![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Borne back ceaselessly into the past
Apr. 4th, 2021 12:56 pmPalamedes 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.
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.
