hellonspectacles | Borne back ceaselessly into the past

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Borne back ceaselessly into the past

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.

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When she says it didn’t work, Palamedes stills, feeling as though something cold has been dropped down his back. But no—she can’t be talking about the Contingency. Gideon wouldn’t know about the Contingency. Though, of course, Camilla would tell her—Gideon and Harrow, they would be the ideal people to enlist to help, and they would help, even if they ended up grumbling the whole time. Together, the three would have done everything they could to bring him back. What if, in the end, everything hadn’t been enough?

But then Gideon keeps speaking, and Palamedes' shoulders relax just perceptively. “It slowed her down,” he says without a hint of doubt in his voice. “I’ve been studying the Seventh House cancer for twelve years, and she would have been in a shocking amount of pain, Lyctorship or not.” He has to stop for a moment and take a breath. “Between that and the explosion, she would have needed time to recover."

"Not much," says Gideon, remembering the raw, bloody edged terror of it, the way that Cytherea had looked, stalking through the smoke with her rapier in her hand. "Harrow and I...I did what I had to do. I hope Harrow kicked her fucking ass."

"Well, I'm sorry my efforts were not up to your standards, Nav," Palamedes snaps, the calm he has so desperately clung to beginning to seep out of him. God, he is just, so tired.

Ans he definitely isn't in the mood for what he assumes to be Ninth House grandstanding. "And what is that supposed to mean?" he asks wearily, returning his glasses to his face.

Gideon hasn't said this to anyone since she got here. Under her t-shirt, the skin of her chest is whole and unscarred. She shrugs, looking down at her bare feet in the sand.

"One flesh, one end, bitch," she says. "You're not the only one who's dead, Sextus."

That brings Palamedes up short. He doesn't have to ask what she means this time. The dark and final meaning of one flesh, one end had become clear to them all as they watched Ianthe transform. Perhaps that had been the real meaning the entire time, and everything he'd ever been taught had been window dressing. The thought makes him ill.

A dozen emotions flicker across his face--surprise, and concern, and anger, and awe, and a bottomless well of sadness. Palamedes offers her a tiny smile and says, very gently, "You never cease to amaze me, Gideon Nav."

"At least someone's impressed," she says, with a sigh. "Come on. We're not far from my apartment. I've got beer and we've got...a shit load to talk about. How long have you even been here?"

She turns and starts to trudge away from him up the beach.

"Well, you're very impressive." This time, Palamedes might actually be teasing. Some of the tension seems to have broken between them--or maybe they're both just too weary to take it out on the one lifeline they each have to the world they'd known.

Pal collects his socks and shoes where he's left them on the sand and follows after her. "51 hours. Barely any time at all, I suppose. Whereas you look like you've been here long enough to have gone native." He quirks a brow at her outfit.

Gideon looks down at her workout clothes - shorts and t-shirt, bare feet. She smirks.

"Since...they call it October here. So just about six months. Half a year." She pushes sweaty ginger hair back from her face. "It's been a long fucking time."

Six months is far more time than Palamedes ever expected to remain in the River, waiting for the moment he was pulled back to his body. Even given the complicated manner of his death, it wouldn't take that much time, particularly with Nonagesimus' help. Particularly--and he feels a certain stab of guilt at this thought--if she had the power of a Lyctor.

Darrow isn't the River, of course. In the past 51 hours, he had fully exhausted the possibilities of that theory. But it reminds him of all the time that might separate him from who he aches to see.

"And I am the first familiar face you've seen, I gather." It isn't really a question because he knows the answer isn't the one he wants. Palamedes would know if Cam were here, by some miracle. And if Harrow were--well, those would have been the first words out of Gideon's mouth.

"Got it in one," says Gideon, her voice bleak, full of ash and chips of bone. She'd left her sneakers in the sand when she hit the beach, and she bends to snag them, putting them back on before they step off onto the street. "Wait all this time for a fucking necromancer and along comes the wrong one." Guilt twists through her belly, and she shoots him an apologetic glance. "Sorry."

Pal nearly laughs, not in the least offended. Hell, he would be shocked if Gideon had felt otherwise. “Of course I’m the wrong necromancer,” he says ruefully, trying not to think too much about the hole left in his own heart where Camilla should be.

“Nonagesimus is going to be awfully put out that she didn’t get her first,” he adds with a bit of mischief. The Ninth House necromancer did love to turn everything into a competition.

"I'll make sure to remind her of that if she ever gets her bony ass here," says Gideon. She's chilly now that she's not running and, not for the first time, she misses the recesses of her Ninth robes. "I will never fucking let her forget that you beat her."

As long as I get to see her again.

“And in exchange, I won’t tell Camilla that you punched the Warden of the Library in the balls.” It’s the first time he has said her name out loud since he got here, and it hurts even more than he anticipated despite his effort to make a joke about it.

"Of all people in the world, Cam would absolutely understand why the Warden deserved it," says Gideon, but she does wince in sympathy at the look on his face. "It's just...it wasn't supposed to be like this, was it? For any of us. Canaan house spent all that time making us realise how much we needed each other..."

It had been a rockier road for some of them than others.

"The Warden's Hand is charged with protecting the Warden's person, Nav," Palamedes shoots back, though he suspects she might be right.

He sighs and scrubs his hand back and forth through his hair, which is damp and a little sandy from his fall. "I'm not sure that's what Canaan House was trying to show us," he says grimly, thinking back on the trials, the way they seemed designed to test power and control. He thinks he knows what she means, though--there's something about going through hell that will make a person realize who truly matters.

"Camilla's going to be shocked that I've managed to keep myself alive this long," he says ruefully.

"Suppose I'm glad that Cam's not here then. I like her, and I'm not entirely convinced I could take her, so..." She flashes him a tight smile. "Probably best for both of us we don't have to find out." She remembers his distaste about the challenge where Harrow had siphoned from her, his insistance that he couldn't have done it to Cam. Even Harrow had hesitated, by the end. After what happened to the Eighth? Not ever again.

"Good thing you've got me now."

"Good thing," he says, no trace of irony or jest in his voice. He might be the wrong necromancer, and she might be the wrong cavalier, but they're still friends. When they had first all arrived at Canaan House, Palamedes hadn't expected Gideon to become one of the people he trusts most in the world, but that's what she has become.

It's a hell of a lot better than being alone.

When they get to her building, Gideon shoulders open the door and then holds it while Sextus steps through it. She lives on the first floor, so she ignores the elevator and lopes up the stairs, pulling her key out from under her shirt on a long chain to open the door. Inside, her apartment is cluttered but comfortable, the sofa loaded with cushions, draped in blankets. Paperbacks are piled on a lot of the surfaces. There's a bowl and a coffee cup on the coffee table and Gideon collects them on her way to the kitchen.

"Make yourself comfortable, Sextus," she says. "I'm going to take a shower. Because I? Smell fucking gross."

Palamedes follows after her, taking in the apartment as the door shuts behind him. Like his own, it’s enormous; unlike his own, Gideon has had the time to make the place cozily cluttered. It’s another reminder of how long she’s been here—and how long he, too, might have to wait before he sees another familiar face again.

He tries not to think about it.

With a nod Pal wanders over to the couch and takes a seat, absently picking up one of the books sitting nearby. The amount of paper he’s seen since he got here has been remarkable. As far as he can tell, people use it for everything, even to clean their hands. Before coming here, Palamedes had probably handled more paper than almost anyone else in all of the Nine Houses, but it still amazes him.

He smirks faintly at the illustration on the cover of the paperback he’d picked up at random and flips it open to read as he waits.

Gideon showers in the small bathroom attached to her bedroom, washing her hair and scrubbing the faint scent of sweat from her skin. Once she's out and dry, she puts on underwear, a pair of jeans and a t-shirt which sticks across her back and shoulders. She pads back into the lounge with bare feet.

"That one's shit," she says, grinning. "Apart from this one bit...page 250."

Palamedes isn't made of stone; with a quirk of an eyebrow, he flips ahead in what has, admittedly, been a rather dull romance, until he reaches the indicated page. He reads, and his eyes go a little wide.

"...Well." Then, "That seems...logistically complicated."

"Not if you work at it," says Gideon, padding behind the counter into her kitchen and clicking the kettle on. It's one of her favourite things, even if she does still find taps faintly unnerving.

"Tea?" she asks, leaning her forearms on the counter. "Something stronger?"

“Tea would be wonderful.” With an amused shake of his head, Pal puts down the novel and follows her to the kitchen.

“You’re going to have to show me where you find tea in this place. And, well, most everything else.” In the past few days, he has managed to acquire the bare essentials, stumbling through the alien process of purchasing the most basic living necessities. But he hasn’t ventured very far into this commerce-filled world, not even for the sake of tea.

"Tea I can do," says Gideon, grabbing two mugs from the shelf over the kettle. She nudges a caddy of individually wrapped teabags down the counter towards Pal, so that he can pick a flavour that appeals as she unwraps her own breakfast tea and drops it into her cup. "You get the hang of it pretty quickly actually." She looks down at herself, the way she's dressed. She can only imagine how pissed off Harrow would be if she could see her.

Palamedes offers a tiny smile and goes to investigate the tea bags, choosing a variety that looks more or less familiar. “You know,” he says as he unwraps it, “I almost didn’t recognize you without your—“ Palamedes pauses and gestures vaguely at her person. “Your Ninth House uniform.”

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