition for tradition's sake, but he has always believed that, and it's what he offers now. "I don't believe so," he says slowly. "There could be a Lyctoral tie that I am unaware of that might offer some kind of signal. But given that the process, as is currently stands, erases the cavalier as an independent consciousness," here, Pal winces, "I doubt it. I'm sorry, I wish I had a better answer."

Briefly, Palamedes considers telling her what he means by as it currently stands. But there is truth, and then there is potentially devastating conjecture. For now, he sets that matter aside.

"Though if you want my entirely unscientific opinion, the Reverend Daughter is far too stubborn to do something as mundane as die."

[wedobones]

Gideon takes that on board, staring at the surface of her tea for a moment before she takes a sip, holding it in her mouth for a moment before it starts to cool.

"Yeah, you're probably right," she says. She never would have thought she'd care; she'd always intended to walk away from Drearburh and never look back, not least at Harrowhark Nonagesimus' face. But here they are. "She was alive. Cam. The last time I saw her."

[hellonspectacles]

"Emperor's blood." Only when Gideon says it does Palamedes realize that he had been afraid to ask. Cam is alive. A little more of the tension goes out of him. "Camilla is also too stubborn to die," he adds wryly. Particularly, he thinks, when she has something so important to do. She would stop at nothing to bring him back; she certainly wouldn't let herself do something silly like die and leave their work unfinished.

[wedobones]

"They were together. When I...left." Gideon picks up a biscuit and dips it into her tea, chewing meditatively on it for a minute. "God help whoever runs into them. Even God himself wouldn't have the balls to stop them." She huffs a laugh. "They'll be okay without us."

She has to believe that. She has to.

[hellonspectacles]

Palamedes picks up a biscuit and takes a bite. It's sandy, a little stale, and remarkably sweet. Honestly, it's delicious.

"Camilla will look after the Reverend Daughter. We still owe you one." He grins briefly. "And, well, to be entirely honest, Cam might need her help with something."

Should he tell Gideon about the Contingency? There's no reason not to, but it feels strange to share with someone after all this time.

[wedobones]

The idea of Cam and Harrow working anything like together really strikes Gideon as hilarious, and she snorts softly, taking another mouthful of her tea.

"Cytherea was a fucking handful."

[hellonspectacles]

Something flickers in Palamedes' expression at the mention of Cytherea. He had spent weeks assuming the woman was Dulcinea, only to discover that she was Dulcinea's murderer. His emotions on the matter of the mad Lyctor are decidedly complicated.

"I don't mean Cytherea. Camilla and I had a plan. A contingency. In the event of my death. But she's going to need a necromancer to make it work."

[wedobones]

For a moment, Gideon's face doesn't move. Then she blinks, her golden eyes narrowing once she opens them again.

"What kind of contingency?"

[hellonspectacles]

The intensity of Gideon's gaze is unexpectedly arresting. Palamedes doesn't answer immediately, carefully sipping his tea.

"A contingency that would ensure my demise wasn't permanent." He pauses. "To be accurate, that my consciousness would survive my death."

A look of satisfaction flickers in his eyes. Even now, Pal is quite pleased with the discovery he'd made. "Put simply, I ascertained how to make myself a revenant."

[wedobones]

A wave of emotion hits Gideon, so strong and loud that, for a moment, she can't actually put her finger on what she's feeling. She stares at him, her mouth hanging open slightly.

"I watched you die, you unspeakable shit," she says, finally. It's a good thing she's too far away from him to smack that smirk off his face. The temptation is strong.

[hellonspectacles]

Palamedes stills with his mug of tea halfway to his lips. Call it necromancer arrogance, call it Sixth emotional stuntedness, call it the Master Warden's unique brand of single-minded audacity, but it hadn't even occurred to him that Gideon would react so explosively.

"It was no picnic from my end, either," he says, sotto voice. Pal takes a breath, he sets down his mug, he presses his palms together. "The results weren't guaranteed. There were at least three dozen things that might have gone wrong, and those were only the ones we had the ability to predict." Another pause, another breath. "Gideon, it wasn't like I wanted to blow myself to bits, believe me."

[wedobones]

"Yeah, well, a lot of people were doing a lot of shit they didn't really want to do, weren't they?" She remembers, with an ache, how easy it had been to do it. To fall. She takes another sip of her tea, and then looks at it like she's never seen it before, setting it down on the coffee table and stalking away from him, back to the refrigerator. She grabs a beer and twists off the cap, knocking back a couple of long, cold swallows in one go.

"I'm trying really, really hard not to punch you again," she says. "But you should know that I really, really want to."

[hellonspectacles]

"That is precisely my point--" Palamedes sighs as Gideon storms away. He takes off his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose, considering whether or not to follow her. In the end, he decides it's worth the risk.

"Yes, I am getting that impression," he deadpans as he comes up behind her in the kitchen. His glasses are still off, dangling between his thumb and forefinger. "I considered a dozen possibilities; nothing else would have worked." He pauses, ducks his head. "But I am sorry."

[wedobones]

"You could have...warned me," says Gideon, after a long moment. She hops up to sit on the counter, drumming the heels of her bare feet against the counter. "Or just...you know....Not pinned me like a fucking bug."

[hellonspectacles]

"I didn't like doing that." Palamedes leans back against the side of the table, facing her, and raises his eyes. "But you would have asked questions--" he raises a hand to stop her before she could object, "rightly so. And there just wasn't time to answer them. It was the only solution that presented itself."

He scrubs a hand through his hair, adding quietly, "I needed to talk to her."

[wedobones]

"Didn't we all," says Gideon, suddenly miserable all over again. Yes, Cytherea had turned out to be hell on wheels, but, God, she'd held a candle for Dulcinea. And she knows she's in good company there. She sighs and scratches at the edge of the label on her beer bottle with her thumbnail. "I just wish I knew how it all turned out. What happened to Cam and Harrow. Even Ianthe. Coronabeth was still kicking the last time I saw her, too."

[hellonspectacles]

Palamedes doesn't really want to think about Dulcinea, but he can't help but wonder what Gideon knows about the two of them. Yes, all right, he hadn't been particularly subtle about his feelings by the end--though God, he had tried--but he had kept the specifics to himself, for the sake of his own pride, and maybe Dulcinea's as well. In retrospect, knowing what he does now, knowing that he might have stopped so much bloodshed if he had just talked to the woman, it all feels miserably childish.

He exhales a sigh. At least Gideon doesn't look like she wants to murder him anymore. "Me too," he says quietly. There are so many things he wishes he could know, that no he might never have the chance to, about the people he had held dear, and about the nature of their society itself. Palamedes doesn't like it one bit.

"We might find out yet," he says after a beat, unwilling to give in to the inevitability of ignorance. "One of them might appear here, or," the corner of his mouth turns up as an idea suddenly occurs to him, "or perhaps we can find a way to communicate. Even if we can't travel outside the pocket universe, we might be able to get a message through." Palamedes turns around and starts hunting through the things on the table for a blank piece of paper and a pencil.

[wedobones]

It would be wrong, technically, to say that Gideon had missed this, the nonsense that comes with being around necromancers. But there is something comforting about it, all the same.

"I haven't even really got the hang of text messages," she says.

[hellonspectacles]

“Lucky for us, I’m much better with theorems than I am with those phones.” He finds a piece of paper—-a menu of food of some kind is printed on one side, and the opposite side in blank—-and briefly holds it up. “Mind if I write on this?”

It still feels a bit like sacrilege to take notes on actual paper, but God, they’re swimming in it.

[wedobones]

"Yeah," says Gideon, her eyes narrowing slightly as she watches him. She's already developing a faint stress-headache.

"I haven't used the paper ones since Maeve taught me how to use the app."

[hellonspectacles]

"That's another one of those phone things, isn't it?" Palamedes says in a vague sort of way, only half paying attention to her statement. He pulls up a chair to the table, sits down with the paper in front of him, and absently taps his pencil on his chin.

"Have you heard of anyone having some sort of contact with the outside world? Even indirectly."

[wedobones]

"Other than people showing up, like you?" Gideon hops up to sit on the counter, leaning her head back against one of the cupboards mounted on the wall. "Sometimes people get stuff from home. And someone told me that there's a mailbox in the park. You write a letter and post it and...hope it gets to here its going."

[hellonspectacles]

Palamedes pauses in the midst of writing something down and looks up at Gideon. "What kind of stuff?" His mind is already beginning to race ahead. Could he get a signature off of something from another universe? And would it tell him anything of use? "Are we talking about specific things, or just-" he makes a vague gesture, "a new pair of shoes?"

[wedobones]

"Seems to always be stuff that matters," says Gideon, pausing in the act of shredding the label on her beer bottle. "I've been holding out hope for my two-hander but, knowing my luck, if anything for me shows up it'll be something of..." She swallows around the sudden lump in her throat. "It won't be mine at all."

[hellonspectacles]

"Fascinating. Right. That implies there must be some sort of connection between us and whatever fragment of us remains in the world we left behind--some bit of our consciousness, even the memory of us." He begins to write, sketching out something not so different from the theorems he created for the Contingency years ago. It isn't a perfect parallel, but it's a place to start.

He grins a little. "Camilla said she thought you were used to a two-hander. When I asked her what that was, she said, and I quote, 'A giant fuck-off sword.' Which seems appropriate."