The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret

[hellonspectacles]

Palamedes keeps up a careful, steady pace as he walks across the city from the boardwalk to his apartment building. It takes every ounce of his not-insignificant self-control for him to do so, every instinct telling him to run until he is out of breath, or to stop where he is in the middle of the road and put pen to paper to make sense of what Gideon has told him.

Gideon didn’t die. The revelation is so great that Palamedes hasn’t even begun to consider what strange Darrow mechanism had caused the memories to enter her mind. What she had told him, as they shivered over their chipped mugs of tea, had been more strange, more wild, more world-changing than solving Darrow’s mysteries ever could be.

And there had been other things, too—stranger and more wild, that hinted at thousand-year conspiracies and a fundamental rottenness at the heart of all he has ever known.

Palamedes doesn’t even notice if Cam is home when he flies into the apartment and makes a beeline for his room. Technically, the Master Warden is incapable of forgetting an idea once it has taken root; in practice, like all good scholars, he believes in writing everything down.

He closes the door and leans against it with his eyes tightly shut, only to see familiar words emblazoned across his eyelids. He lied to us.

When Pal had asked Gideon if she knew what these revelations meant, really meant, she had said she did, but Palamedes doesn’t think that’s quite true. It isn’t her fault; Pal hasn’t expounded much on those last few minutes of his life, telling himself it is because he doesn’t have enough evidence to support his theories, but knowing, deep down, that his avoidance has a lot more to do with his own fears.

Still, they all understand pieces of it: Cam knows nearly as well as he does how they had picked at the lyctorhood theorem, trying to make it less awful in its conclusions, trying to make it right; Harrow, in her wild effort to keep some piece of Gideon whole, had, as usual, found a solution by awful instinct; Gideon, poor Gideon, now knows more intimately than all of them the sort of indifference their God is capable of.

Now, Palamedes Sextus has to put it all together and present his awful, terrifying, wonderful conclusion.

He sits down at the desk in the corner of the room and begins to write.

He doesn’t stop until morning.

Comments

[undonewithout]

I saw Pal is all Gideon needs to say. Three words send the structure she'd been trying to maintain for the last week into shambles, the texted evasions and grimly willful silence she'd kept up all swept away like so much dust. The Warden is as clever as she is, nearly as superior a necromancer and--acrid as the taste of it is in Harrow's mouth to admit--the one who'd understood the lyctorhood theorem first and best and most completely. If anyone knows what Gideon's recovered memories mean, if anyone can understand the importance of it, it's Palamedes Sextus.

In agony, Harrow lies awake all night, sick with something she refuses to call fear and cannot begin to think of as hope, even obliquely. She stays in the spare room, leaving Gideon to their bed, and in the morning she gives her only the barest, numbest nod as Gideon heads out the door for her morning run. The knock that comes only a half-hour later fails to surprise her; getting up from her curled position on the couch, Harrow walks to the front door to meet her doom.

"Warden."

[go_loud]

Camilla is, in fact, home -- which is how she thinks of it these days, not even noting her own technical incorrectness in her head, though technically she still has her other apartment. The two of them live a spartan enough existence that it's not a strain on funds so much as a little ridiculous.

Then again, she has learned many, many times that having something you don't need is much better than the alternative.

Even had she been more obviously present than she is, legs crossed under her and curled into the corner made by the back and arm of the armchair, reading, Cam has seen Palamedes do this exact same maneuver in their rooms in the Library, the sound of the door opening barely registering before the next one -- his office, usually, there -- is clicking closed. She's well aware he wouldn't have processed her either way.

"Hi, Cam," she teases the shut door softly, but it's with a very warm smirk.

It does make her wonder what he's gotten hold of.

There are two ways this always goes: either he re-emerges wild-eyed relatively shortly, asseverating some hypothesis to her in a manner suggesting he is both entirely sure he's correct and would like nothing better than for her to rip his thesis to pieces
OR
he doesn't emerge for -- well, she's never actually let it run its course. Days, at least, if she didn't intercede.

That first option usually takes at least an hour, so she reads for a little while longer -- it's Pre-Resurrection history of the United States at the moment, A People's History it calls itself, advertising itself as extracanonical to what's normally put in textbooks -- and then goes for a run and a shower, not being particularly quiet in case he is contemplating her opinion on anything.

No stir or any sign of emergence from the room. Not even so much as snacks disturbed.

Camilla makes tea and, while it steeps, sits a container of hummus on a plate and surrounds it with olives and cheese and crackers: easy to eat while busy, but nutritious. Then, plate and cups balanced, she tries the door handle.

It turns for her. Palamedes is writing at top speed, pausing every so often where notation doesn't flow quite the same way. Cam has to fight a strange and irritating flip of her stomach: she'd recognized the behavior, but she still hasn't seen him at it in quite this particular intensity, the near-possession of academia, since ...before Darrow. She approaches without sound, identifying a reasonably safe spot to set down the plate and cup as she does, so that by the time she's a halfstep behind she can put them down pragmatically without making him move his things.

On an impulse, she lets herself reach to rub the cord of muscle at the curve of his shoulder and neck: she can almost see the cramp from his hunching.

"What've you got, Warden?"