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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"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.”

"Ah," says Gideon, leaning her hip against the counter. "You mean you didn't recognise me because I didn't look like a fucking douche." She grins. "Yeah. All of that shit was very much not my choice."

Palamedes ducks his head and, for the sake of inter-House politics that probably don’t matter anymore, tries to suppress a laugh. It comes out as a snort. “I was beginning to get that impression,” he says wryly.

"This is the House of the Ninth, Griddle," she says, in her best impression of Harrow's best bottom-of-the-ocean, depth of the tomb tones. "We act accordingly." She huffs out a breath, blowing the soft length of her red hair out of her eyes. "At least my skin's cleared up."

This time Palamedes actually does laugh. It's a tired sound, though--he really hasn't gotten much sleep these last couple of days. And back at Canaan House? He'd been running on pure adrenaline by the end.

"Does she really talk like that all the time? I understand putting on a show for the other Houses, but in private?"

Thinking about Harrow, talking about her for the first time in six months, is kind of a double edged sword. It feels like getting something back that she'd missed but, at the same time, it burns like stomach acid at the back of her throat.

Still, a smile tugs at the corner of her mouth.

"She swears more in private," she says.

“Well. At least that’s something.”

Palamedes’ eyes are gentle behind his thick spectacles. “I’m sorry she’s not here.”

"The worst thing is, sometimes, I'm not even sure that I am. Sorry. I mean." The kettle clicks over to boiling and Gideon lifts it, pouring boiling water into both mugs. Palamedes went for something herbal, but, for herself, she turns to the refrigerator, grabbing the milk carton and adding a splash to your black tea. "Do you want biscuits?"

“Sure,” Palamedes says at the offer of biscuits. He watches Gideon quietly for a few moments as she putters about the kitchen. All relationships between cavs and necromancers have their own inner mysteries, emotions and histories that no one but the two of them can understand. Even by those standards, he knows that Gideon and Harrow have a particularly complex relationship, though he doesn’t know all of the specifics.

“You can still miss her,” he says simply. “You can still wonder what it would be like to have her here.”

Gideon grabs the packet, half eaten already, and her own tea, and brings it around the counter and back into her sitting room, waiting for Pal to follow her. She sets tea and biscuits down on the low table and then folds herself onto the sofa, pulling her legs up and crossing them in front of her.

"I know that," she says. "But...I gave her my whole life. I hope that, somewhere, she's making the fucking best of it."

“You’ll get no argument from me there,” says Palamedes, taking his mug and following her back into the other room. What would it be like, he wonders, doing something like that without entirely knowing if you could rely on the person you needed most? Pal had blown himself up knowing that Cam would do everything in power to bring him back to his body. Even now, he remains certain that if there is a way to reach him in Darrow, she will not rest until she finds it.

He sits in an overstuffed chair across from Gideon and sips his tea. It’s bright and grassy, one of the more comforting things he’s experienced in a while. For the first time in days, he feels some of the tension leave his body.

Gideon blows over the surface of her tea, a habit that she'd acquired after losing at least one layer of tastebuds back at Canaan House, and then she looks at him, head tilted slightly, golden eyes fixed on his face.

"Do you think...." She turns it over in her head. "Would I know if she was dead?"

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."

Edited 2021-04-10 18:40 (UTC)

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."

"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.

"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.

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.

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